| The
Reverend Karen M. Kagiyama was
born at Misawa Air Force Base, Japan, where her father
served in the United States Air Force. After living in Colorado,
California, and Pennsylvania, her family settled in Warner
Robins, Georgia. Karen received her B.A. in English from Emory
University and the Masters of Divinity (M.Div.) degree from The
Candler School of Theology at Emory University. She is a former
Presidential Scholar, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and a
recipient of the Woodruff Fellowship as an undergraduate and as
a graduate-level divinity student at Candler. She is married and
has two daughters.
Karen is an ordained elder in the North
Georgia Conference of the United Methodist Church. She has
served St. Andrew since June 1994. She also serves as Director
and Campus Minister of the United Methodist Wesley Foundation at
the University of West Georgia.
Before coming to St.
Andrew, Karen served three rural churches in the North Carolina
mountains and did an internship in urban ministry with an
African-American church in Denver, Colorado. In 1999, she
completed a year-long C.P.E. (Clinical Pastoral Education)
Program at Emory University in Atlanta. She was the recipient of
a sabbatical grant from the Lilly Foundation in 2005.
You can contact Rev.
Kagiyama directly at
standrewumc@earthlink.net |
|
Rev. Kagiyama observes, "I love stories.
My favorite stories are found in the Bible. I love them, not
because they are so holy, but rather because they are so human,
so earthy, so full of the every day pitfalls and problems that
so many of us face. They are real. They are powerful. In church
we bring together these stories from the Bible and the stories
of the gathered community. We speak, sing, act, pray, listen,
dance, watch, touch, and feel the power of God's word in both
the biblical stories and in our own lives.
The experience calls us
into the fullness of our human experience and the power of God's
incredible love and grace. Stories shape the world. Stories
change people. Stories keep a community alive. It is my
privilege to be a teller and a hearer of stories. I invite you
to come and listen to our stories, and if you want to share one
of your own, we will listen, too. In the meantime, there's a
story that I like to tell about the great German theologian,
Karl Barth. He wrote a multi-volume work called the Dogmatics,
along with many other books. At the end of his life, he was
asked about his faith. What among all his great works and words
would he choose? He began to speak the words of a simple
childhood song: "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible
tells me so." |
