I think I’ve finally figured out how to answer this portion of the essay. 😀

-Reflect on your current understanding of the particular ministry to which you feel called (pastor, diaconal ministry, associate in ministry, deaconess) and your assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, gifts, convictions and concerns related to this ministry.

My current understanding of the pastoral ministry is that a pastor is the following:

• An equipper. Part of my job as pastor would be to equip people for the ministries they face in their lives. As Lutherans, we believe in the priesthood of all believers. This means that all of us are ministers in one way or another, whether it is the pastoral ministry to which I feel called or working as a teacher in the public schools. A public school teacher has just as much of a ministry as I do, and it is my job to equip them with the skills needed to reach out to the students. Within the church, I would need to help people discern where their gifts lie and how they can use their talents and gifts to benefit the community within the church and beyond its walls. My strength in this area is my love of people and the ability to brainstorm ideas with people. I am also wonderful at organizing things, though I would function more in an advisory capacity, rather than the role of chief organizer. My weakness in this area is that I tend to worry about how things will turn out. I am working on the concept of leaving things in God’s hands and not worrying about if someone will do well at something or if a project will come to fruition.
• A mediator of the sacraments. As an ordained minister, I would be baptizing people, presiding over the Eucharist, proclaiming the Word, and being with people in times of crisis. In the past, the pastor was the leader of a spiritual community and looked to for words from God and called on to perform Masses and baptisms. This has changed in that there is now more lay involvement in the church, but people would still look to me for sacramental concerns and for guidance in times of trouble. A strength in this area is my ability to listen. As an introvert, I tend to be silent and listen more than I tend to speak. By doing this, I can size up the situation more easily. I also can think creatively and would work with people to find a solution or someone who could help them more easily than I could. My only weakness is that I occasionally tend to panic because I do care about people and their problems. I am working to let people live their own lives and rather provide advice than try to solve their problem. I understand that I am not to be a therapist, but instead someone who can help guide people to others who can provide them with the help they need.
• A teacher. Aside from mediating the sacraments, I would also be teaching people about God as part of my outreach to the community at large. This instruction comes through preaching, but also through Christian education. I believe strongly in passing on the faith to the younger generations, which means that I’d be teaching it to them in their First Communion and Confirmation classes, but also by having them in church. A large part of my instruction, however, would come from my personal example. How can I tell people that they need to pray and engage in devotional practices if I am not doing that every day?

tell me what you think, especially if you’re a pastor-type person or a missionary type person. 🙂

OK… an hour and a half until Sabrina and I have a purry office assistant in my top drawer. I think I can work on the last question of my candidacy essay.

I’ll probably compile the essay over the next couple days and give it to Jon to mail on Friday. I’ll post the essay on a separate page and post the link. 🙂

-Reflect on your current understanding of the particular ministry to which you feel called (pastor, diaconal ministry, associate in ministry, deaconess) and your assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, gifts, convictions and concerns related to this ministry.

My current understanding of the pastoral ministry is that a pastor is the following:

• An equipper. Part of my job as pastor would be to equip people for the ministries they face in their lives. As Lutherans, we believe in the priesthood of all believers. This means that all of us are ministers in one way or another, whether it is the pastoral ministry to which I feel called or working as a teacher in the public schools. A public school teacher has just as much of a ministry as I do, and it is my job to equip them with the skills needed to reach out to the students. Within the church, I would need to help people discern where their gifts lie and how they can use their talents and gifts to benefit the community within the church and beyond its walls.
• A mediator of the sacraments. As an ordained minister, I would be baptizing people, presiding over the Eucharist, proclaiming the Word, and being with people in times of crisis. In the past, the pastor was the leader of a spiritual community and looked to for words from God and called on to perform Masses and baptisms. This has changed in that there is now more lay involvement in the church, but people would still look to me for sacramental concerns.
• A teacher. Aside from mediating the sacraments, I would also be teaching people about God as part of my outreach to the community at large. This instruction comes through preaching, but also through Christian education. I believe strongly in passing on the faith to the younger generations, which means that I’d be teaching it to them in their First Communion and Confirmation classes, but also by having them in church. A large part of my instruction, however, would come from my personal example. How can I tell people that they need to pray and engage in devotional practices if I am not doing that every day?

he strengths and weaknesses portion, I think I’ll come back to that when I’ve figured out how to integrate it into what I’ve just written.

