 Welcome to those of you who joined us today, I invite you to introduce yourself in the chat by sending your name and where you're at to all participants, not just to those who are the leaders, but to everyone. And then we'll be able to see who has joined us today. Janet McGurrey is providing our support today and she'll be watching in case anyone's having problems. Just send her a chat there. My name is Jeanine Bertie Johnson. I'm serving as alumni director in addition to other roles at AMBS. And I welcome all of you here today. Just a couple of housekeeping details. If you have a question or comment for our speaker, I invite you to use the Q&A feature and I'll be watching that and then we'll ask those questions to David. That's in the bottom of your screen and you can find it by hovering over that. Please note that the webinar, including the questions is being recorded. Turning now to our conversation. David Kramer is managing editor for the Institute of Mennonite Studies, and also serves as a core adjunct faculty member at AMBS. He received his undergraduate degree from Bethel College in Mishawaka, Indiana, his MDiv from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, his MA from Trinity International University, and his PhD from Baylor University. His scholarship focuses on the tradition of Christian social ethics from the early 20th century social gospel movement to its 21st century expression in Anabaptist theological ethics. David has previously worked for Baker Academic and Brazos Press and taught at Baylor University and Bethel University. He has had a blog on Pathios and has co-authored or edited several books. In addition to his half-time work at AMBS, he's pastor at Keller Park Church in South Bend, which belongs to the Central District Conference of Mennonite Church USA. David will start by answering several questions that I have for him, and then after that we'll have time for your questions and comments. David, thanks for joining us today. What would you like to tell us about yourself as an introduction? Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here and to speak with alumni. I actually am not an alumni myself of AMBS, but I'll share a little bit about how I got connected to AMBS. I guess I did take a couple of courses just as audits, but I don't think that's enough to count. But I am really just delighted to be a part of the AMBS community and for the ways that I've been embraced by students, faculty, staff and alumni in the years I've been here. Yeah, as Janine said, I did not grow up in the Mennonite tradition. Actually, I grew up in a missionary church, which if you go back far enough, does have some Mennonite roots, but it's more of an evangelical denomination today. And so I didn't know much about Mennonites growing up beyond just my encounters living in Northern Indiana. So to me, Mennonites were either the people in buggies that I passed on the way to church, going down to church in Napa Ni from Mishawaka where I grew up. Or they were the people that we played basketball against at Goshen College when I went to Bethel. And so yeah, I grew up in a fairly conservative evangelical denomination. That's where I kind of learned about Jesus, learned about scripture, had a lot of really formative experiences. And even as I've kind of slowly moved out of that tradition, it's still a very meaningful one for me. But what happened was, when I went to Bethel College here in Mishawaka, I took a course on the history and polity of the missionary church, and that was the first time I learned that we had this Mennonite founding from the late 1800s. And that was so shocking to me because again to me Mennonites were kind of othered. And then next thing I knew I kind of was a part of that tradition and I didn't know what to make of that and that was probably around 2004. And this is shortly after, you know, a couple years after 911, and as the US is entering into wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan that at the time I was fully supportive of. And I was very dismissive of non-violence or pacifism as I understood it. And taking that course realizing this is a part of my tradition kind of opened me up to doing some exploration. So I kind of slowly read my way into the Mennonite tradition late in college and then in seminary where I went to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, which is kind of more evangelical Calvinist leaning. So I was sort of an oddball there as I was studying with those professors but reading my way into Mennonite theology. So I kind of had this interesting formative experience at an evangelical seminary where I was becoming more Mennonite. After I graduated from there and moved back to South Bend area and felt like okay I've been reading about these people but I really needed to get to know them better. And this is where AMBS became a part of that story. I audited a couple courses in the late 2000 aughts early, maybe 2010. And so I took a course with both Gayle Gerber Coons and Ted Coons. And they were great mentors for me and kind of just getting my feet wet in the Mennonite tradition. Also got to know some other people from AMBS and from Goshen College and started to not just think of the Mennonite tradition as a theology but as an embodied tradition. And I think that was really important for me moving forward was not just having these good ideas but actually being a part of a community. And so when I went to Baylor University for my PhD in theology, my wife and I, my wife, Andrea and I were looking for a way to like really get more plugged into the Mennonite church. And so we attended Hope Fellowship, which is kind of quasi intentional community sort of house church type environment down there. Some of them grew up Mennonite others kind of joined the tradition like like we did, but I was there for about five years they're part of Mennonite Church USA so that was when I started getting more formally connected. And then spent a little bit of time at Baker Academic and Brazos Press and Grand Rapids, and there's at the time