Welcome to all of you and we are about to begin this conversation that we've called Exploring Your Call to Ministry hosted by Anabaptist Mennonite biblical seminary. My name is Jewel Gingrich Langenekker. I'm the Dean of Lifelong Learning here at ABS and it's a great pleasure to welcome all of you as I said from all over the U.S. and Canada. Special welcome to our presenters David Miller, Andy Brubaker-Katler, and Amanda Beachy. David and Andy are joining from their offices here at AMBS and Amanda is joining from Iowa, the Central Plains office headquarters there. So if, as I said, you have any kind of technical concern at any point during the webinar, you can send a chat message to the host, AMBS host. We'll be keeping the video focused on the speakers so there's really no need for you to turn on your video, although when we come to comment times if you want to you certainly are welcome to do so. To send a chat, just mouse over the button at the bottom of the page and click on the chat or chat and in the chat box on the bottom half of the screen there's a text box and if you click in the little box you can type a note and then to the upper left of the screen you'll see a list of people you can send the chat to. When we come to discussion times if you have a comment or question please send a chat message to David Miller. He'll share them as time allows. So technical concerns go to AMBS host but comments and questions go to David Miller. Please don't send a chat message to everyone as we're not going to be keeping track of what's going on with the everyone chat. When you finished writing your chat message hit enter and then it will send it. Enter on your keyboard that is. If you want to speak your question out loud we welcome that too. To do that you can raise your virtual hand to show that you want to get into the conversation and to raise your hand virtually go to the bottom of the participant list. So basically you need to mouse over the lower part of your screen until you see the word participant and when participant pops up you'll see a participant list and at the bottom of that list is a button that says raise hand.  David will call on you at the appropriate time and ask you to speak your comments into the microphone. Then you can lower your hand using that same button. David Miller is associate professor of missional leadership development here at AMBS before joining the faculty in 2009. He served as a pastor for 20 years and also taught pastoral ministry at Heston College in Heston, Kansas. He holds an MDiv from AMBS and a doctor of ministry from Columbia Theological Seminary. David Miller, we turn the time over to you now. Joel, thank you. And to all of you who are joining us today, welcome. A particular welcome to those of you who are yourselves weighing the question of your own call to ministry. And I hope the conversation we're about to have is one that you find both freeing and helpful in that process of discernment. The three of us who will be speaking with you today have walked through that journey at various times and through various periods. We recognize we've got roughly a decade between or a little bit more between each of us. So we are products of different moments and different eras when we were participating in that sense of call. The question of call to ministry really is one that's shaped by many factors. For some of us, it begins as an intensely internal sense of purpose and direction for one's life, a sense that God has placed something on our hearts that we are being called to respond to. For others, there's a much more conscious sense of beginning in the words of affirmation and encouragement coming from within the church community, only after which people begin to really try on for themselves saying, is this a call that I am being given and invited to pay attention to? My own upbringing was not in an abaptist family of churches. It was in a tradition where the sense of call was more personally based. As I was speaking with Amanda and Andy, I recalled the very first time I know that I articulated a sense of call to ministry. I was in kindergarten and all the kids in our neighborhood were seated on our back porch probably drinking Kool-Aid when we started talking about what we were going to do when we grew up. And I remember saying I was going to be a minister to which the girl sitting next to me who was my next-door neighbor and a year older in first grade, so obviously far wiser than I was, looked aghast and said, you don't want to do that. And I said, why not? And she said, because then you can't drink high balls. So I remember running into the house and asking my mother, what was a high ball? Because I wanted to know what sacrifice was going to go along with this call to ministry. But whatever was behind that very juvenile response, I know that I again articulated that in mid-elementary school, writing a paper, several paragraphs on what we were going to do when we grew up. There was something deeply working inside of me about this that never left, even when I would try on different ideas about what I would do with my life. There was always this coming back. And it was after, as a young adult joining the Mennonite Church, that I got a phone call one day from the pastor saying that he and the elders wanted to meet with me. They didn't say, what about? And so I hung up the phone and turned to my wife, Mary, who was raised in the Mennonite Church. I said, what does it mean when you were called to meet with the pastor and elders in the Mennonite Church? And she kind of smiled and went ahead with the meeting. And what the call was was an invitation to ask if I'd ever considered preparing for pastoral ministry. They didn't know the history I had of weighing that question, but it came as a gift coming back. And by this time I had become an abaptist enough to believe that this call needed to be discerned in a community. And this was seeming an answer to that holding out. Well, all three of us have our own stories of call to ministry. And it really is a delight to be joined by by Amanda Beachy and Andy Brubaker and Kate Ler for this conversation. I came to know Amanda as a student here at AMBS and was intrigued as she spoke about her own call as a student and the way that interrupted what she thought was a different chosen vocation for which she was planning. And she'll say more about that herself. And Andy, who has been at the seminary, actually was at the seminary a number of years before I came and first came to develop the Explore program, which was a program specifically designed to invite youth and young adults to really try on and explore what does it mean to do theological study, but even more personally, what does it mean to respond to one's sense of call and where God is calling them? So it's out of that rich experience that we will be speaking today and then opening the call up because we really see this as a conversation with one another, drawing out of our experiences, out of the wisdom and tradition of the church, but want to be speaking in specific ways to the questions that you may bring. But let me turn first. Amanda, you're to my left and since I'm left-handed, I'll turn to you first. Just ask, how did this kind of crystallization of a call come about for you? How did you experience that? Well, I always start out by saying I was going to be a fashion designer. I knew that from the time I was, you know, very small. I have notebooks upon notebooks upon notebooks of these designs of dresses. From the time I was small until I was in high school and it wasn't until I was a senior in high school and taking my first online class to, you know, move toward my degree in fashion design that I discovered. I didn't know why I didn't know what was happening but I absolutely, that was not where I was supposed to be. I couldn't imagine being a part of that industry. So that would be sort of the beginning of feeling like I was called to something different but not yet having any idea what that might be because I didn't have any women, pastor, mentors or anything like that. I didn't, in my church, that's not a thing that happens. In my family, that's not a thing that happens. And so there was no immediate sense, oh, it must be, I'm being called to be a pastor. That wasn't a thing. But I decided, because I didn't know what I was going to do, I took a year out of school and went to, I mean after I graduated from high school, I didn't go straight to college and I went to England instead and worked at a youth retreat center. But the summer between high school and going, leaving for England, I went to youth convention. And I am normally a person who does not go forward when you are invited forward at a mass worship service, that's just not me. But I did for some reason and they were praying over people and the prayer and the words that I heard were, preach the truth to the youth of your generation. And that has, I don't know if that's what I'm doing or not, but that has stuck with me and I thought, oh, you know, I'm supposed to go to England and be a youth retreat worker. This is perfect. And now those words sort of mean more to me than they did then. But I still wasn't articulating any sort of call to ministry. It wasn't until after I came back from that time in service and then spent time being a CNA and a nursing home that I knew I wanted to go to school. And it was going to be Goshen College. And so at Goshen, I started sort of exploring what that might look like, what I was being called to. But the barriers for me were that women that I knew weren't called to ministry. And so, was that okay that I might be feeling a call to ministry. And also, I loved Anabaptist history and I, my family has, you know, Amish roots. And so, the idea that in the lot, you're not supposed to participate in a lot. If you wanted to be in the lot. So if I was articulating some sort of call to ministry, did that mean I should automatically be excluded from being a minister? That was something I had to work through. And so I had a lot of conversations and took a lot of classes and and ended up doing a ministry inquiry program after my freshman year of college in Reedley, California and working with the whole congregation and discovering that this was I think something that I was being called to and that I really wanted to do. But I did, I did a lot of inner work before I ever articulated that that call to, you know, the people who were closest to me at home, my parents, my grandparents, my church. And I had, I was, I, David mentioned community and how important that is. And that was really hard for me too because I believe in the Anabaptist community and yet the Anabaptist community that I came from wasn't a place in which I could necessarily test that call. And so that that was very difficult. But I