If you have studied with Luther House or inquired about any of our learning opportunities in the past two years, you’ve almost certainly encountered our community coordinator, Deirdre Lapp.
Deirdre works for us part-time from sunny Naples, Florida, and we couldn’t be happier to have her on our staff.
She has an incredible story about how she received faith and the power of forgiveness, and we hope you enjoy reading more about her, in her own words.
Check it out below!
First, tell us about your role with Luther House. What do you do?
I’m here to assist students as they enter and come through the program, so I meet with every single person who’s interested in LHOS and getting a seminary degree rooted in the Lutheran context.
Students come to us because they’re truly interested. We wait for God to send us students, so wherever they come from — whether it’s their congregation, the Internet, or via a friend — they come to us on their own.
It’s exciting for me because I’m the gateway for those students, and I get to talk with all of them personally.
I set up a Zoom call with anyone who is interested in LHOS, regardless of who they are — whether they absolutely know they want to go to seminary, or if they’re just interested in auditing a class. I also meet with pastors who just want to learn more about the program so they can tell their congregations about it, and I especially love that because everyone should be interested in building the kingdom and filling the pulpits.
I get to speak to people about their life. If I use the words, “Tell me your story,” I really get to hear their stories. I talk to them about the program, about how Kairos works, how the curriculum is structured from a Lutheran lens, and by the end of our conversation, I usually know if they’re really interested, or if they need some more time.
That’s where I love having the ability to invite them to audit a course (always the Reformation course) because then they can dip their toe in without having to make a commitment. That fills me with joy because we don’t ever want to go past what God would call them to be doing.
Finally, once someone enrolls as a student, I’m available to help them with any technical questions, to ensure they know what courses are being offered and when, and to help them with the registration process. I also manage donations, and if there are community events, I’m happy to help in whatever way Chris and Sarah might need.
Your path to learning about Lutheranism has been an interesting one. Tell us about it.
I grew up in the suburbs of Manhattan. I went to college and grad school in the Buffalo area, and that’s where I met my husband, Aaron. We got married, and I worked in the city, first at HBO in sales and then at a law firm in marketing. I was baptized Catholic, and Aaron grew up Baptist, so although we struggled for a bit to find a place to worship together, it really wasn’t a priority in our lives.
Our priorities at the time were making money and starting a family, but we were always one of God’s priorities, so He made a way for both of us to hear the Gospel clearly. We then spent many years in a non-denominational congregation and doing ministry in Manhattan with CRU, and we loved that so much.
Then, we adopted our first daughter from China, and after that, we had our second daughter biologically. Shortly after that, we moved to Naples, FL, and after a few years of being a stay-at-home mom, I was given an opportunity to help create a nonprofit at a Lutheran church in town.
My husband worked in nonprofit fundraising, so I had always found it interesting. I thought this project was particularly intriguing because the church was committed to raising up pastors in diverse communities, without them having to spend a fortune or leave their existing ministry context. I knew I could get behind that, and I was excited to work in a Christian context. So, that’s ultimately how I ended up meeting Chris and Sarah, because the avenue for these students to be able to get their degrees without moving to the midwest was the Kairos program.
I had the privilege to assist students through that program, and part of it involved getting them signed up for courses with LHOS. All students began with the Reformation course, and that involves a weekly Zoom discussion group. This was around 2018 or 2019, and at that time, many of our students were not proficient in Zoom yet, so I decided to sit in on one of the discussion groups, just to help better understand the software and what the students were learning.
Oh boy. Sitting in on that one Zoom discussion group with Chris and Sarah had a huge effect on my life. In our language, I would say that God had “apocalypsed” me, because I had never heard the Scriptures studied or revealed in that way before.
I always like to mention that what really struck me is that unbelief is the root of all sin and also that grace is God’s favorable disposition toward me. Those were two things that, even as a longtime Christian, I did not grasp fully in my own thinking. It really sent me on a path of learning more about Luther and what he believed. So, all of a sudden, I’m working at a Lutheran church, and I’m learning all about Martin Luther, and I just can’t get enough. The only problem was that I was working and also raising kids, so I didn’t have a lot of capacity at the time. But when COVID hit, I quit my job and went back to homeschooling our two girls, and then I think it was about April 2022 when I received a call from Chris and Sarah asking me to come work for them part-time.
