When you walk past his office you usually see his back, since his attention is focused on a Kaypro computer behind his desk. His name, in its longest form, is Kenneth Robert Wade. We welcome Ken as the new assistant editor of our journal. (Attention, treasurers—we are not adding a budget, but rather using the one vacated by Russell Holt.) Not only does Ken come to us fresh from pastoral experience but he brings with him his personal computer and printer, which have already been used to good advantage. Please be on the lookout for articles from his pen relative to the use of computers and other valuable tools in your pastoral work.
More important than his computer is the family he brought with him. He has a lovely wife, the former Debby Shabo, originally from Alaska, and two delightful, spunky Bible-named boys, Adam and Seth. It was through the efforts of Pastor Ken Mittleider, our newest Gen eral Conference vice president, that Debby and her family joined the church.
Ken was reared in Oregon by parents who united with the church through the work of a colporteur and a layman who brought Bible studies to their home. He graduated in 1973 from Walla Walla College with majors in theology and Biblical languages, plus a minor in biology. Before and after earning his Master of Divinity degree in 1976, Ken labored in the Wisconsin Conference, as associate pastor of the Madison district, and pastor of three churches in southern Wisconsin. After ordination in 1979 he accepted a four-church district in the same conference. By March of this year the district had expanded to four and one-half churches. The half church is a fine study group on its way to becoming a full-grown church.
Ken and Debby worked as a team, with Debby holding vegetarian cooking classes, which was quite in line with her home economics major from Walla Walla College, where they first met.
We know that Ken's contribution to our magazine will be most practical and helpful. Shortly after he accepted the call to join our staff he gave himself a homework assignment. "I decided I ought to know just what MINISTRY is all about—I mean what type of articles we publish, what the major emphases are, and how much space goes to practics, how much to theology, how much to the other types of articles," he declared.
So he sat down with a ruler and his personal computer and began to measure (right down to the half inch) how much space was given to eight different categories of articles. Plugging the results into a spreadsheet-analysis program, he discovered that article balance in the past year was slightly different from what he might have guessed from only casual reading.
Here's what he found in the issues from May, 1983, to April, 1984: practical articles, 34 percent; theological, 29 percent; scholarly nontheological, 11 percent; program promotion, 9 percent; devotional, 6 percent; family, 5 percent; news, 5 percent; health, 1 percent.
If any in the field wish to comment on this particular percentage spread, please do so. If you think we ought to have more in one area than others, let us know.
Back to our subject. Welcome to Ken, Debby, Adam, Seth, and Kaypro!—J.R.S.