This essay is really scaring me. Normally, I can write 4-6 pages in a matter of hours. It’s been almost 10 days.

You know you’re a seminary student when the first question that comes to you during a reflection paper is… how can I spin this? A good spin doctor, I ain’t.

All right… Sabrina isn’t on this weekend because there’s a movie on WWHO. I guess I’ll work on this essay until a thuderstorm or something hits…

-Reflect on your personal journey of faith and relationship to the ELCA including your current church involvement.

After I accepted Christ when I was fifteen, I started exploring the way that I could express my faith. My mother’s parents are Episcopalian and I associated liturgy with the way I should practice my faith. Even now, I still feel the most at home in a liturgical setting. It gives a rhythmic setting to the service and the structure helps me to order my life. The hymns that they sang became instructional for me. The tunes are so familiar and singing or listening to them is a calming and soothing thing for me.

When I started going to church on my own, it was an Episcopal church that shared facilities with a United Church in Christ. These two churches had some theological differences, but they put them aside. They shared Sunday schools and the social work they did. Being a part of this community got me very interested in ecumenism as I saw that different Christian groups could mingle with each other and work together.

In college, I attended a Conservative Baptist church and found that I really liked the “contemporary worship” services. They were a new way of expressing my faith and the “emotional” approach to worship took hold in me. When I’d go home for breaks, I’d find my home church to be boring. My aversion to liturgy usually disappeared at Lent, when I would long for the liturgical activities that marked that season in the church’s calendar. My university had an ecumenical Ash Wednesday service, but it still wasn’t the same.

During my second year of college, a local LCMS congregation advertised a Good Friday service and my friend Melissa and I decided to go. The service renewed my satisfaction with liturgy and I started attending their 8:00 service every other Sunday morning before going to worship team practice at the Baptist Church. A year later, I used that LCMS congregation for a Anthropology paper and started attending the 10:00 service regularly. As much as I connect with the more contemporary forms of worship, liturgy feeds me on a deeper level. The church’s 10:00 service had a more blended approach to worship with a mixture of hymns and more contemporary songs.

During my first year of seminary, I discovered that I am “bi-ritual” in that I can be fed by either the contemporary service that I helped lead at Christ and by the chapel worship at Trinity. Liturgy satisfies my need for order and the contemporary form of worship satisfies my need for an emotional connection with God.

Theologically, I really did not understand what I believed until I reached college. I was halfway on the Episcopal bandwagon and halfway on the Baptist bandwagon until I took my Reformation class and read Luther’s writings. Those made sense to me because I believe that we cannot do anything to save ourselves, but instead need the grace of God. As I read farther, I saw in the explanation to the third article of the Creed in the Small Catechism that we cannot come to Jesus on our own. That resonated with my belief that it is God who changes our hearts, not man. Unfortunately, there were no ELCA churches near my college, so I had to settle for either worshipping with the LCMS church nearby or being a closet Lutheran until I graduated. I was a closeted Lutheran for a while and then decided to try the LCMS church, who welcomed me openly.

At Christ , I started really understanding my connection with the sacraments. During the Wednesday night Lenten services, I was asked to be one of the Communion Assistants. I had been a cupbearer before but I had never been the person to hand out the bread. The words, “the Body of Christ given for you” hold so much more meaning when you are the one handing out the bread, and it was a rather humbling experience.

OK… enough faith talk. Time for Red Green! Quandumni flunkus moritati!

Well… I’ve looked over the bulletins for tomorrow and I have nothing else to do until Bill gets back. I guess I’ll work on my essay.

