A new Mentor joined PLSE…
PLSE network is happy to welcome Mike Angel into our community of folks who listen and care for those are exploring ministry within the Church. Below is a short biography that reflects Mike ‘s journey and his sense of calling.
Mike has a passion for serving the lost, the least and those who are so often left out. His time in the Young Adult Service Corps in Honduras introduced him to a bigger world and a new understanding of God’s call for him in that world. Mike grew up in The Episcopal Church, but remained involved only on the periphery. In high school, he watched his mother go through the discernment process to become an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Colorado. Watching her process stirred something inside of him, and made him begin to wonder about his own vocation.
Mike went to a Roman Catholic college (the University of San Diego). While making plans for after graduation, Mike saw his Roman Catholic friends signing up for service programs such as Jesuit Volunteer Corps and he started to wonder if there might be an Episcopalian equivalent. He stumbled across YASC, and applied right away. It was about this time that he was beginning to plug back into church, and was working as an intern at the local cathedral. For Mike, signing up for YASC was the first chance he had to really test and affirm his sense of call, and it helped to flesh out what that call really was. He understands his time in Honduras as an “opportunity to be formed and a to grab hold of the sense that God has a dream of what the world is about, and that God has a dream that we would all work to build that world.” YASC helped Mike right out of college to form a sense of what it means to faithfully respond to God’s call.
After Mike’s year in YASC, he was offered a position as a campus minister at the University of California at San Diego. His time there was deeply valuable and a wonderful experience for him as he began the discernment process for ordination. Today, Mike is a first year seminarian at the Virginia Theological Seminary and a Postulant in the Diocese of San Diego. As a young adult, he is aware that there is a certain attention that comes to him. People will often tell him that they are the only young adult in their church community. “There’s a weightiness and a responsibility to that that is important,” he says, “it influences how we have to engage.” He sees people in their twenties and to a lesser extent, their thirties as being in a place of flexibility in their lives, seeking to make decisions about career and how to live in the world. Mike wants to help people ask the big questions. “If the church can speak to those places… what would a career look like that was focused on doing something that I cared about and that made a difference in the world? The church has to be involved with helping people to make those decisions!”