MEET: Wendy Fisher, Life Learning Program Coordinator

In Lifelong Learning, we collaborate to equip leaders for transformation as they navigate their calling. This mission combines many of my passions: working with people, supporting ministry leaders, encouraging and noticing transformation, and creating systems that implement a vision.

I grew up in Lowell, MI, but my vocational path has led me to call many places home: New York City; Boston; the U.S. Virgin Islands; the Blue Ridge Parkway, with A Christian Ministry in the National Parks; New Haven, CT, for divinity school; East Lansing, MI, for my seminary internship; Prinsburg, MN, serving with Unity CRC and Rice Hospital; Deerfield, IL, for my husband’s Ph.D.; and Kathmandu, Nepal, where we were privileged to teach young pastors. Since returning to Grand Rapids, I have been a part-time instructor at Kuyper College and was the interim Associate Director of Student Life at Western Theological Seminary. In 2004, my husband and I completed the Special Program for Ministerial Candidacy at CTS (with the bonus of meeting each other!). In this way, Calvin Seminary has also been a home for us, and I am grateful to be back in this community that profoundly shaped my family and me.

As part of Lifelong Learning, CTS recently launched our new competency-based theological education (CBTE) learning path called Empower. This itself has involved a lot of learning! I was drawn to work on CBTE due to how valuable I found my own theological education and my strong desire to make it accessible to more students. My theological education served me in my roles as a ministry leader, hospital chaplain, and instructor and in my own discipleship, church membership, marriage, and parenting. Currently, my husband and I have two growing teenagers. They tower over me in height, delight me with their humor, and help me with technology. (Truly, I could not have met the online teaching demands of COVID without them! And, as their at-home teacher, I hope I offered them a bit in return.)

In this season, I understand an aspect of my vocational calling: companioning others on the spiritual journey and encouraging encounters with God. This happens in my practice as a Spiritual Director, shaping my Lifelong Learning coordinator role—as I help implement educational opportunities, resources, and support for ministry leaders and students. I pray with Paul that “we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:18)