 Today, we're gathering to recognize three of our graduates who have been selected as the 2022 Alumni Ministry and Service Recognition recipients. This annual award honors alumni who've made outstanding contributions in congregational ministry, teaching, mission, piecework, spiritual direction, or other ministries. Before I start, I ask that you mute your microphones. We are recording this event, as you just saw. And if you want to see the whole group that's here, you can keep it on the gallery view, or if you want to just see who is speaking, you can go up to the upper right-hand corner where there's a View button and make it Speaker View. And then that allows you to see the person who is speaking. As we begin this time together, I invite you to join me in prayer. Empowering God, with your people throughout the ages, you have called leaders for the church and empowered them with your Holy Spirit. As we gather here to celebrate the leadership of Gary Harder, Mesa-Krisetia, and Sarah Nahar, we acknowledge your presence with them and with us. Thank you for the many gifts you have bestowed on them to be shared with your church and the world. Thank you for filling them with wisdom, patience, and hope for their callings. Bless this time of celebration, and continue to call each of us to serve you and your people. Amen. AMBS President David Bushert is with us, and he will now recognize the three recipients. Good afternoon, everyone. I add my welcome to all of you who have joined us today to honor three of our alumni who have made outstanding contributions through their ministry and service. If you haven't already read the stories about them, I encourage you to do that to get a fuller picture of their lives. I'm delighted to present the 2022 Alumni Ministry and Service Recognition to Gary Harder, Mesa-Krisetia, and Sarah Nahar. Gary Harder received his Master of Divinity degree from AMBS in 1972. He was one of the first AMBS students to participate in the year-long clinical pastoral education program as part of the seminary studies, and that was a very formative experience for him. Because of this, he started a summer supervised experience in ministry for students interested in exploring ministry, and he mentored 31 students during his ministry, many of whom became pastors. Gary served as an assistant pastor at Yellow Creek Mennonite Church near Goshen for two years while in seminary, then served as pastor of First Mennonite Church in Edmonton, Alberta for 15 years, and pastor of Toronto United Mennonite Church in Ontario for 20 years. After retiring, he and his wife Lydia served as intentional interim pastors at Wiedemann Mennonite Church in Markham, Ontario, Hagerman Mennonite Church in Markham, and the Mennonite Fellowship in Montreal in Quebec. Gary also taught at the Mennonite Seminary in Paraguay for a year. He has served on the Commission on Higher Education of the General Conference Mennonite Church and as Chair of Canadian Mennonite Bible College and as Chair of the Leadership Commission of the Conference of Mennonites in Canada. Gary earned a Doctor of Ministry degree from St. Stephen's College in Alberta in 1986, and he has written two books and articles for several church publications. Gary and Lydia have two sons and a daughter, both of their sons are AMBS graduates. Gary, thank you so much for your decades of service in pastoral ministry, church leadership and mentorship of other leaders. Congratulations on being named one of our alumni recognition recipients. We have this certificate recognizing this honor that will be mailed to you shortly after our celebration today. Congratulations. Mesaak Krissatia is the second recipient and we are so sorry that he passed away before he could be publicly recognized, although he learned in June that he had been selected. Mesaak received a Master of Divinity degree from AMBS in 1973. He spent his career in his home country of Indonesia as a church leader, counselor, educator and administrator. Mesaak served as a pastor at a JKMI Mennonite congregation in Japara and taught part-time at Waiata Wakana Christian Academy in Padi, Central Java. After his studies at AMBS, he was the director of the AKWW for six years. He then invested many years in service to Satchewakana Christian University in Salatiga holding various pastoral and academic leadership roles between 1981 and 2008. He taught courses there on pastoral counseling and the sociology of religion. In October 2007, the Indonesian Department of Education conferred upon him the title of Professor of Theology and Pastoral Counseling, the first of its kind in this field in recognition of his pioneering work and contributions in pastoral counseling in Indonesia. Mesaak earned additional degrees in counseling psychology, including a Doctor of Ministry degree from Claremont School of Theology in California in 1990. Mesaak also served the church as the chair of the JKMI Synod for Multiple Terms as an executive member of the Asian Mennonite Conference and as an executive member and then president from 1997 to 2003 of Mennonite World Conference. He was also