Q&A with Amy Marshall, creator of the “Seminary Reacts” podcast for young adults
Published: June 11, 2026
ELKHART, Indiana (Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary) — It’s not every seminary student who starts a podcast. But Amy Marshall of Columbus, Ohio, who graduated in May 2026 with a Master of Divinity from Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS), Elkhart, Indiana, decided to do just that, creating a podcast for young adults as part of an independent study she did at AMBS in the fall of 2025.
Titled “Seminary Reacts,” Marshall’s weekly podcast invites AMBS faculty members, alumni and other scholars to respond to questions and stories about Christianity from the social media platform Reddit. The questions she’s chosen for each episode reflect frequently discussed topics about Christianity on social media and are often tailored to each guest’s passions and projects.
Produced with the support of the Institute of Mennonite Studies (IMS), AMBS’s research agency, Seminary Reacts launched on Oct. 31, 2025. By June 15, it will have released 16 episodes spanning two seasons. According to Jamie Pitts, PhD, IMS Director, IMS leaders are currently making plans for future podcasts now that Marshall has graduated.
The podcast is accessible at linktr.ee/SeminaryReacts, facebook.com/MennoStudies, instagram.com/seminaryreacts and tiktok.com/@seminaryreacts.
AMBS invited Marshall to share about her process of creating the podcast:
What was your vision for the podcast, and what inspired you to create it?
The goal of the podcast is to bridge the gap between the Mennonite academic world and the broader Christian world.
During my time in seminary, I noticed that in the online conversations about Christianity that I was seeing, there were no Mennonite voices. Many of the topics online were related to conversations we were having in seminary classes — such as current events, the interpretation of Scripture, and theological topics like worship, justice and discipleship. I realized that the Mennonite theology we were learning as students would be highly valuable for these conversations, especially because it offers an alternative perspective to mainstream Christianity.
Around the same time, Drew Strait, PhD, AMBS Associate Professor of New Testament and Public Faith, was speaking frequently about the concept of “public faith.” His research on Christian nationalism addressed the harm done by Christians in power who use the Bible and their faith to justify violence and discrimination. While many Christians were not aligning with this particular movement, I saw little pushback from them against what was happening in our country. In this context, I believe that exercising public faith is important because it can show people that harmful forms of Christianity are not the only interpretations of faith. My hope for the podcast was to make this accessible to a wider audience.
How did the project fit into your seminary studies?
For the first season, the podcast was an independent study course that focused on the podcast as a ministry context. In the spring, it was just a project I worked on alongside my other classes toward my Master of Divinity.
Could you talk about the process of developing your idea?
In my Christian Ethics and Peace Theology class in the fall of 2024, I designed a podcast that would use the popular musical Wicked to teach listeners about resistance to empire from a Christian perspective. In the spring of 2025, I began conversations with Abenezer (Abe) Dejene, MDiv, Interim IMS Coordinator and Interim Audio-Video Producer, and now the producer of the podcast, and Jamie Pitts, who also serves as Professor of Anabaptist Studies, about creating a podcast that would reach people outside the Mennonite world and attract young adults as listeners.
One day, while talking about the podcast idea with Abe, I had the idea of using Reddit to gather questions and stories and have professors respond to them. Reacting to Reddit is a popular content format that usually delves into relationships and social etiquette, but I wanted to create a podcast from a Christian perspective. I spent the next few hours drafting a document outlining how this would work, what the episodes might look like, and what questions and stories we could use. I talked about it with Jamie, who was excited about the possibility of IMS supporting the podcast.
In the fall of 2025, Abe, Jamie, and I discussed what the podcast would look like, how my independent study would play a role, and what would be possible with the resources we had. Melissa Troyer, former AMBS Director of Marketing and Communications, was also an important voice in the process, helping us consider how we would use social media to promote the podcast. I also had conversations with Drew Strait and Nekeisha Alayna Alexis, MA, AMBS Intercultural Competence and Undoing Racism coordinator, while strategizing.
We began by recording a test episode with Jamie as a guest — testing the setting, the questions, and what it was like to host and be recorded. The test episode was helpful as we explained the podcast’s function to others in the seminary. Once we had approval from IMS and the Public Relations Committee, we began recording the podcast with AMBS professors and alumni.
How did the project evolve along the way?
We had always planned to use Reddit to start conversations, but we did not initially intend to do so in every episode. For a while, we also hoped to include episodes in which I spoke more about a popular social media topic. We realized this would require more time from me, not fit as well with the name “Seminary Reacts,” and leave less time to talk with professors, so we chose to use Reddit for each episode.
What surprises did you encounter in the process?
I think the most surprising part of the process for all of us involved was how much time it took to create the podcast — from the early planning, coming up with the Seminary Reacts branding and social media pages, to setting up our recording schedule, recording each episode, editing the podcast and then putting clips on social media. Abe spent countless hours editing the footage and audio for each episode, and he and I spent hours putting together the social media clips.
I was also surprised by how comfortable I was with hosting. While I did struggle a bit with the intro and outros where I spoke directly to the camera, hosting the conversation with the guest was a lot of fun right away!
What would you tell your pre-project self?
I would tell pre-project Amy to keep practicing patience. I went in with no expectations about how well the podcast would do or how many views or listens we would get, and that was the right mindset. I would also tell myself to expect this project to take much longer to get started than I originally thought, but that it would still work out.
What do you hope your listeners will experience?
I hope listeners will gain an understanding of what it means to be Mennonite and a peek into some of our conversations at the seminary. I hope they will appreciate Mennonite theology and practices as I have. In the midst of times where the most elevated Christian voices have platforms dedicated to who they are against, I wish for the podcast to communicate what and who we are for: being the gospel of Jesus — one that calls for peace, justice and to be a space of hope.
What will you take with you from this experience?
First, I will take with me the skills of creating a podcast, like the logistical elements of hosting, recording and uploading the podcast as well as promoting it on social media. I hope to continue using these skills in the future, though I am not positive what that will look like.
I will also take with me the connections that I have made or strengthened through the podcast. We have a pretty great team collaborating on the episodes, and we’ve had fantastic people come on as guests. I have had the chance to talk to professors I didn’t get to take classes from, and I’ve gotten to work with alumni and people outside of AMBS who I likely wouldn’t have had contact with otherwise. I hope to keep these connections and continue to build new ones.
Finally, I have learned a lot more about my original goal of connecting the Mennonite academic world with the wider Christian world online. One of my biggest hesitations about showing up online was a fear of backlash, so we had conversations about how to avoid major backlash that would result in harm and about the reality that pushback from others online may just be an expected consequence. So far, luckily, we have not experienced any major negative reactions.
I also learned about and met others who had a similar vision, and now I can say I have experience in trying to break into the online world from a Mennonite perspective. This is a passion that I think will continue to develop and grow both in knowledge and efficiency.
Amy will serve as Campus Pastor of Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas, starting with the 2026–27 academic year. She hopes to apply her passions and learning there and elsewhere in the future.
— Annette Brill Bergstresser, AMBS
Located in Elkhart, Indiana, on ancestral land of the Potawatomi and Miami peoples, Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary is a learning community with an Anabaptist vision, offering theological education for learners both on campus and at a distance as well as a wide array of lifelong learning programs — all with the goal of educating followers of Jesus Christ to be leaders for God’s reconciling mission in the world. ambs.edu
Want to receive AMBS news and updates via email?