Luis Zamora, who co-founded the successful program to help local small businesses, “Help Me Help You,” was recognized as “Student of the Block” for the fifth block at Tusculum College.

Zamora was presented the award during a ceremony Feb. 28 at the college, in which he was highly praised by four faculty members of the School of Business. A native of Santiago, Chile, Zamora is a senior majoring in business administration with a double concentration in general management and economics and international economics with a minor in civic engagement.

Active on campus throughout his four years as a student, he is one of the founding members of the Help Me Help You program, an international non-profit organization that brings small businesses and entrepreneurs together with students to provide needed services to the owners and allow students to apply the skills and knowledge they are learning in the classroom. The program has been recognized by the Clinton Foundation for its impact on the region as well as global community.

In addition, Zamora is one of the founding members of an outgrowth of the program, the Center for Economic Development and Entrepreneurship, which is composed of seven divisions and more than 20 programs geared towards helping satisfy business-related needs and interests of small business owners, students, entrepreneurs, individuals and family members.

He was also a founding member of the Student Abroad and Global Awareness (SAGA) student organization and led the Bonner Leader student service organization as its director and Bonner senior intern. He serves as a resident assistant and a former captain of the Pioneer Men’s Tennis Team.

Luis Zamora has been selected as “Student of the Block” for the fifth block at Tusculum College and was nominated by School of Business faculty. From left are Dr. Michelle Freeman, associate professor of business administration; Dr. Tom McFarland, director of the School of Business and professor of business administration; Zamora; Dr. Sunday Igoni, assistant professor of business administration and Dr. Antonio Bos, professor of administration.

At the ceremony presenting the award, Dr. Antonio Bos, professor of business administration, said that while Zamora’s intelligence, hard work, determination and commitment to serve others are praiseworthy, what sets him apart from others is his ability to overcome a “no” he might be told in pursuit of achieving a goal or completing a project.

“In the more than 200 years of Tusculum history, you will not find a student who has accomplished more to help others in his time at Tusculum than Luis Zamora,” said Dr. Bos, who nominated Zamora for the award along with Dr. Michelle Freeman, associate professor of business administration. Bos added that the significant impact Zamora has made is felt not only by his fellow students, but also his professors, college administration and staff, business owners and leaders and his influence will be felt for many years to come

Dr. Freeman described Zamora as one of the most intelligent, motivated, compassionate and fearless students she has taught. She recalled that Zamora as a freshman had taken her Accounting Principles I course, a sophomore level course, and made the highest grade in the class.

“As a freshman, Luis came to Tusculum to make a difference,” she wrote in her nomination. “He has. Luis, against all odds, founded an organization, which has built new bridges between Tusculum College students, faculty and the local community at large. In creating this organization, he has changed the business student culture at Tusculum. Students who work with Luis strive to be better. They strive to learn more. He is infectious with energy and persuades others to be as well.”

Dr. Sunday Igoni, assistant professor of business administration, said he also enjoyed teaching Zamora and said he has been impressed by his concern for others and how he has used his knowledge to help others and add value to their lives and society.

Dr. McFarland, director of the School of Business and professor of business administration, also commended Zamora for his achievement in the classroom and in his service to others.

Robin Fife, assistant professor of social science, also spoke, recalling how she met Zamora as a freshman in his interview for entrance into the Bonner Leader program. However, she said, it turned into an interview of her about the program as he questioned how the program would help him in his desire to serve others.

Reflecting on his time at Tusculum, Zamora said, “When thinking about personal contributions to Tusculum College and the community at large I cannot address it or refer to it as my own contributions. In my four years here, several changes have been made and the future seems very promising, but I cannot attribute it to my actions.”

Encouragement from professors, he said, inspired him and as he made friends, a group of students began to form that began “ creating change within the school and the community,” he continued. “This group included people from diverse backgrounds, origins, positions, and ages. Students, professors, community members, administration and staff altogether became united in a common goal of creating a better environment within Greene County. Now, what was our biggest achievement? We all created a place, a school and a community in which everyone plays a part in making Greeneville grow and the people develop both personally and professionally.”

The Rev. Carol Howard Merritt discusses different ways new churches are being founded during the last session of the Theologian-in-Residence series.