can stop here or I can keep going. I mean to talk about sort of how that all came into play. But by the time I was a sophomore in college, I knew that somewhere or another, some day or another, I was being called to ministry. And then began to get some of the external confirmation. And I will just say too that looking back, I think that that was a part of my story much earlier than I realized. I have a memory of being probably in first or second grade. And my family was between churches. And I hated this. And I just felt terrible when we would not go to Sunday or not go to church Sunday after Sunday, you know, the first couple Sundays were great. And then it sort of went downhill from there. And I remember standing behind the big chair and, and doing worship for my family as they, you know, sat and read the Sunday paper, but preaching and singing and, and, and having church because that was important to me. And I think that I mean, looking back, that is sort of the first time that, Oh, if we would have been a family who or a community that that talked about call or thought about call, that might have been a clue. Well, Amanda, thanks. And there's a number of things you've raised that we're going to want to come back to. But I'd like to bring Andy in at this point, because there are some contrasts as we've talked together with about how we've, we came to this place of owning a call and that shaping the course of our lives. Andy, how did how, how was that crystallized for you? Yeah, well, obviously, I'm much of a slower learner than Amanda is. I think it crystallized for me when I was about 28. And I remember the moment very clearly, I was visiting with a gentleman who was in the hospital, he had fallen out of a tree with a chainsaw in his hand and broke his back. And he didn't know at that point yet whether he was going to be a paraplegic or a quadriplegic. I'd been an associate pastor for about three years, working largely with youth. I was called an associate pastor, but a lot of my work was with youth. And this was a time of testing for me. But when I was visiting with him in the hospital, and I visited him, I was visiting with him for about half an hour. And then he asked me, Well, are you going to pray for me? And it just struck me that, Oh, my goodness, he sees me as a pastor. I'm not playing anymore. This guy is dealing with some serious issues. And it's time to stop thinking about whether I'm testing a call. He sees me as a pastor. I need to step up and be a pastor here. So I think this is an expression of the crystallization of an outer call, which began at least 12 years earlier, but crystallized at that moment where I had to, in a time of crisis or where somebody was really putting their hope and trust in me as a as a leader of the church, I had to decide, like, am I going to internalize this? And am I going to accept this now? Or or not? And he sees me as a pastor. So it's time to, it's time to see myself that way. I think my outer call began at least 12 years earlier. As a high school student, I was part of a church that I wanted to encourage its youth. And so I had opportunities to be on committees. I had opportunities for test leadership skills at camps. At this point, I would have never articulated a sense or a call to the ministry or pastoral ministry, although I would have articulated a sense of call to helping people in some way or another. I wanted to work with people. I knew that maybe being a teacher. When I went to college, I went to Canadian Manite Bible College in Winnipeg. And there I was encouraged by a number of teachers, professors to consider pastoral ministry. But for a few reasons, this wasn't really that appealing to me. What was appealing to me at that point was that, yeah, I think I wanted to do something that was related to the church. But still, for whatever reason, I didn't connect the dots between feeling a call to work with people and the encouragement to be a pastor with my own sense of this is something that I should explore vocationally. In part, I had my site set on doing some traveling after I graduated from college. And I had a girlfriend in a relationship I wanted to explore a little bit more. And I wasn't that interested in being domesticated by a church right away. So I needed some help discerning between all these options and the opportunities for pastoral ministry, I kind of just pushed off to the side for a few more years. I'll leave it at that for this point. Thanks, Andy. Amanda, the people want to say more about how the community of the church did shape you for this, because it you've already touched on the challenge. And it's a very real one that women face less so all the time, I hope to be true. But still, this question about if I have not seen the example of other women called, or if I've even been heard that it being questioned, what do I do with this inner sense? And am I hearing wrongly? Must I stifle that? Or is God's voice and leading something greater than maybe what I'm hearing in the ethos around me? Yeah, my church has always been very important to me. And even when when I was going to be a fashion designer, I would think, Okay, I'm gonna have to live in New York. What men and I church will I go to?  And so certainly, my church community shaped me in those ways, and was a real community of love and support. But also, I mean, I just didn't have I didn't see there were there were women pastors in the area. They were not women pastors that I identified with. They were sort of soft spoken, wonderful women who used mothering language and that's that's great. That's just not me. And so I'm not so there were some, you know, not in my church, but but other places there were these these women leaders. And so I, you know, vaguely knew that that was a possibility. And I remember being sort of jealous of the boys in my class when they were asked to preach and things in high school. But I but I was given leadership opportunities in other ways or I mean, I was given a sense of belonging in the church, certainly, which I think is a great gift. And I was taught by a very important Sunday School teacher, who was not a Sunday School teacher very long, but taught to ask questions. And I think that is where an awful lot of of my call and of my I mean, of some of my interests come from. Learning that I could ask questions and I could challenge things. I'm trying to organize trying to think about your question and organize my thoughts here on the fly.  And I would say that that in in different ways, the church was very supportive. I have I had a youth minister who would sort of pretend I wasn't there when I would come back from from college, after I had sort of announced my my calling, his wife would talk to me, he would not. So that was that was one experience. But the lead pastor at church, who, you know, I thought of as fairly conservative and whatever else once my mom went to him, I had countless in internships and camping inquiry program and ministering program, we were constantly asking the church, you know, to help support this program or that program. And she went and said, you know, I'm sorry, we're asking church for, you know, supporting and he said, absolutely. That is what the church is for. Do not do not apologize for that. And that has stuck with me that that he never he never, you know, came to me and said, this is really good thing that you're doing. But through that, through that example, I felt okay. I'm exploring this call isn't is an okay thing to be doing. Um, and I on one side of my family, we are conservative Mennonite from the conservative Mennonite conference. And on the other side, my grandparents were married in the Amish church and and left soon after my dad was born. So I've got some some interesting background. But before my Amish, formerly Amish grandparents died, they both sort of affirmed my life choices, which meant an awful lot to me. And my my grandparents on the other side, when I was at seminary, would, I wasn't going to say anything about seminary to them. But my grandma would say, Now, how how is school going? So I'd say, Oh, this this semester is kind of hard or whatever. And she'd say, Well, you could drop out. Thanks very much. That was that was good. I'll consider that. But I but even over time now, they, you know, they came to my graduation, they came to my installation. They're they are, whether they, they or other people in my community, whether they think it's okay for a woman to be a pastor or not, they are learning to see my gifts and my call, I think. And and respond to that. I don't know if that answers any of your questions. And if you have more, please let me know. I'm struck as I listen to you speak, even about these persons who were hesitant about your call to ministry. I also hear a depth of love for these folks and respect that goes beyond that. And what that does to transcend the that difference that it demonstrates an incarnation of the gospel as that which which does have the capacity to deepen our love for one another and our relationships. So it speaks very powerfully. And I'm also struck to have how there were ways in which those who even again, if they might have been hesitant, maybe on the specifics of a call to pastoral ministry, still did things to open doors, right? And and to to encourage and to hear your thoughtful reflection on that, Amanda, is is a very significant and powerful testimony to this, this, this call and what then ends up transforming attitudes.  Was it was any of that external nature at all? An expression of, you know, perhaps to to give voice to this is is proud, which is not, which is not a value in Anabaptist theology. Was there is there a caution around that? Or what else? Are there other ways that you understand that now as you look back across your life?  