Welcome!

Thanks for visiting my blog. I’m a Synod-Authorized Minister with the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), serving the good folks of First Trinity Lutheran Church in Indianapolis, IN. This basically means that I’m not an ordained pastor, but I’m authorized to lead worship, preach, and administer sacraments in the place of a pastor. It’s been a really long, strange trip to arrive at this point, but I’m thankful that my gifts for ministry are recognized and affirmed by the Lutheran Church.

I’m also a 2020 graduate of Luther Seminary, with an MA in New Testament and Biblical Languages. My thesis work focused on a couple different areas. I worked with postmodern literary theory, specifically the concepts of pure gift and economic exchange as developed by Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion. I also worked with client/benefactor culture in the Roman Empire. With these, I wrote commentaries on the Gospels of Mark and Luke, that boiled down to a couple fundamental points that continue to shape my theology. First, Jesus does what Jesus wants, whether you like it or not. Second, Luke really wants us to say “thank you”. I also do a lot of Greek translation, and always enjoy tutoring languages.

And presently, I’m a candidate with the Lutheran Diaconal Association, to eventually be consecrated as a Lutheran Deacon. As a deacon, I work at the intersection of church and world, which basically means a few different things. First, I hold the church accountable to its call to function in the world as a vehicle for justice and equity for marginalized populations, around racial justice and LGBTQ+ inclusion. I do this by emphasizing themes of inclusion, bias, and institutional racism in my preaching and teaching. Second, I help folks to better appreciate Martin Luther’s theology of vocation, which is a fancy way to say that I help them to see their lives, careers, and relationships as areas of ministry.

ENGINEERING

As it happens, I’m also a software engineer. For about 17 years, I’ve been a principal engineer with Johnson Controls, responsible for the exacqVision Network Video Recorder product. I was one of the original server software architects, which entailed way too much to really list here. Over the years, I’ve also managed various teams, from core services, to IP camera integration, to access control and intrusion panel integration, to manufacturing automation.

While I enjoy managing (and still tell some folks what to do), these days I’m the “Principal Platform Engineer.” I coordinate between software engineers, system engineers, and manufacturing, to make sure everyone plays nicely with each other. I also maintain all server components which interface with hardware, such as networking, storage, audio, analog video, and digital I/O interfaces. While I enjoy continuing to design new functionality, I’m most passionate about maintenance programming, because I have the opportunity to introduce new patterns and techniques in order to make our legacy code more maintainable. This also gives me the excuse to introduce best practices, and to continue learning the ever-expanding modern C++ framework. Lately, I’m pretty interested in coroutines, concepts, and std::async.

Here’s a video that explains more about what we do:

SO, WHAT DOES “GRACEWERKS” MEAN?

“gracewerks” represents God’s grace at work in me. I believe the Holy Spirit lifts us out of our human-ness – the judging, assumptions, and self-centeredness that prevents us from seeing what God is up to in us. And then we can begin to see God at work in everybody around us. I also find inspiration from St. Ambrose of Milan:

“He became a small babe so that you could be fully grown, perfect human beings; He was wrapped in swaddling clothes so that you might be freed from the bonds of death; He came to the manger to bring you to the altar; He was on earth so that you could be in heaven.”