there wasn't a Mennonite church up there. So after spending five years being a part of that I was kind of taken back out of that sort of an exile again, and trying to form community there with some other kind of, and a Baptist minded people but it didn't quite gel before I ended up accepting a call to the community at Keller Park Church here in South Bend, which at the time was a missionary church and then we in recent years have as a church moved into the Mennonite church USA, which is a whole other story maybe I can talk about a little bit. So now I'm bivocational spending half of my time at Keller Park Church pastoring and the other half of my time working at AMBS, particularly with the Institute of Mennonite studies that we can talk about a little bit more to talk a little bit about my family and then we can move on to some other questions but so as I said I'm married to Andrea, we've been married 17 years now she is the founding director of an organization in South Bend called neighbor to neighbor that welcomes in African refugees and asylum seekers into this community provides kind of friendship based wrap around care. So she's been working this past year a lot with Afghan refugees that have come into our community. So that's been a really formative experience for our family and our community here, and then as of a little over a month ago I have a teenager in the house of my oldest, Wesley just turned 13. He's a great here in the South Bend schools and then our daughter Liza is 10. And so it's a really fun time for our family with kids at age so a little bit about me. That's great. One of the questions I always ask people is for them to tell about an experience in which they are a time when the experience got in a powerful way. And this has been a really rich set of stories so I'm curious to hear your story. Yeah, when I saw that question I, I was interested to go back and see some of the other answers that people gave to that. So, I want to tell two quick stories one really quick and then the other one is one I'll focus on a little bit more but I don't think of myself as a very like mystical type of person that often has these kind of mountaintop experiences. I was one time in high school when I was literally on a mountaintop that I feel like I had a mountaintop experience so it was. I was on kind of a short term task force type trip down to Peru. I remember just in the mountains in Peru. Going up on the roof of the hostel we were staying in and feeling like there was just a sense of God's presence in a way that I hadn't really felt before, and I can't really describe it other than just. It's it's one of those times I look back on in my life where I felt like I was in God's presence in some way. I probably explain it away as you know the air was a little thinner up there high in the altitude or whatever. But I did feel like I just sense God's presence. But a more recent experience is more of a communal experience of sensing the spirit at work and that was when our church did discern recently I guess it's been almost two years ago, a year and a half ago. Kind of where we aligned denominationally and so Keller Park Church had been a part of the missionary church sentence founding in 1968. And so 50 some odd years later we were starting to have some feelings that we were not fitting in with the current direction that the denomination was going. And so we had a lot of discernment among our members about do we align if not where do we align, and we based on our own kind of mission here in the neighborhood and vision for who were called to be like. We connect most with our Anabaptist tradition from from our denominator previous denominations founding and so as that denomination had moved out of the Anabaptist fold. For the most part we felt like we wanted to move back in. And so I don't personally love it when churches, you know leave their denomination sometimes that makes me cringe or whatever but in our experience we felt like it was more of a homecoming than a leaving I know it was a little bit of both but anyway, we had a lot of discernment that over many months a lot of hard work. And then when it came down to the actual meeting to make that decision. I was sitting in the sanctuary this was in the middle of coven. So I was one of the only people in the room, everyone else is on the screen all the members but we went around one by one. To a person everybody affirmed the proposal that we had and so that was one of the only experiences I've had a true consensus decision making. I know is a value of our tradition sometimes it can be problematic in some ways but for me just seeing the consensus and unanimous kind of voice of the people it felt like a confirmation that the spirit had been at work and it was a very emotional time for me after all that work we've done. Wow, that's a great story. I touched on this already in terms of your growing interest in an abaptism but what specifically attracted you to be part of the ABS community. Yeah, as I mentioned, most of my initial exposure to an abaptism was through reading theology. So, when I moved back to South Bend in 2008. I had known and BS existed like for a long time but I didn't know much about it didn't know much about the people there. I think I had a friend who was a student there at the time who was attending color park church we're attending as well. And I don't remember if he encouraged me to audit or what led me to audit the course but I, I first audited Christian attitudes toward war peace and revolution with Ted. And just being a part of a community that was wrestling with those issues. That was a new experience for me I mean I'd gone through seminary taken, you know 100 some odd credits including ethics courses but never really wrestled through some of those questions and in a community and so I was hooked from that point on and when I ended up feeling led to go on to continue studying theology. I remember kind of having this thought in the back of my mind like if I could come back to one place and teach one course it would be that