Beeson Podcast, Episode #708 Reverend Hannah King Date >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your host, Doug Sweeney. >>Doug Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I’m your host, Doug Sweeney. I’m joined today by the Reverend Hannah King, who serves as Priest in Residence at The Vine Anglican Church in Western North Carolina. Reverend King has served as a campus minister, an apartment minister ... I’m reading that but I don’t really know what that is, we may have to ask her about that! – and a parish pastor as well. She writes for lots of publications and has a first book coming out in 2025. The reason we get her on the show today is that she just preached in chapel here at Beeson recently and blessed us all with her message. So, thank you very much, Hannah, for joining us. >>King: Thanks for having me. It’s good to be with you digitally again. >>Sweeney: Yes. Why don’t we begin by introducing you to the podcast listeners. We want to make sure that they tune in and listen to the sermon you preached in chapel. But more than that we want them to get to know you and your ministry a little bit. Can you begin just by telling us how you became a Christian in the first place? And why you decided to move into pastoral ministry? >>King: Sure. Yeah. So, a little while ago I was born into a Christian family. So, I really don’t have any memory of life apart from faith. And I feel very grateful for that. I’m one of six children. We were Southern Baptist in the South. So, I grew up reading missionary biographies and by about age eight I was pretty confident that I was called to vocational ministry. Foreign missions was kind of the only language that I had for that at that time and in that tradition. And so I was sort of undeterred from that life plan all the way up through college – where I went to a music conservatory in Princeton, New Jersey, which was very much not the Southern Baptist Bible Belt. That experience there really kind of opened my eyes to how big missions can be and a call to missions can be. And I was really enlivened just through having conversations with my classmates and my professors about faith and meeting people from different backgrounds and sharing about my hope in Jesus and so that was a big seed for me in realizing, okay, a call to ministry may not only happen overseas. And then my husband and I when we got married we started attending a seminary that had a buy one, get one free scholarship for married couples. A really sweet deal for young poor newlyweds. So, kind of during our time in seminary we together discerned what are the contours of our call? And we actually took a vision trip to South Sudan during that time. And thought well surely this is when we’ll hear that we’re called to be foreign missionaries. But it was on that trip that we sensed sort of the opposite. That God wasn’t opening a door for us to go overseas. At least not yet. But that he is calling us to ministry together. So, then when we came back we began exploring – what does a call to ministry look like for men and women in the United States, in North America? And kind of through that we fell in love with the local church as a place where we’re making disciples of all ages and baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so becoming an Anglican priest in some ways seems like the very opposite of what I envisioned as a child, but in other ways it feels like a really sweet sort of culmination of that childhood call that I wouldn’t have been able to anticipate. >>Sweeney: Wonderful. Just a couple of questions about what you just said. So, when you’re an eight year old kid, what happened? What was the experience like that led you to feel like, hey, God is calling me into some kind of ministry? >>King: I don’t remember any kind of moment or like supernatural experience. I just remember sitting on my bed as a child, either reading stories or thinking about stories, or planning my future in Brazil. It was always, it just filled my imagination and my sense of there’s nothing else I really want to do. What do you want to be when you grow up is a big question when you’re eight. And for me I don’t know it was just always uncomplicated in that way. I want to be a missionary. I did also want to be a veterinarian and a singer and those other popular eight year old things for a season. But they didn’t stick. >>Sweeney: Well, sounds wonderful to me. The other question I had about the first answer you gave had to do with music school. We went by that pretty fast. My wife and I are lovers of music. Why did you go to music school? And why did you decide instead of pursuing a career in music to move to seminary instead? How did all that go and is God somehow still using your interest in music as you’re involved in other kinds of ministry? >>King: I love music. I heard classical music probably in middle school and just thought, oh, I want to do that – or, I think I could do that. But again my vocational track in my mind was always foreign missions. So, around the time of college hunting I told my mom, I think I’m either going to go to music school or take a gap year and go do YWAM or something. And she was like, “Please, Lord, let her go to college. Please let her choose college.” (laughs) She was afraid I was going to go and live in Australia for the next ten years, which could have happened, but ... I got accepted at this little music conservatory called Westminster Choir College. Which was very seriously about music. It’s a conservatory but it was a little bit more collegial in its approach because all the musicians sang in a choir together for all the four years that you’re there as a student you’re in a choir. So, I just kind of