Sermonizing

Just wanted to make a quick shout-out.

On Sunday, July 31st I will be preaching my first ever sermon at Saint Paul Lutheran Church in Morgantown, WV.  The gospel text for the day, on which I will be preaching is Matthew’s story of Jesus feeding the 5,000.

The service begins at 10am on Sunday morning.  Saint Paul is located on Patteson Drive, next to Arby’s.

If you haven’t been to church recently, (or even if you have…) why not join us in worshipping God?

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.

So that’s Project Connect in a (rather large) nutshell, but hopefully this should give you an idea of who these folks are and why they provide the resources that they do.  My next post will talk a bit more in depth about their grant program for immersion experiences and just what it is I do at Saint Paul in Morgantown.

Here I Stand, Day 1

Figuring out exactly where to start a story can be hard.

My story doesn’t entirely have a clear starting point to begin with, so deciding where to start is even harder.

To paraphrase Martin Luther, here is where I stand, right now:

• For the past five summers, I worked at Lutherlyn, an ELCA Lutheran church camp North of Pittsburgh, PA.  Being on camp staff helped me to become more comfortable sharing my faith, and made me understand the gifts I have that pertain to ministry.
• On February 11-13, 2011, I went to Project Connect’s Gathering for Pre-Seminary Young Adults at the suggestion of my campus Pastor, Chaplain Matthew Riegel.  I’ll go into a bit more detail about this in a later post, but essentially, he suggested it as “How would you like an all expenses paid trip to Gettysburg?” without really elaborating on what it was.  I knew it had to be something from Project Connect, but I figured it had something to do with campus ministry, rather than the seminary itself.
• This summer, thanks to a grant from Project Connect and some additional generous support from the congregation, I am doing what is called an immersion internship at Saint Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church.  Project Connect gives approximately a dozen of these internship grants per year to allow students to follow a Pastor around for a summer or school year and learn about what Pastoral ministry actually involves.  You’ll get to hear a lot more about this over the next few months as I work with Pastor Bennett at Saint Paul.
• I’ve somewhat officially began the ELCA candidacy process which is  the process by which the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America “approves” candidates for ministry.  I met with Reverend Sandy Kessinger, who is the assistant to the Bishop for Southwestern Pennsylvania synod.  She explained the entire process to me, and helped me to get the ball rolling on the steps I need to take this summer.
• If all goes according to plan, and I do end up going to seminary, I will most likely enroll in Fall of 2012, either at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg in Gettysburg, PA or the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia, SC.

So…  That hopefully gives you a vague idea of where I am, and where I’m going.  I’ll post more about the various pieces as the weeks go by, hopefully posting at least once a week and giving you an in-depth view of my internship and the candidacy process as a whole.