 this St. Patrick's Day. We're glad that all of you could join us today. I'm Janine Berchie-Johnson and one of my roles at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary is as alumni director and I want to welcome all the alumni who've joined us today and those who will listen to this later. Just a couple of housekeeping details before we get started. If you have any technical concerns throughout the webinar just send a chat message to the AMBS host and I invite you to introduce yourself in the chat and make sure you send that to everyone, not just to the panelists. Say your name, where you are now and what years you were at AMBS. As we go through the questions that we have prepared ahead of time, if you have questions you would like to ask please put those in the Q&A function or feature which is at the bottom of your screen. I'll be watching those questions and comments and I will select the ones that I'll ask Daniel later. Please note that this webinar including questions is being recorded. Turning now to our conversation. Daniel Grimes is Vice President for Advancement Enrollment. Before coming to AMBS in 2015, Daniel worked in the healthcare and insurance industries. He's worked for the Pennsylvania Department of Health, Blue Cross and Blue Shield Affiliates, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and Frisnias Medical Care. He also worked at Everett's formerly MMA for 19 years in provider relations and group health sales. Daniel has served as an adjunct professor at Indiana Tech and has served on the boards of Mennonite Health Services Alliance, Everett's Financial Credit Union and Mennonite Central Committee Great Lakes. He's also a former elected official and for eight years he was a member of the Goshen City Council. Daniel will start by answering several questions I have for him and after that we'll have time for your questions and comments. Welcome Daniel, invite you to first just tell us whatever you'd like us to know about yourself. I'm going to start out by saying that I'm West Philly born and raised and that my family has been met at night for three generations and the reason why that is significant is that I believe pretty strongly that place is important in your formation and who you are. So I'm you know from Philadelphia originally which I often tell people is where that the city where America began so that's that's my hometown and my family has been Mennonite for several generations and I think that's important because as formation sort of like where you're what your parents view of the Bible in God is very significant in your formation and how you navigate the world and so my story is simply that it's my life story which is likely very different than anyone else on the Zoom call or Zoom meeting this afternoon. Other things about myself I said you know family of origin plays a vital role I'm from a very socially and politically active and aware family so that was important in my formation and I'm also our family unit is also very much Mennonite education boosters. My wife and I are both graduates of Eastern Mennonite College it was just a college where we went there back in the 70s and we are the parents of four adult children each of whom is a graduate of Goshen College. Three of our children are married one is in a pretty serious relationship and all their spouses or partners are also graduates of Mennonite higher ed with exceptional one who is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia which is where I did my master's work at Temple University so for those of you who want to call maybe from back east recognize that Temple Owls are everywhere so I'll just have to throw in that little plug there. Like I said our children are all married three of them live in Indianapolis in close proximity they all have different career tracks ones in urban educator and gardening one is an accountant the other is a mechanical engineer as our youngest daughter lives in Lancaster Pennsylvania so those who are affiliated with Christopher Duck or Lancaster Mennonite probably have seen a hard work in some of her music productions. We also have one granddaughter hopefully there'll be more that will be coming but at this juncture we have one and Jeanine mentioned that a little bit about my professional background before coming here to AMBS seven years ago but I also just want to point out that I do not have a seminary degree but when I was at EMC I was a double major in nursing and biblical theology so I do have some background in theology and even though I've spent most of my career in healthcare and insurance I've always had an interest in studying the Bible and in theology. Thank you Daniel there may be more questions from folks that are about some of those parts of your story. I'm wondering if you can tell us a story about a time when you experienced God in a powerful way. Okay well I don't want to go into any specific details about stories in this particular venue but I will say that I've experienced God in very powerful ways several times throughout my life and I would classify that really more as God whispers and that would be you know the strong sense of direction from God and sometimes that's been an actually from in my experience in an audible way directly from God or through others and I'll just say that I consider myself I'm a pretty intense person. I like to operate with a full plate so I'm always processing evaluating and planning things and that's just who I am by nature and I honestly hate to lose and I like to do things well and do the right thing so that being said fits into how I have experienced God in ways that when there are decisions that need to be made whether or not there are