vice president of the International Council of Pastoral Care and Counseling and founded and was chair of the Indonesia Pastoral Association. Mesaak passed away on September 30 at age 83. He is survived by his wife Miriam and their two sons, Marcus and Matias. Both of their sons will be on AMBS campus this Friday morning to remember their father and to receive his certificate of appreciation. We are so grateful to Mesaak for his life of faithful service. Our third honoree is Sarah Nahar. She received a Master of Divinity degree from AMBS in 2011. While she was at AMBS, Sarah did an internship at Mennonite World Conference headquarters in Strasbourg, France, where she helped prepare for the 2009 Global Youth Summit in Paraguay as well as two semesters of independent study in Ghana where she created and taught a worship course at Good News Theological Seminary. Following graduation from AMBS, Sarah participated in Mennonite Central Committee's Serving and Learning Together program at Sabille, a Palestinian Christian Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem. In 2011 and 2012. She then served Christian, now community, peacemaker teams from 2012 to 2017, first as outreach coordinator and then as executive director. She has worked as an organizational consultant for the Martin Luther King Junior Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta and the Revitalized Tolson Center for Community Excellence in South Central Elkhart. In 2019, she was a Rotary International Peace Fellow at Chula LeCarn University in Bangkok, Thailand, focusing on ecological sanitation, climate justice and peace. Since 2019, she's been pursuing doctoral studies at Syracuse, New York University and the Religion Department and Environmental Studies at the State University of New York's College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Sarah has published several articles and chapters on religion and ecology, nonviolent global liberation, environmental justice and the human right to sanitation. Sarah and her husband, Jonathan, have one child billet. Sarah, we thank you so much for your leadership and areas of peace and justice in the global church. Congratulations on being named one of our alumni recognition recipients. We'll be sending the certificate to you, recognizing this honor very soon. Congratulations to all three of you. Thank you, David. I just want to note that Miriam Cricitia is with us today in a very different time zone, so thank you for joining us. And also, Marcus and Matias are on the Zoom presentation as well. We're so grateful that all three of you can be with us today. And so sorry for your loss. We have asked Gary and Sarah to share a few reflections with us. We'll start with Gary. Greetings to all of you, President Bouchard, Jeanine, Sarah. I, too, am so sorry that Mesa couldn't be here. My condolences to you, Miriam. My wife, Lydia, and I have such fond memories of the year we spent together here at AMBS. And greetings to all who joined us for this event. And I think of particularly your family, friends, colleagues, all who gave so much encouragement and support to me. I must acknowledge that I have loved being a pastor in all its complexity. I'm overwhelmingly grateful to God for my calling and to AMBS for equipping me for this ministry. This sword came totally unexpectedly, almost to shock. But it gave me another opportunity to reflect on God's calling in my life and to reflect on my experiences at AMBS. I am so grateful for the very rigorous biblical and theological preparation here. And for that incredibly important year of clinical training I received in London, Ontario, under the auspices of AMBS. It was there that I was confronted with and needed to deal with my inner life, my emotional makeup, and how these impacted my ministry. What did I love about being a pastor? Just about everything. Though along the way there were huge challenges and disappointments and pain and a few times despair. I always enjoyed teaching and teaching, though many weeks when I started working on a sermon I just spared because nothing made sense. And then an inspiration would come often from a pastoral visit. Pastoral visiting was always very special, entering deeply into the lives of the people I loved. As I grew into my role as pastor and frankly, I talked many years. I became more and more comfortable with responding to conflict and differences and anger. These were further opportunities to enter more deeply into another person's life or into a community. Also, because of the deep engagement involved, I loved doing weddings and funerals and other special occasions. Though some of these were very, very challenging, I would have many stories to tell. And then of course after retirement from full-time pastoral ministry, I had the privilege together with my wife Lydia to do three intentional intraministries, which really were very special. I want to conclude with two stories that have to do with being a pastor but outside the context of the immediate church. I had a two-year involvement with the Edmonton police force, me, a pacifist Mennonite. The