course I took with Ted. And then, you know, six, seven years later, when I was in Grand Rapids, Janet Hunter Bowman, our current theology and peace studies director had been teaching that course, but had a sabbatical coming up and she had been in that course with me when we were students and I was auditing and she was a student and so we got to become friends and she reached out and said, I'm, you know, I have a sabbatical coming up I know you're in Grand Rapids I don't know if this would work but if you'd be interested in teaching this course. And by the time we finished that discussion I had taken this call to the pastor here in South Bend so I never had to do the Grand Rapids to Elkhart Commute, but by that fall I was able to teach that course and that was really a dream come true for me to come full circle from taking that course to being able to teach that course and then while I was there I got to know, you know, faculty and staff better and through a conversation with Barbara Nelson I was a managing editor at the Institute of Mennonite Studies at the time I learned that she was looking to retire and that that would be an opening and so with my editing background that ended up working out really well I applied for that and was able to come on half time at MMS and I think it was ball of 2018. Many people will know what Institute of Mennonite Studies does, but there may be some that aren't aware of the breadth of all that you do can you kind of outline what all your work includes and maybe some of the projects you've been working on in the last couple of years. Sure. So the Institute of Mennonite Studies has been in existence, as long as a seminary as far as I know, and it's been kind of the research and publishing wing so faculty published with all kinds of publishers but in terms of the publishing we do at the seminary outside of like the marketing department. It comes largely through the Institute of Mennonite Studies and so we have a number of book series that we publish. People may be familiar with the classics of the radical reformation series that's been a series we've had going since I think the 80s which includes original translations of the early radical reformers. We have the studies in peace and scripture which also has been going about that long I think Willard Swartley began that years ago, and those are mostly monographs by biblical scholars on those topics. We have the occasional paper series which has been going for a long time it started as almost like an annual kind of somewhere between a book and a journal but it's sort of morphed into more monographs or edited volumes. And then since I've come on we've added the studies in Anabaptist theology and ethics series, which we publish in conjunction with TNT Clark Bloomsbury so this has kind of like an international scope and we've had three volumes published in that in recent years. So we publish some things directly with the IMS imprint and other things we do in conjunction with other publishers like TNT Clark. We've published with Erdman's Baker, Whip and Stock, I think Westminster John Knox. So, so the breadth of what we do goes beyond just what you might see with, you know, IMS on the spine we've had our, had our hands in a lot of different projects over the years. We also publish a couple of journals so one that I think is especially helpful for alumni who are in ministry as vision. It's a journal for church and theology that comes out twice a year, we publish that in conjunction with Canadian Mennonite University so there's an editorial team that includes some from Canadian Mennonite sphere some from the AMBS sphere that includes both academics and people in pastoral ministry. And those each issue has a different theme that we explore through a number of different angles oftentimes there's some biblical theological essays, some essays that are more kind of first person narration. We've had poetry and other kinds of artistic expressions in there so if you're not familiar with vision I would encourage you to give it a look it's available for free online. And then also people can get hard copies by subscribing. And then we also publish Anabaptist Witness, which is a mission journal used to be called Mission Focus and that comes out twice a year as well. The IMS director Jamie Pitts is the editor of that journal. So recent issues of vision we just had one come out on spirituality and aging that I think I've gotten a lot of good feedback from people who say that's really helping them sort of process those questions. And then this spring will have one on kind of a broad notion of uncertainty. So the topic is uncertainty and coming at that from a number of different ways just living in a time where it feels like there's a lot of uncertainty and how do we navigate that so the actual spirituality and aging one was edited by Jane Kipfer and Andy Brubaker-Caitler and then the uncertainty one is going to be edited by Carl Koop. And then coming up we're going to have one on family looking at different kind of expressions of family that we encounter today and how as pastors or other thought leaders we can sort of navigate questions related to that. We're also always working on different book projects so I'm really excited about a book that just came out earlier this semester it's called Resistance, Violence, or Confronting Violence, Power and Abuse within Peace Churches. So this is a project that Cameron Alteros and Carol Penner approached us about publishing and they had lined up a number of different contributors. I think there's like 34 chapters in this book and it comes at these questions in a lot of different ways. So the book talks about abuse within church context, it talks about the doctrine of discovery, it talks about racism, homophobia, other types of forms of violence within the church and so that book is I think one of the most kind of publications I've been able to work on in my time. Now I've turned my attention to another book I'm really looking forward to which is called Proclaiming Good News, Mennonite Women's Voices 