The Trinity Fellows Program: Ministry, Mentorship, and Mission

A year ago this week, I graduated from college—qualified, credentialed, and confused. 
I remember the flood of well-meaning encouragement from friends and family: the opportunities were endless; the world was my oyster; I could do anything I wanted. Each sentiment felt more hollow than the last, because beneath all the excitement and potential lurked an almost paralyzing uncertainty. I had learned in my campus ministry that my life was meant for more than the American dream, and I believed it deeply. I knew I was meant to serve God and others with my vocation. I knew I was meant to be deeply involved in the life of a local church. But life after college was something entirely new, and I had no idea how to actually do any of this. And for the first time in my life, there was no obvious next step.

Enter the Trinity Fellows Program. This ministry is designed to help recent college graduates transition well by immersing them in professional experience, vocational discernment, theological formation, intergenerational community, one-on-one mentoring, thoughtful self-assessment, strategic relationship-building, and community service, all in the context of deep participation in the life of a local church. The goal of the Fellows Program is to equip young men and women to better love and serve their churches, their communities, and the world by teaching them to orient their education, gifts, influence, resources, and hearts toward the church’s work of sharing in God’s renewal of all things.

For me, finding this program was like discovering buried treasure. I learned to think of my vocation as an extension of my Christian walk and of the original biblical purpose of work. I came to understand my own gifts, skills, and personality traits and how to use them for the glory of God. I worked and studied under wise and godly role models in both the church and the workplace. I was invited to witness and participate in the daily life of a loving and healthy Christian family with young kids. I had the privilege of getting to know a fifth-grader from the community through Abundant Life’s tutoring program. I have spent hours in conversation with six-year-olds and seventy-year-olds and everyone in between. And along the way, I found some of the deepest friendships I’ve ever had. This year has redirected my vocation, reestablished my community, and rekindled my love for the church—it has truly been one of the richest of my life.

The Fellows Program knows what every young adult ministry and theology-of-vocation curriculum knows—that my experience of vocational confusion is all too common among young Christians. Even those of us who had transformative experiences in campus ministries, as I did, often leave college without a clear sense of how to faithfully navigate life after college. The unique insight of this program, however, is that the kind of wisdom young adults need to transition out of college well is not simply taught—it must be modeled, embodied, and practiced in community. Graduates like me aren’t confused because our churches or small groups or campus ministries failed us—it’s just that as we enter a new phase of life, we need new mentors to walk alongside us, new examples of of mature faithfulness to study and imitate, and new communities in which to reflect, process, and serve.

And as I looked around the crowded room at the Fellows’ closing banquet last week, I was struck, as I have been so many times this year, by how generously this church has responded to that need. Host families, mentors, Bible study leaders, teachers, employers, and friends were all present—a great cloud of witnesses to the good work God began in each of this year’s fourteen Fellows. The work of the Fellows ministry is not merely the work of the program director and ministry team; it truly is the work of an entire church body, a community giving generously of their time, their resources, their homes, and their wisdom. As one who has been loved, served, challenged, encouraged, and sharpened by the Trinity Fellows community, I want to say to everyone involved, from the bottom of my heart: thank you.

This fall, Trinity will welcome its thirteenth class of Fellows. Each member of the class is at a critical juncture in life. What they will learn from our church community will stick with them for the rest of their lives. If you have a gift or a resource that God has put on your heart to share—a spare room, an internship, an hour a week in conversation—please consider becoming part of the Fellows community. This new class of Fellows will need host families, employers (part-time), and friends to welcome them to a new home in Charlottesville and invite them to a new mission: the pursuit of God’s renewal of all things.

-Sam Speers (Fellows '15)

Consummation: What Your Parents Never Told You

     A year in The Fellows Program is a year of learning.  Not all of that learning takes place in a classroom (or a church multipurpose room).  In fact, most of this learning happens through the experience of living in community, learning how to love one another through difficulties and figuring out what it means to be an adult.  However, much of what I will carry with me after the program was learned in our seminary classes at the feet of phenomenal professors.  

