Student Spotlights: Ministry rooted in Jesus, flexible in approach Student Spotlights: rooted Jesus, flexible approach

Greg Klimovitz: Please share with us who you are, where you call home, and what has drawn you to CDSP.

Connie Bowman: I am currently living in Howard County, MD. What drew me to CDSP was my friend and my priest. I went into her office one day, with tears almost streaming down my face. I said,“I don’t know what’s going on but I think I want to go back to school. All I care about is God. I just want to learn about God and talk about God.”

So we got up and we took a walk around the church parking lot. At the end of our conversation she said, “Let’s go get you into the discernment program.” And we did. And the rest is history. It’s been one step at a time. It’s a long process but we do it in community and discern whether it is a call from God.

GK: Before you discerned this call and entered seminary, what was life before CDSP?

We regularly interview current CDSP students about life amid formation for ministry. Listen to the full recordings as part of Crossings Conversations at cdsp.edu/podcast Transcripts have been edited for length and clarity.

CB: I’ve been married to my husband for 40 years now. I have two great adult kids. For about the past 20 years, I’ve been a freelance voiceover actor in the Baltimore-Washington area. I’ve also done some on-camera work.

When I went to school, I did some PR work. Over time, I decided I was tired of doing PR for everybody else. So I was doing commercials, PR writing, and copy editing and I wanted to do PR for God. One day, I just blurted that out. I said,“I’m just tired of doing everybody else’s PR. I want to do PR only for God.”

GK: That sounds like a sense of call to storytelling.

CB: Yes. I have to give a shout-out to the Education for Ministry program. I think that has caused a lot of us to feel a call. I went through that program and it really deepened my faith. I was asked to mentor. So I give a lot of credit to EfM for inspiring me to go deeper.

GK: What is one question that you’ve encountered in the classroom as a student that has sparked curiosity related to ministry and your vocation?

CB: One of the things I really love is that we can explore so many questions. For example, why are there so many masculine names for God?

And what can we do about it? We are reading great books by theologians like Elizabeth Johnson. We were talking about the Trinity this week, and I was reading her take on the Trinity from a more feminist perspective. There are so many questions and so many wonderful people with whom I can bounce some of these ideas off.

GK: What is one event or issue that’s happening in the world right now that has impacted how you view ministry today?

CB: During the pandemic, my call was getting clear. I have had quite a bit of experience in the voiceover and on-camera world. I’ve been doing a little bit of production work. It gets my creative juices flowing. So that digital piece is important to me.

In my field ed parish, All Saints and St. George’s in Rehoboth Beach, DE, one of my projects is to examine the digital ministry that we’re doing. I’m finding as I watch and as I look at the stats that our numbers are really growing. We even have somebody who’s watching from Korea. So I’m really fascinated by why people watch, who they are, and how we can better serve them.

One other thing that has just come up in my life is that my dad passed away last semester. He went into hospice about October and then he died right at the beginning of December. What I found was that the care system right now for our seniors is really a mess. So I am also thinking hard about how we can help the lives of our seniors to be filled with love and grace and peace and as much goodness as we can.

GK: What has been one creative or experimental ministry opportunity you have explored or encountered over the last year that has inspired you?

CB: There’s one really cool thing that I’ve been offered the opportunity to participate in: as a co-mentor of a grief group in my field ed parish. One of the coolest things about this group over the past semester is that we had one person from a different faith. So we’re learning about other faiths and how better to love our neighbor as Jesus tells us.

I also teach yoga classes for seniors. I think my oldest person is 94. Because we’re in the Baltimore-Washington area, my class of 80 and 90 year olds is very international. They speak different languages. So I’ll talk about God, but I’m careful with the language

I use. I want it to be spiritual, but I don’t want to impose anything. It’s very helpful to know the context of the people participating.

GK: How do you sense God calling you to live into your vocation beyond your seminary experience?

CB: I’m feeling that I have some gifts

“May the gift of leadership awaken in you as a vocation, / Keep you mindful of the providence that calls you to serve. / As high over the mountains the eagle spreads its wings, / May your perspective be larger than the view from the foothills … May integrity of soul be your first ideal, / The source that will guide and bless your work.”

The Rev. Dr. Mees Tielens ‘23

Jeckonia Okoth: Please share a bit about who you are, where you call home, and what has drawn you to CDSP.