Here we go. Okay, you're talking about the external call? Or yeah, or and also being able to claim this an interior sense of it. Um, well, maybe my background is both Mennonite Brethren and Amish Mennonite. So part of my background and I've been shaped by both of these traditions. So in one tradition, the Mennonite Brethren tradition, there was this the worry about pride wasn't really wasn't really part of it, you were supposed to be very vocal about it. But coming from that tradition, I also didn't know or I didn't have this sense that internally, that I was feeling that spiritual call from the Amish Mennonite side, there definitely I think was that sense of, you know, like, yeah, if this was something you wanted, then maybe maybe you're not wanting the right thing, kind of thing. So you kind of wear it on your sleeves. So it's probably more from the Amish Mennonite side that that I took opportunities seriously. I think some of my own internal resistance, maybe had a little bit less to do with worry about a sense of pride. But there were two factors. One is that by the time I was done college, I had this sense that I wanted to serve the church. But also, I had the sense that I wanted to give my life to something and I wanted to give it all to something. And if it was going to be serving the church, for me, it was going to be like all or nothing. And I don't know how this, how true this is of Generation Xers, but I certainly see this in my group of friends from high school, we fall into two categories, about half of us have, for half of us, the church is totally irrelevant. They don't go, it's not a big deal, they're not mad at the church, nothing happened, they just walked away and it doesn't seem to make a difference. And the other half of us are super involved, we're pastors, we're professors, maybe over committed. And so for whatever reason, that was kind of this discernment internally, like, is this something that I want to give my whole life to and if it is, I'm gonna commit it all. I think the other kind of hesitance that I had for internalizing this external call was when I was in high school and then in college, my parents' marriage was falling apart. And that was emotionally extremely taxing. And I wasn't sure that I was worthy to be a pastor, because I thought that pastors had to have it all together. And I sure did not. And my family sure did not. So I think partly the the hesitance on my part for acknowledging an internal call just had to do with needing to deal with that, that agenda kind of emotionally and separating those issues a little bit a call from the kind of health of my family. And I would say that on that issue, there were lots of people along the way whom I could talk to about that and process that with maybe not so much earlier on, but later on. I appreciate both of you identifying those those personal pieces of call that that in in this process of discernment, the the question of the tension between humility and pride, am I worthy of this to bringing those things to voice? Because I hope that those of you who are listening recognize the how common those questions are, they may take a different form for us. Within within Anabaptist tradition and heritage, there has been really a kind of insistence, if you will, to say that the call to ministry has two dimensions. It has this inner call and an outer call, the the call that is resonant on the heart and identity of the person, that this is a right expression of their discipleship of what it means to follow Christ for them. But also and that that needs to be confirmed within a community that says, yes, we see the gifts for effective ministry, we see in you one we would trust in leadership and and in in stepping up to these roles within the community, and we will entrust that entrust that to you. What you've illustrated, though, between you is those things don't always happen just in a neat, simultaneous process. Very often, one precedes the other. And and either one can be the starting place in our in our experience. And so as those of you who are are discerning for yourselves call or those of you who are mentors and walking with others to be to be attentive to the different ways those things happen. Another Amanda, you sort of noted was saying the the women that you did know who were who were pastors were of a different personality type and say, I didn't fit that. I recall for myself when I when I first began serving in a congregation and was had a feedback group preaching because I was also in seminary at the time and was receiving seminary credit, the pastor under whom I had been really formed in shape in the congregation, I was called to serve in that in that congregation was a really good teacher from the pulpit, but rather low key in terms of expression. And one day in a sermon feedback group, an older man said, David, I've seen you on the stage at the humble center. I was when I was a student in college, I had minored in theater and he said, it feels like you're afraid to bring that person into the pulpit. He said, I would invite you to do that. And it was again, one of these times, I was trying to mold myself into an image of what I thought a pastor looked like and sounded like and also not to misuse emotion theatrics, if you will, as manipulation. But he was saying, bring that as a gift of communication to articulate and to invite us to hear anew. And that door opening, that gate opening, if you will, was one of those kinds of gifts that comes along the way, even as call is perhaps already decided at one level, but at another level, it's still being discerned. It's still being opened up. What are the dimensions of this? I'd invite either one of you to pick up on those, you know, those things that keep opening your sense of call, or did you have to go through times of rethinking Andy, you've obviously lived out your call in in various positions and roles. What's the continuity between those different roles while you still identify yourself as as as one who is called to ministry? Yeah, so my I would identify the focus or the locus of my call as being to serve God through serving the church. And so I would say kind of that kind of framework, just a slightly broader kind of call to ministry has worked for me. But I've been in a few different roles. And each time I change roles, it kind of my identity changes a little bit. And so that opens up for opportunities to maybe not maybe not question my call, but to rethink what does my call mean in this time and in this place. So while it took me a few years to internalize and own called a pastoral ministry at Bethany Menonite Church in Virgil, Ontario, after moving into the seminary, I went through a period of mourning for this kind of loss of a pastoral identity. I was part of a church, but I had a very different kind of relationship with the people in the church. And now I had a pastor. And so there was this kind of transition time. And I would say, similarly, it took me a while to really fully own and internalize that identity as being an administrator at a seminary and then a teacher as well. So in all this, there was that continuity of serving God in the church. And by church, I meant not just the congregation, but also its institutions and its ministry to the world. But there were lots of opportunities to kind of to rethink what that meant in terms of my identity. And these were also, I think, opportunities to reclaim and and reown that to reaffirm that sense of call. So they've come, they've been welcomed opportunities, even though that there were shifts along the way. Amanda, are you are still quite early in terms of your you're serving in pastoral ministry? But as you've embraced that call and moved into pastoral ministry, what, what are you discovering? What what's it like as your move from, if you will, the theoretical, those things that you worked out here in seminary and hitting the reality of living that call out in in congregational leadership? Well, I really like theoretical ministry, but I really like real ministry too. But it's very different. And even I've been five years in my church and came straight from college to seminary to to my church. But even in that time, I have seen my my sense of call or or what that might mean shift a little bit. Before I went to seminary, I kept saying, Well, I don't want to be some young upstart pastor. So I'll do something else for a while before before I go to seminary before I become.  Oh, that's true. And I went I went to seminary. And in seminary, I one of one dimension of my call is is certainly being some sort of a bridge between sort of Mennonite academia and and the rural people or or rural communities that that sometimes they don't relate well. And that that has been sort of my focus or my my one of those things that I used to shape my ministry and my call. And so so that sort of became solidified. I knew I wanted to do ministry west of the Mississippi, which is not very popular. Um, but but even even having been here five years, I grew up 20 minutes south of where I am pastoring now. And it's kind of wonderful. I farm with my dad in the spring and the fall. And I, I have another job as a, you know, co-director of the Mennonite Historical Society. And I have all of these other things that are that are a part of my call. And I think that that as I mean, five years is not long. But I continue to think of all of the other things, other ways that that who I'm called to be in the church will might take shape later. And part of that is that there are so many things that I enjoy that I, I don't, I don't, I'm not full time. I'm three quarter time at the church, I don't want to be full time. I want to be able to enjoy other things. And part of that is that I live in Washington, Iowa, there's not that many different opportunities for ministry. So unless I stay in my church for the next, you know, 40 years, I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to think about some of those things. And I think that's exciting to me. I think that's a different way of thinking about call than perhaps generations before me. Um, I think of my call currently as for this time and in this place, I don't, I think that I will always be a ministering person. Right now I'm called to pastoral ministry. But I think there's a variety of ways and a variety of things that I may do in my life that will continue to to relate to some sort of ministry. And that could take a lot of different forms. But I, but one thing that I, I believe very strongly is that if, if I don't end up being a pastoral minister for the next 40 years or whatever, 50 years, I don't know, that will, that will not invalidate my call for this time in this place. I think that, that that's an important thing for me to express or to think about or to that, that we, you know, my generation, we change jobs, we change careers, we change ideas, we, it's a lot more fluid than I think in years past. And I think thinking about ministry or thinking about myself as a called person in that sort of more fluid way of finding jobs and finding vocations and things like that. I think that's different. I think that's, but I think it will continue to change and continue to grow. And I'll continue to think of myself differently in different situations or of my call differently in different situations. Yeah, you're, you're, you're describing that, that, that possible fluidity of between specific expressions of ministry, how you will do that. I think is something really significant because we're, I think we're all aware, there's tremendous fluidity in the church right now. Many long time established congregations are graying and aging. What is, what is the future for them? The church in North American society is certainly at a very different place than when I began in ministry. And I remember when I