college choices career issues or even relationship issues I've never shied away from praying about those things and asking God for direction and that's been received so whether or not it's going back you know as far as some college choices and sometimes that's not even listening to the voice of God of things that just obeying things that maybe you even disagree with and I will say that in some college choices when they go off to college if I had listened to that voice the small the robbery that occurred at our small family business in Philadelphia would have likely had a very different and tragic outcome if I had not been present during that particular robbery I would not have actually my wife and I would not be married if it wasn't for that strong sense and actually an audible voice of God telling us about our relationship and or the same thing about even coming to Indiana for season our family was a brethren in Christ when we lived in Harrisburg and so we resubscribed to the gospel herald that's what it was called the dead juncture and the first edition there's an ad for this position at Mennonite Mutual Aid that is exactly the same job title I had when I worked with Blue Cross and Blue Shield organization so it was sort of just felt like a direct calling that the church needed someone with this really detailed specific job experience that was calling so we felt like that was direct hand of God informing us about what what direction of what path to take so I guess in short I would sort of sum it up to some extent that looking or feeling the presence strong presence of God as a director you know it's sort of like when there are choices for God to speak into it and say this is the path to go and this is the way I prepare for you. Thank you that might lead right into the next question which is what attracted you to be part of the AMBS community? Yeah well I'll start by just saying when I was a small child my first desire for career was to actually be a judge something about I don't know men and black robes you know the wisdom of Solomon but when I told that to my parents I was informed that to be a judge you had to be a lawyer and lawyers lie so that's off the table so so I gave up the lawyer part and wanted to actually go into education so for most of my life I was interested in education but in the 70s a lot of the persons that I knew that had majored education in college were actually ended up pumping gas and did not land decent teaching jobs after their four years of college so I was determined that after four years of college I wanted a stable and secure job field which is why I chose nursing and then added biblical theology on top of that with that. That also being said when I was at EMC I actually worked in admissions department so I had like a plumb you know work-study job it was great and was actually offered a position to stay on as an employee after graduation but turned that down I've also done some as Janine mentioned some adjunct teaching at a local university here as well so I've always had an interest in that but I saw actually the ad for the position I took initially which was director of enrollment and financial aid it was actually just a posting in our church newsletter and when I saw that you know there were just so many things that sort of went off for me as about well here's maybe my chance you know when you're if you're going to make a career change it's better to do that when you're 50 something than when you're 60 something and so here was my chance to work in an educational institution using a lot of the gifts and then even the financial aid side I would consider myself somewhat of a numbers person a budget person for instance a lot of the nonprofits I've I've been on the board of I'm always generally on the finance committee so there were just a lot of features about the job that I failed to be quite attractive so I couldn't pass it up so I applied and here I am seven years later ending my professional work career at an educational institution focusing on theology wonderful um you have a role that encompasses two branches of the AMS community enrollment and advancement and I'm wondering if you could tell us what some of the projects that you're working right now this year have been it doesn't have to be right now but earlier this year yeah what are some of the things that you've been working on and who else is involved in those just give us a picture of your work life yeah okay well we're very busy on lots of fronts on the development side and the admissions side just two very busy departments in the institution that are both very important in their their own way and there's a lot of I would say a lot of interplay between the two one thing particularly in a development side what we did this year we promoted our senior development director bob yoder to the director of the department so put a director over that department and bob's done a really good job as far as leading that department and onboarding two new hires this past year so two of the new development associates only came on board this past year and that onboarding has gone extremely well so we're really pleased with that there also has been a lot of work gearing up you know for new and exciting fundraising initiatives that will allow us to just sort of position AMBS for the future and to better serve the church so there's a lot of work going into new initiatives that will obviously need funding so a lot a lot of exciting things going on in programming here at AMBS there's also many of you have probably received some letters this year asking you to contribute to either established endowed scholarships or newly established endowed scholarships so