Mees Tielens: I am in my third year here. I am originally from the Netherlands. I moved to the States in 2013 and then California in 2015. I started the discernment process relatively quickly after that. My family and I moved to Berkeley in 2020 to start seminary. At this time I am a transitional deacon in the Diocese of California and will hopefully be ordained a priest in May 2023.

I was interested in CDSP for a couple of reasons. Some of them were practical, like I would prefer not to move my family cross-country for three years. But also for ministryoriented reasons, I wanted to be able to take classes at the GTU. I also think the Bay Area, this unchurched Silicon Valley space, is a really interesting place to do ministry.

JO: What is one question that you’ve encountered in the classroom as a student that has sparked curiosity related to ministry and your vocation?

MT: One thing that I was interested in, coming from the Diocese of California, is bivocationality. What we as pastors often hear as bivocationality is you need a secular job to subsidize your church job or you have to be living with someone who can subsidize your current job.

But then in our second year we read something that has really sparked my imagination: It’s not just the priest who is bivocational but also the congregation. Today’s church landscape has to step up and lead in a new way.

I really value my training and preparation for priesthood and for leading churches. But I think there’s something really important about lay people understanding that they don’t need me to say prayers at mealtimes. They don’t need me to minister to each other. I work really hard on my exegesis classes, but they also don’t need me to tell them how to read the Bible.

So leading in the kind of church in which priests and laypeople work together and not in this hierarchical, top-down way—I’ve thought a lot about that.

JO: What is one event or issue happening in the world that has impacted how you view ministry today?

MT: I know the pandemic is kind of old news, but I think we’re still working through the lessons of it as a church. The pandemic showed us where the church maybe wasn’t working as well anymore. If we’re resurrection people, then we can’t ignore the places where the church isn’t working.

In my sending parish, a lot of families didn’t come back to church the way we might have expected them to, even really active ones. As a parent, I totally get it. There are a lot of Sundays where it’d be really nice if I didn’t have to get up and get my kids ready for services. Or there’s sports or birthday parties or the grocery shopping to do.

But I do think that what we are offering people is worth the trade-off. When I had my baby, she suddenly gained a million church grandmas and grandpas. My family lives a long way away, so that was really meaningful. We’re bound together by our belief in God and by our faith that there is something worth holding onto that is bigger than ourselves.

The world is desperately in need of healing. I think we can all see that. The ways in which we’re divided and hurting—I think church in both the gathering and the sending out is a way to address that. If the model of church we had pre-pandemic is not working anymore, what do people actually need? Where do people actually go, and how can we reach them?

JO: What has been one creative or experimental ministry opportunity you have explored over the last year that has inspired you?

MT: I’ve been mostly interested in ministries that are connected to churches but are not happening in church buildings. It is important that these ministries are rooted in Jesus. We’re just not a social club. But I also think of church in a more broad sense. I’m thinking about how last week in a youth ministry class we had a priest come in who was working on a project that would take people, both church people and non-church people, and bring them together at a playground.

For my field ed, I work in a regular congregation, a small mission congregation in Contra Costa County. The vicar I work with is also the farm church commissioner for the Diocese of California. The idea of extending church that I see in the farm church and that I see in that playground ministry: I see a lot of congregations starting to think about things like that.

JO: How do you sense God calling you to live into your vocation beyond your seminary experience?

MT: I think for me it’s been really key to lean into openness and flexibility.

I’d be interested in associate work or in a CPE residency or youth ministry or school chaplaincy. But in all of those, what I’m interested in is lay formation and that kids and youth feel safe and empowered.

I want to help congregations be generous and hospitable places, which also looks like queer inclusion and disability inclusion and anti-racism and making it possible for people to experience the kind of transformation that the sacraments have given me. I do have faith that, somehow or other, a path will open.

JO: What is a final word of encouragement you have for those reading this transcript?

MT: We hear a lot about the Church dying. We know the Church is dying. I wish we heard a little bit more about what resurrection might look like. When I look around me, I see so many bright and passionate and compassionate people who love God and love the Church and have a lot of good ideas about where they could go.

I also see a lot of churches that have been broken open by the pandemic and by the world’s injustices. We’re now paying a lot more attention. I see a lot of courage for change. That in itself gives me a lot of hope for the future.