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In the twenty-first episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Amanda Hontz Drury, Professor of Theology and Ministry and Director of the Imaginarium at Indiana Wesleyan University. Drury opens by discussing the discernment process that led her to establish the Imaginarium as well as the commitments that animate it. One commitment is a desire to leverage innovation in ways that shares the timeless commitments of the Christian tradition with children and adolescents. Another commitment is children and adolescents have far more to offer in terms of feedback concerning programs focused on their development than is often perceived. Drury then offers details concerning her own faith formation and how a haunting question concerning the persistence rates of adolescents in terms of faith formation proved foundational to how she understands her vocation as a clergyperson and scholar. As someone eventually appointed to the faculty with whom she studied as an undergraduate, Drury also reflects on the key components of that transition and lessons that may be of benefit to faculty members making comparable transitions. Drury then closes by discussing how her understanding of the academic vocation is best exercised by having one foot in academe and one foot in the Church.
- Amanda Hontz Drury, Saying Is Believing: The Necessity of Testimony in Adolescent Spiritual Development (InterVarsity Press, 2015)
- Amanda Hontz Drury, Testimony and Trauma: Making Space for Healing (Fortress Academic, 2021)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is Amanda Hontz Drury, Professor of Theology and Ministry and Director of the Imaginarium at Indiana Wesleyan University. Thank you for joining us
Amanda Hontz Drury: Thanks so much, Todd. Happy to be here.
Todd Ream: You serve as the Founder and Executive Director of the Imaginarium, an effort that quote, “partners with congregations and young people in particular to experiment with new forms of ministry and they’re theologically motivated and socially innovative,” end quote. Would you please begin by describing what led you to establish the Imaginarium?
Amanda Hontz Drury: Sure. I have always been excited by ideas, by, by new things, by finding new creative ways to try doing old things. And what really caught my attention probably in the last 10 years was how often I was seeing churches try new things that were new and exciting, but not necessarily theologically grounded or moving that wheel forward.
I think the best way to describe it would be, I saw a lot of people that were creating new wine skins without paying attention to whether or not there was actually wine in there. So, you know, a church finds a new outreach program that perhaps is great, but doesn’t necessarily do anything for them missionally. Or we find, you know, new ways of doing church, but we’re using curriculum from the 1990s, so really wanting to look at, okay, what are ways of using these, these fresh ideas that are actually moving, moving the gospel forward?
The late theologian, Robert Jensen, has been very informative in even the start of how we imagine the Imaginarium. He talks about how the Gospel must change in order to remain itself. And by that, he’s not saying, you know, it’s a different story we’re telling. It’s playing around with the language, with the way that we’re presenting the Gospel. He points out how Martin Luther says we’re justified by faith alone and he frees generations of people.
But you know, today we don’t know what the word justified means in our everyday conversations. So what does it look like to share the Gospel in ways that really resonate with the language, with the stories that we are already telling without watering down that Gospel?
Todd Ream: Thank you. Can you highlight a couple of ways in which those commitments theologically motivated and socially innovative, intersect with offerings that you and your colleagues prepare?
Amanda Hontz Drury: Sure. I think one of those things and this would pull in young people as well, is recognizing that there is no Holy Spirit Junior, that the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead is on is on young people, children and teenagers in particular. And so a lot of what we do at the Imaginarium is working alongside of children and teenagers to hear where and how God is leading them.
You know, assuming that the priesthood of believers doesn’t just kick in when you turn 18 but that there are things that children can hear from God that we cannot. And so what does it look like to invite them into the planning process, into the dreaming process, trusting that God is speaking through them as well?
Todd Ream: Thank you. What does it mean then to partner with congregations?
Amanda Hontz Drury: So much of the way we understand the Gospel to move in communities is contextually based, and I don’t want to assume that I know what a particular community or congregation needs, you know, from where I am in Marion, Indiana. And so what, what does it look like to work with congregations in ways that helps them deeply listen to their surrounding communities to respond to actually felt needs as opposed to imagined needs.