The concluding session of the annual Theologian-in-Residence lecture series at Tusculum College focused on successful ways churches have been able to nurture intergenerational congregations.

The Rev. Carol Howard Merritt, author of “Tribal Church” and “Reframing Hope,” has led the series, which is co-sponsored by the Holston Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the college with funding assistance from Ron Smith.

Rev. Merritt, who is co-host of God Complex Radio and blogger for Christian Century and Huffington Post, began the session recalling the stories of Abraham and Hagar and their journeys into wilderness areas in the Old Testament.

“These stories tell us that our faith is not just about ourselves, but it is to be moving and breathing from generation to generation,” she said. “They also show that whatever desperate situation we may be in, God still moves in dry, desert places.”

The church has been in a wilderness time, but God is working and there have been some successes with different ways to reach out to the younger generation, Rev. Merritt said.

In the past, people would pick a spot to build a church and expect people to come, she continued, but now people are seeing how God is working in a community and then building friendships and relationships to form a church around that work.

Trying to engage people in their 20s and 30s, churches have tended to think that edgy, interesting ministries are the key, Rev. Merritt said, but that is not necessarily the case.

One of the things working with younger generations is contemplative prayer, she said. While younger people are part of an image-based culture, Rev. Merritt, continued, there is a longing for times when people can breathe, still themselves and listen to God and each other.

But, she cautioned, sometimes there can be intergenerational tension with changes in services to include contemplative prayer or other types of worship. She told of an experience as a pastor when Lenten services were held that provided times for individual prayer, worship and reflection and included candles and incantations. Although it did attract college students and other younger adults as desired, it was not continued because some older members did not like the changes.

Rev. Merritt also discussed the different church models that are arising. One is a church hosting a nesting community, which involves having different services and programs for different groups of people. A nesting community may be a solution when there is tension between generations in regards to type of service or other issues or for a migrant population in the church, she said.

Another is a church partnering with an emerging church. Rev. Merritt explained that an emerging church is one typically formed by people who have left a megachurch or another mainline denomination and may meet in someone’s home. Their worship services vary but usually include ways that people can commune with God involving sight, sound or smell. Churches can invite the emerging church to meet in its building as a partnership in which both sides can learn from one another, she continued.

Churches are also being formed that focus on a type of food ministry such as a soup kitchen or food bank, she said, and there have been churches started related to artwork.

Business and church hybrids in which a church also includes a business, such as a coffeehouse, are being created, Rev. Merritt continued.

Many churches cannot afford to pay a full-time minister so bivocational ministry for pastors is becoming more common, she said. Seminaries are responding to this need by offering degrees in divinity and some other discipline such as social work, law or nursing so new ministers can more easily be bivocational. Related is a team ministry concept in which four or five congregations come together and share two or three ministers.

Some are thinking more of church as a community in which people worship together, study together and serve together, but is not necessarily tied to one place, she said, and there are churches that are forming that only meet together on the Internet.

To help bring more people into congregations, churches need to learn to tell their stories within the community – in small groups, prayer services, Wednesday night services and on Facebook and Twitter, Rev. Merritt said. Leaders can also ask questions of members to allow them to tell their stories of how God has worked in their lives or helped them make a decision.

When the surrounding community sees what the church is doing, it does bring more people, she added. “If you are reaching out the new generation and wanting to reach an action-oriented generation, you want to tell them what you do, what you are doing in the community and how you are helping people.”

Service to others is also a good way for different generations to connect and learn from each other, she said.

Telling their stories of faith and community can help churches engage younger generations in congregations, said Rev. Carol Howard Merritt during the third session of the annual Theologian-in-Residence lecture series at Tusculum College.

In this time of cultural change, the church has an incredible opportunity to reach younger generations through innovative ways to tell its stories, according to the Rev. Carol Howard Merritt.

The Rev. Merritt, author of “Tribal Church” and “Reframing Hope,” is leading the annual Theologian-in-Residence lecture series at Tusculum College, which is co-sponsored by the Holston Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the college with funding assistance from Ron Smith.

Churches can look to Paul’s example as they look for ways to reach out and engage young adults in the life of the church. “Paul did not wonder aimlessly, he was very strategic,” said Rev. Merritt, who is co-host of God Complex Radio and blogger for Christian Century and Huffington Post. “He went to port cities and places that were crossroads of trade. He knew that where he went, he would reach people.”

