“Tomorrow’s Teachers & Preachers” is underway! Part of this program includes learning more about church work vocations, so this week we are featuring five amazing church workers from our District. Check in with us everyday to not only learn more about these hard-working laborers in the field, but also church workers who have influenced them in their lives.
Today we’d like to introduce you to DCE Jason Glaskey. Some of you may know Jason and the work he does with youth across our District. A Concordia, Seward graduate, he’s been in service for 25 years. He is called to Immanuel, Joplin where he also ministers to youth and families at the Martin Luther School.
Here is his story:
“Since high school I knew I wanted to be a teacher. Coming from a small town in Southeast Missouri (Ironton), I didn’t know much about church work careers at all. When I started attending Missouri Southern State University in Joplin, Missouri to become a teacher, I also started attending Immanuel Lutheran Church. While attending here I learned about Lutheran Teachers and Directors of Christian Education. I had no idea it would happen this way, but in this very place God led me to find my life’s calling, my future wife, and the congregation I would come back to serve as well!
As I became more involved in the life of Joplin’s Immanuel Lutheran Church and Martin Luther School, I gravitated toward the choir and helping with the Sunday School and Youth. DCE George Nelson was serving Immanuel at the time, and he taught me a ton about ministry. George was (and still is) an inspiring Bible teacher and musician, a caring, joyful mentor and ally to the young people and families of his congregation and school. I wanted to serve God like that, and I still do. Not knowing what a Director of Christian Education was or what their job was like, I shadowed George, observed, and volunteered often around the church and school. With these growing experiences, I quickly began to understand what God had been leading me to do all along—to transfer my credits from the public university to the Lutheran university in Seward—to continue my Elementary Teacher education, but also to study DCE ministry, training to serve God’s people in Lutheran churches and schools. Who would have thought that God would lead me to Immanuel in the early 90s, then send my new wife Lyla and I from this place to become church workers; that He would bring our family back 14 years later to serve the very congregation that introduced us to ministry. God is so good! My Lutheran teacher wife Lyla and I have been back in Joplin, serving Jesus in this place since 2008.”
Click here to learn more about "Tomorrow's Teachers & Preachers".