And it seems like the more people we can get involved in that from the congregation, the better equipped we are to share the Gospel in a way that people can understand and receive. In a way that actually makes it feel like good news, not just extra stuff being thrown at you.
Todd Ream: I want to return now to the comment that you made about Holy Spirit Junior. I’ve not heard that one before, so I’m going to have to find a way to incorporate that into a class or into a point of writing, but I’ll make sure I give you credit for it in that regard.
But young people, you know, young people play an important role. Young people are part of their congregations and they’re part of the individuals with whom you partner. In what ways do such partnerships with young people then aid in their near term but also their long term spiritual formation?
Amanda Hontz Drury: First of all, I think it signals to children from a very young age you belong here and we actually need you here. We’re not just creating stuff for you, but we need your presence. Back in the 1960s, NASA conducted this study with children that’s been replicated multiple times, but they were testing divergent thinking and found that 98 percent of children five and under tested at a genius level for divergent thinking. By the time you got to a 15 year old that had dropped to 12%. And then by the time you get to the adults, it’s 2 percent of adults test at that genius level of divergent thinking.
And so when I say we need the voices of children, it’s not just this, oh, isn’t that cute? You know, to have a child speaking into this. I think so often the Church, we patronize the things that perhaps God intends to be prophetic, so what does it look like to believe that there are things that children can offer us that we literally cannot access on our own, you know, sitting around, sitting around a board table.
One of the examples I love to give is just the example of hearing and how our hearing goes as we get older. There was a man by the name of Howard Stapleton, Henry Stapleton. I think it’s Howard, over in England who one day his daughter came back from the grocery store and she was all frustrated, this teenage girl, because some teenage guys had been hassling her and her father was annoyed by this. And he’s the one that invented the mosquito tone. You know, this high pitched tone that teenagers could hear that adults couldn’t.
And he started selling this to stores, to organizations to have playing outside their door to keep teenagers from loitering there. And of course he meant it as this negative thing, but I love that example that there are literally things that teenagers can hear that adults can’t. And then of course we’ve got the story of Samuel as well. But that’s really a key founding principle of the work that we do is this deep listening to teenagers and to children.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to ask you now about parents, and if you’d offer a few details concerning the role that you believe parents play in the process.
Amanda Hontz Drury: Sure. Christian Smith has a great book that came out, Handing Down the Faith maybe three, four years ago, that says pretty much what we already knew, but really shows that the research to back it up and that’s just how influential parents are in the formation of faith and particularly, and he’s quoting from other people on this, that the warmth of a parent and their ability to relate to their child. There’s something about the warmth between a parent-child relationship that really helps create that fertile ground for seeds of faith to grow.
And so, honestly, some of the work that we’re doing at the Imaginarium is just trying to help parents have more of an emotional connection to their children, knowing that sometimes parents don’t just need more knowledge about the Bible or how to teach, but just that emotional connectedness to really help till the soil for seeds of faith.
Todd Ream: Thank you. In addition to cultivating warmth then, what challenges do parents face as they seek to invite their children to embrace the Christian faith? And then what opportunities do they also have that maybe they’re not even aware of at the time?
Amanda Hontz Drury: Yeah, well, I think the biggest challenge is parents absolutely convinced that they’re bad at it. I have yet to talk to a parent that feels like they’re really nailing it, both in terms of parenting as well as their ability to share their faith. So just even in, we’ve run some parent focus groups and the words that we hear over and over again, when we ask parents about sharing their faith with their children, it’s words like overwhelmed and guilt and clueless.
And, and, and these are honestly, these, a lot of these were parenting professionals, if you will you know, they’ve got their background in Christian ed, they know how to teach it. And then they go into their own families and they’re going, oh my goodness. I don’t even know where to begin with my own kids.
