It Works in Many Ways

Request: I would like to request a blog about tie dying.
Dedication: To my assistant

This summer another student (my "assistant") and I traveled to 13 Lutheran camps across the Upper Midwest and western United States. In our travels we connected with wonderful young adults serving in leadership roles in outdoor ministry. We got great tans, experienced daily worship and prayer, received Christian hospitality, were invited into the richness of people's lives, and learned about tie-dying.

I grew up tie-dying with my quasi-hippie mother. We had a rigid strategy of how one properly tie-dyes and employed this for many successful 4-H projects. But, while at all these camps, I discovered that the valuable wisdom of my mother wasn't universal. It seemed every camp we visited had a different way of tie-dying. Each strategy had been passed down from the wisdom of previous arts & crafts directors. Some used salt, or vinegar, or urea. Some used hot water in buckets, some use dye in squeeze bottles. Some projects were thrown in the laundry, some set in the sun. What is the most effective way to tie dye with 30-60 kids?...well, it works in many ways.

Now, it doesn't matter too much what wisdom-inspired method you use to tie-dye. What does matter is that you realize there are many ways to tie-dye and not be so closed in on your own experience that you don't come to listen to or value the wisdom of other experiences.

So too, with the journey of Christian leadership.

My experience at seminary is not going to be prescriptive for your experience as a prospective student or a current student. There is not one way to do this. Before coming to seminary, I thought seminary was for deeply spiritual folks right out of college who had degrees in religion from Lutheran schools. Maybe some think seminary is for those who have been in the church their whole lives, or former camp staffers, or pastor's kids, or those who love to read German theology from the 16th and 17th centuries, or get ecstatic about A Mighty Fortress is Our God, or have their call all figured out.

While seminary is for all of these, it is much more and much bigger than that. Seminary is for people who have had jobs as bricklayers and accountants, who've gone to public universities to study Zoology & Physiology, who have been Christians only a few years, who ride motorcycles & who are deeply discerning how & where God is urging them.

It works in many ways.