JUNE 2022
North Park is pleased to announce the appointment of Rev. Dennis R. Edwards, PhD, as Dean of North Park Theological Seminary and Vice President for Church Relations.
Rev. Dr. Edwards, ordained in The Evangelical Covenant Church in 2012, is a highly accomplished New Testament Scholar with more than 25 publications to his credit. He has served as a professor of Biblical studies at eight institutions of higher learning over the past 24 years, including his first academic service to North Park Theological Seminary, when he taught Mobilizing for Justice in Spring 2013. Rev. Dr. Edwards joined the North Park community full-time in August 2019, as Associate Professor of New Testament.
Congratulations to our graduates Dani Kilgore, Brandi Sanders and Nilwona Mapalo Nowlin All graduating from North Park Theological Seminary with their Masters Degrees.
May 2022
APRIL 2022
The Companion sat down with Bryan Murphy over Zoom to ask about his call to ministry and what he has learned about the church. He was elected superintendent of the Pacific Southwest Conference at their annual meeting last month.
Can you tell us about your call to ministry and what that process has been like?
It was not a direct route. I was one of those second vocation pastors, where I started by coming out to California and having a corporate career in Silicon Valley. Ten or 15 years into that career, I started getting this sense that God was doing something different and calling me to live into a part of my life that I had not fully invested in. So in my late 20s, I went to the pastor at my church, South Bay Community Church, a Covenant congregation in Fremont, California, and told him I had a sense from God that I was supposed to go to seminary. I didn’t really even know what seminary was.
He directed me to Fuller. I started out down this road thinking, Let me take a few classes and get God off my back, then I can go back out there and make some money. As I began to dive into it, though, I quickly got passionate about the languages.