My Leap Into Ministry

On Sunday, October 1, 2023, I became the interim minister of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Bradenton, Florida. This is the first sermon I preached on that very same day to introduce myself and talk about how someone who prepared for academia was now in the pulpit. You can watch it on Facebook here.

Standing up here in front of you today, all I can say is “Wow.” Nine months ago, being the interim minister of Redeemer Lutheran Church was not only NOT on my radar, it wasn’t even in the same room as my radar. But as they say, “the Lord works in mysterious ways.”

Because this is both my very first day as your interim minister and my first sermon, the council and I thought a good approach would be to give you some background. I’d like to speak to three questions:

1. Who am I?
2. What path led me here?
3. How will I approach this work?

Who Am I?

As most of you already know, I’m the daughter of Lucille and Richard B. They have been members of Redeemer for more than 40 years and I’ve been visiting here ever since then. I always say that they ran away from our home in Roselle, NJ when I was in college. They basically quit their jobs, got in our motor home, and came to Florida to begin a new life. We hadn’t lived in the same town as each other since then until I moved here to Bradenton in 2021.

I grew up in the Lutheran Church. When I was a child we attended St. Paul’s in Linden, NJ, where my mom sang in the choir. I’m sure that doesn’t surprise you. I started singing in the junior choir at 9 years old. There are a lot of things about the Lutheran church that I appreciate: it’s emphasis on grace and on music, its encouragement of people thinking for themselves about faith, and also that because it is a church in the lectionary tradition, we hear almost all of the Bible stories every three years. We grew up being exposed to the wisdom of the biblical narrative.

I’ve also found the Lutheran church to generally be a friendly and loving community. Let me give you an example. When I was very young, I went with my mom to a choir picnic, this was probably even before I began singing in the junior choir. There was a man in the choir whose name I forget – but I do remember his friendliness to me. He was always very kind and never dismissive.

At the picnic, I began to add all kinds of things to a glass of Coke – all food, but not all things that belonged in soda. I probably added milk, and I think I even put in ketchup and mustard. I have no idea why I did this. And then I asked this lovely man to drink my crazy concoction. And do you know what he did? He drank it! I’m sure it was the LEAST appealing drink of all time. But he was willing to be play along with me in a loving way. And that has stuck with me all of these years later.

Now I promise I will never do that to anyone here, but I do really appreciate your friendliness. A recent visitor told me that on his first Sunday here, about 13 people said hello to him within the first 20 minutes. I love that about you people. Let’s do our best to hold on to that.

What path led me here?

Answering that question could take a long time, because the pathway to this place from Roselle, NJ was no straight line. But I’ll just hit the highlights.

I left NJ when I went to Purdue University for college, where I majored in communications. After I graduated from Purdue, I moved to the Atlanta area, originally thinking I’d work in human resources. Instead, I ended up in marketing and corporate communications for many years, mostly in the software industry.

But that work never felt very satisfying. I wanted to bring more of my heart and soul to my work, to express more of my gifts. So after being downsized out of several marketing jobs, I took the plunge into more creative work as a performing singer, songwriter, and recording artist. I truly felt that God had called me to that work. You’ve heard some of my own compositions here. In fact, I have a song called “Working with Beauty” that expresses very well the yearning I had for a more creative life.

After six years of trying to support myself as a musician, it seemed that I just could never get any traction. Even though I had released three music CDs, and had some really impressive gigs – including in Nashville at the famous Bluebird Café – making one’s way in the world as an artist just isn’t that simple. I knew I had to find a new pathway. And I prayed about it. A lot. I asked God to put me where God really wanted me to be.

For many years prior, I had felt a desire to pursue theological education. But I just didn’t feel called to parish ministry, and so even though many people around me – including the pastors of my church in Marietta, GA – thought I should go to seminary, it never seemed the right thing to do.

But in 2008, I realized that I could go to seminary to pursue the academic path so that I could teach religion and theology at the college or graduate level. That immediately made perfect sense, and I got very excited about it. I was accepted to Emory and Vanderbilt, and just assumed I’d stay in the southeast. But when I visited the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, it just felt like home. I began my studies there in the fall of 2009. At LSTC, I earned a master of arts of theological studies with an emphasis in religion and science – and so I took courses in Old Testament, New Testament, church history, and even biblical Greek. There were wonderful courses about that intersection of religion and science that were really interesting too.

I also took a class in a particular type of theology called process theology at McCormick Presbyterian Seminary and that led me to pursue my doctorate at Claremont School of Theology in Claremont, CA, a school that is affiliated with the Methodist Church and known to be the center of process theology. For most of my adult life, I’ve had a passionate interest in the intersection of spirituality and psychology, as well as human wholeness and transformation, and that is what my research at Claremont was focused on.

I finished at Claremont with a perfect GPA and the President’s Award for academic excellence, and was sure that I would find a faculty job, and then begin a new life in a new place. But even my good grades didn’t help me find a teaching job, so I instead took a position as associate registrar at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN, a school that is owned by 28 dioceses of the Episcopal Church. I soon was promoted into a position with the School of Theology as director of a program center and associate dean.

As you can see, I’ve had a very ecumenical life – I’ve worshipped with Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, and even occasionally in other churches. In fact, I’m a lover of all the major world religions. In a society like ours, it really helps us love our neighbors when we understand their traditions.

