Today marks the end of a chapter in my life. I read an email this morning from my friend and colleague, Susan Brooks. She is the director of Faith+Lead Academy. Her email was the official approval of the last course I will create for Faith Lead Academy under my initial contract.
Thus marks the end of a four-year chapter of my life. Time for a little reflection…
This journey began during Lent of 2022 while I was serving as associate pastor at Easter Lutheran Church in Eagan. We had just crawled out of the pandemic, and I was settling into an extended, settled call there and feeling good about a new season of ministry. Then Terri Elton, Dean of Academic affairs at Luther Seminary, called me and said, “Steve, we just wrote a job description, and it has your name written all over it. I really want you to apply.”
She told me they were looking for a “unicorn” because it was a four-year, grant-funded hybrid contract. Half of the role was to join the faculty with all the rights and privileges of a full faculty member and teach a half load (five courses in two years). The other half was to be a content creator for Faith Lead Academy.
At that moment, Faith Lead Academy did not yet exist; it was set to launch in the fall, and Luther Seminary wanted a faculty member to be the first to create courses for the platform. They needed someone with the academic credentials to be a professor, as well as the technical and pedagogical skills to build compelling digital content. They felt I fit that description, so I applied, went through the search committee process, and was hired.
My journey began on August 1, 2022. I was onboarded on the same day as Susan Brooks. She brought years of experience as an English professor at Bethel, alongside incredible wisdom and an eye for digital pedagogy. Under Terri Elton’s leadership, we launched into what became a wild and wonderful adventure.
In early 2023, a rare convergence occurred in the lectionaries. Because of my work with the Revised Common Lectionary and the Narrative Lectionary (at visuallectionary.com), I noticed that both were syncing up on the Gospel of Matthew. I proposed that our first course should focus on the Gospel of Matthew. Since I had already illustrated A Cartoonist’s Guide to Matthew, we built a course around it. I invited New Testament professor Kristofer Phan Coffman to be my conversation partner. I created video guides through the illustrations, and Kristofer and I recorded podcast-style conversations exploring the Bible scholar side of Matthew. Susan and her team built out the pedagogy on the LearnDash platform, giving me the opportunity to author the very first course ever created on Faith Lead Academy.
The second course I created was Overflow, designed to launch a broader discipleship track on the platform. I had time in my schedule during those days to do laborious animation work, so I created animated overflowing pots and fun animations from my Grow Deeper illustrations.
In year two, Susan and I brainstormed our next step. In my work with A Cartoonist’s Guide to the Bible, I had spent four years illustrating each gospel in a graphic novel style and had recently published A Cartoonist’s Guide to John. The next logical step was to illustrate the Book of Acts.
The spring and summer of 2023 was a career high point for me because, for the first time in my life, I was being paid to do my Cartoonist’s Guide to the Bible work. I spent the spring soaking in Acts and mapping it into graphic novel pages. Because I had dedicated time, I made it twice as long as previous guides. That summer was a throwback to early Spot Productions days: I would pencil and ink the pages, my wife, Lona, would lay in the flat colors, and I’d return to handle the shading and lettering. We published the book, created the course in the fall of 2023 with Dr. Catherine Wright from Bethel, and launched The Book of Acts: The Ever-Expanding Church.
Next, I continued the Overflow series. I created Overflow: Loving God with Our Mind, which focused on engaging our intellect and learning as a spiritual practice. That brought me to four completed courses through the 2023–2024 academic year.
In the summer of 2024, everything changed. Our seminary pastor, Jeni Grangaard, accepted a call at a congregation in Minneapolis. Our Dean of the Faculty, Dr. Rolf Jacobson, approached me in June 2024 to trial a “Dean of the Chapel” model. This seemed like an answer to prayer, since, at the start of 2024, I had been feeling a holy itch, wondering if God was calling me back into active ministry leadership alongside my work as a professor. Discerning that this was the answer, I stepped into the role as Luther’s first Dean of the Chapel.
This role shifted my contract. I stepped out of the original four-year grant-funded contract and into a three-year contract as Dean of the Chapel, while agreeing to fulfill my remaining course commitments to Faith Lead. Stepping into chapel leadership brought a tidal wave of administrative responsibilities, making course creation much more challenging in years three and four.
Still, I completed a fifth course, Loving God with Our Spirit, focused on Christian spirituality, prayer, and worship. Around this time, I had also been experimenting on my Art Pastor site with live streams and contemplative practices. I created seasonal series called Drawing Through Advent and Drawing Through Lent. Faith Lead used this content to build an Advent challenge and workshop, and the team graciously gave me credit for two courses based on that work.
That left only one final course: Leading Discipleship in Your Context.
Over the summer of 2026, I wrote all the scripts, and in the fall, I recorded the videos. All that remained was filling in a few illustration gaps by the end of October. Today, I received official approval for those final illustrations. The course is scheduled to release on December 10, 2026.
My contract with Faith Lead Academy is officially complete.
I am so thankful for the opportunity to do this work. My prayer is that God will bless every student who takes these courses—that the content helps them grow deeper in the love of God through Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, for the sake of the world. Amen.