loved the feel on campus. It was this kind of magical place where everyone made music together. And so I never actually went in thinking, “I’m going to be a professional musician.” It was more like – this is going to be really fun for four years. >>Sweeney: Yeah. We mentioned as we began, as I was introducing you, that you’re in the Anglican Church now. Do your interests in classical music find expression in Anglican Church ministry? I don’t know what kind of church you’re in now. I know some churches sing parts of the liturgy and so on. Are you somebody with a great voice who gets asked to sing in church and that sort of thing? >>King: I have sung in church some. Most of the churches that I’ve served in have been on the more contemporary style side of music. But I think just having an appreciation for sacred music and kind of a background does lend itself well with the liturgy because there’s this aesthetic of worship and appreciation for the good true and beautiful God. But my husband is ... I met him at Music Conservatory. He is, I would say, a much more well trained musician than I am. So, the first Anglican Church that hired us actually hired him to be the Young Adult Ministry Director and the Choir Conductor. So, he has used his musical talent in church in a variety of different capacities. >>Sweeney: All right. We’re about to get into your congregational ministry. But we’ve also mentioned that you’re a writer. So, on top of all these other interests, somehow you’re one of these people who is also gifted as a writer. How did that come to happen? Tell us just a little bit about the kind of writing you’ve done so far. And then I’ll ask you about this book that’s coming out in the spring. >>King: So, I’ve always just written for myself as a way to sort of process my life experiences and my faith. I think I started journaling my prayers in high school. And maybe about five or six years ago I started having a sense that I had more to say and yet I had no margin. So, full time parish ministry and we had two young children at that time and so I was like I think I’d like to write but what I really need to do is sleep. With whatever free time I have. So, that was just sort of a prayer and a question that I held before the Lord. And when we moved into our most recent parish before the one we’re at right now. I reduced to a part time role – more meaningfully part time. So, began to have opportunities to write short pieces for different publications and things like that. It was always just being faithful and open to whatever the next little project was. And then that kind of snowballed into this book project that I’ve been working on for the last year. >>Sweeney: Which is about what? >>King: It is about, in kind of a nutshell, the Lord’s Supper. And how the Supper can teach us to live as people of hope in the midst of our unanswered prayers, our experiences of un-met longing. And the seemingly kind of un-resolvable pain that a lot of us carry, whether that’s physical pain, like chronic illness or the pain of grief and loss. How do we hold those things in tension with our belief that God has come into the world to renew all things through Jesus Christ? >>Sweeney: Sounds great. And that’s out sometimes this spring. Am I right about that? >>King: Sometime next fall. >>Sweeney: Next fall. All right. Who is the publisher? >>King: Intervarsity Press. >>Sweeney: Fantastic. All right. I want to ask you about the different kinds of ministry with people that you’ve done over the years. But at some point I also want to ask you, because lots of people who tune into the Beeson Podcast are thinking about whether seminary is for them. There’s a growing number of seminarians these days who are women. Some of the women who come to Beeson Divinity School are in denominations that have women on pastoral staff, some are in denominations that don’t. But they all want to be useful. They’re all trying to figure out why has God gifted me in these ways and given me these desires? Some of them think maybe I’ll also be a mom someday. And as you know, better than I do, it’s hard to do all these things at the same time. It’s hard to be a minister and a writer and a musician and so on – be married and have kids at the same time. So, I’m eager to get some advice from you for female students and prospective students especially about how to process these things. And maybe how you process these things and now having gone through so much of this ministry yourself, what kinds of advice you want to give to people who are kind of coming up behind you. So, has this all just been perfectly natural for you? Was there a struggle in your life as you were trying to sort these things out? What do you want our listeners to know about what Hannah has learned through her pilgrimage? >>King: I think where I would start is that when I first began in seminary I really just was doing it very part time and I did not think that I was going to be in any kind of public office or leadership position. I was actually a pretty strong complementation when I started seminary. But it was free for me to do. So, the opportunity was there and I took a class on the doctrine of God with [inaudible 00:13:30] Ferguson, which was completely life changing. And after that class I was on a flight next to a Jehovah’s Witness missionary and we talked for three hours about the Trinity. >>Sweeney: Wow. >>King: And that was a really important moment for me because it helped me to realize no matter what I do in the future with the seminary training, whether it’s homeschooling my kids, or teaching Sunday School, or doing vacation bible school overseas – everything that I learn is going to be precious and it’s going to be