We Fired Mark

After our chapel at Iowa Mennonite School (IMS) on Monday, August 18th, Seeds of the Kingdom officially fired Mark Gingerich from the team. Now, this had nothing to do with his performance or lack thereof, rather this was a pre-emptive strike. Since the beginning of the summer, we knew Mark would be leaving us to take a job at Western Mennonite School in Oregon after our chapel at IMS. So we developed the plan to fire him quick after the chapel, before he turned in his official resignation. This way, we could save face, and would not have to write reference letters for him in the near future.

Immediately after the students left after chapel, I raced over to Mark and tackled him, then shouted, “You’re fired!” in my best Donald Trump voice. He groaned in agony, in part because of my intense tackling skills (I did play 8-man football, after all), in part because we had pre-empted his plan to resign. “You can’t fire me, I quit!” Mark exclaimed.

“Too late,” I said as I hopped up and did my I-just-fired-Mark-dance. “You can’t quit, because we already fired you. And don’t even dream of asking us to write a letter of reference.”

Quickly after we fired Mark, Randy and Elizabeth offered to re-hire him for less than the $55 monthly stipend the Seeds have received this summer. “We’d love to re-hire you at a reduced rate of $30 a month,” offered Randy generously. Mark rejected Randy and Elizabeth’s benevolence, however, and chose to stick with his original plan of heading to Oregon.

Okay, so I made most of that story up. But really, Mark is leaving us to go West. This post is my twisted way of saying thank-you to Mark for all his work: on the website, helping us pull together content, and shaping the way we present our material, and a whole bunch of other things too innumerable to mention.

So thanks for all your work, Mark, and blessings as you head out to Oregon. And despite repeated claims to the contrary, yes, one of us will write you a letter of reference.
Matt, on behalf of the Seeds