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The view from the pulpit…
On Sunday, I preached a sermon for the first time at Saint Paul Lutheran Church in Morgantown, WV. The gospel text for the day was Matthew 14:13-21, the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000. For those of you more interested in reading the sermon itself, it is in the post previous to the one you’re reading right now. CLICK HERE for a direct link to that post.
BUT, I know there are just as many of you who are more interested not in the sermon itself, but moreso how it felt to deliver it.
The short answer of it all is that it felt good, and it felt “right.”
In the congregation on Sunday, we had, not only Pastor Brian, but also Chaplain James Riggs, who is a United Methodist minister serving as the chaplain at Fairmont General Hospital, and Rev. Jerry Robbins, who was the original Lutheran campus chaplain at West Virginia University (and celebrated his 50th anniversary of ordination this year). All three were very complimentary, as were numerous parishioners. Even one of my acolytes told me it was good, although, his metric of success seemed to be merely that it was shorter than Pastor Brian’s normally are.
There are some Pastors that really struggle with writing sermons, but I enjoy writing and speaking so it was a fairly natural transition for me. It wasn’t at all uncomfortable, just different.
The truly interesting thing for me though was the pulpit at Saint Paul. It is a very large, raised pulpit, similar to what you might see in a much older, colonial style church. You have to go up about half a dozen steps from the altar to what is very literally a raised platform. The really cool thing about this type of design is that it allows you to make clear eye contact with literally EVERYONE in the congregation, something that I didn’t take as much advantage of as I should have, but still, really cool.
A large part of my internship this summer has been putting my gifts and talents to use for ministry and seeing the (usually positive) outcomes. In the past, I’ve had people nudge me toward seminary, or tell me I would make a good Pastor, but now, those statements carry a lot more weight, having preached my first sermon, having visited shut-ins and hospitalized parishioners, having sat in on conversations between Pastor Brian and parishioners. Now, it’s not just people telling me that I’d be a good Pastor, but me being able to personally see that my gifts ARE useful for ministry and that “yes, you know, I really think I could do a decent job with all of this.”
Even if we didn’t get the grant from Project Connect, I was planning on asking to shadow Pastor Brian for a week or two over the summer. I think anyone who’s considering seminary and going into ministry should take the opportunity to work with a Pastor and truly get the intimate feel for what all it entails. It doesn’t have to be in the formal context of an internship like mine, I think even just a week or two of shadowing can have a major impact in understanding and getting a better feel for your sense of call.
Project Connect
So let’s take a moment to talk about my friends at Project Connect.
Project Connect is an initiative of the Eastern Cluster of Lutheran Seminaries, a cooperative group consisting of the Lutheran Theological Seminaries at Gettysburg and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, and the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia, SC. Three ELCA seminaries on the East Coast, working together, pretty simple, eh?
Project Connect is about identifying the future leaders of the church and giving them the resources they need to discern their vocational calling, whether that be to ordained word and sacrament ministry, or something completely different. They’re big on creating an “Ecology of Call,” a connective environment where young adults can understand what it means to be called and have resources in pursuing that call.
Project Connect is about… connections. They like to describe themselves as a web pulling together many various parts of the church on the East Coast. If you’ve helped a young person with discerning their call, either through your congregation, campus ministry, camping ministry, youth group or anything, OR you’re a young person trying to discern for yourself, you can list yourselves among the PERSONAL HEROES of Don Johnson, the executive director of Project Connect.
They do all this connecting by reaching out to places like summer camps and campus ministries, and local congregations, places where you might find up and coming church leaders and connecting these young adults with colleges, seminaries, Pastors who have volunteered to serve as “Discernment Advocates” and other organizations within the Lutheran church. They host various discernment retreats throughout the year at different camps and seminaries and are very visible in regions 7, 8 and 9 of the ELCA.
Regions 7, 8 & 9 of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America... That's a lot of territory!
It’s hard to quantify how successful this program is, especially since its goal is not so much to “pump out Pastors” but instead to be a resource for young adults. It’s still a success if someone decides that they are NOT called to being a Pastor, which inevitably happens.
Here are some numbers, numbers that I think are kinda cool and really telling about the “success” of Don Johnson and his web of personal heroes:
- Since Project Connect became fully functioning on May 1, 2005, they have made connections with 886 young adults who at one time or another indicated interest in exploring a seminary education.
- Of those 886, 240 have enrolled in a seminary or divinity school and 210 of them are at one of the three “Eastern Cluster” seminaries of the ELCA.
- The average enrollment of young adults in those three seminaries has increased by over 17% during the past 6 years, and is up 8% in the other five ELCA seminaries.
- 90 young adults have received Immersion Grants (that’s what I’m doing) or Competitive Mini-Grants (something fairly similar). 39 of those 90 are now in seminary and 27 say they are still heading in that direction.
