David Schoen

Minister and Team Leader, Evangelism Ministry Team in Local Church Ministries, a Covenanted Ministry of the United Church of Christ – Cleveland, Ohio

David Schoen was born on the way to a new church start meeting. “My dad was a pastor, a graduate of Eden, and he and my mom were on their way to a meeting with the new women’s group when Mom’s water broke,” he explains. “If you know my parents, you’ll know they went to the meeting anyway. But they didn’t stay long, and I was born soon after!”

Now Schoen is working on new church starts himself, as minister and team leader for the evangelism team of the national UCC. “I was baptized in a school gym,” he notes, “and now I worship with new churches in school gyms.” He didn’t expect to come to full circle; in fact, he was determined to break the four-generation streak of ministers in his family. At Elmhurst College, he “got caught up in the agenda” of the late ‘60s and turned his back on the church completely. “Then I took the only Bible-study course I was required to take,” he says, “and the professor made the Bible come alive. That course revealed to me how the Bible spoke to all the issues I was concerned with – peace activism, social justice, racial and sexual equality, environmentalism. It got me back into studying the Bible, and claiming my faith for myself.”

Eden got me back into studying the Bible, and claiming my faith for myself.

Schoen says his parents never pushed him toward ministry, but he figures “they were always in the background hoping. We went on vacation in the Ozarks and it just so happened that (former Eden professor) Walter Brueggemann was in the same place and he just happened to bump into me and ask where I was going for seminary…” At Eden Schoen says, “I felt a constant sense of anticipation, a sense of freshness and learning, new insights and revelations. That’s been true of the ministry as well; it’s what keeps you engaged.” He served a serendipitous suburban congregation in the Midwest; an urban congregation in New Jersey right across from Manhattan; and a large congregation in Canton, Ohio, for 14 years. Now he works in new church development to “church the frontier,” reaching out to different racial and ethnic groups, different generations, and new emerging communities, as well as helping existing churches revitalize themselves.

“For a long time, I saw evangelism as a programmatic concern for church growth,” he says. “Today I see it as the vital, core ministry of the church.

Numerical growth may be an outcome of evangelism, but missional outreach is done because that is God’s purpose: for the church to go forth into the world.

“I rediscovered the core of our faith while on a mission trip in Nicaragua during Hurricane Mitch,” he adds. “All the things Americans take for granted were stripped away from us in that devastation, and I discovered again that the one thing that cannot be taken away is our faith in God. I came back knowing I had something significant to share in a world that’s being tossed about by mighty winds, and is looking desperately for the kind of strength, power and transformative life that we know in Christ.”