if you haven't received any of those letters you know let us know we'll be happy to clue you in on ways that you can help support those endowments those endowed funds which actually go a long way toward helping to support the financial aid that we're able to offer to students so there's been a lot of activity and work very successful work on that over this past year and then covid impact of both departments and particularly in the development areas we had to find new ways of connecting with our donors and not being able to do face to face for most of the year however with the covid surge waning at this juncture we've been able to sort of jump start that the ability to meet with donors face to face again and that has going very well so we're back up to some degree close to where we were prior to the pandemic with having face to face meetings with individuals we're also redoing some of our literature and things of that nature just trying to and also sort of connect it with the update of our website as well you know making takeaway pieces and leave behind literature sort of coincide with some of the new information on the website and in the admissions area it's really been right now is actually peaks season for admissions because this is the week that actually the merit scholarship deadlines occur and then we have some other scout deadlines are vastly approaching and it's sort of like the juncture were actually this week even just yesterday I was on a exact meeting with the executive committee of the board and I actually didn't know what my numbers were looking like as far as students for next year because you know they're coming in that that rapidly and even you know 10 30 I'm getting it notices from someone else is just new application review things of that nature so things are just really really busy and in a positive way so that's good we've also in the last year in the financial aid area have restructured some of our financial aid we now provide church matching funds up to a thousand dollars a person that's semester for students which is double that for most other men I hire at institutions we also instituted several new scholarship programs that are designed primarily to help us with our strategic objectives of having the AMBS student community be more reflective of the overall Mennonite church population in North America overall so we're and we're finding new ways to reach out to prospective students and doing a lot more emailing and texting and things of that nature and moving actually toward a more church what I would classify as a church relations mode of recruitment so we recognize that AMBS doesn't necessarily call individuals into ministry that's what congregations do and we walk alongside those congregations and educating those persons called so we've been doing a lot of fostering relationships with congregations and key church leaders and that display the full racial and ethnic diversity of the church and even some of our communication pieces have been translated into Spanish this year for the first time doing some communication in Spanish we're also planning several new a new initiative to generate videos so as another way of communicating with congregations and conferences about AMBS and giving some profiles on students and and not shying away from maybe some of the challenges that diverse types of students from various backgrounds and settings and programs have encountered and how we walked alongside them to make their seminary journey successful we also want to partner with Mennonite higher education institutions to develop stronger relationships working with them to maybe augment their programs and to provide sort of an entry point for students to consider seminary study and I've actually just recently submitted a grant request to the Sherwood Foundation for funds that would allow us to offer what we're calling a Mennonite Educator Summit here on our campus next fall so hopefully that will come through and then just last but I guess one thing sort of an unexpected thing is that we have quite a few international students and I think some of the other third Thursdays we've talked about that some students here on campus and unfortunately several of our international students this year have had firsthand experience with the American healthcare system including all of its flaws and so I've had to work on several issues relating to some claim resolution and in the active process of looking looking for an alternative healthcare solution for international students so there's a lot of activities of development we're going on in both departments development and missions we're you know really hands on because our work is dealing with individuals so it takes a lot of time but a lot of good conversation and ability to interface with various aspects of the church I'm wondering if you could share with us a dream or two that you have for AMBS okay well I would say you know I mentioned earlier that I you know somewhat consider myself somewhat of a numbers numbers person so from my vantage point you know I'm always concerned about numbers and growth and how that fits into the bigger scheme of things however for us at AMBS we really want numbers to grow naturally and for numbers to grow at a natural pace whether not they're financial contributions or students or persons just receiving services here you know we have to demonstrate our value to the church overall so I guess my hope or dream would be that that the church would see us as an attractive institution that belongs to the church and we're here to serve the church so it will take us and a lot of the things that we're doing currently are a lot of things we initiate as we have