fruitful. So, I think I would start by saying if you have the opportunity, what you get from a seminary education will not be wasted. And that’s one of the beautiful things I think about theology is it’s not just information for information’s sake. It brings us into a deeper encounter with Jesus, or ideally, right? It enriches our worship and helps us to be better Christians. And that’s in whatever capacity we’re serving. I think in terms of professional ministry, one thing I’ve been told and I tell myself often is that you actually can’t do everything at the same time and that’s okay. And so to really entrust yourself in your seasons to God. Because when I started wanting to write more I wasn’t writing more and I didn’t have opportunity and margin. And then I became more part time at church. Was writing a little more. And then God opened the door for me to write this book. And I’ve been very, very part time at my church. Really just helping to serve on Sundays. And so for me it’s been very much a winding journey with majoring on certain things in certain seasons and much more limited in other ones. And I think ministry is not one of those things you’re going to age out anytime soon. Right? You just get better with age. So, I think to not be afraid of any sort of artificial timeline but to just learn all you can, receive all you can, and then trust God to do what he wants to do through you with that and that might look different from one season to another. >>Sweeney: Yeah. That’s a lot of wisdom there. All right. So, you got involved in campus ministry and apartment ministry. So, everybody knows what campus ministry is. But where did you do it? >>King: That was a the Music Conservatory. So, I was an undergrad student, kind of like the student ministry president. Our school was very small and most of the traditional campus ministries did not have a lot of success there because it was just a bunch of music nerds and normal people didn’t know how to connect with us. (laughs) Because we’re all so weird. So, we had our own sort of student run thing and over time when I was there, there were different local pastors or even local Christian musicians who were serving and pouring in and mentoring but they were actually working for us in the sense that it was all just a student led operation. The apartment ministry is regional, I think it’s in a lot of different states. It’s called Apartment Life. And we did that while we were in Dallas because it’s a way to get reduced rent on your apartment. So, it’s teams of two. It can be roommates or a married couple. And you kind of function as like RA’s or Chaplains for an apartment complex. The complex hires Apartment Life to put this team in place. They live among their other residents and they’re sort of there as retention specialists, I think we’re called. Because we’re hosting events for the residents, we’re getting to know them, we’re hoping to build a sense of community. Apartments can be pretty lonely places where you don’t know any of your neighbors. And turnover is high but turnover is expensive. So, these apartment complexes have a vested interest in retaining their residents. And Apartment Life saw this as a great opportunity to also build community and help Christians meaningfully connect with people who live in their city. So, you’re supposed to be five miles from your local church so that if you meet somebody who is looking for a church you can invite them. People from your church can come volunteer at the event. It’s kind of just a way to be a bridge into the community. >>Sweeney: Okay. But it’s an explicitly Christian form of ministry in these apartment complexes? >>King: It is. But it has kind of two faces. So, the apartment facing side is we’re here to help you keep your residents. The team facing side is as you’re getting to know people be praying for them. Be building relationships for them, with them. Think about how you can connect your church to your neighborhood and vice versa. So, it’s a little bit complicated because of fair housing laws and things. We’re not in there as missionaries or proselytizing, we’re there to just be good neighbors. And through that lots of ministry can happen. >>Sweeney: Wow. That’s great. I didn’t know about that. It’s probably time to start talking about congregational ministry here. Tell us just a little bit about your history in congregational ministry. And then we’ll ask you about what’s going on at The Vine Anglican Church these days as well. How did you first get involved in congregational ministry? >>King: So, it was sort of through Apartment Life because my husband and I were seminary students. And we were kind of adopted by our church as local missionaries. So, Michael and Hannah are ministering in their neighborhood and we did a little bit of support raising. We were inviting people from our church to volunteer at the events. Get to know residents with us. And through that we were also doing other little things for the church as they needed. When we graduated from seminary we were hired at our first church full time and that’s where we were ordained. So, we were at a historic Anglican church in the DC area for five years. And did a whole bunch of stuff, learned a whole bunch of stuff, met a lot of wonderful people. It was a very busy church. The DC area is really intense culturally. The pace of life, the cost of living is very intense. So, we ended up in 2018, 2019 moving to a parish in Greenville, South Carolina where I grew up to be closer to my family. And we actually shared a position at a church for about three years. And that was a really fun/interesting experiment. We were the co-Associate Pastors. Just less than a year ago we moved up