Howdy! My name is Pam, and I
was born and raised in Texas where I grew up with two brothers
on the outskirts of Houston. After completing a degree in Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences from Texas A&M,
I spent a year volunteering with LAMP in a Native village in
the Northwest Territories of Canada. During that time I worked
with teen-age moms and helped get a childcare center started
in the new regional high school in the village.
Less
than a year later I found myself back in the North attending
the University of Alaska Fairbanks. For 3.5
years following graduation, I worked for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), spending half
of my summers in the foothills of the Brooks Range managing
the Coldfoot Visitor Center and the rest of the year living in
Fairbanks. In 2000 I felt God leading me to serve
Him in overseas missions, so I left my job with BLM and spent
almost 1.5 years with LCMS World Mission in northern Kenya
as the Women’s Ministry and Development Coordinator for
the Samburu people.
Shortly
after returning to the States, I enrolled in the Master’s
in Christian Outreach program at Concordia, St. Paul. For the
next 1.5 years I lived in Minneapolis and served as the Publications
Manager for the World Mission Prayer League while I went to
school. In May of 2004, God led me back to Fairbanks to
work for the summer, and before the summer ended I had joined
the staff here at Zion!
It
is exciting to see how God has led me and provided for me each
step along the way, and how each experience has prepared me
for the next one to which He had called me. I see my role at
Zion falling into two main areas. The first is to help create
or facilitate a caring community in which both members of Zion
and others in the Fairbanks community are cared for and welcomed
unconditionally. In this way we will become more and more A
Place for All. The other area of focus is, of course, outreach!
Zion has been a mission-minded congregation for as long as
I have known it. My hope is that God will use me to help equip
the people of Zion to reach out even more to this community
and beyond with the love of Jesus. I welcome your input and
look forward to working with you!
