Our Newest Members

Pastor at John Calvin Presbyterian Church, Salisbury

Faith biography introduction:

      I was born in Toronto, Canada and christened in the Anglican Church. My family considered ourselves to be nominally Anglican. We did not attend church, and I did not really know what “Anglican” meant. It was just what I put on my school forms.

      Nevertheless God was always there, calling me through events unique to me. For example, I was the only person in my family to attend a Christian summer camp where I read the bible and learned to sing several hymns. I assumed these hymns were “camp songs” until returning home to hear the other “camp songs” my brother learned at his camp.

      My husband and I were married in the United Church of Canada. We moved to Maryland when our children were in kindergarten and second grade. In Maryland, we were invited to   attend the Presbyterian Church (USA) with our neighbors. The first time I sat in the pews, I sensed an overwhelming feeling that I was home and that God had been patiently waiting for me to get there.

      Over the next several years, as a stay at home mom, I became actively involved in the church. During these years I was ordained as an elder and a deacon, serving three different congregations, twice as a member of session and once as the chair of the deacons. I strongly sensed God’s call to full-time ordained ministry, even though I had not yet been to college.

      At the age of forty, and with some fear and trembling, I made the decision to go to the  university to work on my B.A. I had exhausted every effort to think of a way to answer God’s call without university. I earned my B.A. in history and religious studies, and began working on my M.Div. at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity. I graduated from Wake Forest in May, 2009.

Member-At-Large

Thom transferred back into Salem Presbytery within a period of less than 3 years.

Faith biography introduction:

      Born in the turbulent year of 1968, I have had… so far… what I would characterize as a nicely normal and fairly unremarkable life. There has been love found and love lost.  Successes and failures all along the way.  Good times and bad times. Friends and enemies and everybody in between.

      My childhood was one of middle class, suburban comfort and adventure.  Childhood school days were fun without too much undue drama.  Even those pesky teenage years were filled with more geekiness than trauma and drama. The four years at UNC- Chapel Hill came and went way too fast.

      After some missteps in the transition from college to “real life” in my early twenties, I went out in search of myself as an “educator” and somehow that journey led me to Princeton Theological Seminary after a stint in the world of preschools.  Baptized as an infant in a small Presbyterian church in the mountains of Tennessee, I had grown up in the church during all those wonderful suburban years.  Sunday School, VBS, Children’s Choir (at least until my voice changed and I could finally convince the powers that be that I was no singer and had been faking it for years), Confirmation, Youth… did it all.  I had a well-programmed instilled faith, but in retrospect I wouldn’t really call it mine, yet.  Still, somehow in those too quick college years I kept finding myself in different religion classes every semester.  On this   journey toward “educator”, Christian educator felt right.  There wasn’t a whole lot of thought and deliberation.  This was what I was supposed to do.  I felt it.
  
      At Princeton, I finally was able to explore with abandon what it was I believed.  I was taught how to delve deep into scripture.  I was set loose to explore theology.  I was finally given permission to make my faith my own.  With MA in hand, I went off to become a Christian   Educator at First Presbyterian, Franklin NC.  I was an educator with attitude.  No, I would not become a minister.  No, I did not want to step behind the pulpit.  No, I am never going to be a minister.  No.  No.  No.  Okay, maybe.
 
      Four years later it was back to Princeton.  As an educator, I had hit the proverbial non-ordained glass ceiling and wanted to serve more this congregation I had fallen in love with. My youth group had a nasty habit of growing up and I wanted to be able to fully minister to them throughout their lives.  It was a strange lesson to learn… that in order to serve better I would have to leave that congregation behind and take my love for them into the rest of ministry.  Growth, I suppose.  During those four years in Franklin, I also met, fell in love and     convinced Jo to be my wife in a whirlwind courtship that took about as long as it took me to write this sentence.  We also had our first child, Baylen.  In between classes at Princeton, we cooked up our daughter Sarah who wouldn’t be born until a few months into my first ordained call at Sparta, NC.  She was born into a congregation of proud grandparents. 

      As first calls go, I was spoiled by Sparta.  My eight years there were full.  As a hybrid educator/minister, I was often the one who was learning the lesson.  In the first half of my time there, I learned about death and dying.  I came to know too much about cancer.  I learned to let go of whatever fear I had of death and to replace it with trust in God.  I learned about listening instead of waiting for my turn to talk.  I learned how to dream about ministry and the risks that have to be taken in order to have those dreams realized.  I learned how to fail in order to succeed.  I learned that being a minister went beyond the four walls and the small group of people who carried the name “member”.  I learned about community; it’s possibilities and pitfalls.  I learned to keep learning.  And in that time, I earned another piece of paper to hang on my wall along with the joyful vanity of putting three stripes on my “preachin’ robe”.

      I had hoped that my second call in Union, KY would be just as full.  Union presented itself as a church with immediate challenges and amazing potential.  Unfortunately, too much too soon became full of conflict as my hopes for another long-term call turned into just a year and a half as “unintentional interim”.  Union is still a church with immediate challenges and amazing potential.