Feature

Discerning God’s Call to Serve

Teachers and pastors have left secular careers to serve in Lutheran settings, where they can share God’s Word and care for His people.

Story and photography by Erik M. Lunsford | Summer 2026

Many pastors, teachers and other rostered workers in The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) know from a young age that they want to serve the church in this way. Others take a more circuitous path. Read on to learn about several pastors and teachers who answered God’s call at different times in their lives.

In the Weight Room

In a sprawling weight room, strength and performance coach Colin Shumate finishes prepping machines for the incoming basketball team on a hot Monday in March. Colossians 3:23 is painted above the dumbbells, with James 1:4 and Galatians 6:9 outside the coaches’ office.

This is Crean Lutheran High School in Irvine, Calif. The Lutheran identity is foundational, says campus pastor Rev. Timothy Unke, to the large LCMS high school of almost 1,200 students and 150-plus faculty and staff members. The Lutheran identity — that the students’ identities are in Christ as God’s beloved children redeemed by Jesus Christ and His work on the cross — is what Shumate drills into his student athletes, fixing their eyes on Jesus and reminding them of who they are among a secular sea of self in athletics and formative high-school life.

Shumate grew up in a non-denominational church. He played football in college in San Diego and went into sports performance after graduation. Shumate wasn’t Lutheran when Crean Lutheran hired him in 2019, but for the first hour of every faculty meeting, he attended sessions titled “Keeping Crean Lutheran.” In these sessions, the school’s theology teachers deliberately walked staff through Lutheran doctrine and timely theological topics.

“There was more depth to what we were talking about than I had been taught or experienced in different denominations,” Shumate says. “So, just being around it was what drew me to considering colloquy in the first place.” He joined an LCMS congregation after friends invited him to church.

Now he is wrapping up his online teacher colloquy program, which prepares qualified teachers serving at a Lutheran school to receive a call as a rostered church worker in the LCMS. The colloquy process “did more than add knowledge; through it, the Lord reshaped my understanding of Lutheran theology and how I see myself as a teacher,” says Shumate. It fulfilled his desire to teach “where I could speak about Christ openly and explicitly.”

Unke says the colloquy program is essential for teachers in LCMS schools. “It cements them in the teachings of the biblical church, and I think when they are firmly planted in that, then they can convey that to the students. … We don’t want to speak with mixed voices. We want one voice to come out of this school so that when somebody has a question, it’ll be answered according to what the Lutheran church teaches from the Bible.”

As the basketball team arrives, full of excitement after recently clinching a major state championship, Shumate gathers the students together in prayer and then sends them off to their exercises.

“Here we have students that are not Christian. We have students that are not Lutheran. And the blessing is that, in the end, there’s an agreement that when you’re here, this is what we believe, and this is how we teach,” says Shumate. “Athletics is very much a realm that is driven by society and media. … It is so self-centered and driven by pride and ego.”

That’s why Shumate finds it so important to talk about identity in Christ and what God has done for these students through His Son, Jesus. It doesn’t matter whether the teams win or lose, Shumate says, because it doesn’t affect their identity in Jesus. “We are justified because of Christ, thank God.”

In the School Lunchroom

“Chocolate milk or regular milk?” Robinette Flach asks a student in the lunch line at Altamont Lutheran Interparish School in the small city of Altamont, Ill.

Flach is the administrator at Altamont, a school supported by four area LCMS congregations. Serving as a principal in the day-to-day administration and care of God’s children isn’t what Flach envisioned her life would one day be like when she was younger and eager to establish a career in the business world.

“My journey toward Lutheran education began with a plan that looked very different,” she says. “I expected to major in marketing and build a career in the city. But my dad always believed I would make a good teacher, and his words stayed with me. Eventually, I realized marketing was not my niche and quit my job to start a family.”

Later, when the time was right, Flach landed a teaching position at a preschool, which helped her to discern that serving in a school was exactly where the Lord wanted her to be. She completed a master’s degree and student taught at Bethany Lutheran Church and School in Naperville, Ill. She also went through colloquy in the LCMS.

“When I got into the middle school level,” says Flach, students “were really asking deep [faith] questions, because they’re more into that abstract thinking. And so, I really felt that I needed to take that next step [of colloquy]. I needed to take the initiative and get those classes so that I could be a teacher of religion.”

As principal, Flach sets aside dedicated time for her teachers to finish colloquy coursework, and she pairs teachers together to complete the program. Colloquy “shaped me, and in multiple avenues, I feel I became a better teacher. I was better qualified to teach religion, and I knew where to go to get answers if I needed them, because I also had a lot of connections. Then too, after that program was finished, I was a better parent. I was able to talk about our faith with our girls as they went through their confirmation classes,” she says.

Back at lunch duty, Flach watches the students come through the line. She knows each one by name, and she encourages them regularly that they’ll make great teachers and pastors and other church workers later in life — in God’s perfect time — just as her father told her back in high school.

In the Classroom

Teacher Alexa Wolf points children to Jesus at every available opportunity. She teaches fourth and fifth grade at St. Paul Lutheran Church and School, a beacon of Christ-centered preaching and teaching located in the village of Hilton in upstate New York.

“I couldn’t imagine myself doing something else,” Wolf says of her current position. Prior to coming to St. Paul, she taught several years in parochial and secular classrooms, so she treasures the fact that she can now talk with her students about their identity in Christ and incorporate Scripture and devotional conversations into classroom lessons. “It gives us an eternal perspective … to emphasize that they’re saved by grace through faith … and for a love that God had for us in sending Jesus, our Savior, to sacrifice for us.”

