Farewell from Stasia Fine

For the past two years I have been blessed to fulfill my graduate internship requirement with The Clapham Group.  Mark has brought together an incredible team with a shared commitment to influence culture with that which is good, true, and beautiful.  Every Monday we have met as a team to pray, study God's word, and reflect on how God is leading us as a company and as individuals.  This has been a powerful time for us as a community to claim the vision that God has given us and to work as a team on each of our various projects.  I am grateful for these times of visioning.I am also grateful for the incredible people I have met and projects I've been able to be a part of during my time at Clapham.  You all are world changers!  During my first few months here during the fall of 2008, I had the privilege of working with Christine Gutleben and the Humane Society of the United States on creating a Sunday School curriculum for their All Creatures Great and Small campaign.  Christine has had a passion for connecting the Christian faith with our eating habits and care for animals since writing her own graduate thesis. From Christine, I learned the value of living out one's gifts and passions in one's career and persevering in one's call to make a difference.I've also had the opportunity to work with Faith & Law as they serve congressional staff by offering a lecture series at the Capitol that explores how the Christian faith interacts with contemporary policy and ethical decisions. One of my favorite parts about working with Faith & Law has been our annual family retreat in Maryland.  Here we were challenged to consider how we think and process the world and how this impacts the decisions we make in our daily lives.Another project was The Poverty Forum.  Here we brought together politically diverse Christians policy makers with a common focus on decreasing domestic poverty in order to create some bipartisan policy proposals.  This project has been and continues to be proof that we as Christians can come together to make a tangible difference in our world.Over the past two years, as I have prepared for future work in the church, I have learned a lot about the value of learning how to live out our faith in our vocational setting. I believe that my experience at Clapham has prepared me to be a better pastor, as I will be more in tune to the vocational life of my congregants and the manner by which they are consistently influencing culture.Stasia Fine