Edmonton police force came to the Edmonton council of churches, of which I was a member and with a request. Could we help them develop a chaplaincy program for their force? The chief of police told us that in his observation when they entered a violent situation with the show of force, the violence often escalated. But when social workers or pastors encountered these situations, conflict often eased. Could we help the force develop a chaplaincy program, which would help the force find alternative ways of responding to troubling situations? The council of churches said yes, and then appointed a Lutheran pastor and then pointed to me to do this. I co-tested. I'm a pacifist, I said. I'm critical of the priests very often. Well, in the end, this Lutheran pastor and I met with the police chief and other members of his force to help develop a chaplaincy program for them. I was surprised and pleased by the high respect I developed for the chief and for his vision for better policing. A second story. I confessed the second story in my congregation several years ago and haven't heard the end of it. I still play ice hockey. Well, several years ago when I was visiting my son Mark and Kitchener, we live in this area now, but then I lived in Toronto, he invited me to join him to play hockey with a group of clergy in the KW area. They called themselves Rebs on Ice. I did notice a large limousine at the front entrance when we arrived, but I paid a little attention. Our dressing room was full and one younger player was quite animated, but he was at the other end of the room. We were ready to play hockey. This group always has a prayer before the hockey starts. This young man, it was who said the prayer, a rather animated prayer. I noticed later that he was really a very good hockey player, scored several goals. I didn't. After the game, my son and I head into our car. The limousine was still there. Again, I paid no attention. Well, the next day Mark called me. Do you know who we were playing hockey with? I had no idea. It was Justin Bieber. I had been playing with Justin and had no clue at all of who he was. Maybe AMBS didn't prepare me enough for pop culture, but otherwise I have a very deep appreciation for AMBS. Thank you so much. Thank you, Gary. Sarah, we invite you to share your reflections now. This is so wonderful to be here. Gary, I'm going to pick up right where you left off. I agree with you. I also was not prepared for pop culture, even being several decades younger. I met Bono once, didn't know who he was, but he was standing beside Coretta Scott King, who I was working with for the King's Center holiday. He assumed I was wanting to take a picture of him, so I had to go up to him and say, hi, I'm Sarah, what's your name? If you would be in the picture, let me know a little bit about you. Wow. That's us, metadata is out there in the world. Sometimes we do what's going on, sometimes not. Thank you to everyone who is here. Each one of you is such an encouragement to me, and it's been wonderful to engage in this process with the Crescenta family as well with Gary, and with Janine, and Jewel, and Annette, as we've prepared for this day. I just want to give so much gratitude to you all. And today I'm calling in from Onondaga Nationland, and AMBS, and where I grew up there in the south side of Elkhart, Potawatomi land, I'm just so grateful for the past, present, and future elders and those communities who cared for the space and the elements of that indeed, like we may have this chance to thrive and to connect, and so a lot of the work that I do now recognizes that, you know, the truths that we carry, we hold them indeed in these earthen vessels, and the more and more that we are cracked open to see and learn from the pain of the past, it gives us an orientation to the future that I think the good news can arise in ways that I feel prepared for by AMBS and I feel prepared to be open to what I can't even imagine for how we will need to be together as people with different and similar truth claims trying to share this fragile and extraordinary planet. So, you know, it's awesome that we have a chance to pause and reflect today together. Thank you, Gary, for sharing about your pastoral ministry. A lot of my ministry has been in administration. I grew up at Prairie Street by the night church. I didn't know it as I grew, but that's a church full of church administrators. And so I was brought in early to have a chance to hear about the types of struggles and ideas, innovations and backtracks, careful organizing that has tried to serve the church. And so when I came to work in Christian peacemaker teams and worked in administration, I was a little bit young. Some people thought, you know, just 30 going into that. And I had to reflect. I said, why do I feel like at 30 years old I can support an organization doing administration. And so I looked at my village that had raised me. AMBS is influence, Elkhart's influence, Prairie Street's influence. And I realized I grew up in that church full of administrators. And if all my church would have been carpenters, I