first started here in the, and I was serving in Goshen, we would annually have our meeting with the, the, the local ministerial association with the superintendent of schools and we'd all pull out our calendars because Wednesday nights belong to us at the church and Sundays belong to us. And if the school district violated that by an athletic practice going too long or something like that, we would, we would stand up and say, you know, we expect these things to be okay. This is our time and most of our congregations at that point, we're still having Sunday evening services and, and at least some we're having Wednesday evening services that that has changed dramatically in terms of the place of the church in society. So it is also meaning that the form in which ministry takes many times, it has to take more entrepreneurial forms, persons who are maybe not employed full time in the work of ministry, but nonetheless, recognizing that they are called to this work of guiding and forming a people, a community of faith that is bearing witness to the kingdom of God in the world. Andy, you, in your work, you work with a lot of youth and young adults through the explore programs. What do you, what do you see in terms of the where they are in their journeys of discernment? Are there are the things that characterize those? And how do you perceive your role as a mentor in that process? Yeah, so I was really glad that Amanda raised the issue of her own call to ministry not being unvalidated by the possibility of it, meaning that she leaves pastoral ministry. Because I do see, I do have a question about how the church is going to or has already responded to young leaders who do aren't necessarily thinking about what is God calling me to for the rest of my life, but what is God calling me to do next? And so there's that, that openness to next may not be forever, and it may involve change. So I think both young people and older people are looking to the church and its leaders for stability. But I think we, they have different understandings of what stability means. For some it status quo. And for others, it's more just a sense to love, to love the people who are there and to deal with the mess that that we're dealing with. And so I do kind of, I do wonder about that. I do think that younger people that I've seen kind of go through the explore program or younger seminary students here, do have this sense that God is calling them to some very important work and it involves the church, but it may not be forever. So I think we need to think in somewhat more provisional terms. I've also in more recent years been thinking about this in terms of the framework that Kenda Creasy Dean provided. Kenda is a professor at Princeton Seminary. And she says that for the church to form people with a consequential faith, we need to provide four things, a language of faith, a community in which that language is taught and practiced and tested, a call, which is kind of a personal vocational call, and a hope, a hope for the world, a hope that represents how your our own personal call kind of goes alongside of what God is doing in the world. And I think this is not only a formula for a consequential faith for all people in the church, but of a call to leadership as well. And I see people of all ages responding well when we can provide them with a language of call. When I was when I was younger, we didn't the word vocation would have meant very little to me. If anything, it might have been like slightly Catholic or something like that, right? But I didn't I didn't think about it. My own sense of calling in terms of vocation, we didn't even use the word call that often. But I've just found over the years that having a language, a specific language that helps us process these issues and these questions, that alone is really helpful. But we still need a community in which that call is tested. And I think this for me, this is kind of a there's a bit of difference here between my Mennonite Brethren upbringing and my Amish Mennonite upbringing. Mennonite Brethren Church had a more religious language that was more explicit. It wasn't necessarily more deep, but it was more explicit. And so they did have a language of calling and an internal internal call. And I think for for churches that don't have as robust a language, this might have worked fine 50 100 years ago, where the community that you farmed in was the community of people you went to church with those the young people were the people you went to school with. It was a fairly close tight knit community and faith could be passed on by osmosis or leadership development by osmosis. But that's not the day and age that we live in quite like that now. So we need to be the church needs to be more explicit. I think about providing those those four factors. Another thing I would say, especially from my experience with the explore program is that young people, but I think this is true of people of all ages, want to be affirmed for our gifts, want people to help us identify them because sometimes other people see them in self in us better than we see them in ourselves. But young people aren't necessarily concerned with like whether they're going to be pastors or not. So the notion of developing gifts, the language of leadership development, that works really well. But for young people, you know, to be called future pastors, often that can be a little a little unnerving. And so I think as a congregation or as a church when we think about leadership development, I think we don't need to worry right away and immediately about who are going to be the future pastors of our churches, but more about who are going to be the leaders participating in what God is doing in the world and helping those of us in the church do that. I just comment here and Andy, thank you. Thank you for that. At this point, I set a chat out, but I also want to again, invite those of you who are participating, who have been listening to enter the conversation more actively. If you have questions or comments to send those to me using the chat function, we'd really like to have to join in this this kind of conversation together. Just as a reminder to send a comment or question by chat, you just mouse over the bottom of your screen to find the chat button, or if you want to speak your comment, mouse over the bottom of your screen to find the participant button, click this button and then find the raise hand button at the bottom of the participant list. If you have a chat, send it to David Miller. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Jewel. Here we do have, we do have a response right here. Krista has said, I agree with Andy's statement that the church needs to respond to short term call, asking what does God calling me to do next? How does AMBS and Menonite Education respond to equip young adults wanting to lead and serve, but don't necessarily have four years to commit to training for pastoral work? How does one live in limbo between proper pastoral work and lay leadership? Our systems aren't very well set up to grow into this space and I see lots of peers caught in this. Do you want me to respond, David? Andy, would you have, yeah. Sure. Well, yeah, I think this is a good question and I think we don't do a really good job of helping people in that intermediary space, other than by providing opportunities to invite them into kind of fuller or more slightly longer term commitments. So I know Christa is an example of somebody who was part of the Explore Program, which works with young people. And I just I know from experience that a lot of Explore participants have ended up in some kind of congregational or church related work in some way, not nearly all of them becoming pastors or even going on to seminary. But I think kind of taking advantage of programs that are also short term programs. I think of things just like this webinar that the Church Leadership Center is doing as kind of being a very short term commitments that can help with that ongoing process of discernment. Yeah, there are like the Central Committee has programs, other programs like that. Now, I think maybe Christa, if I understand you right, part of your question has to do with, you know, what can happen within the congregation itself? These are all things that kind of take you out of the congregation. And I do think that congregations as a whole need to need to keep thinking about what it means to call people to leadership. And that it's an ongoing process, right, that it is a step at a time. And I just want to say that I think that's that's an ongoing issue. And we haven't found our way yet. I do think part of that is because different generations have different understandings of what leadership means and is. And so part of it is we might even have similar terms that we use, but we associate different meanings to those terms. So, you know, when I think of my own call to pastoring, I think there were lots of people that saw me as a pastor, a real pastor earlier than I saw myself, because they had a higher respect for the role of the pastor position of a pastor than I did as a young person. And so I think part of it is just kind of talking about thinking about this language that we're using and do we mean the same the same thing with it. There was a while, I think where the emphasis in the church was towards professionalization, which ended up not being a good thing for lay leadership development. And I think we're at a point where we're going to see the pendulum swing the other way a little bit, and that we're going to be spending more time doing lay leadership development, thinking about that. Unfortunately, this is also coinciding with a time where denominations, conferences, area churches are shrinking. Right. So I think a lot of this is going to have to come from within the congregation. And I think, you know, I know I would and I think other people would look to people like you, Krista, who are younger adults in the church who are committed to the work of the church to kind of help us all figure out how we're how we're going to do this.  