Becoming a

pastor was the farthest thing from Jennifer Hepler's

mind, growing up in Kannapolis, N.C. Yes, her family was

in church every time the doors opened, but their middle

child was usually at the piano.

She took

her degree in biology at the University of North Carolina

at Chapel Hill, and worked for a time at a physical

therapy clinic. When she began to see her interest in her

patients as a ministry, her pastor suggested she consider

the ordained ministry, but she pushed the idea aside.

A year

later, however, when her father died suddenly, the young

woman found herself face to face with some of the hard

questions of faith.

Thoughts of

entering the ministry would not leave her alone.

"I

fought it for a good while," she says now. "I

did a whole lot of walking and praying, and in the end,

once I made up my mind, it felt right."

Last month,

with a new husband and two cats, Hepler moved to

Peachtree City to begin her year as an intern, or vicar,

at Christ Our Shepherd Lutheran Church. During this, the

third of her four years at Lutheran Theological Southern

Seminary at Columbia, S.C., she will participate in every

area of ministry, supervised by Senior Pastor John Weber.

Hepler

explained the program: "This is the year when you

are assigned to a parish and apply some of the skills and

training and theology that you've already studied, to

gain growth and learning from real life experience in the

parish. Then you go back for your fourth year and find

out what you didn't know."

Christ Our

Shepherd is not a typical Lutheran parish, especially in

the Southeast. With about 700 worshipping members, it is

several times as large as most of the other congregations

in its synod.

In that

respect, the intern's experience will be atypical of what

she will probably face as an ordained pastor. The

church's size, however, makes possible a wide range of

activities and experiences not usually found in a single

parish.

For

example, "It will be helpful to know more about

finances and parish administration," Hepler said,

"and getting a feel for what life in a large parish

looks like on a day-to-day basis. I can already see that

I'm going to be able to take from here a lot of great

ideas for programming-there are a lot of elements in

place that I'll be able to pull from."

The vicar

said she thinks her

strong

points are in theology and spirituality, but she also

believes her sense of humor and interpersonal skills help

her make people feel comfortable. She's looking for

"practical experience when it comes to teaching,

since I was the one who always played the piano."

She's

"the balanced middle child," she said, with a

younger brother who is doing missionary work in China and

an older sister who is a pharmacist. Her mother is a

school teacher; one of her grandfathers was a Lutheran

pastor in North Carolina.

Once she

decided to pursue the ordained ministry, she saw herself

remaining single so as to be undistracted by family. That

too was apparently overruled by a higher authority: she

met Noah Hepler in seminary and they married last May.

Her husband is completing his last year of seminary in

Atlanta, and the couple hopes one day to serve a parish

together.

Hepler is

the eleventh pastoral intern Christ Our Shepherd has had.

The congregation suspended participation in the program

in 1988 when it called a second full-time associate

pastor.

With that

position well-established, the church council decided

last spring to offer internship again as a way of serving

the church at large, said council vice-president Suzanne

Lamfalusi.

"Without

the practical experience of serving in a parish, a future

minister's training would be very incomplete,"

Lamfalusi said. "We feel hat as a church actively

engaged in outreach we have a responsibility and a

privilege to be able to do this."

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