That was two years ago now, and it has been a joy to be able to assist students from all over the world to receive a first-class education, and I get to learn more and more along the way as well. I learn from the students, who are great, and then I get to interact with the staff, who are incredible — they are some of the best people I’ve ever met — the kindest, and also the most knowledgeable.
What has been the greatest impact that LHOS has had on your life?
I have learned and continue to learn how to preach the forgiveness of sins, not only in ministry but in everyday situations, both to the Christian and the non-Christian. That’s why the podcast is so important to me — it helps me understand how to say the words without sounding like an academic, which I certainly am not; I’m just a regular person. Being able to clearly delineate that Law/Gospel distinction is so important, and I find that many Christians, no matter the denomination, are still stuck in the ladder of works. They’ll say that they’re not, but it’s because they’re not really facing their sin and truly embracing forgiveness on a regular basis.
I am learning how to, as Sarah would say, ‘name sin’ in a gentle, (and sometimes not gentle) way but not leave people in their sins and remember to tell them they’re forgiven. It’s not just, “Oh, you’re doing these bad things, stop it.” That’s the half of it that we hear so often, but we don’t hear, “And God knew that you were going to do this, and you’re forgiven in the name of Jesus Christ.”
To be able to say those words to people, I’ve seen such a change in them. They’re either touched or they’re angry, but it doesn’t matter because either way I’m doing what Christ told us to do.
The last thing that LHOS has taught me is the importance of hearing the Gospel instead of just reading and studying the Bible. I have come to understand the power of God’s Word being preached out loud, not only in congregations but also in community, in our every day, no matter what vocation we’re in. I think as the world gets darker, we need to have the words of Christ in our brains, so that we’re always ready to deliver the message — the forgiveness of sins through faith.
How has that played out in your day-to-day life?
As a mom of teens, my language has changed. At the end of the day, we all know that faith comes from God, none of us have done anything to receive it. But with children, you’re always going to be Moses to them, laying down the law. That’s just the way it is. That has been the struggle for me as a mom — how to deliver the Gospel in my home — and what we do is we ask for forgiveness… a lot!
In our house, there is no such thing as, “I’m sorry.” It’s “I have done this thing. Would you forgive me?” And the kids say, “Yes,” — it’s the most beautiful thing. They are quick to forgive us, and that’s the part that we forget with Christ. God loves to deliver mercy to us, and we should love to deliver mercy to our children.
The thing that’s really humbling is that we really do need to forgive them, and it’s easy when they’re 10 months old, or when they’re five or seven, or even when they’re nine. But I have a 13-year-old and a 19-year-old, and what I want to do is tell them that they’re forgiven, but then lord their sins over them just in case they didn’t quite get the message, right? And that is the part that can wreck relationships, and it can wreck a congregation.
It’s a humbling and a beautiful thing to fall at the feet of Christ and remember that there isn’t anything my kids have done that I haven’t done — or worse. And He no longer remembers our sin. He chooses not to remember or count our sin against us. If we, as a society, could learn how to do that, we’d be in much better shape.
Tell us more about how you heard the Gospel for the first time, back when you were living in Manhattan.
We [my husband Aaron and I] were both “good people,” but we were out to lunch when it came to anything as far as truth was concerned. We just cared about ourselves, our careers and the next best restaurant until we tried to have children, and then suddenly we weren’t getting what we wanted. We followed all the rules, but we went through this time of great grief trying to conceive.
I was definitely on the road to an agnostic type of thinking when I was working at HBO and then the law firm because there just wasn’t an outlet to investigate those types of things. But God made a way.
We got invited to a non-denominational wedding, and many of the people we met just absolutely loved their church, and we thought that was totally weird. It was the first time I had ever been to a wedding where there was a sermon of interest, and it was beautiful. In the car on the way home, I asked Aaron, “Do you want to try this church?”, and we went the next day. It was like we just had these blinders on that fell off, because even him agreeing to go to church was weird.
When we got in the car after that church service, we were very quiet on the way home, and I finally turned to Aaron and said, “I don’t think we’re living our lives right.” That was an initial clue that I had heard I was a sinner, but I didn’t know what in the world to do with that yet. Ultimately, we started going to church again, we started reading the Bible and going to Bible study, and God opened up a whole new life to me when I finally understood that I was a sinner who needed to be forgiven.
Thank you to Deirdre for sharing her amazing story! We’re grateful to have her on our team, and we know many of you have been blessed to know her as well.
If you’re interested in more Q&As from our Luther House community, visit our blog or see below.
