If you visit the Southern California Coast, you might run into Noel (ThM, 1980) and Denise Enete and their contagious joy. Married for fifty-three years with four children and four grandchildren, Noel and Denise gather the Enete clan monthly for birthdays and other festivities. Their house serves as home base for family life and ministry; they spend eight-hour days teaching and writing Bible studies with Noel coding for the Spectrum Bible application. They equip believers to study God’s Word by nurturing their desire for God, building up their confidence as learners, and providing them with approachable tools that enable intuitive study.
Noel and Denise attended DTS together, both desiring to teach. Noel specifically wanted to teach the Bible on the college or seminary level. Fittingly, Bible Study Methods with Prof Hendricks turned out to be Noel’s favorite class. He also enjoyed all his language classes. Allen Ross, Noel’s favorite professor, modeled the balanced and understated academic life. He also delivered a brown bag lecture on being a balanced seminarian, which Noel typed up, word for word.
As every balanced or attempting-to-balance seminarian knows, brain breaks are crucial, especially physically active brain breaks. That insight led the 1970s’ Swissland seminarians to the invention of the poolside game, Dibble Dabble. The rules? Everyone stands along the edge of the pool. One person jumps into the water and swims to the other side, dropping a wooden golf tee. The first person to see the tee yells “Dibble dabble!” and everyone dives into the pool, a full-body game of spoons.
Prior to graduating, Noel sent out a hundred of the most beautiful resumes to Bible colleges and seminaries all over the country, but the mailman never slipped a response into the Enete mailbox. Noel’s resume, however, had not gone unnoticed. As he was working in the mailroom after graduation, a new coworker asked if she knew him. Noel answered “No.” Then it clicked. “You sent your resume to Bible college X. My dad’s the president. He loves your resume. Do you want to know what he does with it?” Noel nodded. “He keeps it in his top desk drawer, and when someone hands him a resume, he whips it out and says, ‘Now this is a resume.’”
Noel kept working in the mailroom until the seminary hired its first computer guy. With one semester of programming for his mechanical engineering degree, Noel proved to be the most qualified applicant. He bought all of the PCs for the campus and taught himself programming. Noel started thinking about programming Bible study software, and then he started coding, crafting the earliest versions of Spectrum Bible.
God’s course for their lives puzzled the Enetes. The shift from teaching God’s Word to computers looked wrong. One day, as Noel installed a professor’s PC, the professor asked, “What in the world are you doing? I didn’t train you to install computers.” A liked professor, the words punctured Noel’s heart. It looked embarrassing, world-class Bible training and computers, but in the Enetes’ words, “God doesn’t seem to mind if you’re embarrassed.” Noel and Denise kept moving forward, even though it didn’t make sense. And the Lord kept opening doors. On a random afternoon, when their oldest skipped through the living room, sounding a little too Texan, Noel turned to Denise and said, “We’ve got to move.” They headed back to Southern California, and Noel continued working with computers. Eventually, he became the chief architect for America Online, but Noel always spent his evenings programming for Spectrum Bible.
Noel and Denise started writing and teaching after a lady at their church asked Denise to lead a Bible study. They adapted their inductive Bible study method from Ann Graham Lotz, and their students started calling it Flicker (Facts, Lessons, Challenges, and Responses). Denise loves teaching her women’s study. It feels like what she was born to do, as she integrates the truth with her psychology training. Noel focuses on his coding. He even gets grouchy if he goes too long without programming. The Lord has certainly given Noel lots to do, rewriting a million lines of code, making Spectrum Bible available for Apple and now Android.
God’s path for Noel and Denise looks different from what they envisioned. God has incorporated the life-giving things they love into their callings, shaping their ministry according to their God-given designs. Even though it looked wrong, God was equipping them for their ministry through people and experiences. Noel learned design theory from Don Regier and from AOL, the principle that if you make something simple enough for anyone to use, everyone benefits. Noel and Denise both learned that people lack the confidence to study God’s Word, and they learned how to fan their students’ confidence into a flame. Taking note of potential learning challenges, Noel stripped Spectrum Bible of all serif fonts to avoid textbook flashbacks, and Denise helped him perfect a user-friendly interface. Denise says they learned that “if something doesn’t make sense, but you feel like you’re in God’s will, you just keep going.”
For Noel and Denise, a lot of things did not make sense; however, God was leading, so they followed. Their advice: Stay the course, even when the preaching of the Word does not look how you expected it to look. Preach the word regardless of the season—even if you have no clue how God will use things. Follow God’s thorough instructions with great patience (2 Tim 4:2). The Lord who called you is faithful (1 Thess 5:24).
Morgan E. Underwood (ThM, 2023) is an administrative assistant for the Alumni and Career Services Office at Dallas Theological Seminary. She is also a Theological Studies PhD student and writer. She is married to her husband, An Dau, and they, along with their black cat, call Dallas home.