Pew-side

As a young woman I sat pew-side dreaming about the possibilities of becoming a pastor.  Each week at mass I would watch in awe as the priest preached good news from the pulpit, taught the dangerous truths of scripture and called people to participate in something larger than themselves.  

For me, the call to get out of the pews began with a dream of one day joining the great lineage of preachers to share the radical news of Jesus Christ.  Although, this is where my calling began, I have since discovered that the call to come out of the pews runs much deeper, and the places to which pastors are called are much darker.

I am a pastor with a church-based campus ministry, at Stanford University. Like any college campus, Stanford comes with a whole host of challenges: secular hostility to Christianity, overcommitted students,  the constant and overwhelming temptation of self-glorification.  And like any pastor, I encounter road blocks along the way; road blocks that annoy and pester me, and others that shake me to my core.  

As a young woman sitting pew-side dreaming about becoming a pastor, I would have never imagined that what I thought was a call to come out of the pews would become a call to walk into the darkest places of people's lives, a call to push back against the painfully broken institution of the church universal, and most importantly a call to hope in something larger than ourselves.   

So today, I dare to hope...

today, I muster the strength to push back...

and today, I follow the call to get out of the pews...