Linda Morgan Clement
An unexpected path to ministry: God's call to college chaplaincy
By Toni Montgomery
As the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Linda Morgan Clement, chaplain and director of Interfaith Campus Ministries for the College of Wooster (Oh.), knew she definitely did not want to go into ministry as a career. Adopted from China as a baby, Linda has lived in the United States since she was 18 months old, and for most of her childhood, her father served as a parish minister.
"I guess I would honestly say [that] in both a positive and a negative way probably the greatest influence on me was my father," she says. "I have incredible respect for his ministry, but it was clear to me [ministry] would not be a good setting for me."
When she went to college, Morgan Clement wasn't quite sure what she wanted to do, but she did not feel called to ministry. She started out in computer science and tried that path. It didn't take long for her to realize that working with computers was not how she wanted to spend her life. Morgan Clement did know one thing: she loved people; she cared about them. So she considered social work. But, once again, the idea fell short.
"At that point in time it was very clear [that] social work did not include people's religious or faith backgrounds, and what I came to realize for myself was that my faith was the source of my hope. I couldn't imagine helping other people whose lives were broken or in pain to find hope or make a new way without [faith] at least as one of the tools," says Morgan Clement. "It was when I was able to say, ‘I can do a different kind of ministry' that I said, ‘I can do that.'"
Youth ministry was also not part of her plan and not among her areas of interest. Morgan Clement went to a new church development for her first call and then was an associate pastor in a congregation. After that she went to the Synod of the Northeast, where she was an associate synod staff person for eight years, and from there she went to the College of Wooster, where she has served as a chaplain for the last 16 years.
"I feel like my story is, whenever I say, ‘This is something I really don't do, I'm not interested in it,' that's where God puts me," she says. "It was really sort of growing up enough, having enough distance from college students that allowed me to step into the college chaplaincy—and I love it. It's been a great match."
What Morgan Clement says she enjoys most about the job is the mix of activities it involves. She realized she missed the regular contact with a congregation when she worked at the Synod of the Northeast, but she found it again on campus, where she has a congregation of about 1,800 students and 600 staff people.
"That's been great, sort of both pieces, because I do a lot of administration and I do a lot of programmatic work (bringing in speakers, teaching students), but then also doing regular worship services—pastoral care, funerals, weddings," she says. "It's sort of the whole range of human care, human life pieces."
As director of Interfaith Campus Ministries, Morgan Clement and her staff strive to provide a place where students can feel safe within their own faiths but where staff can also push them to step outside their comfort zone once they feel safe enough.
"That's the interfaith part of it, where we have several programs that we run to encourage students to gather and have serious conversations with people of another faith tradition or people within their faith tradition with whom they might have disagreements," she says.
Morgan Clement is also involved in service projects with the students. Soup and Bread, a collaboration between Westminster Presbyterian Church, students, and food services at the college, is one example. Students, who also volunteer to serve the food to those in need, give up their regular Friday lunches for a meal of soup and bread. The difference in cost is given to regional, national, and international hunger programs.
"We raise somewhere in the neighborhood of $6,000 to $8,000 a year," says Morgan Clement. "It's a pretty simple way to do it."
Add in coordinating and sometimes going on three regular mission trips off campus per year, teaching two courses (one of which also involves a trip to Thailand every year), budgeting, and just trying to stay in touch with what the campus is doing and thinking, and Morgan Clement has a diverse, busy, and rewarding career doing the one thing she didn't think she wanted to do.
Toni Montgomery is a freelance writer who lives in North Carolina and also serves as secretary of First Presbyterian Church of Statesville.