And I think there’s a lot of just a lot of fear and anxiety behind that too. We can throw around that Bible verse, that train up a child in the way they should go, and when they’re old, they will not depart from it, which is a beautiful promise, but I feel like I can sometimes be the sort of Democles hanging over us. Your children are not following the Lord. You have clearly screwed up somewhere along the way.
So one of the questions we grapple with is how do we empower parents to feel confident in the ways they share their faith that that doesn’t just feel like an added on Bible study to their everyday, you know. Here’s my life and now I’m going to do a devotional with my child. Here’s my life, and now I’m going to what are ways that we can really integrate faith-building activities with everyday life so that these types of things are integrated with their everyday forms of life, not just some additional add on, not a tag along?
Todd Ream: Thank you. Would you please offer an example of the resources that you and your colleagues have created that can offer some assistance to parents then?
Amanda Hontz Drury: Oh, sure. I think two of my favorite ones, at least that I’m using in my own house right now would be, it’s a nightlight that you simply, that you write on, it’s one of those things where you know, you write on it with a special expo marker and then press the button and it lights up at night.
And so my son and I will, we’ll talk about, okay, what’s the promise that I want for Paul to have on his mind as he’s falling asleep at night. And so there’s a Bible verse out of Micah. I’m not gonna remember the exact text here where it’s found, but it’s, it’s, though I sit in darkness the Lord will sit with me. And so for us to talk about, okay, what are, what are the words that you want to have in your head as you’re falling asleep?
Because he’s going to have a nightlight, no matter what, if there’s a way I can take that nightlight moment and somehow draw it back to the Lord, it’s not taking any extra time on my part. And now it’s just become a part of Paul’s everyday routine. So that would be one very, very small thing and that’s the other thing too, is I want these tools to actually make life easier for parents. You know, nobody needs one more thing to do.
With that said, there is an extra tool that I’ve also been using a lot to that, that Ronnie Farmer created. He’s one of my colleagues here and it’s the how was your day cards. And I’d seen something like this a lot before in other places where, you know, you’re choosing the card of the emotion in terms of how you’re feeling.
What makes this a little bit different though is, so it’s got this beautiful artwork, you know, how was your day? You choose an emotion. And then on the backside, there is a passage of scripture that talks about how Jesus experienced that same emotion. And it’s not a, let me try to fix that feeling or help you get out of it. It’s just deep, deep empathy of boy, you felt rejected here in this moment. Jesus has felt that way before too.
And I’ve been surprised how much that one really connected with my children. So much so that my 10 year-old pulled it out not too long ago and made me go through it. You know, he’s handing me the cards, show me the three cards from your day, mom, that you felt. And there’s, you know, there’s sad emotions in there. There’s happy emotions in there, but it’s been a great tool for conversations.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Thank you very much. Very creative. And especially thinking about parents and failure. There’s probably no moment in the day that may generate that more than, “It’s time for bed.” And when we go to bed, we go to sleep and we stay in our room and we go to bed. If it can make it easier, but also it can be a formative moment for a young person in terms of his or her faith. Yeah, I think that’s beautiful. Thank you.
I want to ask you some questions now about your own calling. You grew up in Michigan. You were an undergraduate at Indiana Wesleyan University and a graduate student at Princeton Seminary. At what point did you discern a calling to the ministry?
Amanda Hontz Drury: In some ways, I felt this as a very young child, but assumed it would be as a pastor’s wife. I did not see any women pastors growing up, even though my denomination affirms women in ministry. And as I got older, I felt more of a pull there and thought, okay, well, maybe I could be a missionary. I’ve seen women, women missionaries before and then had opportunities to preach and didn’t quite know what to do with that.
And it was really in coming to Indiana Wesleyan that I first started getting encouragement from professors and started studying the matter. But then it was my time at Princeton Seminary of just regularly seeing women preaching, that it just became a normal idea for me. It didn’t seem like something that was so far out there.
So for as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to do something related to the Church. And even, even the shift that I took towards the academy has always been, always been in service to the local church, knowing that was ultimately the institution I was wanting to serve.
