It is my pleasure to introduce myself to you. I have been the pastor at Our Shepherd since 2022 and have been an ordained minister in the ELCA for past 10 years. Before I was ordained, I served as a chaplain at the Hershey Medical Center and practiced vocational counseling at a community based mental health non-profit organization. In my education, I have earned degrees in philosophy and religion, studied psychopathology and pastoral care as a visiting student at Yale Divinity School, and recently earned a doctorate in ministry focusing on Jesus’ parables and contemporary homiletics. Over my years, I have lived, experienced, and witnessed many joys and sorrows, and they have all prepared me for this ministry. As your pastor, you will discover a person with a wide variety of life, work, and educational experiences, all of which influence my approach to spiritual development and pastoral care.
My spiritual and religious life is also diverse. I have not always been Lutheran. I was born into the Bible Baptist tradition, raised in a Christian and Missionary Alliance church, and became an ELCA Lutheran when I was 25. How did I become Lutheran. When I was in my 20's, I wanted to experience other Christian faith traditions. I visited a lot of churches, but when I attended a service and met the pastor of Tree of Life Lutheran Church, I knew my search was over. The reason I joined an ELCA church was because they welcomed me with open arms, accepted me unconditionally, made me feel like I was home, and adopted me as one of their own. They bore witness to God's love for me through Christ not in what they said, and not in their theological proclamations, but in what they did. I became an ELCA Lutheran because they loved me as I was, accepted me for who I was, and they called me one of their own. I did not choose them. They chose me. As your pastor, I will love you as Christ first loved me, no matter your background.
My dream for you and for our congregation is to be a people of prayer seeking to be more aware of our spiritual nature, to be a gentle and peaceful people seeking God as fiercely as God seeks us, a community who can bear each other’s differences, who can testify to a deeply isolated, alienated, and divided society that it is possible to be connected and united in the face of a culture that demands we pick partisan sides, and who can, in a sea of universal absurdity, offer an evidenced based reason to find purpose, significance, and meaning in the stories of both the Jesus of tradition and the Jesus of history. I believe God created the world as a good place, and God calls us into collaborative ministry to help make the world a more loving, compassionate, empathic, accepting place so all God’s creatures can experience a good life. Church is not about the next life. On the contrary, it is about this one. When you come to church here, I will guide both you and our congregation in experiencing God’s love for you so that you can go into the world to love others as compassionately as God loves us.
Throughout my entire life, I have sought after God. It has been a wonderful journey filled with discovery, wonder, and awe. It has also been a journey filled with joys and sorrows. If you yearn for God, then come to Our Shepherd. It would be my delight to walk with you on your spiritual journey to discover God through Jesus Christ.