Yeah, I'm just thinking about, as churches, it was hard for me to articulate or think about a call because all of the people I saw up front looked the same. And if I, you know, if I wasn't a white male wearing a suit on a Sunday morning, it was it was hard to see that leadership. No, sometimes, you know, women were we're doing different things. But if you're if you have gifts that you don't see as, you know, my primary gift is speaking in public. My primary gift is playing music and church. My primary gift is I think churches can often get stuck in. This is what a pastor should look like. This is what a worship leader should look like. These are the the three things we do in church every Sunday or or five things or whatever. And I think as we talk about how church is is changing in our world now, we as pastors and church leaders need to think of new and different and creative ways of of doing church and encouraging our congregations to be more flexible. Because I think that as we try new ideas, we then then involve more people. And I think, you know, if my gifts weren't valued by my church, would I still be in church? And I don't know that. And I don't have, you know, some 10 step program for making your congregation more flexible. But I at Washington Mennonite it's a small enough church where we have we've been able to do some different things. And I think that it would be. I, you know, how I don't know how many you think, but they see different things happening in church on on any given Sunday. And so there is the possibility that some of them will see some of their gifts valued and and utilized in a congregational setting. And I think that's one way to encourage, encourage leadership or encourage even I mean lay people to use their gifts and whatever, whether that's, you know, we're talking specifically about called pastoral ministry, but whether that's making cinnamon rolls or whether that's making artwork for the church, or whether that's sometimes we can get caught in a rut. And I think then it's hard to see how we are valuable to the church. And I think yeah, a couple of comments have been coming in here and that I want to bring in. But this this role that the church can play in forming in in calling people's gifts out to give opportunity to test gifts and to lead out in new areas, because again, the form that the church is going to need to be taking and its engagement in communities in engaging in what God is doing in the world is is going to take different forms and what it has. So so the the readiness to both open doors, but also to give feedback and guidance to those who do give expression to their gifts. Sometimes we we do the first half of that without doing the second half of that in congregations. I want to bring in just sort of amusing from that that Andrew has put up to saying that with relation to the topic of calling connected with the person's struggle with the question of ordination. There is here's attention between someone in the church who has really pushed and encouraged his ordination. But that's a calling that hasn't yet been picked up by others in the church and being left in this kind of limbo between this struggling with his own sense that this is a lifelong calling and yet maybe the church hasn't other than maybe one person or one or two people haven't really embraced that yet or summoned that forth. What would you say say to Andrew as he as he walks with that and lives with that in that uncertain place? Yeah, I think that's a that's a great, great question, Andrew. I mean, I would one of the things I would wonder or ask about is just this person who has been encouraging you, whether you see them as as a kind of a mentor figure or somebody for whom you have received that you haven't kind of an ongoing relationship, you know, somebody you could go to to with questions or issues, or whether it's just kind of like a one off kind kind of question. And, you know, I don't know your situation or your context at all. I think, you know, if you have peers who are in a similar position, certainly checking with checking with peers to see how they are both perceiving you. Some people kind of call discernment circles together. So like people who you intentionally want to invite into this process of making a particular discernment. So kind of between mentors and peers discernment circles, I think those could be two ways forward. I would say, again, not knowing anything about your congregation and context that, you know, not all congregations are really good at calling and affirming leaders congregations do that much better than others.  Or is there's kind of something else going on? So I would say just because it hasn't come more broadly, don't take that necessarily as a sign that it's not a real call. But find people who you trust both peers and mentor kind of figures to help you tease this out a bit. Take it seriously, that one person has affirmed you. Amanda, did you have so you nodding in agreement? I don't know if you had something you wanted to add to that. Oh, this is just something I'm struggling with to you right now. So so that just although on my on my end, it's more my resistance. But my I will I will just say that my congregation would not have a clue that it was time for ordination, that it was a thing that people I mean, they know pastors who have been ordained, they would have no idea how to get to that point without my sort of saying like, hey, so I'm at the end of my license. It might be time for us to do some discernment here. So that's that's just one thing that I would add that that for my congregation anyway, that's just not something they thought of. And so I don't know if that's your situation or not. But but I think many congregations probably are that way, that things sort of happen. But but the people sitting in the pews aren't aren't sure how they're supposed to happen. And and you know, the official the official sort of way things are supposed to happen is that you're supposed to get this this called ordination from from the congregation. And and in some cases, that probably happens and happens very well. And in others, you have to kind of you have to say, OK, yeah, it's time to time to think about these things anyway. But yeah, Andrew, I'm going to invite you to was this the follow up to your question or your comment? You'll need to unmute your microphone, Andrew. Thank you. Yes, a little bit of a follow up question there with you, Amanda, or others as well. I got the sense it's OK then to ask the congregation, hey, can we think about this together? Can we push this a little bit rather than wait for someone else to catch on? And the individual in question, we just laid them to rest recently. So from that perspective, he's no longer going to be present there. But yeah, I'm wondering about he's been asking the board and he's been contacting conference ministers and such for four years, four years saying, hey, we need to get going on this and the board is kind of like, well, whatever. So I've kind of laid it, let it rest for a little bit while the board thinks about this some more. So do I push further? Let it rest. I remember hearing I should contact others. And this is a discussion I've had with other pastors already and is waiting for the board to go to the church and say, hey, this is something we need to do or not. Well, I am certainly not an authority to tell you whether that's OK or not. But in my situation, that has. That that would have to happen because otherwise nothing would happen. But I think we have elders in my church and so that's who I've processed a lot of that with and sort of OK elders. I'm at the you know, the end of my of my second two year licensing. And so so at this point I'm either not going to have a license to do the things that you want me to do or we're going to have to to move forward. And so and I have I have struggled with whether I want to be ordained or not too. So that has been the group that I have have done some of that processing with also and in trying like OK. So if I'm if I'm not licensed, what are we going to do? That sort of thing. So, you know, I'm not anyone to give you permission, but I know that in in some cases, many cases, churches need a little gentle nudge or questions asked in order to to get some balls rolling. I would just add that here's here's a place that conference and area church ministers can be a resource as well. They can they can help educate a church forward because it can be hard if it's the person who is the candidate for potential ordination to to try and do that educational role as well because it just it can very quickly feel like this is just being self promoting where the the the resources outside the congregation really are there and available to help provide that kind of education and guidance to a congregation. And it is it's also a way of further developing the leaders who are in the congregation, the lay leaders who are, you know, often often come into their roles without much orientation except what they've observed others doing. So so to it can be very helpful for congregations to think in terms of doing really formal kinds of things. You know, one, we used to annually have a worship and music leaders day long workshop in the congregation. Sometimes we would resource that ourselves sometimes we would bring in outside resources simply to further develop those gifts that people were expressing and but giving opportunity to not just say, well, we invite you to do this sometime, but also we're going to provide some feedback and guidance and orientation to that work. So at all levels, if we can become more intentional about those things, we are we are strengthened through that. And David, I can I just jump in here quick. Absolutely. I'll say to Andrew, I think it's I think it's perfectly OK for you to to say I need this, right? I need a sense of clarity about what my relationship with the church is. And maybe maybe they do have a plan, you know, ask, you know, so what is your proposal for formalizing this relationship? And I so I think it's perfectly OK for you to say and be honest. I have this need. This is part of my process of discernment. Can you help me understand why the board has not been moving on this, right? So at least provide them the opportunity to to be pretty open and honest with you about what's going on at that level. But for you to own that, you have that need. I think that's perfectly fine. David, we can't hear you. Now, now, yes. OK, I bumped. There's a mute on my headset that doesn't show up on the screen when I mute it. So thank you. Victor has several related or interrelated questions that I'd like to get to. First thing for an older person who who has an MDF but has been working in industry for over 30 years now and feels a call to now draw on that that that preparation has a calling to ministry. Any advice I could see. He hasn't stated this, but I could see that that people would say, oh, well, you've been doing this for the last 30 years. That's not the lens we've been thinking of. I'll put his other questions out here and either of you can pick up as you will. Second part is how do we discern call versus an ego trip? What's what's the difference between those two things? And thirdly, why are Danes do we ordain some folks and not all who are doing good work with the church? You can take those in any order and then I'll be glad maybe to pick up if there's once an art spoken to. But let me turn to the two of you first. Well, I will say that that was a large part