Jenette Sturges and the Work of Building Bridges
Jenette Sturges built a first career in local government communications and left it looking for more meaning than the work was giving her. That search led her back toward the church, and this fall it leads her to Vanderbilt University, where she begins her Master of Divinity.
She comes to it by way of writing. In May she earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Washington University in St. Louis. Originally from Aurora, she has spent recent years in the kind of congregations that reach people who assumed church had nothing for them. She counts herself among those people. Big Life Community Church in Oswego and Gilead Chicago each took a different approach to making room for her, and she found in them something that carried her through hard stretches and closer to God.
Now she wants to help spaces like those hold steady. New church communities run on fresh energy and new ideas — she has led ministries as varied as yoga and live storytelling — and they are also fragile, easy to lose. Sturges is drawn to a ministry that strengthens them and draws young people back toward church life, especially the young progressives least likely to walk through the door on their own.
Her scripture is the one she says keeps everything from getting overcomplicated:
1 John 4:16, NRSVUE
God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.
This year, Sturges received a Ministerial Scholarship from Disciples Home Missions, which supports students preparing for ministry across the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). She names the money as real help and the confidence behind it as something more: a vote of trust as she changes course and forges a new path.
Asked to finish the sentence “the church needs leaders who,” she wrote: leaders who can build more and new kinds of bridges to the world outside it, especially for younger generations hungry for spiritual connection who will never go looking for it inside a church.