Jean-Philippe and Dana Bru
Jean-Philippe Bru is the current occupant of the James Montgomery Boice Chair of Practical Theology at the Faculté Jean Calvin, the Reformed seminary in Aix-en-Provence, France.
The Rev. Bru was born near Bordeaux in 1965, but grew up in Nîmes, a major center of Protestantism in France. His family embraced the evangelical faith in the 1970s. After high school, Jean-Philippe attended the Seminary in Aix for a year. He then trained as a missionary in the Baptist Church, and was sent as a church-planter to Rumania. There he met his lovely wife, Dana. Together they returned to Aix so that Jean-Philippe could complete his studies. Dana is a scholar in her own right, an expert on European literature.
After receiving the Masters degree at Aix, the Brus accepted a call to help with a church-planting effort in Lyon, alongside Francis Foucachon, another graduate from Aix. After six years in that work, the Brus were called to do evangelism in Saint-Girons, a town at the foothills of the Pyrénées, the mountain range bordering on Spain. He has also been a regular translator for Editions Excelsis, the largest evangelical publishing house in France. Jean-Philippe was ordained in the year 2007 in the Evangelical Reformed Church.
Here is how Jean-Philippe describes his sense of call to the Seminary at Aix: “If I accepted the position of professor-coordinator of practical theology, it is of course because I have always been drawn to teaching, but it is especially because I have become more and more aware that pastors needed, in addition to their formal training, to be able to reflect theologically about their practice and to enlarge their toolbox in order better to face the challenges of their ministry.” Jean-Philippe believes the Faculté Jean Calvin is the right place to carry this out.