of my coming to terms with my call is is this a calling or do I just think that'd be kind of neat? I don't know how to answer that besides saying some days my calling is a burden that I would like to get rid of. I have not questioned my call but I question whether I want to obey my call some days. And that's not that helpful when you're just getting started because you can't just sort of get started and do it for a couple of weeks and then say, yeah. So I don't I don't know how to make that helpful from the outset. But I but I would say I have I have done a lot of thinking about that and I and I don't have any concrete answers except that my, you know, I sometimes fantasize about being a fashion designer being a a home Mac teacher would just be the best thing ever. You know, something where I didn't have to take it home would be would be pretty great where I have I have these hours and I get to go home. But I I don't think that that I could I could do that. I could abandon sort of sort of what I've been called to do long term. It's it's like a yeah, I don't know how what else to say but to say that that is that's a good question and I have thought a lot about it and it it's an important question. I also think that's a really important interesting question and the fact that you're asking it and aware of it, I think is already a step in the right direction to making sure that that kind of just some kind of ego trip is not your primary reason for wanting to get into ministry or exercise ministry skills. You know, and I think there's kind of other another series of questions that one could ask themselves, you know, about motivation for doing this. For example, am I motivated by the desire to talk and have other people hear me or am I motivated by the desire to listen and learn from others? Right. I think like little simple distinctions like those can help along help along the way. And I notice that you're from Foothills Men and the Church. Is that right? I think you're if you're Victor from Foothills. Yeah, OK, right. So I know there's other people on the pastoral team there that can help with with this discernment process. And I'm wondering like that's a that's a pretty important kind of intimate question, you know, whether I don't know if you have a spiritual director or spiritual friend or some or something like that, that that's the kind of question to ask with somebody that you know at that level, right, who can kind of who can see into your soul or help you see into your own soul and ask some of these really, really important questions. I'm reminded of what Richard Rohr talks about and he talks about, well, and Henry now and talks about this, too. I think the difference between being wounded, wounded and wounded healers, right? As humans, as sinful creatures, we're all kind of wounded, right? But we do have a choice. And if we're not aware of our own ego impulses, then we tend to become wounded wounded rather than wounded healers. So I'm just I'm really grateful you're asking a question like this and wish a lot more people would. I'd like to pick up for a moment, though, maybe on the opposite side of this ego question, because I have seen people paralyzed for fear that it might be ego. There was a really helpful book written, well, I read it back in my college days. So it was the last millennium. But Elizabeth O'Connor, who was part of the Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C. and and wrote some very wise books that are still still of great value, wrote a book called The Eighth Day of Creation on Gifts and Creativity. And in it, she said, you know, we sometimes struggle to know the will of God for our lives without ever imagining that that will may already be written into those gifts and creative impulses that are already flowing through us. I remember a close friend in college who suffered from what I would call the Jonah syndrome, who decided that the way this person knew what God's call was, it was going to be that thing that was most diametrically opposed to the direction they wanted to go. And so they would, you know, if they felt like they were fleeing to Ninova, wanted to flee to Ninova, that must be that God was calling them at that moment. Well, there can be those times we resist what we know to be a call of God. But also if that is being formed within us, we dare not immediately fall into the trap of negative assessment that that is automatically self-willed. It is a process of discernment. We can, even when we are following where God is calling us, slip into times where it is ego, that's part of Christian discipleship, of this healthy expression of ego to say that I am a child of God. I have, I claim that. I am a person of worth. I have competencies and gifts. But that can also drive us to a kind of self-willed that makes space for no one else and we just become kind of self-seeking. So that careful work in discernment is an important ongoing task in ministry and it doesn't just get settled with ordination or not. Couple more here. We have a challenging one. How do pastoral ministry students here expect, deal with the financial cost and what they expect to gain in the development of their gifts? You know, will I be able to repay the loans I've taken out or the debt that comes along with this, that's actually become something we have taken up and in fact, seminaries across the country are facing, is the challenge of debt and in the cost of education. Sometimes we have undergraduate students who don't consider seminary because they bring so much debt from their undergraduate studies already. So those are very real. Those are things we need to be talking with people as they are pursuing careers and as they are pursuing preparation of any kind. But also, are there ways that concretely, that congregations stand with people too to help facilitate that happening, help to make that possible? We've had a question here from Karen about, she'd like to hear more about spiritual gifts. She said, I believe there are exercises, tests we can take to help people determine their specific gifts. Is there a website or other way to work through our spiritual gifts? How do you, how do the two of you work at that identification and affirmation of spiritual gifts? Or what helped you in that process? Well, I think when it came to spiritual gifts, one of things that really helped me, it wasn't even so much a test or web resources as mentors. Having people that I could kind of ask these questions, test these gifts with, seek answers or look for cues from, I would identify in my own life people like grandfathers and pastors. Part of this, somebody who's on this webinar is David Brubaker, who was my official mentor after I was licensed in Mennon Church Eastern Canada. And I very much saw and still see David as somebody with whom I kind of had conversation about spiritual gifts like that. That being said, there are other tools that you can use. And one of the tools that I use in classes is Korean wears spirituality wheel, which helps us identify the kinds of spirituality that we may be more drawn to. And she distinguishes between a head spirituality and a heart spirituality, mystic spirituality and a kingdom or an active spirituality. And what I find helpful about a tool like that is it's not very complicated. It's not so much about pigeon holding people in a certain place, but just about being aware of our own preferences or spiritual styles and a recognition that other people have different spiritual styles. So sometimes even the way we read scripture differently or deal with conflict differently partly has to do with our own spiritual style and whether we're drawn to more of a head spirituality or heart spirituality. So I'm not sure if Korean wears tools are available online. Another one would be something like the enneagram, which isn't explicitly or solely about spirituality, but there has been work that has been done with the enneagram to understand our spirituality. The key here I would say again is just so that it helps us recognize that we do have kind of preferences for spiritual types and other people may function differently. So it helps with kind of providing a language for our spiritual preferences and then a way to think about how other people might be different so that we can encourage each other and challenge each other and grow together in our relationship with Jesus. Let me turn to another because our time's getting short. I'd like to get at least some of these questions on the table. Lindsay's note saying I'm not a pastor but have felt a call to pastoral ministries. I'm in my 30s with a young family and have already obtained a master's degree but not a seminary degree, not an MDF. I struggle with this call and have resistance. I believe the biggest reason is because I'm resistant to engaging in another few years of schooling. Has this been a roadblock for others? My current career is as a mental health counselor so sometimes I think I justify my call to pastoral ministry but I think I am doing this work with clients but not imposing my beliefs on them. What happens though is I keep returning to try to discern what it is that God is nudging me towards. Do either of you want to pick up with Lindsay's question here? Well, first of all, yeah, Lindsay, I do think that it could well be that the work that you're currently doing is ministry and I don't know if there are like personal or legal or whatever reasons for which you feel like it can't be explicitly Christian. There are probably both of those that are really good valid reasons.  