Dr. Kenda Creasy Dean & Abigail Visco Rusert on Purpose

This lecture was delivered by Dr. Kenda Creasy Dean and Abigail Visco Rusert on March 1, 2017 at Yale Divinity School.

Speakers:

Dr. Kenda Creasy Dean is the Mary D. Synnott Professor of Youth, Church, and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. She is also the coordinating pastor of Kingston United Methodist Church in New Jersey, and an ordained elder in the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference. Her publications include Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church and Practicing Passion: Youth and the Quest for a Passionate Church.

Abigail Visco Rusert has had the opportunity to work with youth on three continents and in six churches. Ordained in the PC (USA), she served most recently as the Associate Pastor at Carmel Presbyterian Church in Glenside, Pennsylvania. Abigail is a graduate of Valparaiso University (music/theology) and Princeton Theological Seminary. She and her husband Thomas live in Doylestown, Pennsylvania with their daughters Dorothy and Solveig.

Topic: "Moved to Joy: Purpose, Awe & Wonder"

To live the life of a young person is to live a life in motion. Propelled by a frenzy of activities, the young people in our care long to be “moved” beyond their selves and situations. Every day, the lure of achievement and the spectacle of entertainment promise to elevate them to new levels of joy and importance. Meanwhile, Christian theology promises a different kind of movement—the movement of God towards us, revealed when we do the unthinkable in our culture of perpetual motion and “wait” upon the Lord.

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