Todd Ream: At what point did you begin to discern a calling to the faith formation of young people and that that would be central to how you express your calling in ministry?
Amanda Hontz Drury: Todd, I went to seminary as an afterthought. I went there honestly to kill time. John and I were getting married. He was already going to seminary. I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. And so really kind of accidentally ended up there.
And it was while I was at Princeton that someone suggested I take a class with Kenda Dean. And I didn’t necessarily care about youth ministry. I enjoyed youth ministry as a teenager, but I remember the very first class we had with her. There had just been some new studies released on teenagers graduating from high school and graduating out of the church for an extended period of time.
And I remember her throwing around a statistic about 75 percent of teenagers, this and that. And I heard that and I had this, oh my goodness. This is a problem. Somebody should do something about this and looking around at the classroom wondering like, why isn’t everybody in an uproar about this?
And I really look back to that moment as an awakening for me in terms of this, this matters. This is a worthy question of giving your time to you. So Kenda has been a dear mentor, dear friend in this whole process.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Are there any other mentors that you would mention, or perhaps you mentioned Robert Jensen earlier, other authors who also contributed to your formation as a clergyperson, but also as a scholar?
Amanda Hontz Drury: So, Rick Osmer would be, would be the other person who’s probably had a profound effect on me both in his way of really pulling in the imagination particularly with, with children’s literature and moral formation. That was a pretty key class that I took with him and then taught with him later on that has shaped me.
And then just the four moments of practical theology that he’s developed in his, in his intro to practical theology book that has really, really shaped the way that I do my, well, both my scholarship and my own preaching. I find myself using his fourfold moments quite a bit.
I often use Osmer’s four moments of practical theology in conjunction with Marshall Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication, if you’re familiar with those. So those are the methods that I find myself kind of interweaving with, with one another to do the kind of work that I do.
Todd Ream: Thank you. As previously mentioned, you were an undergraduate at Indiana Wesleyan and then returned to serve as a faculty member and now also serve as the Executive Director of the Imaginarium. In what ways, if any, was serving as a colleague with professors you had as a student a familiar experience?
Amanda Hontz Drury: Oh, it was such a joy to come back here. I loved my time as a student here. And one of the things that really stuck out to me was the way that the school of theology and ministry faculty interacted with each other.
So as a student, I saw them having coffee together, laughing together, having weekly lunches together. So from the time I was, you know, 18 years old, I always had in my mind, this is a really healthy, joy-filled place to work.
Todd Ream: And we’re talking about faculty members.
Amanda Hontz Drury: We are talking about faculty members.
Todd Ream: This is great. This is good.
Amanda Hontz Drury: And so I was nervous when I was hired here thinking, okay, they’re going to pull back the curtain. I’m going to see what it’s really like. And maybe I am drinking the Kool Aid, but I could not imagine better colleagues than the people I’m serving with here at that faculty.
They’re the type of people that they find out you’re teaching a class and it’s a class they’ve taught before and they show up at your office with a, you know, a file and say, take whatever of my lectures, my syllabi, assignments, anything you want. If it’s helpful, take it, if not, just chuck it. There’s not a possessive spirit here. There’s very much of a shared camaraderie, which I know is rare. And I’m just so thankful for it.
Todd Ream: Yeah. What advice then, if any, would you offer faculty members who may return to the institutions where they were once students and the manner in which they enter back into that community?
Amanda Hontz Drury: Okay, I hope this comes across the right way, because I remember a friend of mine sharing with me right before I took this job, he said, nobody will treat you like a junior faculty member there, but you are, so act like it. And by that, he meant, you know, everyone was so respectful and kind.
But to recognize, okay, yes. Steve Lennox, Steve Horst, they have taught here for decades, they have a deep wisdom here that I do not have. David Vardaman would be another person. Those are the three people I constantly found myself in their office, just asking what I do with the student that doesn’t show up? What a lot of the, kind of the simple mundane things that you just don’t know when you’re a first so not being afraid to admit my own ignorance and where I was stuck and trusting that people were willing to share their wisdom.