Describe your current life situation including marriage and family situation, physical, spiritual, and emotional health, financial status and geographical restrictions. Describe your understanding of being open to the needs of the whole church as well as your readiness for ministry preparation.
**Maybe it’s just me, but it sounds like this is the weeder question.**

My family situation is thus: I get along with everyone in my family and my husband’s family. Both sets of parents get along well and I often go to my mother-in-law for advice on being a good pastor’s wife. My marriage is as good as it can be considering that I’ve been married only six months. My husband Jonathan is a pastoral intern this year and will be seeking a first call parish next year. I took this year off from seminary so that we could be flexible in where we were placed for Internship.

Physically, my health is good despite a diagnosis of Crohn’s Disease (which is currently being looked at again) and my spiritual and emotional health are both improving. In the last six months, I’ve gotten married, moved twice, and transitioned from being a student to being a temporary member of the working world. That does put a strain on the emotions as it creates stress, both positive and negative. Spiritually, I have finally adjusted to not having the same patterns as I’ve had the previous four years. College spiritual life and seminary spiritual life are very different from the spiritual life of one who is in the working world. In college and in seminary, I had little spaces in my day where I could schedule some devotional time. Now, I either have to do it when I get up or before I fall asleep.

Regarding my Crohn’s Diease, I was diagnosed in May of 2001, a month before graduating from college and moving across the country. Back then, I was hospitalized for a week. Since then, I have had one minor stomach ailment with Crohn’s symptoms, but nothing that would confine me in bed for more than a few days. I have altered my diet, my lifestyle, and my physical activity so that I can control the symptoms. Due to my careful watch of my health, I have had no serious problems since May 2001.

Geographically, I do have the restriction of needing to be wherever my husband is called to serve. He has agreed, however, to try to take a call wherever I decide to do seminary. After I finish seminary, we are open to going where the Spirit leads us. We both will have student loans to pay off, so it would probably be beneficial to stay in the Midwest where it is less expensive to live.

In being open to the needs of the church, I understand that I must be available to go where my gifts are needed. This might mean serving in a rural parish, or it might mean that I serve in an urban church. I have been in both environments and I look forward to the challenges that either one offers.

With regard to my ministry preparation, I have completed an academic year of seminary already and I understand the caliber and amount of work that lies ahead of me. While I did not participate in the Ministry in Context program at Trinity (due to lack of eligibility), I was active in my home congregation and learned how to balance my church duties, my academic duties, and my family life.

Might as well get started on that essay…

-Discuss the events, circumstances and persons in your life that have affected your faith and your sense of call. Describe how others have encouraged you to explore theological study and/or the possibility of a church vocation.

When I was six years old, my neighbor invited us over to bake cookies for the homeless. After we’d baked the cookies, she read us the Christmas story, which I had heard before. She then continued to the Easter story which I had not heard before and I heard for the first time about how Jesus died an innocent man for my sins. It did not really impact me that much at the time, but the story stayed in the back of my mind as I got older.

When I was ten, my friend Emily invited me to come to church camp with her. There, I heard about Jesus again and got to interact with other ten year-olds who were “on fire” for Jesus. I dedicated my life to Christ that week and then promptly ignored that move for another two years.

When I was twelve years old, my decision started weighing on me as I started pondering the thought that if all of this Bible stuff was really true, I really should start believing it. That was when I started to pray and read the Bible stories books that my Christian relatives had given me as a child.

When I started high school, severe depression hit and I began to really understand my need for God. It was during the last part of my freshman year that I seriously dedicated my life to Christ. My life did not get an easier, but I at least had help dealing with my life for a change.

While my neighbor might have led me to Jesus, the people who influenced my call to ministry the most were the leaders of my church college group and the chair of my independent major committee. Dane, Kathy, Joan, Gordon, and Laurie saw a need to provide support for the Christian students at my university and they formed a program that did just that. We would all go to church together on Sunday, eat lunch together at the church, and have Bible Study. Every Tuesday night, they would come up on campus and eat with us so that they could get to know us and meet our friends. Over the three years I spent at the university, we had long talks about school, family, and my depression as they were the ones who finally got me to seek treatment. Through my discussions with them, I started discerning that my possible career in medicine or pharmacy was not going to be about serving the Lord, but rather about serving myself. They emphasized the point that our work can be a ministry in itself and that started changing my direction of study. At that same time, I was engaging in Mark Study through my school’s chapter of Intervarsity, which was a manuscript study of the Gospel of Mark. I discovered that I really preferred Religion to Biology and soon shanged my major to Religious Studies.

