The Next Steps in My Seminary Journey. A personal update .
If you've been following along my seminary journey, you know this is a BIG month for me. Today is my last day of Homiletics (the art of preaching) class and will graduate with my Master of Arts in Practical Theology from Winebrenner Theological Seminary on July 30! Emails are flowing right now about graduation details AND fall registration details. That's because I received my official admission letter to the Doctor of Ministry program at Winebrenner this morning!
I actually finished my Master's level courses in the fall but because I have a MA and not an MDiv, I needed two more classes to qualify for admission into the program and I have been praying about the next steps. God's direction has become clear this year as leaders at Winebrenner allowed me to take a Doctoral level class in January, and I have entered the Discernment process with the Episcopal Church.
Through it all, I received many confirmations that I am on the right path. I know there is something new happening in this next season, though I don't yet know what that will look like. I am taking one step at a time as God makes it clear.
After years of writing publically and being afraid to call myself a real writer because it's not my full-time job, I have been able to claim the title of writer because I believe it is a gift God has given me that I am using for God's glory. I am learning to accept my own unique voice in the world.
After years of studying religion and theology but not having the credentials behind my name or feeling equipped to claim it, I am claiming the title of Theologian. I know God has gifted me with this desire to always learn and dive deeper into the study of God. I know God has equipped me with the longing and ability to help others learn to listen to God, learn from others, and lead lives that love.
So, here I am. Theologian. Writer. Discerner. And in the fall, Doctoral student!
Winebrenner is a wonderful school where I've found my place! It is a small Evangelical school. But wait, I am Episcopalean. Yes, but I've attended many churches throughout my life and travels, with my main home being the Evangelical church for most of my life. Take any time to poke around my writings and you will see my passion for Ecumenism and the Global Church. I believe the diversity of the church is part of the strength of the church, not a weakness.
No, division and in-fighting is not a strength. But diversity is about so much more than that. Each denomination and cultural expression of the Christian tradition has a piece of the puzzle and has strengths that reflect the complex and mysterious nature of God. I believe we can and should learn from each other. We can be stronger together. We can have a whole picture, instead of just one piece of the puzzle, if we will look to others' strengths to cover our weaknesses. None of us has it all right, and we can find value in each other.
That's why I love Winrebrenner—because they value diversity and welcome those of us from other traditions to come to learn alongside them. I believe whatever my future in the church may be, it will not be solely in the Episcopal church, but in writing, speaking, or learning from and teaching the breadth of the Body of Christ. And so, I want to keep learning in a diverse community. Not to mention, I love the faculty and staff who have encouraged me and helped me grow more in the last year and a half than ever before. Winebrenner has been a place I have flourished and drawn close to God. I can't wait to continue to do so over the next few years.
My family’s support carries me through the long days of work and the nights of class and writing. When I get that old familiar mom guilt that says I should not be investing in school when I have a teen who will be entering college in a few years (shh, I am in denial that she is old enough for that, anyway), I talk to my daughter about class. Her eyes light up as she says, “Mom, you’re going to be a Doctor? Did you ever believe you would do this?” She says she sees how happy I am in the Episcopal church, how at home I look in the pulpit. These are the moments I cling to in times of doubt.
It is a sacrifice of time and money for our family as we are still rebuilding our life in the U.S. after moving home from Bangladesh three years ago. God has provided at every turn with government grants during COVID that allowed for affordable monthly tuition rates. I was able to finish my entire Master’s program remotely. A few unexpected scholarships cushioned the cost. As I begin my Doctoral program, I will need to travel only twice to take classes in the low-residency program. I will take classes and research for two years and finish my Dissertation in the third year.
This part is exceedingly hard for me - the finances. God has shown me over and over that I'm in exactly the right place. Last year I received a scholarship that covered half my tuition. I didn't know how we would afford it going back up to full price this year when we had to buy a house last fall. But, I just got the news that my scholarship has been renewed for this year!! I expect I need around $2500 to cover this year’s tuition, books, and in-person class this summer. If anyone feels compelled to give toward these expenses, I can provide Venmo, Paypal, or Zelle account information (just shoot me an email - nicole@nicoletwalters.com). I’ve spent my life amazed at the generosity of those who believed in our family’s calling and partnered with us to make our support-based service in non-profits overseas possible. It never gets easier to ask for partners to come alongside our ministry. It also never gets less amazing when God provides in surprising ways, so please reach out if you feel led. I am so excited for this journey and to see where God takes us together!
Listening with you,
Who Am I, Really?
