“I always felt as though I was missing something, missing this love,” says Steve Gallego, senior M.A. student at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He had attended church with his mother growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and also when they moved to New Jersey, but only to make his mother happy.
When college came it took him farther away from home and any church relations, until his senior year when he met a beautiful young woman named Alice who he took a liking to and would go to church with on the weekends to East Liberty Lutheran Church. Then on one of the weekends he went home and attended church with his mother as he normally would, he decided to start reading Matthew.
“Then something just clicked.” Steve says, remembering that day with a smile. “The truth that had been blurred my whole life came into focus, and then this love came rushing in, and now there is no void.”
In that first year Steve grew quickly in his Christian faith, reading and learning as much as he could. It was in that year he felt himself drawn to seminary and a call to teach. This call was encouraged and supported by his church family at Living Gospel Baptist Church, especially the pastor and his wife. Steve enrolled at PTS ready to be equipped for whatever ministry— whether it is teaching, mission, or pastorate—God is calling him.
Now that Steve has completed one year at PTS, he is immensely glad that he listened to God’s call to seminary. “I thought the best way to be prepared was to have a wide scope of things to experience,” says Steve and therefore appreciates the Seminary’s commitment to diversity.
Additionally, Steve attends nearby Rodman Street Missionary Baptist Church and recently had the opportunity to volunteer with them. The congregation picked up litter in the streets, visited with residents of a local nursing home, held voter registration, worked with the food bank, and prayed for those in the streets. “Operation Inasmuch—named in recognition of Matthew 25:40 which says, ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me—’” he says, “gives me the opportunity to do the Lord’s work. People see us doing work in the community and living out what we preach.”
As Steve finishes his last year, he and his now fiancée, Alice, are discerning their path, willing to follow God’s calling wherever it leads in the world.
Written November 2013