Since my major was an independent one, I got to know the chair of my major committee very well. Cindy is a professor of History at UC Santa Cruz and she was my professor for Reformation Europe. She is very agnostic when it comes to religion, but she really endeavours to teach Christianity rightly to the point that she knows the New Testament very well. It was in her class that I did a paper on Luther and found my niche in Christianity. She wants her students to understand the viewpoint of the people that they study and writing her “first person account” papers challenged me to understand the mindset of the people I studied in her Reformation, Medieval, and Saints classes. During our advisory meetings, we would talk about religion and about how the Bible views women. She encouraged me to go on for further study and was highly pleased when I told her that I was feeling called to ordained ministry.

The circumstance that challenged my faith the most was definitely my adventures with depression. It started during my freshman year of high school and continued throughout. Part of its cause was the sexual harassment that I was subjected to through most of my high school years and part of it was genetic. When I reached college, my depression and the stress disorder left over from the harassment wreaked havoc in my friendships and relationships. My first year was marked by a lot of fear and illness because my body was under attack from so much. I could not understand why all of this was happening to me and I did not believe that I could be both Christian and depressed. During my second year of college, things reached a crescendo and my college fellowship leaders finally gave me the ultimatum that I would either have to seek treatment for my depression or withdraw from school. I chose to seek treatment and was blessed to get a referral to a Christian therapist who helped me to work through the issues from the harassment and re-author my ideas about depression and Christianity. During the two years that I was in therapy and on medication, I saw some amazing things done in my life. I started discerning things rather than assuming that God would bless whatever I wanted to do and I started reflecting on where God had been so that those times could serve as reminders of God’s presence with me through everything. I am out of therapy and off medication and I still look back on those two years as the time when the Lord turned my life around.

The event that probably impacted my call to ministry the most was Urbana, a missions conference that I attended in December 2000. Tewnty thousand college students, staff, and missionaries from all over the world descended on the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign for four days. It showed me the variety of ministries that existed and through my experiences at the conference, I discerned that God was calling me to ordained ministry. I had the chance to talk to seminary students and representatives from other seminaries and found that seminary was what I wanted my next step to be. I was a Bible study leader and I found that I loved working with God’s Word and helping to teach other people about it.

-Describe your family of origin and how it has shaped who you are.

My family of origin is a variety of religions. My dad’s side of the family is deoutly Irish-Catholic and my mother’s side ranges from Episcopalian to Baha’i. My parents themselves are not religious people and my dad is relatively anti-Christian. Despite their beliefs, they have been suprisingly supportive of my decision to become a Christian. Through living with them during my formative years as a Christian, I’ve learned to be tactful about how I express my faith and to quietly disagree with them though I respect their beliefs.

My mother is my hero and I am thankful to have gotten some of her tact and diplomacy as I’ve gotten over. My father gave me his temper, which I’ve learned to control and his analytical mind. The listening skills that I picked up from my mother go well with my father’s analytical mind and I can usually size up a situation quickly upon hearing some of the conversation present.

As far as shaping who I am, my parents have instilled a love of my Irish heritage in me and much of the way I see my faith is derived from Celtic Christianity. I was blessed to have parents who were very loving and who have been married for thirty years. Their example has shown me that marriage is meant to last and I look up to them and to my grandparents who have been married twice as long as examples of how marriage should be. They always supported me in whatever I did and it meant that I grew up having pride in myself and in my actions.

I have a twin brother who is quite the opposite from me but still one of my best friends. Sean and I discuss almost everything and our discussions have taught me how to present my case. As one aspiring to attend law school, Sean likes to debate and argue, so I learned quickly that I have to back up everything I say with something grounded in its source.

After all of the newsletters were mailed off, the Sunday School dittoes copied, and the bulletins for the September 11th service were printed/folded, I finally was able to start on my candidacy paperwork.