Hello. My name is _____
My mom called me the other day to tell me she can't keep straight what degrees I have or what I am studying in school. “What’s the difference between religion and theology?” she asked. A neighbor I met at the pool the other day eyed me suspiciously, saying, "that's really vague" when I said what I do for work. I often find people think I get paid for my work as a writer. For the most part, I don't. The people in my daily life are confused about the various hats I wear, so I wonder what anyone reading my work online might think. Maybe it's time for a re-introduction. So, hey y'all. I'm Nicole.
Family and Home
I grew up right here in south metro Atlanta, always with the itch for something beyond this place. No matter how many times I leave and how far I go, I can’t seem to shake the red clay out of my blood, though. Lee and I met at thirteen. No, we weren’t childhood sweethearts. There were no romantic notions until we were twenty-four after we had both finished college and moved back to our hometown. It’s that previously small, now booming town, where we are raising our two kids, now entering the tween and teen years.
We’ve lived in Egypt (2007-08) and Bangladesh (2017-19) and traveled to many other places. I’ve left pieces of my heart scattered around the globe and there is not much I love more than international travel and exploring cultures not my own. The places I’ve lived and loved have shaped who I am and am still becoming. I know God has planted me in this place now, though. In another year my daughter will attend the same high school my husband and I both graduated from. We live miles from our extended family. They too, continue to shape every aspect of my life.
Faith and Church
My faith has been guiding the trajectory of my life since I was 14. I’ve been in and out of the church, but kind of how Georgia is always on my mind, Jesus never would let me be. I’m more in love with Jesus today than ever, and I am less certain I have how to follow Jesus faithfully all figured out than ever. I will spend my life trying.
I like to call myself a denominational mutt. I came to know Jesus in the Baptist church and am thankful for the love of the Bible and of discipleship I gained there. But my heartbeat is for the diversity of ways God is worshipped by God’s own diverse creation. The beauty of the global church confounds me, and I am committed to the ways we can learn from and strengthen each other. I’ve worshipped in the largest church in the Middle East, on the dirt floor of a schoolhouse in the largest slums in Asia, in a crowded house in a village in South Asia, and in a coffee shop in Yemen with just a handful of people. I’ve been fortunate enough to sit under the teaching of Jesuit priests and Cistercian monks, and have been a part of Baptist, Coptic, International, Non-denominational, and Assemblies of God congregations.
I feel most at home, though, in high church and was confirmed in the Episcopal church in the fall of 2022. No, I don’t think the Episcopal church is the right church. I think it is the right church for me. Lee and the kids still go to the church that has been home for them most of their lives. We’ve always raised the kids to value the diversity of the Body of Christ, so it works for us.
Ministry: Writing
I’ve always written. Stories were the landscape of my childhood. Today they are the way I process the world. They are my prayers and the way I figure out what I think. I started writing for publication in 2015. Like most other writers, I don’t make a living from it. I do it out of love and because I cannot not write. I believe it is a gift God has given me and I am always trying to figure out how to faithfully use it to best serve and love my neighbors.
Work
Since I don’t make a living with my spiritual writing, what do I do? Writing is part of what I do for work, but there is more to it than that. I am a Content Specialist with a communications agency working with non-profits, Ruby Brick, based in Atlanta (but working mostly remotely). Organizations with a social impact come to us to tell their stories and connect with their people. I started working in this kind of writing when I was working in a dual role in a church that had a discipleship ministry, and then as the director of communications for the nonprofit we moved to Bangladesh to serve.
Just like I did for those organizations, I help our clients communicate about the needs they exist to serve (so others can donate or get involved) and tell the stories of life-change they are seeing in their programs. I love being a part of ministries and nonprofits and helping them tell their stories well (we tell these stories through websites, emails, social media, and more).
Ministry: Ordained or Lay Leadership?
I felt God calling me into professional ministry when I was in college. I have since learned how calling changes and grows over our lives as we, ourselves, evolve. I have served in churches, in nonprofits, and through my writing. I have been feeling God call me to something deeper for years, and I officially entered the Discernment process with the Episcopal Church this year. It’s a long process boiled down to lots of meetings with various people to pray together and discuss how I can best serve the church. That could be in ordained ministry (priest or deacon) or some sort of enhanced lay ministry within the church. I preached for the first time this year, and never expected to love it as much as I did. Stay tuned. Your guess is as good as mine as to what God is up to.
Studies
My undergraduate degree is in Religion. This comparative religion degree sparked a passion in me for understanding how people experience God around the world. I’ve lived in Hindu and Muslim contexts and continue to love studying world religions. Wanting a deeper understanding of my own faith and God’s call on my life, I entered seminary straight out of college but life intervened and I never finished that degree. I went back to grad school in 2021 and am set to graduate with my Master of Arts in Practical Theology in July.
