THE REV. KEITH THOMPSON

TEMPORARY ASSOCIATE PASTOR

I was not a child of the church. My older brother was invited to a youth group in middle school and loved it. Once my twin brother and I were headed to sixth grade, I couldn’t wait to start going to youth group. I participated in youth group, youth choir, every summer trip we could manage. It was where I made friends and felt community in a way I didn’t know before. I got my first real taste of serving the church when I was elected as an elder in high school.

As I headed to Davidson College, the PC(USA) campus ministry became my new faith home. I was able to join the Chaplain’s Office on a trip to Nicaragua to learn about and alongside people of faith in contexts there. Through all of this, I was in regular conversation with friends and my campus minister, helping me to process and establish my system of beliefs. And it was on a youth retreat with that campus minister when he first asked me about going to seminary.

The year after I graduated, I spent as a Young Adult Volunteer in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Through that year, I discerned that seminary was right for me, and likely ministry. I spent the next year teaching English in France, spending most of the year disconnected from a church community. I leaned into my spirituality in a new way and found God in nature.

When I came home to Atlanta to attend Columbia Seminary, I got linked up with a wonderful part-time youth director role at a church that showed me what inclusion could really look like. I learned about justice and peace in new ways that will never leave my sense of call. And in the first years of my first call, I got to experience church ministry in the weirdest circumstances imaginable: a global pandemic. I have come to know the fellowship of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I can look and see the Holy Spirit poured on me and on my siblings throughout it all. And for that outpouring of grace and love, I give thanks to God.