Coordinator of Worship Arts and Spiritual Formation, Southern Wesleyan University

My name is Michaela Wickham, and my job title is Coordinator of Worship Arts and Spiritual Formation. Southern Wesleyan University is a organization, a college, a university that offers college degrees, master's degrees. We have some doctoral degrees as well. But it's in a Christian environment, so all of those Christian values are poured into your academic rigor. But I specifically work with the worship arts, that's chapel services, making sure those are planned, the people that need to be there are there, making sure that everything happens, and that student leaders are also grown during that experience to be able to graduate and hold a service like that of their own. So it's a lot of teaching in that aspect as well. I also help to resource, recruit, train discipleship group leaders across campus. And so that's really cool to pour into these leaders who are leading other people in their faith. And that could look like a college student leading a small group or a faculty and staff member leading a group as well. So I'm a big part of that. So every year, around this time, we have a homecoming service. And what that entails is a lot of alumni are coming back. There's actually prospective students here on campus. And so everybody is coming to chapel together to celebrate just the history of the university. And so a bunch of that task is making sure that the chapel band has practiced their set, making sure they're ready to go, they have everything they need, tech-wise, music-wise, sound-wise, all of that. Speaking with our president who's speaking at chapel, so I'm in communications with him and saying, "Hey, what do you need? Do you need a certain thing on the screen while you're talking? And here's the service order and things like that." But also talking to the director of alumni, seeing if he needs anything, is there any special element to the service because it's homecoming that we need. And just making sure the logistics are all set up and everybody's communicated to to be able to let that chapel service happen. So when it comes to it, everybody's already oriented on what they need to do, and we just do it.