probably would have been a carpenter. But here I am really believing and feeling that ministry is that root word and that root way of being in administration. So that's a lot of where my call has, has taken me. And though some of that administration can be behind the scenes. I feel that administration is akin to organizing to community organizing to allowing and developing leaders to supporting and allocating supporting people and allocating resources. And so the opportunities I've had have some community organizing mentors here on the call today that have allowed me to learn as an organizer has also been the way that I have found the spirit calling me to, to ministry. One story about that is that when I joined the Damascus Road team at AMBS and this is the team that works on racial justice. And that summer of 2008. There was a cross burning in Elkhart. Elkhart and Goshen and Indiana are not new to activity of the Klu Klux Klan. And it had been founded there just about 150 years beforehand. And even in 98, there were merchants. So here we were in 2008. And we knew that we had seminary needed to respond. Summer snow and contacted Lauren Johns and Lauren Johns brought it to the Damascus Road team. We said what can we do. So we organized together as a community to join with others. And we were all around Elkhart to say, Hey, it's not welcome here. Everyone is and we, myself along with then president Nelson Crabill helps at MC and organize this March that was bilingual to let people know that we wanted to say as Christians. We don't condone the burning of the cross. We don't condone the cross use as a weapon. We don't condone conquering exclusion. We don't condone that we do condone welcome. We condone stretching across lines of difference to come together. And it was so much fun. We march all the way from the seminary downtown to the civic plaza. And this was so meaningful to me as someone who had grown up in Elkhart to see my seminary community and my home community connecting. It's something that's at the heart of what the seminary has done in the past and wants to continue to do. How do we continue to be in service to this city that is hosting us? I did feel like when I was on the megaphone starting those chance, I felt like I was preaching. And it was awesome to have the call and response of the crowd. Because in addition to a midnight upbringing, I was just really treasured. The black Christian upbringing that also flows through my veins and that has inspired me in the pulpit and in terms of social justice and service. And a number of my aunties on my dad's side are also here. So thank you all for coming too. And so I think bringing this mix together and myself, it was welcomed at AMBS and it was like set on fire through the work with Mennon at World Conference. I see Ray, Larry and Eleanor here and there's some of my deepest mentors in figuring out what it means to do this work together as a global church. Wow, it is so complex. But the attention and the care that they brought to it was incredible model for me. For how we really can't meet one another, talk about what's important, wrestle with our differences and what they show to us about how our context influences, how we experience God and how we experience the church. It was my first opportunity to work internationally in such a deep way. Still have friends to this day and had a chance to watch Rev Mesa Cresciata in action as well as other leaders in the church. I was just in college then and their willingness to bring me into the fold and welcome our views as young people is something that I have sought to emulate. I always tell pastors, pay attention to your middle schoolers. They're ready, they're willing, they're critical in a great way that we need for ongoing biblical criticism. There's a lot there. So yeah, young people. I think a lot more about that now, I guess even now just being a young mother as well. So I just felt really prepared by NBS as well to deepen in liberation theology to make connections between Latin American Liberation theology, African American Liberation theology, and then Palestinian Christian Liberation theology as well as feminist Liberation theology, just having the chance for prost to cultivate resources that I didn't even know were out there, but they brought them forth to us and made space for us to think about how what we can do can relate to liberation. Of course that's now taking me to even think beyond just our human family as we do this work, but for all of creation. And so the aspects of climate justice that our faith calls us to, I think, give us more than enough to be able to be leaders in the environmental justice movement. I mean Jesus spent a lot of time outside. I mean, the metaphors are natural. As we move into the next phase of the church, I hope that it is a wild one that we connect with the elements of communion and communion with the elements of the more than human because we know all creation is growing, groaning for the revealing of us right now. So I look forward to having conversations about climate justice and working on creating