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Year-End Challenge
Seeking Director of Admissions
Founders' Day 2012
PLTS Grad Elected NE Synod Bishop
Updates
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Above the Fog
PLTS Newsletter

June 27, 2012
Greetings!  

Happy summer! This week is a busy one on our campus. We welcomed 28 participants to this year's Week of Renewal. Staff and faculty are busy preparing for next academic year, preparing to welcome new and returning students, freshening the Delaware apartments, sprucing up the campus, closing out this current fiscal year, and settling into their new offices.
 
Yes, new offices! In order to streamline our work together, nine of us packed up and shifted to different offices on campus. The TEEM office (Drs. Moses Penumaka and Jane Phillips) are now in the lower level of Giesy, formerly the home of the Office of Seminary Relations. OSA (Christine Sinnott and Brian Stein-Webber) moved to the former Admissions Office in Sawyer Hall. The Admissions Office (Steve Churchill and Ed Johnson) can now be found where Contextual Education once lived in Giesy, and Contextual Education (Nan Hirleman and Marsha Anderson) moved up one level to the Dean's floor. Two faculty members will move in to the empty offices near TEEM later this summer.
 
So much for those lazy, hazy days of summer!
 
Blessings to you this day.

Closing in on the Year-End Goal

 

Seminary Fund ThermometerDear Friends,

There are just a few days remaining in the PLTS fiscal year. Please help PLTS reach this fiscal year's Seminary Fund goal.

Your gift helps prepare leaders for the church. More than that, it helps extend the body of Christ around the world and into the future. There is no end to the good your gift will do.

Help prepare the next generation of leaders for the church and for the world. Send your check today, or click
here to make your secure gift online.

 

Several of our friends have joined together to match all gifts received by June 30, up to $77,000!

Opening for Director of Admissions

Director of Admissions Steve Churchill has announced that he will his leave his position at PLTS at the end of July to become Chaplain of Salem Lutheran Home in Oakland. For the last four and a half years, Steve has served with integrity, discipline, passion, and a deep sense of calling in this work of helping others discern their ministerial call and choose PLTS. A graduate and long-supporter of PLTS, he continues in his deep love for this seminary and all that it stands for. He will be sorely missed as part of the everyday life of this community.

 

PLTS is opening a search for a new Director of Admissions immediately, with the goal of having the person in place by September. The primary role of the Director of Admissions is to represent the seminary in encouraging qualified candidates to discern their call to ministry and seek admission to PLTS and to oversee the process by which prospective students are admitted to PLTS. You are invited to consider whether this might be a call for you or for someone you would recommend. Please take time to look at the job description and pass it on to someone for whom it might be a good fit.  

Founders' Day 2012
J. Kameron Carter
Save the date for Founders' Day, September 26, 2012. Our speaker this year will be J. Kameron Carter, Associate Professor in Theology and Black Church Studies at Duke Divinity School.

Registration details will be available soon.

PLTS Grad Elected Bishop of NE Synod

Jim Hazelwood, MDiv 1987The Rev. James E. Hazelwood, MDiv 1987, was elected June 9 to serve a six-year term as bishop of the New England Synod. Bishop-elect Hazelwood has been serving St. Andrew, Charleston, Rhode Island, since 1993. He will begin his new call on September 1 and will be installed on Saturday, September 29 at Trinity Lutheran Church, Worcester, Massachusetts.

 

Bishop-elect Hazelwood, who was born in Concord, Massachusetts, will be the first native New Englander and the first parish pastor to serve as the New England synod bishop since the ELCA was founded in 1987. The New England Synod believes that he also may be the first "native son" to ever serve in this role in of any of the predecessor bodies of the ELCA in New England, dating back to at least the 1920s.

 

Congratulations, Jim!  

Updates

 

Kinnon Falk, MDiv 2010, MA 2011, and his wife Allison welcomed their daughter, Norah Hallie, on May 22, 2012.

 

Don McMillan, MDiv 1994, after serving 5 years in hospital and hospice chaplaincy, has accepted a call to St. Paul Lutheran Church in Blue Hill, Nebraska.

 

Katie (Bombardi) Osweiler, MDiv 2007, and her husband Victor moved to Washington DC. Victor has recently accepted a new assignment with the US Air Force as Defense Attache for the US Embassy in Niger. They will live in Washington DC for one year of training before moving to Africa. Katie will spend the year learning French and being trained in the ways of diplomatic hosting.

 

Philip Petrasek, MDiv 1973, has been living a retired life with Parkinson's and yet remains busy in his community. He has been appointed by the mayor and the police chief to organize neighborhood watch programs. He is helping residents to get to know each other, care about each other, and especially reach out to the youth in the neighborhoods. It is exciting to journey down this new avenue of community ministry even though Parkinson's has created some limitations in his personal life. 

 

Joshua Serrano, CATS 2010, will be ordained on Saturday, June 30th at Christ Lutheran Church in Pacific Beach, CA. He has been called to serve as Associate Pastor at Holy Shepherd Lutheran Church in Orinda, CA.

 

Please keep us up to date with your whereabouts and news with this form.