Introducing Bryan and Maureen Langdoc
July 06, 2009
We are excited to Welcome Bryan and Maureen Langdoc to our Escondido Light and Life Church. Bryan joins the team as Pastor of Worship while Maureen serves as the Pastor of Discipleship.
Maureen and Bryan both attended Greenville College in Illinois where Bryan majored in Music and Maureen studied Philosophy/Religion and English. After his graduation in 2001, Bryan accepted a position at the Greenville Free Methodist Church as Director of Worship and Arts while Maureen completed her senior year. They married in 2002 and then completed a 10-month research stay in Mauritius, a small island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It was during this stay that both Maureen and Bryan found that they loved ministry and began to feel called to further theological study.
In the fall of 2004, Bryan and Maureen both enrolled at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina where they spent three years earning their Masters of Divinity degrees and further discerning God’s call on their lives. While they were at Duke, they became connected to the Southern California Conference and began to pursue ordination.
In Escondido, Maureen’s ministry is guided by one central question:
What does it mean for Christians to live holy lives?
She writes:
“The call to discipleship is a call to belong to a community of followers that constitutes a body whose very head is Christ. As Christ’s body, our challenge is to follow Him into an incarnational way of life: we come alongside one another in sharing joys and sorrows, we enter into the lives of the ‘least of us,’ we visit the sick and imprisoned, feed the hungry, and clothe the naked. What unspeakable joy in becoming more like the people God created us to be! And what a blessing to know that in living such transformation (that is, in being the church) Christians tell the world of a story not based upon violence, greed, and hate, but upon a love so great that the Author himself actually became a part of the drama. This is the joy of discipleship.”
As a Pastor of Worship, Bryan has lived in the tension between old and new liturgical styles for most of his ministry, and he is experienced in planning services in all styles of worship while encouraging Christians to learn from one another and meet somewhere in the middle. He writes:
“More and more, I am convinced that the road to the future runs through the past. We have more to learn from the early church – not just the earliest records from the book of Acts, but the multitude of sources from the first centuries of Christendom. The Didache, the Didascalia Apostolorum, and the Aposotolic Constitutions can all teach us much about worship, discipleship, daily prayer, evangelism, and the sacraments. Post-Christian America is not unlike Pre-Christian Rome. New generations of Christians are responding more to silence, mystery, and symbolism than to the more 60’s-style contemporary services of rock music and high-tech video. I am excited to lead the community of Light and Life Escondido in a worship gathering that is appropriate to the 21st century, while ever mindful of the vast resources from the ancient church.”
|