1972 to 2006, and that's edited by Lois Barrett and Dorothy and this is a collection of essays kind of looking at the history of women in leadership in the Mennonite Church. I think the range of dates there corresponds to some different surveys that were done, I think one was done in the early 70s one in the late 80s and one I think in 2006 so it looks at kind of different cross sections of how the Mennonite Church in its various expressions has evolved, I think in very positive directions to bring more women into leadership and congregations and conferences and at the denominational level and other ways so that should be available this spring. That's a lot of different things to keep track of at once. And you mentioned earlier that you've gotten to teach the course on war peace and nonviolence. Are there other courses that you have taught and and how often are you teaching. Yeah, so my main role at the seminary is as managing editor of the Institute of Mennonite Studies but my PhD is in theology and ethics and so I'm available to teach various courses and sort of the HTE department history theology and ethics department. So Christian attitudes toward war peace and revolution I think I've taught about once a year on average, Janet Hunter Bowman still teaches it. So we kind of rotate that course, and that's, I've taught that on campus online and for the MACA Ethiopian cohort so last summer, did a two week intensive of that course. And that was quite the experience because as many of you may know, Ethiopia is in the midst of a lot of internal conflict and kind of civil strife civil war and so this is not academic cerebral conversation for them their questions were very on the ground of what they should be doing as church leaders in their communities in the midst of violence and so that was humbling for me to be teaching from a relatively comfortable safe North American context and having these questions. And I found myself framing my answers almost almost every time to the point where almost became a joke where I would say well as a North American, you know white male scholar here's how I would answer it, but I encourage you in your context to be thinking about it for yourself and so I felt myself kind of wanting to contextualize my own way of thinking about it and I think the students and were able to own kind of their own approach to war peace and revolution by the end of that course so that was, that was a really that was a privilege for me to be able to teach that I've also taught a course called the ethics and practice of forgiveness. And right now I'm teaching Christian theology one also for the Ethiopian cohort. Oh, and then through the church leadership center. Our Old Testament one of our Old Testament professors who's Anna Larry and I teach a course every year on understanding an abaptist approaches to scripture. So there's different ways that you engage the AMBS community I'm curious what dream do you have for AMBS. I would, and I'm going to kind of personalize it but I would be really thrilled to learn someday that a student that I had kind of had that sort of experience that I had with Ted of being so energized by taking a course at AMBS that they would come back someday and teach that and so I don't know if I'll ever see that but I would love to be able to pass the baton on to a former student, especially some of the students we've had from the global south. And so I know that AMBS graduates go on to do amazing things around the world and throughout North America. And I celebrate all of those things, but I would love to see a former student of mine come back and be able to sort of take the reins of one of the classes I've taught. And before we turn to questions that our alumni have for you do you have any questions for the alumni who've joined us today. Yeah I mentioned. I mentioned kind of one of my formative experiences at AMBS. I would really be interested to hear from alumni what formative experience they've had that maybe has continued to stick with them in ministry or wherever they've gone on since seminary. Was it something that they knew at the time was meaningful or was it something that later on really connected to whatever they were doing in life so I'd love to just hear some of those stories of kind of what a formative course or lecture or specific conversation you know what is it that's really stuck with you years after graduating. Right, thanks. So, if you would like to answer that question you can put your answer in the chat. If you'd also like to ask your own question of David, or make a comment I invite you to put that either in the chat or the q amp a and I'll be watching those and read those. So it's time now for your questions. And as we wait for those to come in, I will just ask you a little bit about the book that you edited a wrote you co authored with someone can you tell us about that book. Yeah, so I had a book come out earlier this year called a field guide to Christian non violence. The subtitle is key thinkers activists and movements for the gospel of peace. I was published with Baker academic and my co author was a fellow Baylor alum we got to know each other at Baylor and our PhD programs miles words he teaches at Abilene Christian in Texas and the book kind of came out of a somewhat of a frustration with the ways non violence had kind of been pigeonholed into a particular expression. And so, a lot of my own journey with understanding Christian non violence came through reading the other and Stanley how I was that kind of tradition and while that's clearly a very influential tradition. It felt like that was sort of what people thought of when they thought of non violence sort of full stop. And so I wrote an article for sojourners magazine. And it was around 2015. That was exploring different expressions of Christian non violence and maybe someone said had been overlooked or under appreciated because of all the attention on kind of the Yoder how it was tradition and so miles read that article, and he had been on some panels, where he was like the token