I have always said I would go to school forever if someone else paid for it, and I have applied for the Doctor of Ministry Program at my school, Winebrenner Theological Seminary. (If someone else is willing to step up and pay for it, do let me know). What will I gain from this degree? A wise mentor told me last year that when she entered seminary she didn’t feel called to Pastor at the time; she felt called to seminary. I love my school and the ways I have learned and grown in the past year and a half of my studies. I feel called to this next step. That is all that is clear currently, and that is all I need to know.
Many Roles; One Self
When we introduce ourselves, it is easy to talk about what we do or where we’ve lived, who we are in relation to our family members or the other people in the room. Is this really who we are? As I think about all the hats I wear on a regular basis, I am reminded of what Richard Rohr says in Immortal Diamond: “Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had.” The roles we fill in our life do not make us who they are, but they can help us uncover who God created us to be. As we use the gifts God has given us and discover the parts we play in the great tapestry of life woven together by all of us, we uncover a little more of our true selves.
Today I am a daughter, a wife, a mom, a strategist, a student, a writer, a budding preacher, and a Georgian—to put a few labels on my life. Take away any of those things, and who am I really?
Who are you, really? “Your True Self is who you are, and always have been in God, and at its core, it is love itself,” says Rohr. In all that I am doing, I want to be more loving. I want to reflect God in each facet of my life. We are complex beings, created in the image of Love. All that we are and do should reflect this. Rohr continues, “Love is both who you are and who you are still becoming, like a sunflower seed that becomes its own sunflower.”
Maybe you want to take some time this month and listen to who God is saying you are. Is it the same person who is showing up at work or at your home every day? Is it the person you see in the mirror? Are there roles God is asking you to set down for a season or ones you need to pick up? Above all, remember you are beloved. You are Love. You are enough.
We Were Never Meant to Walk Alone
Charting a Course Alone
“You can be anything you want,” they said. “If you can dream it, you can be it,” we were told. My generation grew up believing we could follow our bliss, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and every other cliche of the American dream. We were led to believe we were the masters of our own destinies.
I remember a moment I realized we’d been fed lies. I was standing with a friend I had been close to all through high school and college. I was on a break from grad school and he had been in the workforce before heading to law school. We stood on a balcony talking about where our lives had gone since college, about to go our separate ways again. Barely into our twenties, we had weariness in our voices already. “Nothing has turned out the way I thought it would,” he said. I saw the disillusionment in his eyes that mirrored my own. We had been launched out into a world we weren’t ready for, ill-equipped to face reality, and had no one to guide us when everything went topsy-turvy. I felt so alone.
Twenty years later, I watch nieces and nephews graduate and step into the same uncertainty. I watch my eldest with dread, realizing her turn to step into the great unknown is closer than I want to think. How can we help the next generation face reality better than we did? How can we equip them to chart a course that works? I am getting tiny glimpses into the answers to those questions as I, myself, navigate my next steps.
When Our Maps No Longer Work
My personal and professional life has been fraught with life-altering decisions I have second and twenty-second guessed. Two international moves around the world and back, my husband’s mid-life career change, and a late-in-life change of church traditions for myself have left me reeling in the past few years. I’ve been asking God for assurances that I made the right decisions or to show me how to make better ones in the days ahead.
My family felt alone in making many of these massive decisions. No one in the non-profit we just left or our home church helped us figure out how to re-enter life in the United States after two years living in South Asia. Confused and alone, we reached out and felt a void reaching back for us. The map we’d been given didn’t work and we didn’t know where to turn.
Stopping to Ask for Directions
I knew God was moving me into something deeper but I didn’t know what or how to figure that out by myself. I sent out a cry for help and took steps to surround myself with people to walk beside me. I needed some fresh eyes to help me see what I couldn’t see clearly for myself...
CONTINUE READING AT THE MUDROOM
How Place Shapes Our View of God. for the Redbud Post.
“Say it again,” they urged me. I felt like an animal in a cage, surrounded by the watchful eyes of gleeful children who poked at its helpless form with a stick. My fellow college-aged camp counselors hailed mostly from Canada and the Northeastern United States. Much of the kitchen crew came from the United Kingdom. The oddity of my red hair and southern drawl quickly earned me the nickname, “Georgia Ginger,” and now they wanted me to speak on command like a trained parrot.