Todd Ream: Thank you, thank you. Your dissertation and first book Saying is Believing: The Necessity of Testifying in Adolescent Spiritual Development argues that offering one’s testimony is not only an accounting of what occurred in one’s past but also a formative practice. What led you to focus on testimony as being a critical practice in the spiritual formation of young people?
Amanda Hontz Drury: That probably takes me back to Christian Smith again both his book Soul Searching and even actually in his parenting book as well. Both places he talks about how this space for articulation is so important and faith formation. And in both books, he says, really more work should be done on this practice.
And I had grown up in a church that did a lot of testimony, on the fly testimony times. And I remember always being excited on those Sunday evenings when a microphone was in the middle of the aisle, because you never knew what you were going to get. And my father who was the pastor was always really anxious on those nights because you never knew what you were going to get, you know, same thing.
And so I knew there were formative things about that practice for me growing up, but also that it was somewhat of a risky practice, if you will. It was a high stakes practice. And so really wanting to find, okay, how can we really claim this practice of testimony? How can we best distill the good while mitigating some of the risks that come along with it? Because I really do believe. Well, I mean, we see all throughout the social sciences that when you are saying something out loud it is shaping and forming your beliefs.
Charles Taylor has a very short book called the Ethics of Authenticity that was influential when I was first making some of these decisions as well, where he talks about as far as adolescents are concerned, they will engage in their most authentic selves when they are able to articulate who exactly they are. So the words they use to define themselves also shape the people they are emerging as.
Todd Ream: Thank you. What qualities then define such a practice?
Amanda Hontz Drury: Feedback loops understanding that when someone is sharing a testimony, they are not just sharing their story. They are presenting something to the congregation that needs some form of recognition, whether it’s affirmation or pushback or, you know, a question that asks that shifts things around a little bit.
One of the things I really try to encourage churches to consider is to have a very wide view of what testimony looks like. So it’s not just the microphone in the center of the hall of the aisle way for someone to say anything. but to really curate and shepherd those testimonies as well. So I tell churches, really any place where somebody is talking is a place where you can lean into the practice of testimony.
So announcement time, you know, it’s announcements, you don’t just have to talk about the Lenten soup supper. You can also ask someone to announce it and share what happened to them last year when that happened or stewardship moments, or you know, any places where people naturally talk. So often you can normally just lean in even just a little bit and articulate where God may be present.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Thank you. I want to transition now to talking about some of your more recent work in particular, the role that trauma plays in the lives of young people and their spiritual formation. So for example, your most recent book is Testimony and Trauma: Making Space for Healing. What led you to explore trauma in spiritual formation and in the lives of young people?
Amanda Hontz Drury: So this is one of those perhaps God moments that you can’t quite explain any other way. But when I first started teaching at Indiana Wesleyan for, for some reason, I kept having students coming up to me, sharing, sharing stories of sexual abuse. And there was honestly no reason for people to be coming to me other than like, I wasn’t in a position where I was saying, I’ll hear these stories or this and that it really was just kind of strange.
I keep getting these stories and ended up partnering with a psychiatrist and a church to launch a small group, a Sunday night anonymous small group for young women who had been, who had been sexually abused. And that was just more out of the, there’s overwhelming need here. I don’t know what to do. I need to bring in some professionals and let’s see. And everyone wasn’t required to be in counseling at the time. So it wasn’t like a group therapy session, but it was simply a space for people to share their stories and receive recognition in response.
And I was really struck by how powerful it was for someone to be able to share a story and to hear someone else say, you know, I, that happened to me too, or that makes sense to me because one brief example of that would be, you know, one woman saying I was raped. And then after that, I started sleeping around with multiple guys and I don’t know why, and I’m so ashamed that, you know, all the confusing emotions that come with that and other women saying, oh, that makes sense, you were trying to reclaim, you know, a sense of ownership of your own body, making your own choices.