pacifist, you know, debating with just war people or whatever and he also felt like he understood the just war tradition with a bare amount of nuance but they didn't seem to understand because I'm with much nuance it was sort of either either focused on an expression from Yoder how us or kind of a crude understanding of like the Schleitheim confession of sort of two kingdoms dualistic theology where pacifist just don't engage in the public at all. And so he reached out to me and said, Hey, I read this article. What would you think about making this into a book. And I hadn't really had that thought but as we talked about it more we thought yeah this could be something that could be helpful and then by the time I was actually working on it I was teaching Christian attitudes toward war peace and Revolution and so I was thinking of it as, what would I, what would I want to read in a course like that. And so sort of thinking of it in some ways as a textbook so it surveys eight different approaches to Christian non violence it doesn't try to argue for anyone over the other doesn't pick winners and losers or even really try to for an apologetic for non violence is just sort of setting the table and inviting people to come and experience it for themselves so yeah that was that was my most recent project. Wonderful, we have a couple questions that have come in one is from Doug Amstutz and he's asking in teaching your course in Ethiopia and Doug I believe you lived there for a while so you understand that context. So here in response to your teaching in their context were they skeptical or open to Christian non violence and pacifism. Thank you Doug. Yeah, that's a great question. In real time it was a little hard for me to know if they were skeptical or open and I think part of that is because of a, maybe an approach to education where there was tends to be more deference to the professor. And that's where I was saying earlier oftentimes they would ask, you know, what is your position on X and they just wanted to know. And that's where I tried to nuance it by contextualizing my own standing but you know like one question they had was, should we have armed guards in front of our churches. Because if we don't, there's a possibility that our people will be massacred. If we do what does that say about our commitment to non violence and how do I answer that you know I mean I say we don't have armed guards in front of our church. And that is, we all know it's not that there isn't gun violence here in the United States, but it hasn't felt in my context like that's a pressing question. So I told them, you know, we don't, and I encourage them to think through the different theological and ethical ramifications for their context and. So again I didn't know by the end of that class, where they were at on things but one of our professors drew straight was able to teach any theopia last summer. And he said he came back and asked me to have lunch with them you want to tell me some about his experiences and he said Dave. Your students said taking that course convinced them to become pacifist or convince them to take Christian non violence more seriously. And that was very humbling and sort of shocking to me that it had had that kind of impact on some of the students I don't widespread that was but that was something he was reporting back to me. And it was when they realized that in North America, we don't have it all figured out either. They were more willing to say you know what, maybe I can be a part of this tradition, because I don't have all the answers I'm not sure if I'm a card carrying pacifist but it is a, it is a question that I take seriously and that I want to wrestle and so if that's what it means to be a part of the tradition is to wrestle with this question, then maybe I am Mennonite after all. And so that was more of the feedback I got in real time was, yeah I think maybe we are a part of this Mennonite tradition whereas before maybe they weren't so sure. What a great story. Rebecca Kaufman is has a really practical question here. Do you read everything that IMS publishes. So I guess, how, how much do you have your fingers in everything that IMS is doing are you overseeing all of that. Thank you Rebecca. Yeah, thanks for the question I. Vision. So I read all of those articles, kind of multiple times, and then I edit most of the standalone book projects we do so I mentioned resistance and proclaiming what's the title of that one I'm doing now proclaiming the good news. So those I will read very closely, kind of a multiple passes, but then some of the other series that we have going on might have a different editorial process. So like, and a Baptist witness I have very little to do with that's mostly Jamie pits, and he has a team of people that do the copy editing and proof reading for that so I only read that for pleasure, not for work. And so the series and piece in scripture series has oftentimes been published through other publishers so when that happens, those publishers often have their own editors that work on it so again I might take a pass at it but I'm not actively involved in kind of the line by line editing so it, it varies but that is a major part of my job is is editing the different projects we do. And if that's not enough reading for you I understand that you are also part of a book reading group. Do you want to tell us about that and why that's life giving to you in the midst of your other kinds of reading. Yeah, so that started during the pandemic and it was just a few old college friends of mine. This was during the time of, you know, a lot of us were pretty socially isolated and one of my friends suggested that we do a reading group and we had just a couple guidelines we wanted to only read fiction, and we wanted to try to read things that we felt like we should have read by now but haven't. Whatever that means so kind of broadly understood. So we've read some classics, we read Moby Dick, we've read some John Updike. We've read some more recent things like Octavia Butler. We, we just finished