organizations and administering them in ways that help honor the elders and bring forth the youth. And I'm grateful to AMBS for supporting this work and for its ongoing passion for the church. And last but not least, I'm wearing my grandmother's beads. She was the one that was the first to suggest to me to go to seminary. She had a desire for one of her grandchildren to go and go to seminary. And she had a desire for one of her grandchildren to go to seminary. And she told me I had all sorts of other paths I was thinking of. But she floated that idea. And through my time of seminary as well, it was the most amazing transition in our relationship from one of my childhood self to one in which we were sisters in Christ. And so I'm just grateful for her prayers and her support and so many capacities as well. Thank you so much, Sarah. We have enough time if Miriam would like to say anything on behalf of the Christia family. I did not warn her about this ahead of time, but Miriam, would you like to say something or Marcus or Matias? I guess it's up to me. On behalf of our family, we really appreciate this recognition of my father who has received, as you mentioned, he was completely unexpected for my dad to have this recognition so late in his life. I mean, till the very end, my dad was still actively pursuing work. And he was already writing another book even as it became ill. So having this kind of acknowledgement for his entire body of work from the place that started it all, I guess is a way to describe it. It was really gratifying for him. We're just so sad that you couldn't accept this award himself. And so it means a great deal to my brother and I that we'll have the opportunity to come to the seminary this weekend and meet with some of you in person. So thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Marcus. Anyone else from your family want to say anything? Well, we do want to congratulate all three of our recipients and thank all of you for joining us today. This is the end of our formal recognition event, but we want to give all of you time to speak with our recipients, perhaps words of congratulations or short testimonies of how their lives have impacted yours. And since we're a big group today, we're going to do that in breakout rooms. And I'll explain how to do that and then, and then invite you to move to a breakout room. At the bottom of your screen, you might have to go into the part called more, but you will find a button that says breakout rooms. And when you click on that, you'll see a room for Gary and a room for Sarah. And you simply click on the one you want to join, and then you'll be sent to that breakout room. And if you want to speak to both of them, you can use that same button to move to a different room after you've greeted one, you can greet the other. And you can stay in the breakout rooms as long as you like. We'll close them at four o'clock today. But if you want to just visit with the people there, make sure you have a time to share stories that you want to share with the person that you're recognizing. Again, thank you all for joining us today. I want to especially thank Brent Graber and Janet McGurry from our IT tech team to help us set this all up. I really appreciate their help. Thank you all now. I'll invite you to move to a breakout room. If you need help with that, we'll ask you who are still left in the main room, who you want to move to, and we can assign you if you can't figure out how to go there yourself. Doug is saying his zoom isn't showing a breakout room at all. So Doug, I'll, I'll, is there anyone else who's having that same issue? Okay. Janet, people are not seeing the option for breakout rooms. It is not open yet. So I got to open it right now. Okay. Thank you. So if you see those breakout rooms and want to move into one of them, if you can't figure that out, just stay here. And then you can choose which one you want to join. Looks like most of you are getting into a breakout room. Ali, where would you like to join? Can you unmute yourself just for a moment and tell me who you want to. Yes, please join Sarah. No, I will send you there. Okay. Mary, where would you like to join? You'll have to unmute yourself. Sarah's breakout. Okay. Maryam, did you want to join a group? Alex, I'm going to send you to Sarah's breakout room. Sure, sure. I got lost for a while and now I'm returning. Okay. Let me figure out how to get you there. Um, What do I do? Okay, I'm, I'm going to sign you now. There you go. Good. I'll join. I was just going to say, I wouldn't mind going to the Miriam one. And just saying that, uh, we remember them from. Oh, can you have to leave the other one first? We did already. No, it's still a song. What? No. Oh, okay. Join. Oh, no. We can't join. Okay. Okay. Let's just end it. Yeah. Yeah. No. Do you want to join with? Which room? Uh, could we join that? Which one? Miriam. No, that is not a room. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Miriam. No, you said we can't. Okay. Okay. Okay. Thank you so much, Janet. We can stop the recording. And I believe at four o'clock.