in the works are sort of geared toward increasing that the value that people see in us you know whether those are doing things such as creating resources for church vitality and supporting pastors or just access the theological education through it and about this lens which only can occur through the generosity of our donors so we are very affordable in comparison to other seminaries and very few of our seminary students have any debt at this point which is a significant turnaround so another hope would be that people would see us so valuable that those funding sources would continue to come in and increase so that theological education can continue to expand to be even more accessible to the broader church in all of its rich ethnic and racial diversity of everyone would see AMBS as a resource for them so those are some of the things I would hope for you know as far as that people sort of maybe I don't know I'm from Lancaster Conference originally and you know Lancaster Conference at least back in the day you know people had this allegiance to church institutions and that was just that was your go-to so I guess my dream would be that that we would be able to demonstrate to the broader church that we are the go-to institution to support the churches in in God's reconciling mission in the world and to provide support and resources so that individual congregations can go about fulfilling their mission in an effective way in their local locales thanks those are wonderful dreams and before we turn to other questions that are joined us today want to ask I'll ask if you have any questions for them is there anything you'd like to know from those who have joined us today a good question well I mentioned earlier that I like to succeed and I'd like to do things well so I guess I would I would I would value some honest feedback from this this constituent group some critique about how we're doing and I would I guess I would say in three different areas you know one would be how how have you experienced AMBS over the last 12 to 18 months you know how we communicated with you at an appropriate rate do you feel like you've received the information that's been helpful um or what what things are missing that you wish you knew about AMBS or received that you don't have number two I'd be very curious in how alumni view the whole whole concept of people being called into ministry vocations is that something that you feel is part of your responsibility or where would you see that that responsibility worth that be housed that and what advice would you have to offer to us of how we can do a better job of connecting with those who have been called to ministry and then thirdly I would ask or just be curious if anybody how many how many persons on the call have have actually read through or at least thumb through our annual report and if you did were you aware were there any surprising things that that's jumped out to you or were you aware of these the small percentage of revenue that actually comes from student tuition and how dependent we are upon endowed funds and gifts to support the seminary and if you are you know does that how does that change your thinking and does it motivate you to play it forward whether or not that's in donating to AMBS or increasing your donations to AMBS or include is us in your state plan those kind of things just what kind of impact when you read through the annual report does that make to you so you know the question would be how can we do better and how are we communicating with you and effective and maybe in effect great questions thank you so much Daniel I now invite those of you who've joined us today to ask your questions and you can use the Q&A feature if you prefer just to answer the question that Daniel has asked you can do that in the chat but it's also fine if you want to use those as a question I'll be watching both the chat and the Q&A while we're waiting for those questions to come in Daniel I'm going to go back to your story of being on the Goshen City Council I don't remember how many years that was but how did that experience shape you and what tools did that give you for your work today in the in the roles that you have at AMBS a great question when I was on Goshen City Council for eight years at the beginning of 2000 to 2008 and it was a very rewarding experience I should back up and say I did not seek out necessarily to run for city council it was it was not something to say okay I want to be a politician it actually just grew out of my natural involvement in my new community so I was very when I moved to Goshen in 1994 we I was just very involved in a lot of local initiatives and there were some I'm going to detail some things occurring in the community that I didn't understand and as a newcomer I kind of questioned my colleagues that at MMA and my neighbors like I don't understand this why is this happening this way and people would tell me well that's just the way things are you know they're the elected officially do they just do things and I told people I moved from Pennsylvania but I'm still in an America and in America the people decide and so I became active and I did some took it upon myself to develop a petition and that I took around knocked on doors and I enjoyed that community engagement and so we long story short there was a school initiative that that ended up being canceled and rebooted in a completely different fashion that ended up saving our community about 13 million dollars at the time and when I went public with this I my phone kept ringing off the hook there were other people who were wanted to get actively involved and how could they help and so I was just asked by the local minority