And I think we need both of those. And so yeah, I do want to affirm the idea that maybe you are already doing ministry. I do, I notice that if I understand it correctly, you are from the United Methodist Church. And so I've also went to a United Methodist school. I know the Methodist Church has some tools or ways for exploring this question as well. So I'm just curious if you've explored any of those. And also, we are, NBS is very close to where you live. And so I think one pretty simple way of testing it would be just to take a class. If you haven't done that already and test it out and see, are you energized by this? You know, do some of the questions that you have about your call. How are they excited by your experience here? Does this help you want to kind of go back to the work that you're already doing or to continue exploring other possibilities? And I think, I mean, I've been gone for five years, but I think NBS has some ways that, you know, you don't have to return to school full time. They have online programs. They would have, you know, take classes as you can. But I would encourage that. I think that's a really great way to test that. And I would also encourage you to take two classes, take a Bible or a theology class and take a more practical class and see where that leads. If that's, yeah, if that's something you feel like you can do. I think one thing I would guess that all of us would affirm is as we do enter into ministry, we find that there's no experience that has been wasted. I wouldn't say God is the ultimate economist in terms of sometimes it's even, you know, it may be by way of negative example that has taught us something, but I have drawn on pieces of education that I never would have imagined that I would. My own background was in natural science for the minor in theater and communication. All of those have been really important. Certainly your training in counseling and mental health work would be an asset in ministry as well. So none of that is lost if you are being called into pastoral ministry. Also, all of you who are listening have found your way to the site for the Church Leadership Center at AMBS and to know that we offer also not just our regular courses but a number of what we call short courses, which are a good way to get an introduction to a field for what is a seminary class. These are non-credit classes, but they provide substantial continuing education opportunities and to test those out. Also, many church conferences have leadership development programs of one form or another. We work very closely here with Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Central District, and Ohio, I believe, Mennonite Conferences and what's called the Journey Program. This is a program of leadership development where persons have a mentor who walks and works with them. They gather three times a year. It is eligible for undergraduate credit. So, or if you're a distance from here, there is what's called the Missionary, it used to be Pastoral Studies Distance Education and now called Missionary Leadership Development Program. So these are, there are numerous other ways of seeking education that is part of the preparation for ministry. Lastly, that I wanted to pick up here, who have been the most helpful people you have walked within the process of discerning your call? Pastors, spiritual directors, friends, family, congregation? Who has it been? And we're gonna need to close the quick answer from both of you on this. Andy and Amanda. I had some excellent friends in college who I could process everything with. So that was number one. And now I have three or four retired pastors, one of whom was a retired pastor from our congregation and is now a conference minister at my church. And they are the most fun people to pastor. Because they do it well, they're encouraging, they give feedback, they have been awesome for discerning. Discerning who I am as a pastor and where to go, I would say that. Thanks Amanda. Andy? And I would say professors and pastors who fall into categories of both official and unofficial mentors. So like I mentioned, David, who is an official mentor, was really important. But also once I did accept the call to test ministry and being a associate pastor, lead pastors that I worked with were extremely important in helping me do that. And I was, I'm very blessed to have had some wonderful lead pastors to work with because I know that's not the case for all young pastors that they have really positive relationships with lead pastors, but I did and I'm very grateful for that. Well, Andy and Amanda, I wanna thank you both for joining for this conversation. For what you have brought out of your own experience and wisdom, blessings to both of you and to those of you who have joined us as you continue this process of discernment or if you're mentoring others, blessings to you that God provides a way to live out this calling. I don't know what exactly, what way or form that's going to be. Sometimes it's surprising. Certainly not when I look over my own life, it was not a way I could have mapped out at the front end, but there have been tremendous gifts along the way. So God's blessing to you and thanks for joining us for this day. Stood in hearing more specifics about AMBS programming that we do have our campus pastor and admissions counselor here on the line, Janine Berchy Johnson and she's gonna stick around. So if any of you want any more specifics on what's available specifically through AMBS for pastoral development programs and other programs, just stick around. I wanna add my word of thanks to yours, David. Thank you for leading us. Thank you, Andy and Amanda for your very insightful comments. This has been very interesting and helpful. We have another webinar next week just to tell you a little bit about that. It's called Introduction to Antibaptism. It's with Lois Barrett. That'll be one week from today. Same time, same place. More information about that on our website, ambs.edu. By now you should have received in your inbox an evaluation form to help us get a read on how you experienced this webinar. It's really helpful to us if you take a minute to fill that out and send it back to us. And so again, thank you for joining us. If you have ideas for webinar topics you'd like to hear us explore, please include that in your evaluation and we'll do our best to respond. Thanks also to everyone who offered support for this webinar. Sophia Austin, Shabnam Pratikbagh, Brent Graber, Cheryl Zaire. Thanks to all of you for joining us. This concludes the webinar. Hey, I'm Janine Bertie Johnson. For those of you who are wanting to get a little bit more information, I will share just a brief bit about the different programs that we have. And then I'll be very glad to take whatever questions you have. We have at AMBS, in addition to the Church Leadership Center offerings, which the Church Leadership Center does our non-credit courses. And in addition to that, we have our academic programs. We have a master of divinity degree for people who are thinking about pastoral minister leadership and those graduates do a number of different kinds of things, including pastoral ministry and congregation, chaplaincy work, pastoral care and counseling, teaching, other kinds of ministries. We also have two options for that. One is an on-campus MDiv and that is just a regular program that if you go full-time, it could take you about three years. If you are working at that part-time, you have up to 10 years to complete. And we also have an MDiv Connect program, which allows you to do a master of divinity degree from the place where you are currently located. You come to campus two or three times a year for an intensive week and you get your residency requirement through those hybrid classes that are partially on campus and partially done online. And the other classes that you take then would be online classes. And doing the MDiv Connect program could take anywhere from about five and a half years to 10 years, depending on how quickly you go through that program. We also have Master of Arts in Christian Formation. It's a two-year degree if you're going full-time, which is oriented towards Christian formation, worship and Christian education. We have Master of Arts in Peace Studies, which is also a two-year degree and a Master of Arts in Theological Studies. All of these classes are taught by the same faculty. We have a great faculty here and we try to focus our studies, our programs on knowing, being and doing. And so the courses are oriented towards preparing you academically, spiritually, and as a person, a leader, and also to develop the skills that are necessary for ministry.


I'm Petty Officer Alec Jacobs with your DOD news update. On Wednesday, Commander of U.S. Army Europe Lieutenant General Ben Hodges spoke to reporters at the Pentagon on the security environment in Europe. General Hodges discussed the differences between U.S. Army Europe's exercises and Russia's military exercises. The Russian snap exercises, you know, there's never an observer there. We find out about them when they're happening. And so that kind of capability that they have, where you could show up in a training area in Kaliningrad or Belarus or maybe both at the same time, you could see that's a threat, a concern that we have because of the lack of transparency. For more information on our operations in Europe head over to defense.gov.


Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another Top 5 Friday. Today we are talking about my Top 5 Coming of Age novels not written by Stephen King and not The Girl Next Door. Every time you hear about Best Coming of Age you hear about Stephen King's It or The Body or numerous, some people even say Dreamcatcher because of the flashback scenes, but I'm going to not include those books. I'm not going to include The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum either. I'm going to try and give you guys options that are not the most popular. One of them I know for a fact that it's probably on everybody's list. Not everybody, but it's going to be on quite a few people's lists, but I can't help but to include it. The inspiration for today's post is we're finally getting, if there's other ones available, I do not know. I haven't read them, I haven't been able to find them, but we're finally getting a Coming of Age about a group of girls called The Dead Girls Club by Damien Angelica Walters. I'm super excited about that one. It's coming out in December 10th in hardcover, ebook, audiobook, I think all that. I got an ARC from Netgalley and the publisher, so I'm going to be getting to that well before December. I'm super excited about it. I'll probably be getting to it maybe, maybe as soon as next week. Who knows how long it'll take me to read it because I think it's like 400 or so much pages, but I'm definitely going to be getting to it soon. Let's go ahead and jump into it. The first one, these aren't really in any kind of order, and now looking at it, I know at least two of these are going to probably be on a whole lot of people's list, but I know one of them is going to come out of left field, going to come out of nowhere. I got a bug flying around here. It's just a moth, I think. But the first one is Boys Life by Robert McCammon. This is an easy pick, of course. It's one of the best Coming of Age novels, of course. It's just a fantastic novel overall, and if you haven't read it, I highly, highly recommend you do. There are the complaints that I do hear when I do hear a complaint. It's usually, sometimes, the complaint about it being overwritten for what it is. I don't agree with that. I think it's very sparse for what it is. Maybe not as sparse or stark or succinct as a Jack Ketchum kind of novel or two of the other ones on this list, but it is. I don't think it's overly wordy, especially not compared to some of his other stuff like Usher's Passing, which I just finished. It's definitely nowhere near as wordy as that one. But this one is a fantastic novel about a little boy growing up in Zephyr, Alabama. I'm pretty sure Zephyr is 100% make-believe that it's a fictional town, you know, like Derry Maine and Castle Rock and all that stuff. But Boys Life is on here. It's just the saga feel of it. There's so much life crammed into this one story and so much goes on. And one of the coolest parts of it is the alligator. The alligator and the wasp. There's a lot of stuff in here that as a boy I ran into myself. Now, I didn't run into alligators, but everybody has a story around their hometown about the monster in the water or the monster in the woods kind of thing. And what McCammon did for Zephyr was create that monster in the water and I really, really enjoyed that aspect of it. Alright, let's go with the other obvious one. I almost dropped books all over the place. Summer of Night by Dan Simmons. You can see this is a fantastic cover. Unfortunately, I don't have a really good version of it. And the version that's available now has a really ugly, boring cover. It's like just foggy, kind of like a foggy night, foggy morning kind of deal. But this one's pretty cool.  