New Chairs for Synod Table & Global Missions Team!

We are excited to announce two new chairs who will lead important ministry in our synod over the next year. 

Pastor Kirstin Tannas to Chair New & Renewing Mission Table

Pastor Kirstin Tannas has accepted the invitation to chair the New & Renewing Missions table. This table helps to start new congregations and ministries in the synod as well as assist with efforts to renew existing congregations through grants. We give thanks and blessings to Shannon Anderson who served as chair of this table for the last four years and has been a committed member of this table for many years prior. 

For the past 22 years, God has called Pastor Kirstin to serve in ministries of transition and transformation, including co leading congregations in the city of Detroit to connect with their neighborhoods, co leading three suburban metro Detroit congregations in consolidating and becoming one new church, serving as a Pastor Redeveloper in coastal southwest Florida, and currently as Co-Pastor of Good Samaritan Lutheran Church in Lexington Park, MD with her husband, Pastor Troy Jacobson. Through these challenging experiences, God has gifted her with vision to see new life and possibility in critical situations, and the expectation that crisis will bring about new life. She finds power and peace in God’s story of death and resurrection.

Pastor Kirstin loves to be a part of renewing and growing things—from old houses and gardens to ministries and leadership. She is energized through ‘holy experimentation’, innovation, diversity, collaboration, teamwork, learning new things, and building community partnerships. Pastor Kirstin enjoys spending time with Troy and their children, Jonah and Emmett, walking at parks and beaches, cooking, and going to the farmer’s market. She is thankful to be able to work with the New and Renewing Mission Table to support and equip congregations of the Metro D.C. Synod.

Pastor Kirstin currently serves as Co-Pastor of Good Samaritan Lutheran Church in Lexington Park, MD with her husband, Pastor Troy Jacobson. You can reach Pastor Kirstin by emailing mission@metrodcelca.org.

 

Kathryn Tobias to Lead Global Mission Comittee

Katharyn Tobias has accepted the invitation to lead the Global Mission Committee. This team works to support Companion Synod relationships in El Salvador, Namibia and Slovakia, advocacy efforts for peace through the Middle East Working Group, local ELCA World Hunger efforts and Gifts of Hop, the synod’s alternative gift giving program. 

In 2002, Kathryn J. Tobias first began serving on the Metropolitan Washington, DC Synod’s Global Mission Committee, where she helped develop the Synod’s Companion Synod relationships with Lutherans in El Salvador, Namibia, and Slovakia, as well as the Middle East. She has traveled to all four places, visiting Lutheran lay leaders and pastors in each. Over the past two decades, she has participated in consultations with church leaders in the four Lutheran church bodies in Namibia as they grew in closer relationship to their companion synods in Metro DC, Iowa, New Jersey, and Washington State.

Born in Geneva, Switzerland, where her father was working with World War II refugees and then the World Council of Churches, Kathryn became a Lutheran at age 15, when Dr. Tobias began teaching at Augustana Seminary in Rock Island, Illinois. She earned a degree in English and a teaching certificate at Augustana College, volunteered at the Indian Community School in Milwaukee, then moved to Madison, where she worked as a writer in state government. She was invited to Washington in 1977 for a three-year stint with the Upper Great Lakes Regional Commission. She found a welcome at Lutheran Church of the Reformation on Capitol Hill, which has been her spiritual home ever since.

Parallel to her subsequent paid work as a writer, editor, and manager in the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration, her life of faith as a lay leader has been enriched in countless ways. She worked with children at Reformation’s Neighborhood Center; served on the Public Affairs Sector Committee planning seminars that took an interfaith perspective on issues of the day; assisted youth from South Africa to develop life and work skills; and continues to chair the Good Neighbors of Capitol Hill coalition of congregations, which has worked to serve refugees with Lutheran Social Services of the National Capitol Area for the past six years.

Kathryn lives in Cheverly, Maryland, and enjoys singing in and traveling with Reformation’s choir and related choral groups. She travels in the U.S. too, visiting extended family in the Midwest, Virginia, and Colorado. She loves participating in InterPlay.org, which is “an arts-based, interactive, incremental, integrative, transformational, affirming and fun” way to access the wisdom of the body.

You can reach Kathryn by emailing globalmission@metrodcelca.org