On a Wednesday evening in March, Wolf helps Pastor Mark Ball, himself a son of the congregation and a second-career church worker who came from the journalism world, with the church’s Lenten dinner. As she sets out pizza, she worries about a student from her class who had just sprained his ankle.

Wolf has known she wanted to serve as a teacher since the day she was confirmed. She can still recall the pastor’s sermon vividly. “Here we were, confessing our faith in front of everyone, … and it just really hit home for me, and it made me think this is what I’m feeling called to do and to share with others,” she says. Over the years, she often tagged along with her father when he served first as an elder and then as a pastor. Her grandparents also encouraged her to pursue teaching as a vocation.

“The Lord rooted me more deeply in Lutheran education’s rhythm of centering all we do on Scripture and relying on Him as we speak the full truth in love,” Wolf says of going through the LCMS’ colloquy process.

In Wolf’s classroom at St. Paul, a Bible verse has been written on the whiteboard in anticipation of a later discussion. Posters of Law and Gospel, the Ten Commandments, the fruits of the Spirit, and church work vocations hang on the walls.

Many of the school’s students aren’t Lutheran, says Ball, so it’s important to have Christ at the center in the classroom for students who may not have a church home. Wolf makes sure to weave in Jesus throughout the day, whether in the daily morning devotion or as the class discusses the day’s reading lesson.

“It really drives the importance of reminding them who they are as God’s child,” says Wolf.

Recently, she had a “light bulb” moment with a student who was pondering heaven. “I said in heaven, there won’t be any kind of illnesses, pain, suffering or anything wrong, and we’ll be reunited with all our family who have gone before us [and are] living in eternal joy with Jesus, … [with] His angels praising Him. It’s just how God wants it. Jimmy said, ‘I want to be there right now!’”

When the student with the injured ankle arrives back at school, his classmates rush out to greet him. Wolf smiles as she shepherds everyone back into the ongoing activity, thankful to have one of God’s children back.

In the Home or Hospital

Rich Schag inserts a nickel, and the player piano plays its familiar tune. The piano keys depress automatically, while a leather belt spins on a wheel seated inside an ornate wooden cabinet. The entire process — creating music that corresponds to the notches on the spool of paper — goes according to the plan of the instrument’s unseen inventor.

On an afternoon in March, Rich starts the player piano for his wife, Karin, and their pastor, the Rev. Dave Keane, during a home visit.

Keane, a second-career pastor called to Faith Lutheran Church in Vista, Calif., regularly visits the Schags and the other congregation members at Faith. As heirloom clocks chime the time, Karin mentions this past New Year’s Eve, when she went to the emergency room after a fall. Her husband followed the ambulance, and when asked by medical staff if they wanted anyone else to visit the hospital, they asked for one person: Keane. They wanted their pastor to be with them.

“I love one-on-one [time],” Keane says, “with people or small groups, to sit down and to get to know them.” Keane says pastoral presence and visitation with Christ’s flock builds the trust to speak the Word of God both during regular visitation and in times of crisis. It is a wonderful privilege to be invited into their lives, he says, to “just come and bring God’s Word.”

At a nearby Mexican restaurant, Keane sits down for lunch with Lynn Scott over a large burrito and a mound of nachos. Scott’s wife, Marla, fell asleep in Jesus just days before their lunch. Now he and Keane are talking through the upcoming funeral service.

“You were married for 67 years. What wisdom do you have for us [married people]?” asks Keane.

“Yes, ma’am,” Scott says, indicating how husbands should respond to their wives.

It’s a lighthearted moment between the two before Keane leans over and pivots. “Listen,” he says, “God’s Word never changes.” Even as we struggle in this grief, Jesus died for us so that we have eternal life, he reminds Scott.

Outside the restaurant, Keane leans over the trunk of his car and works with Scott on details for the funeral service. Before he was a pastor, Keane worked in carpentry and construction for over 30 years. His car trunk often doubled as his work desk. His prior experience, he says, shaped him as he relates to people’s different backgrounds and situations.

Keane was in high school when he first thought about becoming a pastor. It was at the 1986 LCMS Youth Gathering that his youth director told him that he would be a good pastor.

Keane attended Concordia University Irvine in the pre-seminary program while also pursuing a business major, thinking it would be an asset to his future ministry. After graduation, he felt the need for a break, and his mother suggested that he help his brother get a business off the ground. Over 30 years later, Keane looked to his wife, Cindy, one day and said he felt it was finally time to head to seminary. A week later, they were sitting in St. Louis finalizing the paperwork.

During his time at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, he and Cindy served as “seminary parents” for the younger men in his class. “If there was a problem or something going on, they would come over and sit down and talk to us, … and in the same way that I think I helped them, those guys definitely helped in supporting me,” Keane says. “You can just see God’s hand placing us both there at the same time.”

Now after serving as a pastor for two years, Keane looks back on his life and sees that, like the spool of paper rotating in the player piano, he was always headed down this path, even if he didn’t know it at the time.

“We always have plans. We have things we think we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it,” he says. “And God has His own plans. And they’re excellent plans.”

On New Year’s Eve, when in a time of crisis Karin and Rich Schag called for their pastor, Keane answered the call and came. His plans for that evening changed in an instant, as he brought not sparklers or confetti, but God’s Word to the hospital gurney.

Learn More

Set Apart to Serve — a Synodwide effort to build a culture of church work formation and recruitment throughout the LCMS — provides resources to help raise up future church workers, no matter which path they take. Learn more at lcms.org/set-apart-to-serve.

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Erik M. Lunsford

Managing photojournalist for LCMS Communications.