By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
Staff Writer

Becoming a pastor was the farthest thing from Jennifer Hepler's mind, growing up in Kannapolis, N.C. Yes, her family was in church every time the doors opened, but their middle child was usually at the piano.

She took her degree in biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and worked for a time at a physical therapy clinic. When she began to see her interest in her patients as a ministry, her pastor suggested she consider the ordained ministry, but she pushed the idea aside.

A year later, however, when her father died suddenly, the young woman found herself face to face with some of the hard questions of faith.

Thoughts of entering the ministry would not leave her alone.

"I fought it for a good while," she says now. "I did a whole lot of walking and praying, and in the end, once I made up my mind, it felt right."

Last month, with a new husband and two cats, Hepler moved to Peachtree City to begin her year as an intern, or vicar, at Christ Our Shepherd Lutheran Church. During this, the third of her four years at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary at Columbia, S.C., she will participate in every area of ministry, supervised by Senior Pastor John Weber.

Hepler explained the program: "This is the year when you are assigned to a parish and apply some of the skills and training and theology that you've already studied, to gain growth and learning from real life experience in the parish. Then you go back for your fourth year and find out what you didn't know."

Christ Our Shepherd is not a typical Lutheran parish, especially in the Southeast. With about 700 worshipping members, it is several times as large as most of the other congregations in its synod.

In that respect, the intern's experience will be atypical of what she will probably face as an ordained pastor. The church's size, however, makes possible a wide range of activities and experiences not usually found in a single parish.

For example, "It will be helpful to know more about finances and parish administration," Hepler said, "and getting a feel for what life in a large parish looks like on a day-to-day basis. I can already see that I'm going to be able to take from here a lot of great ideas for programming—there are a lot of elements in place that I'll be able to pull from."

The vicar said she thinks her

strong points are in theology and spirituality, but she also believes her sense of humor and interpersonal skills help her make people feel comfortable. She's looking for "practical experience when it comes to teaching, since I was the one who always played the piano."

She's "the balanced middle child," she said, with a younger brother who is doing missionary work in China and an older sister who is a pharmacist. Her mother is a school teacher; one of her grandfathers was a Lutheran pastor in North Carolina.

Once she decided to pursue the ordained ministry, she saw herself remaining single so as to be undistracted by family. That too was apparently overruled by a higher authority: she met Noah Hepler in seminary and they married last May. Her husband is completing his last year of seminary in Atlanta, and the couple hopes one day to serve a parish together.

Hepler is the eleventh pastoral intern Christ Our Shepherd has had. The congregation suspended participation in the program in 1988 when it called a second full-time associate pastor.

With that position well-established, the church council decided last spring to offer internship again as a way of serving the church at large, said council vice-president Suzanne Lamfalusi.

"Without the practical experience of serving in a parish, a future minister's training would be very incomplete," Lamfalusi said. "We feel hat as a church actively engaged in outreach we have a responsibility and a privilege to be able to do this."

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