The paperwork is basically the application and a 4-6 page essay on my call to the ministry. The application is done and the paper lies ahead of me. I might use this journal/blog as a place to post portions of it as I write it. The essay will be the tricky part as I am so conscious of my word choice in matters like this.

These are the questions that must be answered:

-Discuss the events, circumstances and persons in your life that have affected your faith and your sense of call. Describe how others have encouraged you to explore theological study and/or the possibility of a church vocation.

-Describe your family of origin and how it has shaped who you are.

-Describe your current life situation including marriage and family situation, physical, spiritual, and emotional health, financial status and geographical restrictions. Describe your understanding of being open to the needs of the whole church as well as your readiness for ministry preparation.

-Reflect on your personal journey of faith and relationship to the ELCA including your current church involvement.

-Reflect on your current understanding of the particular ministry to which you feel called (pastor, diaconal ministrt, associate in ministry, deaconess) and your assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, gifts, convictions and concerns related to this ministry.

It should be easy to write. (NOT!!!) I’ll probably post excerpts in this journal. PLEASE comment on the excerpts since I’d love to know how they sound.

Thing is… I need to get it done this week and I also have to study for my permit test in the next few days since I want to take the test on Saturday. Please pray that I can get both done.

***This is copied off of an entry I had in the first incarnation of Meditatio with a few things added to make it fit my current circumstances.

The Story of My Seminary Admission (abridged)
In November of 1999, I was miserable and failing two of my classes. After a night of fighting with my roommate and a few hotly worded emails to my ex-boyfriend, I was at my wit’s end. That lunch, I was sitting with Carolyn (my roommate) and Jon Louie (my ex-boyfriend) and both knew what was going on. Jon offered to take me off campus for an afternoon. We apologized for the latest blow up and made up. Then, he held me as I started sobbing about the fact that I hated my life and I just didn’t know what to do. I commented that I was considering a change in major to Religious Studies but that I didn’t know the first thing about doing it. Jon gave me some pointers and then took me for some tea (since my stomach was so knotted up that I couldn’t eat).

=Flash forward to February 2000=
I had indeed passed all my classes the quarter before, but I was miserable in my Bio major. I was looking into Religious Studies classes in the course catalog and had basically decided to take a quarter off of Biology. I was talking to Jon (my boyfriend then who is now my husband) and he encouraged me in my thought that ordained ministry might be where God was calling me. He recommended Luther and Trinity and since Luther is the more conservative school, I thought I’d go there.

=Flash forward to September 2000=
I had made up my mind to go to seminary but this would be after I’d been out of school for a few years (since I really didn’t want to go straight to grad school after college). Jon and I had been engaged for a month at this point and I’d met his parents. His dad had suggested bumping the wedding to December 2001 so that I could take intensive language classes at Trinity before I headed up to Luther. This would also give me time to get all my candidacy stuff done.

=Flash forward to January 2001=
I’m sitting in my room surfing the Trinity site when it gets put on my heart to apply there. My response is: “NO CHANCE LORD!” However, the Lord really doesn’t like taking “NO” for an answer, so the whole application thing stayed on my heart until I downloaded the application, printed it out, and sent it in. I applied as an MTS student because it was really my only option, and I figured that I’d get my MTS first as something to do while Jon finished seminary and then figure out what to do with my life.

=Flash forward to March 2001=
I get a letter stating that I’ve been granted admission to the MTS (Master of Theological Studies) program at Trinity. I waffle over whether to go, even though I told God that if He got me in, I’d go. I finally decide to accept the offer of admission.

My Seminary Adventures
When I arrived in July 2001, my housing had fallen through and I was staying at Jon’s apartment. When the property management people found out, they called the dean of the seminary and the housing office and explained to them that Jon and I were living in sin and the seminary should probably look into this. (As if my life was *that* interesting.) I went over to the housing office to straighten everything out and Cecelia (our housing person and purveyor of good chocolate) explained that they knew my situation and I was welcome to stay with Jon as long as I needed. In the meantime, had I thought about taking Summer Greek? I’d be able to live at the seminary and I’d be able to have a job there. So, I ended up taking Summer Greek and getting to know some of the M.Div students.

