Rooted in Faith: Ministry in Our National Park

When Deb Yandala was 13 years old, she received her confirmation verse: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). She is positive it was randomly assigned, but the words struck her deeply and have guided Deb ever since.

“My confirmation verse was surprisingly moving to me as a 13-year-old,” Deb recalls. “I really believe Jesus was the first environmental educator, if I could say that. That verse, and that imagery, has been an inspiration through my whole life.”

Deb’s path has woven together faith, creation, and leadership in ways she never anticipated. After serving in outdoor ministry and as a rostered leader in the ELCA, she found herself at a crossroads. Unable to receive a call in the church, she was invited into a new opportunity: helping to open a residential environmental education center connected to the Conservancy for Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

“It really fell in my lap,” Deb said. “And I do feel that was the Holy Spirit at work. Another door opened when I least expected it, and it ended up being exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I had a graduate degree in environmental education. It was just kind of... Perfect.”

Even so, the transition brought grief. “I had felt very called to being a rostered lay leader in the church,” she said. “But within a few weeks of starting the work, I felt such a sense of… this is where I need to be. This is where God would have me do my work. I realized I could be probably more impactful in a secular setting than I could for the church.”

For Deb, faith and work were never separate. While she didn’t use religious language, she embodied it in practice. “Sometimes when staff had problems or issues and came to me, I drew on my pastoral skills to help people see their worth and their value in the work they did.”

Becoming President and CEO of the Conservancy in 2002, Deb’s faith shaped how she approached leadership. “My calling wasn’t to convert everybody to my faith, but to connect people with nature, to love people. You can be the language of faith,” she explained. Caring for creation became a vital expression of that faith. “You can’t care for people and not care for creation, frankly. We are all interdependent with the earth. As a person of faith, I believe that God created creation, and that makes it holy right there.”

She also carried her faith quietly into moments of discernment. “I learned to not always try to answer or fix things right away, but to step back and let my values, my faith, inform the decisions I needed to make. When I think about Jesus going to the garden to pray, I think about how often I’ve needed to do that too.”

This year, Deb retired after decades of service with the Conservancy. At her farewell celebration, one of her former board chairs stood to speak. Amid the stories of her accomplishments, the chair simply said: “The thing you need to know most about Deb is she values her faith and her family. And that came through in everything she did.”

For Deb, that was the greatest affirmation. “It’s not just going to work,” she said. “It is going to your ministry site. If you view what you do as a vocation, as a calling from God and as ministry, you view your work a little differently.” Looking back, Deb sees her life’s work as ministry in its fullest sense: walking alongside people, tending creation, and serving in ways that reflected Christ’s love.

Her story reminds us that ministry doesn’t end when we leave the sanctuary. “If we put our faith on a shelf, only for Sunday mornings, we miss out on the fullness of what God calls us to do. Our work, our communities, our daily lives—that’s where our faith matters.” Every one of us is called to live out our faith in daily life—in our workplaces, communities, homes, and neighborhoods. God’s mission continues wherever God’s people are, and in every vocation, we are invited to be ministers of Christ’s love.

Your Northeastern Ohio Synod is committed to supporting lay leadership and vocational discernment. Thanks to the mission support of congregations, programs that help people explore their calling - like Growing in Faith (our lay leadership school) - are possible, empowering individuals to live out their faith in meaningful ways, just as Deb has done throughout her life.