party in our county to run for city council with the expectation that they just needed somebody on the on the ticket there was no expectation that I would actually win because the district that I was running in had never elected someone from my party in over 50 years so it was like really basically no win situation but I campaign hard like I said I like to do things well I knocked on every door it was fun I enjoyed it and you know part of that you know you do your own fundraising you know so you just sort of learn skills what what do I need to do to get this job done um one thing else I'll just though this might as a maybe a side note that you'll might find in of interest um at the time I ran for council there literally may have been 30 African Americans in the entire city of Gosha of 25 000 at the time maybe um and I heard from a colleague who was at a barbershop and there were some gentlemen in the barbershop talking about that grimes guy um and you know I think he's done a lot of really good things but you know you know about him don't you and the guy was listening my friend was listening thinking they were going to mention that he was African American he said you know he's Mennonite um and so that was viewed as a negative um because it was sort of like the the implication of Mennonites taking over too many positions so I'll just throw that as an interesting side note about how you're viewed in society and necessarily sort of like not conforming to uh generally norms of other people sticking out a little bit but I would say you know the thing for me with with city council and there were there were times when I was on council that I took very unpopular votes um for things because um and I was actually told by some council members you know if you vote that way even though everybody thought it was the right way to vote you're going to lose votes and so it's like well that's not important I'm not on council just to be on council if I can't do good um I don't need this job um and I had a life before I was on council when I'll have a life when I'm off council so I'm going to do the right thing even if it costs me votes and it did it likely did cost me votes um so I think some of the things that I learned you know as far as some fundraising techniques um just hone in on your public speaking skills um and sales I've been in sales for most of my life in in in the health industry and so I think that bringing those kind of skill sets assisted me I think in making a transition for some of the work that I do here at AMBS as well um so I think there were a lot of uh learnings learnings there as well that just easily transfer over to things that I feel comfortable with that are just sort of I sort of gravitate towards it that way I don't know if that gets to your question yeah that's great and I'm going to push just a little bit further in one area I'm wondering how um working in a city council that's that has been fairly evenly divided between the the political parties you had to listen carefully to a lot of different perspectives and find ways of cooperating with each other um how do you see that um serving you in your AMBS roles well I think part of that is just trying to understand things from someone else's perspective I will say one thing another formational thing for me when I was in high school I was the co-captain of our debate club I know it sounds dirty but debate club was the most fun ever I loved it and we were actually league champions that year my senior year so you when you're in debate you always have to make the case from both sides um and understand things that way and I think that's part of it I will say even like from my city council experience I mean there were times you know for instance there was a anti-smoking ordinance that you know wanted to come we did pass and some persons you know would say well you know I don't care if other people don't like it you guys have to vote to just do it and that was really not my perspective um that I didn't feel it was incumbent upon me to force my will on others um that there's needs to be a clear negotiations there needs to be clear communication and is there a way to meet in the middle to some degree so that neither party feels that their rights have been totally snuffed out and then you can bring that person along to further on your continuum as you progress um but you have to have some kind of place to start to dance um and so I think those kind of things help when you're even talking to prospective students per se about you know where is you know where are we starting at this dance and and what are the things that they're concerned about to try to be able to communicate in such a way that they understand you know you have a clearer understanding of what their perspective is and you can communicate ways to hope hopefully overcome some of those reservations that people have um whether or not that's a prospective student or prospective donor but to really understand where a person is coming from and to respect that thank you we have a question from Elizabeth Soto thank you she is commenting that there are many small churches now both inner city and even in rural areas that can't afford full-time support of pastors or offering full benefits and she's wondering if AMBS is doing anything to promote bi-vocation approaches to pastoral formation um so I'll leave that question thank you Elizabeth for that question yeah I would say I know that has been a part of the conversation or dialogue here at AMBS for quite some time and actually prior to my tenure here there had been some gatherings talking about bi-vocational and how we can support recognizing that reality I would say here is