     Most notably, I have learned to understand the world through the lens of this paradigm: Creation, Fall, Redemption and Consummation.  In Creation, God created a good world.  The Fall tainted all the goodness planted by God, but the good is still there.  As Christians, we are called to look around us and seek out beauty, goodness and truth, and to reclaim them for God’s original creational purposes.  This is the mentality that can guide Christians through the difficult and complicated issues that we cannot avoid in our culture today.  The appropriate response to racial disparities, gay rights, environmental stewardship, gender stereotypes and every other challenging issue can be addressed through this paradigm.

     It sounds hard right?  It is.  Fortunately, there is one who has gone before us to show us the way.  Through his life, death and resurrection, Jesus has begun his work of Redemption and placed the world back on its right trajectory (toward Consummation).  Now, there are lots of interesting things to say about Consummation, but I will limit myself to the following point.  The best part of the Consummation is that we can begin to live it out RIGHT NOW!  As we live and work and love in this world that God has given us, we participate in preparing the new heavens and the new earth that God always intended.  

     The biggest thing that I have learned from this year is that my work and life matter.  I can participate right now in God’s plan for eternity and so can you!  

-Peter Frank (Fellows '15) 

A Day in the (Abundant) Life

      The bell rings.  A sea of bobbing backpacks floods the cafeteria. Some students run up to give hugs to their tutors, some clump together like penguins huddled in the cold, while others pace about the room. The noise finally settles, and tutors and their students make their way through the maze of the Walker Upper Elementary hallways to their classrooms. Papers spill out of backpacks, the search for the elusive and always missing pencil begins, students wrack their brains to remember which general won the Battle of Gettysburg, and tutors keep their composure while frantically trying to remember all the steps of long division.  Throughout the hour of homework, shoulders periodically slump down in frustration, and there is the occasional tear shed over the never-ending worksheet. However, it also wouldn’t be a true tutoring day without the bouts of laughter peppered throughout hour, the words of encouragement to finish one more math problem, and the triumphant smile of the successful student.   

      Each day of tutoring with Charlottesville Abundant Life Ministries in their after-school programs is an adventure.  While it is exciting to see the academic growth of each student and the tangible results of test scores reflecting their hard work, , I have been encouraged even more deeply by the relationships I see built between tutors and students. For many of the students, their tutor is more than just another teacher figure.  They are also a friend, mentor and someone with the capacity to speak deep truth and inspiration into their lives.  Having a “cool” college student who is willing to show up consistently, encourage and love them through a melt down over mixed fractions, or even get excited with them about the parts of a plant cell, means more to a student than they may ever admit.   All this to say, I am grateful for Abundant Life, for friendships with kids so different from me, and for the opportunity to witness growth in the lives of so many students.

- Rebecca Lee (Fellows '15) 

Where is the LOVE?

           On February 14th of this year, we celebrated our culture’s commercialized day of love. There are a lot of people that resent Valentine’s Day and I can say that in the past, I have been one of these critics. This year, however, my perception of this so-called celebration changed, and I was reminded of a truer, more beautiful love.

            A couple days before February 14th, the lady Fellows received an invitation to meet the gentlemen Fellows in the Trinity Church parking lot at 5:15pm on Valentine’s Day evening, dressed to impress. We were expecting a simple spaghetti dinner at the church—a small, yet incredibly kind gesture, just to show they remembered us. What we got was so much more!

February 14th, 2015 6:00pm:

            Two handsomely dressed Fellows men chauffeured us to the Stamper’s lake house.  We arrived to luminaries lighting our way to the door, lights strung across the ceilings, a beautiful table with white linens and candlesticks, and hand-made place settings for all. There were flowers for each of us with a name plate the men had made themselves, fancy printed menus that the guys had cleverly composed, and a beautiful spread of cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. We were served a delicious three-course meal including Caprese salad, steak, salmon, and German chocolate cake with raspberry sorbet, all planned and prepared by the Fellows men. Dinner was followed by an evening of swing dancing, laughter, and walks down memory lane with some old classic hits. It was like one of those sweet, heart-warming scenes out of a movie.