I hadn’t traveled outside of the Deep South much before and didn’t realize I had a different vocabulary than people from other parts of the United States. When I said I was fixin’ to go somewhere and they laughed, I felt exposed and uncertain of what I’d done that warranted their teasing. I never realized my place in the world unknowingly shaped me in ways that were unlike other people.
Understanding the world
I was young and unaware of how acutely our understanding of ourselves, others, and even God, is formed by the location and people we are born into or by the proximity we allow ourselves to cultures unlike our own. I later learned the word for it in my seminary studies: worldview. James Sire in The Universe Next Door explains a worldview as “a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart” and says a person’s worldview “provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being.”(1)
The place, family, religious tradition, and culture in which we grow and learn shapes our understanding of the world and how we will interact with it. Each person has a unique vantage point shaped by our circumstances, background, and life experiences; but we share common beliefs and commitments to those who are like us, who share our place in the world. This is the foundation upon which we build our beliefs about God and the universe God created.
My upbringing in what’s called the “Bible Belt” didn’t just influence the way I speak. The phrases y’all and bless your heart aren’t the only takeaways I gained from growing up in the former Confederacy. As I stepped further outside of the boundaries of the Mason Dixon Line and the Atlantic Ocean, I learned just how much that red clay had been the fertile ground for a particular view of God.
The shock to my body as a young adult who was transplanted into the Western Sahara Desert was nothing compared to the shock to my soul. Wide-eyed and newly married, I sat on the hewn rock pews of the largest church in the Middle East and listened to Arabic sermons next to my new Coptic Orthodox neighbors.
I learned fresh ways of seeing everything I had ever known along with new words for God and the way to understand and explain faith. I must have looked like my camp counselor friends in those early days, mouth agape with shock and delight, “Say it again.” Abouna. Father. Eid. Feast.
CONTINUE READING AT THE REDUBUD POST
Jesus On My Street. for The Mudroom.
The very credentials these people are waving around as something special, I’m tearing up and throwing out with the trash—along with everything else I used to take credit for. And why? Because of Christ. Yes, all the things I once thought were so important are gone from my life. Compared to the high privilege of knowing Christ Jesus as my Master, firsthand, everything I once thought I had going for me is insignificant—dog dung. I’ve dumped it all in the trash so that I could embrace Christ and be embraced by him. I didn’t want some petty, inferior brand of righteousness that comes from keeping a list of rules when I could get the robust kind that comes from trusting Christ—God’s righteousness.
– Philippians 3:7-9, The Message
I was following all the formulas I knew and heard nothing, saw nothing. Why not? I was doing everything I’d been taught; and how much I had been taught, indeed.
If someone else thought they had a reason to boast, I certainly had more. A student of religion, I had the degree on the wall to prove it. I had all those hours in seminary and years as a spiritual writer to show off. Shelves and shelves of books on theology and prayer proved how much I should have known. I had years of ministry under my belt. We’d left everything we knew behind in the United States and moved 8000 miles away because we’d heard God say, go. In regards to the law, I was obedient. As for zeal, serving the church. As for righteousness based on the law, faultless. ¹
Coming of age in the Protestant church, I was encouraged to dive deeply into studying Scripture and its application in my life. I expected to meet God in the pages of the Bible, but couldn’t see anything more than words anymore.
As an adult I had become a student of the more contemplative paths of other traditions, learning about the Ignatian Examen, Lectio Divina, and Centering Prayer. Now, none of these prayers was yielding comfort; only resounding silence.
Staring into the face of my spiritual director through the tiny dot of a camera on my laptop, I talked about the yawning abyss I felt I was facing. We were leaving Bangladesh in a few months and I had no idea what the future held. I was buried under anxiety and only wanted to feel the peace that passes understanding that Jesus promises.
My background had hardwired me to think pleasing God had to do with my performance. The concept of just living in the love of God, trusting I couldn’t do anything to lose it, was taking some major unlearning and relearning. “As the day rolls on and I regrettably slip back into trying to earn Your favor, forgive me I pray, and gently remind me that I am the child and You are the Father, and it is Your kingdom I desire—not mine,” wrote Brennan Manning. I knew it in my head—that I was God’s beloved. Getting that lesson to my heart was proving to be more difficult. I tried everything I knew to try to experience God in this place of unknown…Silence. Darkness.
That was when my spiritual director asked me if I had ever heard of the Ignatian practice of Imaginative Prayer. I thought it meant imagining biblical scenes like I was a character in them. It seemed like another mental exercise in studying Scripture—and not a prayerful one. She asked if I was willing to explore Imaginative Prayer with her during our time together. I said okay, not expecting much...
CONTINUE READING AT THE MUDROOM
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