Three Quick Questions for Rev. Mike Dangelo

Throughout the summer, our visiting clergy will be asked a series of questions about their work and what they like to read.  First up, Vicar Mike:

What do you find the most challenging in your work?

I’m a parish minister at heart, and each parish has a set of gifts (charisms) and challenges (particularities) that a parish minister constantly negotiates and re-negotiate. With regards to the both, you have to continually call them out celebrating the former and gently weathering and resisting the later. All along the way (hopefully) building skills and responses that become more deft in their application and expression. This takes patience I’m still learning to have!

What gives you the most joy in your work?

Preaching and teaching bring me the greatest joy. I’ve never been afraid of public speaking and scripture study has always provided the greatest joy. Sharing the history and story of God’s guiding love in the classroom or pulpit is the best!

What kinds of books, periodicals, podcasts, etc., do you read for pleasure, inspiration and/or intellectual grist for the mill? 

Science fiction. There…I said it, confessed it and claimed it. Good Sci-fi is always trying to wrestle with human moral dilemmas. In the end science fiction stories are parables that use fantastical worlds to wrestle with humanity’s greatest existential challenges. Bad sci-fi is just delicious and frivolous fun!