During Fall, I kept saying that I’d switch into the M.Div program the next year and then I realized that just getting my MTS meant that I could either go on for Ph.D work or apply it toward an M.Div later on. In February, I was prepared to declare my entire program and go for my thesis proposal conversation. Then Jon’s pre-Internship interview happened. They told us that we couldn’t stay local and that one of us (read: JEN) would have to take a year off for the other one to finish. That basically shot all my plans.

Damage Control
After getting that news from the Contextual Ed people, I decided that I really needed to get some plans in place for the next year. I went to talk to my pastor about candidacy stuff and to our seminary president about whose jurisdiction I’d be under for candidacy since I might be changing synods (which turned out be a moot point because I’m still in the same incredibly dysfunctional synod for Jon’s internship).

Since I was taking a year off for Jon’s benefit, I was told that this might be a bargaining chip to use for being able to stay at Trinity if I wanted to. Others who knew how I was feeling about Trinity at the time told me that I could probably look into Luther at this point since Jon and I really wanted to go to Minnesota for his first call. Trying to get a call in my current synod is hard because there are so many people here that hire those who know them from something else. In Columbus, it would probably be impossible to get a call and we’d have to live apart. It would be the same way at Luther but the synods in the Twin Cities are less dysfunctional, so it would actually be nicer. We’d met the bishop of Southwestern Minnesota Synod at a reception and he was really wonderful, so we felt like we had a shot. (He actually is now the head of the Division of Ministry, which is also nice since he’d be a good person to work with for appeals.)

On Draft Day (when the seniors find out what regions of the church have chosen them — it’s a majorly festive day around the sem), I cornered one of our admissions people who had graduated from Luther and explained my predicament to him, asking him what I should do as we might be in Minnesota next year or even for Jon’s first call. He told me what to do about taking a leave of absence and he told me that the head of admissions at Luther was at Capital University and that he could meet with me the next day. This was pretty sweet timing!

The next day, I went and met with Ron Olson (their admissions guru) and explained my situation to him. He told me that they needed a positive entrance decision from my candidacy committee and a letter of honorable dismissal from the dean of the seminary. He also understood that my decision to transfer seminaries was not an “I hate Trinity” thing; but rather a move to help Jon get a first call in a more friendly climate. He told me to keep in touch with him (which I’ve started doing) and we’d work admissions stuff out.

My Present State of Mind
After spending a year at Trinity, I’m seriously looking at checking Luther out as far as how the campus is and feels. Trinity is one of the best seminaries academically in the ELCA and I have never found more gracious and loving people. It’s also incredibly liberal and I constantly feel like I have to hide my conservatism. (And yes, I’ve heard the argument about being God’s leaven in the midst of rampant liberalism. I think it works for public school children bringing others to Jesus; but it’s not that way in a seminary setting.) I had a TA rip apart a paper because I had an opposite viewpoint to his on the issue of homosexuality as a sin. (My professor took it and re-graded it, letting me know that he at least agreed with me.)

Mainly, I’ve been feeling called to Luther for the last two years and I’d like to answer that call. Why am I feeling awful? I really love the people at Trinity and Dr. Ramseth, our seminary president, is really pushing for me to stay. He is everything I’d want in a pastor and a bishop and he really tried to help Jon and I find a good site for Internship. He and his wife have essentially adopted Jon and I for holidays (like Easter) and his wife Carol is someone who has really been a support to me this last year. They are really pushing for me to come back and I know that if God calls me to Luther, there are going to be some seriously hurt feelings.

Why I Actually Want to Transfer to Luther

My mother-in-law has pointed out that I have until June to get my application in and to figure all of this out, especially since Jon might not get approved until December 2003 (meaning that he’d be in the February 2004 draft). I really don’t have until June — I have until May because I need to figure out my program changes if I’m going back to Trinity. I also have to mentally psych myself to be able to deal with our director of Contextual Ed since I am still just a *teensy bit* pissed at her for making much of my year a living hell. The woman simply intimidates me and if she comments on how well all of this has worked out during her site visit, I swear that I will vomit. It has *NOT* worked out as “well” as she’d like to think.

OK… enough ranting for the moment.