            Chivalry is not dead, people! We were blown away! When I think about it, it wasn’t that they put together such a fabulous evening. It wasn’t that it was so elaborate and perfect that we could not have imagined better. While these things are true, I think the real reason we were so overwhelmed by the guy’s incredible acts of service was because, in that moment, we truly felt LOVED.

"This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. We love because He first loved us.”

1 John 4:10-12, 19

         One particular point came to mind in reading this passage. God’s exceptional love is made complete through the love that His children have for one another. If we love others with the love God demonstrated through sending Jesus, we glorify Him and accomplish His purposes of going to the cross. Jesus died and rose again to defeat sin, but He walked among us to show us what true love looks like. Love establishes a reverent posture towards Him and His creation. Vertical: His love for us, horizontal: our love for one another, THE CROSS: Complete.

         The joy we felt coming away from this beautiful evening was a response to that complete and perfect love that the Lord desires for us to find in community. Because He first loved us, we are able to love each other, and that is a love worth celebrating. Commercialized love is fleeting, but I doubt that any of us will forget the way that our incredible brothers loved us so thoughtfully and tangibly that night.

-Mary Kathryn Sawyer (Fellows '15) 

A Refreshing Refocus

As an ecclesial fellow I have a slightly different experience from the rest of my Fellows class. My job is with the church’s student ministry and I work full time rather than part time. Prior to becoming a Trinity Fellow I worked in the corporate world for two and half years. As much as I enjoyed client facing opportunities, pencil skirts, and quick turn around pitches for new business, Trinity Fellows has given me the opportunity to explore my passion for youth ministry as a vocation. Here we have over 100 students attending youth group and a plethora of quality leaders. My role is to pursue and equip leaders and students the best I can. Seeing Jesus move in these students’ lives is a gift, and being behind the scenes has been a pleasure.

A lovely perk of this internship is that each year the student ministry team ventures to Nashville for a Youth Leader Training Conference through Reformed Youth Ministries. This is a five-day conference focused on cultivating community with youth leaders around a shared philosophy of ministry.

You may be wondering: what on earth would you do for 5 entire days? Well, quite a bit! The schedule was jammed packed with reflection, teaching, and relationship building. I shared meals with youth ministry staff from all over (California, Texas, Maryland, Missouri, Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee…the list goes on) where we encouraged one another with successes, failures, and dreams for the families within our churches.  I was part of a prayer group in which we prayed for each other’s ministries, churches, students, struggles, and for Jesus in the midst of it.  This training was a time to recalibrate, cast vision, share stories, connect, learn, and reflect.

Ultimately, after a week of youth ministry training I am walking away very encouraged and with a lot to meditate with. I am thankful to the Fellows for giving me the opportunity to build a foundation for my theology and my approach to youth ministry. In five days, I am refreshed and excited to see how to take all I’ve learned and incorporate it into our youth program!

“Rejoice in the Lord always: again I will say, Rejoice. ”  Philippians 4:4

-- Kathy Giese (Fellows '15) 

