This March, Pastor Laura Webb will celebrate three years at her first call, Elk Horn Lutheran Church in Elk Horn, Iowa.
Though her path to ministry has not been without its challenges, she says she received her call at a young age.
Growing up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, she was heavily involved in her small, Lutheran congregation. At one point, the church was without a pastor, and youth members stepped in to lead the services about once a month. After one of these occasions, an older member of the congregation approached Laura and encouraged her to pursue ministry.
She continued to be involved in the church throughout high school and went on to get a degree in ministry from a small Christian college. At that point, she says she “stalled out” for about a year and began working in special education at the local public school.
One day, her pastor asked her to meet with him after church. She expected he was going to ask about teaching Sunday school, but instead, he offered to give up a portion of his own salary for her to come on board and work alongside him.
“He knew I had ministry aspirations that had fallen off, and he wanted to bring me back,” she said.
That pastor happened to be a Luther House of Study (LHOS) student, and a few months later, in January 2020, Laura started seminary.
“It was an interesting time because my grandfather had died just a few months prior in November, and my grandmother died on February 14. They had been very crucial in my faith formation, and so the beginning of seminary was a bit of a blur,” she said.
On top of those personal challenges, there was, of course, the pandemic.
“We had a lot of additional meetings because LHOS really guided us on how to approach what was going on in the world, helping us tackle theological issues like virtual communion,” she said.
Still, Laura finished in the spring of 2024, and at that point, she had already been working in Elk Horn for about a year.
She is especially grateful for that call because her application process came with a unique set of challenges. Laura has a condition called albinism which severely affects her vision.
“I have to be a lot more intentional about how I do ministry,” she explains. “A lot of pastors can just pick up a book and lead worship, but I have to have everything formatted and enlarged in a way that I can interact with it.”
In addition, her visual impairment means she cannot drive. For a pastor, this significantly affects the way she interacts with her community.
“The congregation I serve has to be more involved in things they wouldn’t usually handle. I have a group that drives me to visits, and I have people who help get me groceries. It makes the church have to interact and care for each other in ways they might usually leave up to the pastor. In a lot of ways, it really builds the community,” she said.
When she was in seminary, Laura says her condition helped her center on what is most important: “the external call to ministry and the fact that nobody who God has chosen feels like they are completely capable, yet He gives us the equipping we need to do what He has called us to.”
With that in mind, she says she spoke openly about her condition in her job applications to various churches because she wanted to ensure a good fit.
“I applied to 13 churches and received 10 rejection letters, which was challenging, but I knew God would put me where He wanted me.”
Now, as she serves in Elk Horn, Laura says her LHOS education continues to be a support. She especially appreciates how congregationally-focused her training was.
“Everything LHOS taught us was centered around the congregation and how we would use what we learned in ministry. We didn’t write 10-page papers on theology, we wrote newsletter articles and sermons,” she said.
Still, she says the practical nature of LHOS training wasn’t just helpful for ministry tasks, it shaped how she understood the heart of pastoral work.
“During the Reformation class, they talk a lot about our backpack—how everyone comes in with their different interpretations,” she said. “Having been raised Lutheran and gone to a liberal arts school, I had the law spoken to me for too long, so for me, taking my backpack off was being given the freedom of the Gospel and the freedom to live with Christ’s forgiveness at the center. The rest figures itself out.”
That kind of formation, she says, is what sets LHOS apart.
“LHOS deeply cares about their students, and not just when they’re in front of them—they care about their ministries,” she said. “They want to form theologically sound leaders for the generations to come.”