I don't know, but it's the cut hole in it and then you got this gorgeous bit. Yeah, it's very, very nice. I'd love to, if there is a, come on, focus, focus, you gonna focus? Stay focused. If there is a like sign limited edition to this book, I'd love to get my hands on a copy because there's so many, especially like the rendering truck, the roadkill truck. Sorry, my nose is itching.  This also has one of the most surprising character deaths ever that I've ever come across. This and Song of Collie, Dan Simmons really knows how to kill his darlings. Now that, that term is actually used for writing, you know, getting rid of your fancy language or whatever or sections that you really, really like, but he gets rid of very popular characters and he's, he's, he's long been an inspiration for my own work because of that. If you've ever read any of my work, you'll know that nobody is safe as the same way in a Dan Simmons novel. Next up, maybe on quite a few lists also, but less so than the other two is The Traveling Vampire Show by Richard Layman. This in my opinion is Layman's best novel. It's his most mature work. And that's saying something because the book is still very, very immature, but I think there's a lot of theme. He played with theme, that kind of thing with, with the book and the ending especially is fantastic. It comes out of nowhere.   Layman didn't do too many twist endings. And if he did, they were either phoned in or they were so off the wall as to be considered cheats. You know, just fixing something there at the end with either, but he rarely uses supernatural, but fixing something with the most outlandish possible conclusion. This one is outlandish, but I find it exceedingly awesome with what he did there at the end. It just, it comes out of nowhere and it fits thematically with the rest of the book. Next up is one of my personal favorites that has somehow which stood the test of time. If you're a fan of the channel, you know how I feel about this author nowadays. In fact, we're doing a whole series on his stuff as I go back and reread through his stuff, but The Voice of the Night by Dean Koontz. This is one of the first coming of H novels I ever read that I actually sat down and read. I had seen Stand by Me, which is based on the body by Stephen King and Goonies and all that stuff. I had seen those movies, but I had never actually read one until I read this one. Oddly enough, I bought this because it has a train on the cover and I was a huge fan of trains when I was a kid. I still am a fan of trains, but I've never actually been on a train. So that's where, it's probably more along the lines of something I can not never have, but something that I haven't experienced is one of those things. Also, my grandfather, not my blood grandfather, but the one that married my grandmother after my real grandfather died. His son, Scott, owned the train that was used in Back to the Future. He also did all that. He did several movies because he owned his own trains. He did his own stunt work. He drove the trains. He did all of that stuff, and I thought that was a pretty cool little tidbit, but I can't remember. I guess Scott Clark is the guy's name because my grandfather's name was Jim Clark. I don't think that's going to give anything away because Jim's been dead for a long time. So anyways, and anybody who knows Jim, hang on, anybody who knows Jim, my head's itching completely. Anybody who knows Jim already knows who I am just by the look, so I ain't too worried about it. But yeah, the voice of the night finally is one that's going to come out of nowhere for a lot of people, especially since y'all know that I don't like YA. I don't like young adult. I feel that the writing is usually too dumbed down or too simplistic or the themes are too heavy handed. I also don't like that it's called YA, called young adult. I don't believe in young adult or new adult or any of that stuff. Not that I believe like it's a figment of my imagination, but I don't agree with labeling these things that. Maybe middle grade is fine. Of course children's books are fine, but middle grades even kind of float in it because with Wonder, Wonder was a fantastic novel. And it wasn't written in that dumbed down way that even King, Stephen King, has had a problem with. When he tried to do The Eyes of the Dragon, it came off as him writing down to people. And one of the only authors that I know of, I know of, I know there's probably more out there people, but I know of is Andrew Smith. He wrote Winger, Standoff, I think is the sequel, and this utter joy, Grasshopper Jungle. This was a impulse buy. You see how, yeah, I love, not gilded, but I love painted edges. And this one kind of just called from me, called to me from the, from the shelves at one Barnes and Noble in Mobile, Alabama. It was sitting there and I saw the beautiful, I pulled it out and I saw this and I was like, I have to have it. I don't care what, what it, what it's about. And then oddly enough, I got home and I read, I read a list of the best current YA authors and they were talking about Andrew Smith. I read the book over the course of like three days. I blew right through it and I fell in love with it. It also has LGBTQIA themes. It's got all different kinds of wonderful stuff in it. It is also super, super brutal. I enjoyed the horror aspect of it. And yes, it is about gigantic, not Grasshoppers. It is about gigantic like praying mantis-esque type of creatures. In fact, I think they actually are praying mantises that have grown into human size or else they were, it's human beings turned into praying mantises. But there's a sequel coming. The book is fantastic. If you have not read it, you need to go out and check it out. If you haven't read Andrew Smith at all, you need to go check out Andrew Smith. If you, if you're not too into the weird side of things, then definitely pick up Winger. That's a fantastic novel and that ending just utterly destroyed me. There's also a thousand or a million something steps or it's got a horse on the cover, whatever it is.  The only three that I have read is are this one Winger and standoff. But I highly recommend this stuff just because of the way he writes.  So if you enjoy Caroline Kepnis' writing style, you're definitely going to like Andrew Smith. So my challenge to you is without using Jack Ketchum as a girl next door, without using Stephen King, without using those ones that you hear about all the time. I know I did, I did Boy's Life and that's kind of cheating. But without using those ones that are used all the time, what are your favorite coming of age novels? Let me know down there in the doobly-doo. But until next time, I have an E, you have an U. This has been another Top 5 Friday. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye!


Hey everybody, it's Eric Johnson from AirTay ThrowzNation and in today's video we are going to take you back a couple of seasons to 2018 at the Chula Vista Elite Training Center throws competition every year. In April there's a meet on Thursday at the training center where usually many of the great throwers around the world will come in for training camps especially. Many of the European athletes who don't have as good of weather will come out for training like usual you would see the global throwing squad, Daniel Stahl, they had Jacob Gardner Cranes that year, Simon Peterson didn't throw on this particular day but threw a couple of days later at the Trenton Invitational and every year at this meet you'll see a bunch of these world-class stores. Daniel Jizinski who's the Olympic bronze medal in Rio in 2016 with a 67 meter PR. He was in this competition, Esan Hadadi had a big day, went 68-85. Yeah, yeah, yeah, started from the mud now you see us going up, numbers never lie now you see us blowing up, people use the front now you see them showing up, show us up, I've been down and now below, keep it up, I don't, always been one up on all of these, they be trying to front for all of these, to we all touch a million, don't ever forget but we probably forgive them I'm living, started from the mud now you see us coming up, numbers never lie now you see us blowing up, people use the front now you see them showing up, show us up, I've been down and now below, I'm trying to get where I'm going but hey, let's be charlin', that's what they f***** gorgeous, dug up, gap, they want us to wrap, so f**k are we back, yeah, drew me the facts, we turn to the macro. Jason Harrell had a big day at 62-32, good day, this is one of those things, it's always good conditions, the field is very favorable, it's deceptive, so this is the second meet that Jason had thrown a PR distance and walked out because he didn't think it was far, so as a coach I wanted to strangle him and it's a good message for you guys, remember don't, don't do that, take your mark if you're not sure and in this case he had actually walked out on what at that time would have been a PR throw, so just a generally good performance is by a number of athletes and this was kind of a tune-up meet every year for, you know, for the Saturday competition, we know everybody's missing the regularity of big throws, Daniel Stahl has been on fire even this 2020 COVID year, so what we're going to do is just kind of take a look, we did the six rounds, put it all together and hopefully you enjoy, so check it out.  Started from the mud, now you see it's going up, numbers never lie, now you see it's blowing up, people use the front, now you see them showing up, show us up, I've been down and out, but look, keep it a buck, I don't f*** with it. Started from the mud, now you see it's going up, numbers never lie, now you see it's blowing up, people use the front, now you see them showing up, so it's...