reading Marion Taves women talking. And so that's been helpful for me because I got away from reading fiction and just kind of literature more generally, partly out of just the demands of so much other reading, but being able to get back into that and having reading be just about the enjoyment and the company of friends and not about trying to complete a task has really brought a new love for reading back for me so yeah. In the last few years you've also done some writing for the pathios blog and I'm wondering if you can describe what you were trying to do there and what your goals were, and what kinds of responses you got from that doing public theology. Yeah, thanks for asking that so a number of years ago. I had been blogging at pathios. He's since moved to Christianity today but I got to know him a little bit through kind of neo-anabaptist circles and he told me that pathios was looking for kind of an anabaptist voice to add to their evangelical channel. And at the time I was finishing grad school. I wasn't sure vocationally what I was going to be doing so I talked to them a little bit but said you know I'm not really sure if putting my ideas out in a public way right now is sort of the best idea for me professionally so we kind of put it on hold. But once I got situated in at AMBS and at Keller Park I felt like okay I'm fairly confident in what I believe now I mean I'm continuing to learn obviously but I didn't feel like it was as problematic to start putting some of those thoughts out there for public consumption and so the blog I started was called anabaptist revisions and it was sort of exploring my own understanding of what anabaptism is how it relates to other movements especially evangelicalism and then over time it kind of evolved in different ways so I went through the blog we did a sermon series a couple summers ago during the pandemic on women in scripture and so it was neat to be able to put up I think a dozen or more sermons kind of highlighting various women in scripture. So it served multiple uses. It's sort of gone dormant. I'll admit at this point so I haven't done a whole lot in recent year in recent months I guess did a little bit of promotion of the book and things like that but I'm curious what other people think about the role of blogs and today's kind of social media environment and information saturation I think they might still have a place but I've, I've kind of drifted away from it for the most part. So I'm curious if that's a good idea or if I should get back, get back in the ring there. We have one response to your question to the alumni. Rebecca Kaufman said that many of the classes she took were very good, but two that made her really think were biblical perspectives of atonement, which she hopes we are still teaching and biblical perspectives on. Looks like peace and justice. Yeah peace and justice. So that are there other people who want to respond to David's question or to ask him any more questions. Well to Rebecca's response I'll say that I know we still teach. It's now called biblical foundations for peace and justice. But Drew Strait has taught that I think he's team taught it before with previously with software marzook and I think he'll be teaching it with one of our two Old Testament scholars Susanna Larry or Jackie wise road soon. We also offer a short course version of that through the church leadership center if anyone wants to brush up on that. Now the biblical perspectives on atonement I don't know if that is on the books right now or at least if it's in regular rotation, but I'm not sure why it, why it's dropped out I think that's a really fascinating topic it's something I've explored personally in grad school and I know it's it's still a very live question. So Mary shirts was the person who taught it when Rebecca took the class. Thank you Rebecca any final questions. And David anything else that you'd like to share with the group. Well as I said I'm not personally an alumni, an alumnus but I have felt very embraced by the community and the alumni and. So I thank you for welcoming someone in and hopefully my story is an encouragement for for you that people can grow and change. I know we're living in a time where it can feel very polarizing politically in a lot of ways, even within the Mennonite church and so if someone like me who was gung-ho about Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s and through encounters with different people and different things I read changed my mind I know it's possible for anyone so keep at the good work you're doing keep proclaiming the good news of the gospel of peace and I know it's continuing to have an impact in your communities and around the world. Thank you so much David and thank you to all of our alumni who joined us today. We are so grateful for your ongoing support of AMBS. As I've said many times you are our most influential supporters in the church both by tapping prospective students to come to AMBS and by supporting us through your prayers and financial support. I encourage you that if you know someone that you think should be considering seminary studies that you do talk to them about that let me know so that we can be in touch with them as well. You can just send their names and contact information to JB Johnson at AMBS.edu. Today also begins our season of giving all gifts given between today and November 29 are going to be matched up to $50,000 so encourage you to consider making a gift or asking friends to make a gift. And I hope you'll stay connected to the seminary through ongoing classes, which remember you have a wonderful audit rate for grads that you can pick a class from next spring to take. And the church leadership center has wonderful offerings, including pastors and leaders coming up in February. We hope that we see all of you there. Thanks to all of you for joining us today. Thanks to Janet McGurie our student technician for providing the AV support. That's the end of today's third Thursday conversation. I hope you have a wonderful day and we'll see you next month. Bye bye.