First and foremost, as a Pastor, I want you to KNOW "GOD LOVES YOU." I am soon to be 58 years old with two Master's Degrees and a lot of life experience and that is the most important thing I have learned. God loves you because that's who He is and what He does. There's nothing you can do that will make Him love you more or less. You can't earn it or deserve it--that's His gift to you. What you do with your life is how you respond to His love, how you say thank you.

Secondly, He created you for a unique purpose--He's given you gifts and talents and experiences to prepare you for your special part in completing the creation of His kingdom. The path of blessing is to seek His will--to do that which He created you and shapes you for. To use His gifts for personal gain, to turn them to your own ends, or to just ignore them is to kill time, to waste your life. This isn't to say your lifelong goals are necessarily contrary to God's plan. He may well have inspired you in the first place. We study His Word, worship Him with prayer and praise, and share the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion in our search for His presence and His will in our lives.

Pastor Jerry Collell

Lastly, our church is an active and joyful part of the body of Christ, the gathering of all believers and our denomination is a secondary description of how and where we fit into that eternal body. We are an energetic and committed part of the Yelm Area Ministerium which has nine participating congregations. We are Christians within the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.

Personally, I am a second career pastor. My first MA is in Special Education focused on adolescent emotional and behavioral disorders. I directed a residential treatment center in Oregon, trained counselors and provided consultation and developed evaluation systems for programs throughout the state. I also worked directly within the Juvenile Corrections and Children's Services Division for three years. I've seen the myriad ways in which the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generations.... And I've seen how God can intervene in a family and impact and bless that same family for thousands of generations with His love and forgiveness and guidance. I received my Masters of Divinity from Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, a member of the Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley, California in 1988. Until my last year I carried a dual membership between the Americal Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. When three major Lutheran bodies merged and formed the ELCA in 1988 I was ordained and called into that affiliation. I was a trail breaker in the Missouri Synod and tend to be a sea anchor in the ELCA. I love our Wednesday Text Studies where I get to meet with six to ten other Lutheran pastors from our South Sound Conference to work through God's Word for that week. It's an interesting counter-balance with our delightful Tuesday morning Yelm Area Ministerium prayer walks where three to six of us from different denominations walk and talk with each other and God and pray for our extended community.

Nancy, my wife, was a youth worker at a church in Oregon when we met. Noah is our ten year old son--a blessing well worth waiting for. He is appropriately named as he would have two of every kind of animal and bug in our house if we let him. We live in the parsonage connected to the church.

Here at Emanuel one of my predecessors was called the "marrying preacher." In my three years I've gotten the handle of the "burying preacher." We had 14 funerals in my first twelve months and recently had four funerals in three weeks. Strangely, God has used this ministry to help grow our church. Many folks have come through our doors who wouldn't otherwise enter a church and to their surprise found we offered practical good news during a tough time in their lives and they went away feeling better than when they came. Many came came back and some brought their family and friends. An exciting Vacation Bible School each summer has been another effective tool for growth.

A personal ministry focus during these last three years has been the Cursillo/Via de Cristo/Kairos programs. They are, along with the Road To Emmaus, intensive four day spiritual retreats that expose candidates to the life changing personal love of Christ in surprising and powerful ways. Kairos is the prison arm and I am specifically involved with the McNeil Island Correctional Center and occasionally Stafford Creek.

Some of my passions are rock and mountain climbing, white water rafting, elk hunting and occasional fishing, biking and hiking, a wide spectrum of reading, using technology to enhance the communication in our relationships and worship, and putting the blood and spark back into our country's dehydrated, nearly flat-line language and worship. I have survived and through God grown from the ravages of divorce, familial alcoholism, parental suicide, and some other tragedies and I know first hand that ALL THINGS can and do work together for good when we love and trust God and know He loves us.

Pastor Jerry Collell