The ways they were ministering to each other that really I was just kind of stepping back and facilitating, that was, that was really what started that exploration into that. And then Serene Jones’s book, Trauma and Grace was influential in getting me to think about that. But the more I read about trauma, particularly in the church, the more frustrated is too strong of a word, but I was deeply unsatisfied with how the trauma conversations tended to end.
Most people tended to locate trauma in Holy Saturday, which I love that image of that liminal space between life and death. You know, something horrible has happened. And here we are in the Saturday and we don’t know what to do. I like that, but I think there’s limits to that because my fear is what we are telling people is you don’t get to experience the risen Christ until you’re over your trauma or other people you know, they think they have a breakthrough and they are experiencing the resurrected Lord.
And then they, you know, the Tuesday after Easter, they’re realizing they’re having flashbacks to this and, you know, I thought I was over this and, so really what does it look like to shift the trauma conversation from Holy Saturday to Traumatic Tuesday? You know, what does post-resurrection trauma look like?
Because we see that all throughout the New Testament. And Shelley Rambo has some great work on this as well, where you know, there is scars after the resurrection. You can’t experience the risen Lord and still be terrified and in a room with a locked door, because you don’t know what’s going to happen. Jesus could be resurrected right in front of you and you could still be stumbling over your words, calling him the gardener, you know, asking the same question over and over again, like we see in Mary. So a lot of my work was really trying to shift some of the conversation to what does trauma look like in the Church in light of a resurrected Lord?
Todd Ream: Thank you. In your estimation then, what kind of training should pastors who serve young people and young adults experience when it comes to preparing them to encounter trauma?
Amanda Hontz Drury: One thing that I always advise people to do is to have a large network of knowing who is in their community, who, where are the support systems? I’ve really been impressed by a lot of the research that’s come out with EMDR, a kind of trauma therapy. And so asking, okay, do you know who offers EMDR in your area and offers it well. So to have a vast array of resources like that that are available.
And then also, especially for youth pastors, the mantra that I find myself saying over and over again is to assume trauma before drama. It’s so easy with teenagers to assume if there’s something you don’t understand, oh, they’re being dramatic. You know I’m thinking of a young teenage girl who did not want to sleep in the basement on a youth missions trip with a whole bunch of people and it’s not because she was being dramatic. It’s because she had, you know, horrible memories of a basement.
I picked up a young girl once from middle school when I was a youth pastor and she gets in my car and she throws her head down the dashboard and she says, today was so stressful. And I’m thinking, oh no, you know what happened? And she says, we had our rehearsal for the National Junior Honor Society. Going, yeah, she goes, and we had to get an alphabetical order, by last name. And it was so stressful. So I’m hearing that I’m going, oh my goodness. We’re talking about how stressful it is to get an alphabetical order.
But to recognize to stop in that moment. And go, okay, there’s something about this that for whatever reason is important to her. There’s something here that matters. And I never did quite find out what it was, why that was so hard for her but the relationship that we had meant that she felt comfortable coming to me in the future when something clearly significant had happened, because she knew how I would respond. So that even if it doesn’t make sense to assume trauma before drama.
Todd Ream: Thank you. The practice of self care then for pastors who serve children and young adults who experienced trauma is also becoming more and more important in order to be able to not only respond in the moment to those young people, but to continue to persist in ministry and be able to respond over the long-term to several generations, what would you recommend for pastors who need to refresh or to revitalize themselves, in order to be able to continue to be vigilant in serving young adults when it comes to trauma?
Amanda Hontz Drury: That’s a great question. I think some of the most interesting, helpful partnerships that I’ve seen, especially amongst youth pastors, has been the youth pastor that has two counselors. There is the therapist that they talk to with their own personal, whatever is going on in their own personal life but then to have a counselor on-hand as a consultant.