to North Carolina and my husband is the Senior Pastor of this little tiny church and I’m sort of the volunteer Associate for now, I’m a priest in residence, so I just help out with whatever is needed. >>Sweeney: Well, that sounds great to me. It seems like you’ve really enjoyed it but you’ve had a varied ministry. You’re not that old and you’ve already done so many different kinds of things. I guess that’s just all good, right? That’s been exciting to you? Is that the kind of flexibility that, say, if you get to speak into the lives of seminary students today who are thinking about what lies before them, would you encourage them to be similarly flexible? Or do you feel like your experience has been unusual because you’ve had opportunity to do so many different things in so many different ways? >>King: I mean, I think it’s fairly normal for people who are young in ministry to have two or three different church jobs in the first ten years. Maybe I’m wrong about that. But I think I’m really grateful to have been inside a handful of different churches, because for one thing you realize, “Well, there’s no one way to do something.” And even within a denomination there’s actually no one way to be Anglican. There’s a lot of room for different leadership styles, different congregational cultures. I’ve worked in old churches and young churches and there are pros and cons to both of those. But I do think my husband and I both also really long to be somewhere and stay. And so that’s a hope that we’re sort of holding out before the Lord. We don’t want to move every five years. That’s kind of how it’s happened so far. But I think, I hope to learn some new things that you only can learn by being among one people for a long period of time. >>Sweeney: That’s a great segue to the last question I wanted to ask you. And that is so what’s God doing in your life right now? What is God teaching you or showing you? How is he kind of leading you forward at this stage in your ministry? >>King: We just had this year in a new place and I went from a pretty public ministry, being almost full time at a church, to writing a book in the isolation of my living room in my pajamas every day. And parenting small children. And so that was kind of jarring. Because I’m fairly extroverted. But I think it’s also been very formative in a good way because when you take away some of the noise and also just the feedback of being among adults and being kind of in a popular position, I guess, in a public facing ministry, to just be with God and be with your young children, and doing their laundry – it has taught me that a lot of the spiritual life and ministry actually is in those unseen quiet, boring maybe even, places. That’s where we meet God is in obscurity. So, it’s been a tough year for a lot of reasons. But it’s been a very fruitful year and that’s just one reason why it’s been fruitful. The church is going through a lot of change because my husband has been the Rector for two months. The founding pastor of 22 years is retiring at the end of the year. And they’re a brand new baby Anglican Church as well, so they were a non denominational church for 20 years. And just sensed this call to affiliate and to come into the Anglican tradition. So, that’s been kind of choppy and just full but we’re starting to see the fruit of some of those decisions. And to see the life ahead for this church. And so that’s something that we’re really excited about. >>Sweeney: Yeah, that sounds exciting. All right. So, Beeson Divinity School is a praying community. We want to be praying for you and your husband, Michael. I think you’ve said so much about how things are going in your lives and ministries. We can probably already guess how to be praying for you. But how can the Beeson family pray for Hannah King in the days ahead? >>King: Thank you for asking. We would definitely love prayers for our church and for leading this community in the aftermath of hurricane Helene. None of our parishioners were deeply affected but we want to be good neighbors and be seeking the welfare of our city. So, that’s sort of a long term discernment project I think. And for me I submitted my book manuscript, my first draft, on October 1st. So, I’m still coming down from having a lot of clarity of what I’m supposed to be doing with my time and having one project as kind of my focus. And now I’m waiting to get my edits back. So, I think I would love prayer for that sort of ability to sit still and listen for what God wants me to be doing over these next few months. And also even as I move into the next stage of just book writing and doing edits and whatever comes after that. I don’t know. Because I’ve never done this. But just that I would be faithful in that. >>Sweeney: Okay, Beeson family, you have been listening to the Reverend Hannah King. We’ll put a link to her Beeson chapel sermon next to the podcast when we drop it. Please listen to it. It was marvelous, wonderfully edifying sermon. Thank you, Hannah, for your ministry among us a few weeks back. Thanks for all the good work you’re doing. Listeners, we love you. We know you’re praying for us. Please pray for Hannah King as well. We’re praying for you. And we say goodbye for now. >>Mark Gignilliat: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast; coming to you from the campus of Samford University. Our theme music is by Advent Birmingham. Our announcer is Mark Gignilliat. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our Producer is Neal Embry. And our show host is Doug Sweeney. For more episodes and to subscribe, visit www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast. You can also find the Beeson Podcast on iTunes, YouTube, and Spotify.