MODGNIK

A few weekends ago I had the privilege of leading a group of sixth graders on a retreat known as Modgnik. I felt silly when having a conversation a few days later with Dennis Doran, the Fellows Program director at Trinity, that the “Modgnik” is just “Kingdom” spelled backwards. (I hope you were as blown away by that news as I was.) The retreat took place at a Young Life camp called Rockbridge just about 15 minutes outside of Lexington, Virginia. I would be remiss not to say that this camp was absolutely gorgeous. Modgnik was designed as a retreat to provide middle school kids with an opportunity for an amazingly fun weekend, but most importantly, as a place where the Gospel could be presented to them in a clear manner. We spent the weekend playing basketball, a getting scraped up in a crazy game called “octoball,” and blobbing kids into the Rockbridge’s lake. The most important time, however, was spent listening to the Gospel laid out clearly and concisely. On Saturday night, our speaker used the story of the Prodigal Son in Matthew 12 to effectively express to the kids the love the Father has for all people. I got to talk about this parable with a few of the sixth graders later that night. So many people have heard this story, the son asks his father for his inheritance, and then goes off to lead a very dark life. The son finally realizes he could return to his father if only to work for him. We then see the beauty of the father running ridiculously to embrace his son. He brings the son back into his house, and throws him a grand party. Jesus is expressing how much God loves his creation. We also know that the older brother in the story was not too happy about what transpired. Some of the guys I was talking with seemed to agree, saying, “I would be mad.” The sentiment of these sixth graders makes sense. It is a reaction many of us would have. Why is it fair for the son to be treated this way? Why would the father welcome him after all he did? I got to express to them what so quickly came to my mind, what God has spoken into my life through His word and His people: we should rejoice when someone, who does not seem to deserve God, receives Him as savior because I never deserved Him either.

Leading and teaching these kids has forced me to think about and face questions I do not have an answer to sometimes. But in an instance like this, it was another opportunity for God to speak His Gospel into my life as well as preach the Gospel to these young men.

-Luke McCann (Fellows '15)

"You'll Hear About it on the Testimony Retreat"

“I’ll tell you about it on the testimony retreat.” “Just wait for the testimony retreat, I’ll explain more.” “I don’t want to explain this before the testimony retreat.” These phrases peppered our casual conversations, as we tip-toed around, attempting to get to know one another before we knew where we came from. We had been told to prepare to tell our stories three weeks into the program, on a weekend called “Testimony Retreat.” I knew that this would be a sweet time of learning each other’s stories, and attempting to have a better grasp on how to enter into one’s own story. However, I am not one for small talk--so cutting real conversations short with the excuse of “you’ll hear about it on the testimony retreat” was getting somewhat old.

In the days leading up to this retreat, there was much conversation about how to share our stories. The Fellows spanned across the spectrum of confident to scared, knowing the reality of the intimacy of becoming known. In my opinion, some of the conversations before the retreat were just as crucial as the actual retreat. Times of question, intentional thought behind one’s own story, and careful consideration of how to portray a lifetime of moments in 20 short minutes caused each Fellow to think individually about where they had been and where they are going. The great intentionality behind this retreat was evident in the way that Fellows thoughtfully considered their lives before declaring their story in front of a group of people.

The actual time of hearing each other's stories was incredibly rich, as each Fellow individually portrayed what they felt like were the most important parts of their being. We sat for hours on end, looking through pictures, laughing, crying, and praying for one another as these God-given stories unfolded before us. There was a sense of relief, at least for me, in feeling known. A threshold was broken as each story was told.

This retreat was merely a platform for the rest of these 9 months together. As we continue to journey towards whom God has created each of us to be, this retreat will serve as a backdrop to love, care, and understand each other better. It was an undeniably meaningful and beautiful weekend of sorting through where the great God of this universe has blessed us, taught us, and most importantly rescued us.

And in deep relief, I will never have to hear the phrase “you’ll hear about it on the testimony retreat,” again.

--Katie Randazzo (Fellows '15)

First Impressions

What I’ve loved about the Fellows program so far are the conversations that have arisen, both topical and organic. So much of the program is structured; Dennis and the Fellows Ministry Team put a lot of time and effort into logistics and scheduling. And the fruits of that labor are awesome retreats, bible studies, and formative class time. What I have enjoyed about this structured time is that it creates opportunities to freely talk and share, focusing on the people in the room and what they have to say. When we are not doing something on the calendar, what I look forward to is the unstructured fellowship time we have together. For example, this past weekend a few of us spent almost an hour sharing embarrassing middle school stories. It can’t be planned and that is what is so fun about it. It was such a joy to open up and laugh with new friends.

--Waters Faulkner (Fellows '15)