from the roles that I play here at AMBS we have scholarships that are specifically for bi-vocational pastors and we've designed um some of our academic programs are more geared toward um individuals who are bi-vocational and that would be you know rather than online degree programs which have actually increased you know even more in the recent time period as well so there's more of that kind of work occurring and and more of like I said as far as scholarships for part-time students and not just full-time students for students that cannot come to campus to study that needs to stay in their place of location because they're working there and just really cannot uproot and move here so there is really conversation talk about recognizing that reality that churches will have a harder time as the average congregation size becomes smaller and smaller it's more of a luxury of those larger churches who can afford a full-time pastor or multi-pastoral staff so I think that's the ways we're working at that it's a it's a long-term issue and I think some of it even has to do with how people view ministry per se um and so some of that you know being the tentmaker type concept and how how that can play in um to making sure that that there are appropriate church leaders going forward thank you others please share your questions in the q&a daniel i'll ask you to reflect a little bit about um how you have worked with ambias's uh long-term planning its goals um you mentioned that you like numbers and um i know that one of the things you've worked really hard at is to quantify whether we're reaching some of those goals that we've set our strategic plans do you want to comment on your role in helping to shape the strategic plans and also to implement it sure well i would say the one thing that historically as far as development there's always been targets established as far as fundraising goals because you have to balance the budget and how many funds need to come in so that's that's something that's has more of a long-standing history and precedent that wasn't necessarily the same case i would say in the in the admission side um and so during my tenure here i mean we worked at that we have a new strategic plan that was just implemented it's a five-year plan um that will go through 2025 and part of that is not just as far as what type of uh headcount and students we should have but for my work here i wasn't really clear on how some of those things were established so you know did a lot of work when doing some analysis data analysis on historical figures so how can i go how can i project forward what a reasonable student count is if i don't really have a good take on the prior history and why some explanations for what those numbers the fluctuation in numbers were like i did quite a bit of analysis on that to come up with um metrics and analysis going back five-year trends or seven-year trends or even further to identify that so that's sort of how we have started to work at that so we can establish realistic goals i would just say some other places i have worked actually um sort of pressing some of the vp some things were actually done by dart so i'm not a dart board find out the number but i've worked places where that's where we did so that doesn't feel comfortable to me and it's sort of think about you have to understand numbers that numbers always tell people that a number is is actually meaningless when it stands by itself numbers only have meaning or value in comparison to other numbers so it's all about those trends so um you know for instance when i worked for blue cross one of my roles was um account reporting and consulting and so we we did a lot of data analysis so i'm familiar with that that data analysis process which i think is very helpful in helping you establish realistic goals the other thing it's not just about the numbers but it's digging down deeper into those numbers and so one of the new strategic objectives is really that our student body be more reflective of the rich racial and ethnic diversity of the church in north america so we have used financial aid to assist us in our aroma process so that's why there are several new scholarships that were from in it last year that are really targeted towards specific groups and why we have made some efforts to reach out to different constituent groups um in ways that are comfortable for them to to establish those relationships for instance um the spanish man and i council recently had a a gathering and we had a representative you know um i had previously went to a gathering of people of color known people of color gathering were you know people were saying we don't know a the s we don't have a relationship with them so we are actively um trying to identify and connect with those influencers and individuals in the church so that we are known to the church and people have a clear understanding of the value ad that a nbs can deliver to their congregations thanks and that brings up another question related to employment at a nbs you just recently joined a brand new task force to look at how our employee makeup might better represent the diversity of the church as well do you have any comments i know you're just getting going here but are there at least tell tell our alums about what the hopes and goals are for that group yeah thank you and actually that meeting was started too it'll be my first time participating at that group gathering um so there's a little bit of work i need to do on my lunch break here but um that group is really looking once again it's looking at the numbers so you know you people not just anecdotal information but what what do the numbers tell us how so there's been