I worked at the University of the South for three years, but unfortunately, right in the middle of the COVID lockdowns, budget cuts resulted in the loss of my job in TN. I also had to move out of the house I was renting from the University. I had no idea what I was going to do next. And I really felt like God was playing dirty tricks on me.

I decided to come here to Florida to be close to my parents, and because I was tired of the woods, and desperately wanted a change of landscape. I eventually secured two half time remote jobs in my field of study and was at least able to stabilize my financial life a little bit.

Although one of those jobs allowed me to be helpful to organizations I cared about, it was putting a lot of pressure on me. It involved work in fundraising and planned giving, areas that weren’t really aligned with my experience. So I began to ask God to help me find something else that I could do part time.

Right around that same time, Pastor Geoff invited me to do a reflection for one of our Wednesday evening Lenten services and then to do a tag team sermon with him the Sunday before. It was only a couple of months before that that I joined the church officially and was elected to serve on the Council. That Wednesday, after I shared my reflection, I felt a kind of sadness or regret that I hadn’t pursued ministry. I shared that with John after the service and he asked if it would be possible for me to take over for Pastor Geoff who had already announced his plan to leave in August. I told John that I didn’t have the credentials – I wasn’t ordained and didn’t have a master of divinity degree. But I knew that some denominations could approve people to serve a specific church even without all the right credentials, if they had an appropriate background.

That evening, I began to pray about it. While I was praying my right eye began to tremble. Now I’ve been dealing with a condition in my right eye that causes distorted vision. And for two years, I’ve been wondering if there was symbolic meaning to this condition. Was there something that I wasn’t seeing, or wasn’t seeing clearly?

So here I am praying about whether there was something for me to consider regarding service to Redeemer and my eye starts to tremble. I literally said out loud to God, “Is this what I’m not seeing? That you want me to be a PASTOR??” And I immediately started weeping.

I knew this was something that I should pay attention to. The very next Sunday, Pastor Bill happened to be sitting next to me in choir and asked me, because of the sermon that Pastor Geoff and I did together, whether I had considered ordination. And then other people here started asking me if I could serve Redeemer in this way. Next thing I know, I’m meeting with the Synod, and getting approved by the Bishop to serve as a Synodically Approved Minister of Word and Sacrament. And now here we are. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything emerge that organically and happen that quickly in my life before.

That is the path that got me here. And I am so very delighted.

So what will be my approach to the work?

Of course the most basic answer is that I’ll be working half time, and that I am approved to preach the Word and administer the sacraments. I can conduct services of baptisms and funerals, but I can’t do weddings. So if any of you are planning to get married any time soon, we’ll have to make some other arrangements.

As I begin, I believe that my key areas of focus will be on:

1. Worship and preaching each week
2. Basic pastoral care of members, supported by the cottage care groups, and
3. Exploring new ways to attract people to our community, and also to help the call committee and congregation understand how we can move forward in this ministry.

Personally, I see my ministry as being about the Way of Jesus, and the Love of God. How do I see Redeemer’s ministry?

Claire Zammit, founder of Feminine Power, says that when women are seeking to live at their highest level and be their most creative selves, they shouldn’t ask “What is my purpose?” Instead, they should ask, “What is God’s vision for the world, and how can I be a creative part of it?”

In the same way, I don’t think the question that Redeemer Lutheran Church needs to ask is what is our vision and our mission for the future. Instead, we might ask, what is God’s vision for west Bradenton, and how can we be a creative part of that? I hope we can find new ways to listen for the movement of God’s Spirit to help us understand the answer to that question.

Over the next several weeks, I hope to share more with you about the ways in which I hope we will work together. One thing I’ll ask is that you all wear your name crosses – as it will take me a little while to put everyone’s names with the faces that I already know.

As I conclude this message for today, I want to share something that I found inspiring about leadership from the Irish poet, priest, and philosopher, John O’Donohue. It’s called “For a Leader” and it goes like this:

May you have the grace and wisdom
To act kindly, learning
To distinguish between what is
Personal and what is not.
May you be hospitable to criticism.
May you never put yourself at the center of things.
May you act not from arrogance but out of service.
May you work on yourself,
Building up and refining the ways of your mind.
May those who work for you know
You see and respect them.
May you learn to cultivate the art of presence
In order to engage with those who meet you.
When someone fails or disappoints you,
May the graciousness with which you engage
Be their stairway to renewal and refinement.
May you treasure the gifts of the mind
Through reading and creative thinking
So that you continue as a servant of the frontier
Where the new will draw its enrichment from the old,
And may you never become a functionary.
May you know the wisdom of deep listening,
The healing of wholesome words,
The encouragement of the appreciative gaze,
The decorum of held dignity,
The springtime edge of the bleak question.
May you have a mind that loves frontiers
So that you can evoke the bright fields
That lie beyond the view of the regular eye.
May you have good friends
To mirror your blind spots.
May leadership be for you
A true adventure of growth.

That is how I hope to lead, and that is how I hope to serve. This is a new adventure for me, and I truly believe that Redeemer is poised on the edge of its own new adventure. Let us walk together in faith, seeking always the will and the wisdom of God.