At first I came to the Religion Department at Ashland because I was interested in the coursework. So, I decided to double major in that and in Teacher Education. After a few weeks of courses, though, I realized that the middle school math classroom was not for me. As I searched for my vocation, the religion classes were my foundation. They kept me grounded in who I was, where I came from, and where I was going.  It was not until my advisor said, Ben, you know what you want to do, you're just not listening to it. Soon thereafter I recognized God's calling in my life to be a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. 

The coursework was wonderful. What really made the program outstanding was the level of devotion to the material and the students that the faculty in the department displayed. Their genuine concern and devotion to the gospel set Ashland's religion department above that which I could find at other colleges and universities. 

The faculty's encouragement and teaching guided me to seminary where I already had a strong grasp on the materials that I would encounter. Encountering the material for a second time in seminary allowed me to gain a stronger hold on the ideas. This provided an opportunity for me to move further along into more advanced material. I remember tutoring my classmates in our first year of seminary ideas that I had learned at Ashland. 

Ashland University's religion department prepared me well for graduate work in seminary at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, where I am pursuing a Master of Divinity degree. Ashland's religion department opened up new worlds of thought, perspective, and life while remaining faithful to the Christian tradition. I am blessed to have attended Ashland University and to have been a part of the religion department. For it was there, through faculty and ideas, that I was nurtured for my future, spiritually and academically.