some work in our human resource department to look at not only our current employee base but as far as the hiring practices and what kind of uh applicants have come through when vacancies have occurred and then also talk about you know how significant is representation um in our employee base so those are things that we're going to have to wrestle with and what does that mean and what does that look like um and i guess adding to that component it's not just in this regard it's not just the numbers present but i always look at things as as you know there's a short term objective and a long term objective and i've taken that approach to you know my professional career as well that the short term yes you may want a more diverse work group but you also have to ask the question what am i doing to develop uh the potential the potential of individuals out there who may who currently may not know us or may not qualify for those jobs so it's not just about increasing those numbers today but to me what am i doing to develop a diverse work group for tomorrow so that's something i will definitely push for and that needs to be incorporated into how we go about uh establishing programs and funding mechanisms so that we're actually increasing the number in the pipeline instead of just taking from it thank you are there any other questions from the alums i'm gonna ask that again because this is your chance you can put that in the q&a feature right at the bottom of your screen daniel while we're waiting for another question from them i'll ask you um about your free time what are the things that you enjoy doing when you're not crunching the numbers at work and i know you you sometimes stay at work pretty late so how do you relax what do you enjoy um well my wife would say uh the other woman is the garden um so it's not it's not unusual for me to come home kiss the wife and walk outside and me and around the garden to see how things have changed from yesterday um so i've always my philosophy has always been if you can't plan a dirt what's the point um so that's that's something that is uh something i'm really i really enjoy and and actually a little surprised when growing you know having four children you try to get them to cooperate in the garden and do all kinds of tasks and you know they complain their kids um but my daughter is is really a garden educator um and has established urban gardening programs in pittsburgh and in chicago um so it's just kind of interesting the things that they sort of observe and and take the heart that you kind of surprised by um so that's one thing i do um i do like the exercise i have a treadmill my basement i kill two birds with one stone you could say i i'm a news junkie this is my wife would classify me that way so when i'm on my treadmill um i get my news fix from the shows that i've taped so i can fast forward through all the commercials and get the exercise on my news fix at the same time and i do like the white sporting events particularly professional football i like the football season i'm always glued to the tv on sunday afternoon so enjoy that i'm hoping starting next year to um read more um that's a big goal for myself uh i'd like um and i was just telling someone i was at the um lecture series that noted in earlier this week um and just fascinated by new new reads but i generally i don't i think it's probably been 20 years since i've read a novel um i generally read biographies or just some kind of upcoming topical manner so and i you know i enjoy we hope to do more traveling i like to travel um i have been to all 48 lower states that meant to last kind of why so that's on my bucket list but um like to travel and obviously connect with our our children in their dispersed locations and hopefully you'll get to spend a lot of time with those grandchildren right yeah one for now we're hoping for more all right i um i think we have not had any other questions come in so we're going to bring this to an end here want to thank you daniel for um answering these questions giving us an insight into the work that you do and we're so grateful for all the coordinating that you do at AMBS i want to thank our alums for your ongoing support of AMBS um you don't realize how much that means to us the fact that many of our students come to us because someone has uh tapped them on the shoulder and often that has been um someone who knows AMBS through personal experience so continue to do that continue to call people out in your congregation who might be leaders we have so many opportunities now as daniel was saying to walk alongside and educate them while they're serving in their own setting uh the majority of our or the yeah it's we're now above 50 percent of our MDiv program participants are in the MDiv connect program also thank you for your donations to AMBS for influencing other people to share their financial resources with AMBS if you um have any interest in taking a course uh auditing a course with your alumni credit please let me know um we can hook you up with that as well um and then also you can stay connected to the seminary through the church leadership center offerings we had a wonderful pastors and leaders event here just a couple weeks ago um um we look forward to the short courses and other things that are happening in the coming months thank you also to our student janet migiri who provided technical support for this uh next month we will be talking with alan rudy froze who is the professor of proclamation preaching and then in may we will be meeting with uh rachel miller jacob's who is professor christian formation so thank you so much for being here today and we hope to see you again next month very well