Our Previous Speakers

2016 - Church - Pastor Jodi Houge, Humble Walk, St. Paul, MN - Jodi started Humble Walk in a coffee shop during her last year of seminary and has been running to catch up with where this community leads her ever since. She spends a good deal of her time drinking coffee and observing life in the West End of St. Paul--where she lives with her baker husband and two offspring.

2017 - Nourish - Pastor Margaret Kelly, Shobi's Table, St. Paul, MN - A happy cynic and mission developer who works to provide food, friendship, faith, and employment skills to the homeless/near homeless from a food truck.

2018 - Discovery - Dr. Jake Sorenson, Sacred Playgrounds - a practical theologian and researcher who finds joy in bringing scholarly attention to experiential ministry. He set out with Dr. Roland Martinson to discover exactly what Lutheran Campus Ministry looks like across the country and what it offers to students and the larger church alike. The research is the largest study of its kind.

2019 - Community - Pastor Lenny Duncan, Jehu's Table, New York City - Lenny has been everything from high school drop out, drug dealer, sex worker, street corner poet, hitchhiker, dharma bum, small town drifter, seminarian, political activist, father, pastor, lover, public theologian, and writer of newly published Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US.