So when I was a youth pastor, I think it was maybe once every two or three months, I met with a counselor in our community who met with me pro bono because of conflict of interest type things where I would just sit down with him and go through my list of what I was dealing with, with teenagers in my youth group. And he would just, he would coach me essentially. He’d say, well, yeah, you can encourage this person to X, Y, or Z, or, you know, boy, Mandy, that’s that one’s really outside of your purview. That’s something you need to refer on.
And it was so helpful to have a professional coach in that area that I wasn’t worried about my own personal soul. You know, I had spiritual directors and whatnot. But they could just help navigate this world with teenagers because it is, it changes so quickly. And it was so reassuring to know I had someone I could go to.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to ask you about one particular partnership that the Imaginary has, Imaginarium has developed. And that’s with Fort Wayne’s Three Rivers Wesleyan Church. And one of the resources is the Advent Grief Box. Would you please describe what led to the creation of that resource and in what ways it can allow adults to walk alongside children through what is often referenced as this most wonderful time of the year?
Amanda Hontz Drury: Yes. So a few years ago, we launched the Pastor Pod where we identified between five and eight high capacity youth pastors that we thought, boy, this person, if they just had, you know, a little bit more wind in their sails, they could really take off. And we reached out to them and said, hey, who are three pastors that you would want to spend time with that you would find life giving.
And so ultimately came up with a group of about 20, 25 youth pastors that we pulled together and we partnered with Ministry Incubators, which is Mark DeVries, Trey Wince, Kenda Dean, and took them through a hatch-a-thon, where you, you take just a germ of an idea, spend a few days with it and see what emerges from this.
And Three Rivers Wesleyan, we had Kalina Smith there at the time and, or Kalina Carlson. I can’t remember which one is her maiden name now. And she had just lost her mother in a very unexpected, very traumatic way. And here she is coming in as a youth pastor with all this grief that she is thinking through. And we just gave her the space to dream, okay, what would it look like to take this grief that you are experiencing and not use it to make a ministry, but do something that matters that you think you could get behind.
And so she created this Advent Grief Box, just recognizing, okay, there are, there are young people who have tremendous loss that they come into this Advent season and it does not, it doesn’t feel the way they think it should feel. And we know adults have a hard enough time with that. You know, you lose a spouse or something, but kids, especially, I feel like it was like, we didn’t even have much of a concept for what that could look like.
And so she just came up with this weekly Advent gift box that went under the tree, that each time pulled out each week you opened up a part of it that would acknowledge parts of the Christmas narrative and interweave it with the pain of life. And to just kind of give permission to allow beauty and brokenness to co-exist. And that’s become my go-to gift for teenagers who are going through a season when they have, when they have lost someone. I say teenagers, but I know a lot of adults who have found that helpful as well. In fact, as I’m talking, I’m thinking, ooh, there’s someone else I should send that to. I know she just branched out into doing a box around miscarriage as well in Advent and just really trying to get to the complicated feelings of those things.
I should highlight Wonder Space in Marion, Indiana, out of College Wesleyan Church. They just received a Lilly Christian Parenting Grant from the Lilly Endowment to launch blue groups. And again, there’s some similarities here in terms of what does, what does grief therapy play look like? What does it look like for a child to be able to either through incarceration of a parent or the death of a parent, to bring that anger, those questions into a playful environment to to really, to really work through that.
Todd Ream: Thank you. As unfortunately, our time begins to become short, I want to turn now to asking you about how you conceptualize and understand the academic vocation as you practice it. You’ve served as a faculty member for approximately a dozen years and as the Executive Director of the Imaginarium for approximately five years. How have you come to understand the academic vocation in terms of the commitments and characteristics or the qualities that define it?
Amanda Hontz Drury: So I mentioned early on that I want my academic work to really serve the local church. And what that means for me is is to never have one foot squarely to never be standing too firmly in one space so we talk about, you know, a foot in the Church, a foot in the academy, but for me, that means even getting as nitty gritty as teaching ninth and 10th grade Sunday school class because It’s a whole lot easier to teach about youth ministry than it is to actually have a ninth grade boy in front of you who doesn’t want to be there.