Likewise, she said, church leaders can be as strategic in reaching out in such ways as using podcasts of sermons that can be downloaded not only by the local congregation, but all over the nation or world and blogs to tell about the church’s work to serve the poor, disaster victims and other community services on blogs.

Rev. Merritt said she did not want to convey that there is no hope for small, rural churches in the future. Serving as a pastor of a rural Louisiana church, Rev. Merritt said church members relied on each other and helped each other get through the challenges of life. That sense of community is something that smaller churches can do much better than large churches and have been doing for years, she said. “The smaller churches are better prepared to handle the cultural shift.”

Creativity is needed to reach people in this time of change, Rev. Merritt said. For example, she said, her husband is in the process of starting a church in Chattanooga. He has been creating a network of artisans, artists and business people in the city and is setting up a local food market to provide fresh produce and basic staples to a community that has not had ready access to them.

“It is an idea of empowering the community in a different way, sharing with one another,” she said. “It gives the message that with Jesus Christ, we have abundance.”

This way of starting a church, bringing different people together and forming a worshiping community, is different from the way churches began in the past, she said, when a building was constructed and people were expected to come.

While the question of this type of church’s long-term sustainability is still unanswerable, there is a need to look differently at churches. “If we are going to thrive in the next generation, we need to start thinking more like Jesus in Luke 10 when he sent out disciples, saying ‘the 70 of you, you have power and authority go out and teach ahead of me.”

For a new generation of people, the “bigger is better” model is not working, and they are searching for a deeper community where they feel valued and cared for mind, body and soul.       This means an adjustment for the church away from looking at what the church can build or buy as a measure of success to perhaps measuring how it has reached out to the community in deeper and different ways, Rev. Merritt said.

Some say that the church needs to be more mission minded – “realizing how God is working in the community and how we can support and sustain that work,” Rev. Merritt said.

There has been a shift in culture from people being expected to go church to that not being the expectation, she said. “In a way that is frustrating and upsetting, but the positive side is the people who are there in church are not there out of expectation, but are there because they need something.”

Each generation is responsible for caring for one another, the giving and receiving that is part of the church community, she said.

Differences in generations can be seen in regards to giving, Rev. Merritt continued. The Silent Generation, who was born from 1927-1945, considers giving as part of their civic duty to their community, she explained. The Baby Boomers, the generation born between 1946 and 1964, are more idealistic and give toward efforts that are going to make a change to better someone’s life or the community. Members of Generation X, those born from 1965-1983, are more pragmatic in their outlook and want to give to efforts that “get the job done to help people.” Those born between 1984 and 2002, now known as the “Millenials” have been described as civic-minded and very team oriented. She said she would like to see churches engage this generation to discover how it wants to give.

Rev. Merritt also discussed the shift toward post-modernism with the breakdown of the meta-narrative, a predominant western philosophy in which history is seen as a progressive swing upward in that things were always improving.

However, a shift away from that began after World War II when people became aware of the depth of evil that people could do to one another and that technology does not always result in things getting better as technology had enabled the destruction of life on a massive scale, Merritt said.

Likewise, she said, there has been a shift in theology from the dominance of theological thought by the foundational European male theologians to the inclusion of other voices, such as women or liberation theologians that have different stories to tell.

Sharing testimonies, stories in essence, has long been part of church and can be a way for talking between generations, Rev. Merritt said, telling of the hope she found in listening to the stories of an older friend about surviving the Great Depression and growing in her faith.

In another church where she served, people who joined were asked to tell their faith journey and “it was some of the most holy moments in the church,” she said.

Telling stories deepen connections between people in churches, she said. For example, she said, she had a Lenten worship series in which people from each generation were asked to tell how God had worked in their lives or about a mentor who inspired them in their spiritual journey. “The sense of bonding between the generations was often palpable,” she said.

Merritt will conclude her discussions Feb. 26 with a look at how churches can faithfully respond to changes in culture, including examples of what has been successful in congregations around the country.

The sessions begin at 10 a.m. in the Chalmers Conference Center in the Niswonger Commons on the Tusculum College campus. There is no charge to attend the lecture series, but reservations are required as lunch is provided in the college’s cafeteria. For more information or to register, please call 423-636-7304 or email eestes@tusuclum.edu.