Why Columbia?

Kathy Wolf ’09

Inquirer, Presbytery of Ohio Valley

First Presbyterian Church, Bloomington, IN

B.A., English, Indiana University Hutton Honors College

I was 20 years old when I sat across from Doug Bauder, former Lutheran minister and director of the GLBT student center at Indiana University, and proceeded to tell him why I could never pursue ordination.  I listed my complaints without hesitating: the church is exclusive, the church is hypocritical, the church has its priorities all wrong, the church is so caught up in political issues it has forgotten the teachings of Jesus Christ...Why would I want to be a representative of a system this broken?

Doug smiled.

“Kathy,” he said, “this is exactly why God is calling you to ministry.”

I don’t claim to be any sort of savior to my denomination, but I will admit that the injustices that have been done in the name of Christ were what haunted me as I discerned my call to seminary. At Columbia I have found my peers and professors similarly haunted by those same injustices. In our daily study and worship, we work as a community to better understand Christ’s call to us so that we might go out from this place with renewed vision of what it means to live faithfully in a broken world.