Todd Ream: My initial thought when you said that was you’re brave.
Amanda Hontz Drury: Oh my goodness.
Todd Ream: I knew you were, but now I have confirmation.
Amanda Hontz Drury: And my life would be easier if I wasn’t doing that. But I know that the research that I’m doing would not nearly be, would not nearly be as meaningful to me. So just that importance of really trying to regularly practice try things out and to not be afraid to make mistakes.
I mean, so often I will come up with an idea in the classroom that I think, oh, this is great for youth ministry. And then I go and try it out and it just bombs, but to not be afraid of that failure, knowing that it’s just in that constant experimentation and the quick pivots that allows for new things to grow.
Todd Ream: In what ways has your understanding of that calling developed over the years and in what ways may you even anticipate it will change in the months and years to come?
Amanda Hontz Drury: I think at this point, my own kids, they’re 16, 14 and 10. And so oftentimes my research questions are me doing my own therapy out loud in terms of, you know, how do I do parenting in this kind of setting? How do I do parenting in this new stage of life? So my hunch is, as I continue to get older and the questions that I’m asking now will change, wanting my academic research to be able to move in whichever direction I’m going.
Rick Osmer has modeled that so well for me. I feel like every five years he is into something new, so he was a professor at Princeton and, you know, for five years, he’s focused on spiritual direction and then it’s children’s literature and then it’s pacifism. And I’ve so admired his agility, his ability to move within various disciplines, all firmly planted in this area of practical theology, but he’s been a model for me in terms of trying to take my own life circumstances, my own interests, and allowing my academic agendas to shift and flow depending on what’s going on in the spaces around me.
Todd Ream: Thank you. As someone whose exercise of scholarship is deeply rooted in discovery, as well as application, what virtues, if any, have you found it critical to cultivate?
Amanda Hontz Drury: Oh, curiosity. That’s the first one that comes to mind, especially over cynicism. I think the real enemy here to the work that I’m doing is, is cynicism, either assuming that I know what’s going on or dismissing something or judgmenting, judgmentally deciding, oh, that’s not, but to instead assume that, okay, someone probably had a good, had a reason for why they thought this was a good idea, even though it seems ridiculous to me and to really sit in that tension of not knowing.
Sharon Garlowugh Brown, she didn’t quite put it this way, but this is how it stuck in my head, really encouraging people to linger in the chaos, knowing that the Holy Spirit is hovering above doing work that we can’t understand. And so that the curiosity, the willingness to sit in unresolved stuff with no idea whether or not it’s going to resolve itself, but just trusting that somehow the Holy Spirit is at work creating things, even if it’s not clear where it’s headed.
Todd Ream: For our last question, then I want to come back to the way that you’ve conceptualized the relationship in your work between the university and the Church and for the academic vocation, and what ways do you estimate broadly across the disciplines is it connected to the health that the university shares with the Church? It’s one thing perhaps for a scholar to have that sense of understanding, but the broader university in which that scholar serves, what does that look like for you and in what ways can that health be not only maintained, but perhaps advanced and enhanced?
Amanda Hontz Drury: I think I’d come back to that feedback loop idea again. Just trusting that the local church pastor, they might not have read as much as the, you know, esteemed university or whatever, but to recognize that there is a contextual learning there that is so crucial to the health of the institution that really, we cannot be preparing future ministers for, for work without this, this deep relationship, this deep listening to what might seem like even mundane problems of the local church, making sure that we’re taking seriously even the trivial, the things that sound trivial or so contextually specific making sure those feedback loops are there and that we’re hearing not just what’s going on, but also hearing back from alumni, what’s working, what’s not working. What do you wish you had known? What has surprised you? Just really trying to cultivate those relationships.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Our guest has been Amanda Hontz Drury, Professor of Theology and Ministry and Director of the Imaginarium at Indiana Wesleyan University. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Amanda Hontz Drury: Thanks so much, Todd. Loved, loved talking with you as always, but this was especially fun.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
