Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park

On August 1st, seminarian Kyle Duff begins a one-year full-time internship at Augustana. He wrote the following introduction:

Hello Augustana Community!

My name is Kyle Duff, a student with LSTC and grateful to be your new pastoral intern!

I live with my wife Jeneal (pronounced jeh-nell) and our new 7-week old son Camden here in Hyde Park (as well as our two cats!).

I consider Chicagoland home as I was born in the northwest suburbs with my three siblings, living in Schaumburg and Itasca until graduating from college, so it is a blessing to remain here for my schooling and internship as much of our family is also around the Midwest.

I grew up in another Lutheran denomination, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, where my father was a grade-school teacher, and then pastor as he went to seminary while I was in preschool. During my time at Valparaiso University, where I studied “Theology and Ministry” as I had felt a much clearer call to ministry in my first semester of college, I began to discern that the LCMS was not where I felt most aligned theologically. Eventually I ended up officially becoming a member at an ELCA church, Bethel Lutheran Church, in Winchester, Virginia where Jeneal and I had moved for her graduate school. Jeneal serves as a Physician Assistant (PA) with Lawndale Christian Health Center on the West Side, but is still enjoying a few more weeks of maternity leave currently.

I am passionate about the church’s role as a space that can welcome and hold all people no matter who you are or what you believe, and that the baptized body of Christ has a special call towards reconciliation and seeking wholeness amidst brokenness.

Besides learning how to be a father, and continuing to be a committed cat-dad, I love to be outdoors, especially hiking, camping, kayaking, and riding my bike as well other team sports and athletic activities. I deeply appreciate music and theatre, and have dabbled a little in each over the years. I am enlivened by meaningful conversations and love drinking coffee and eating sweet things and having dinners with other people or playing games, whatever I can do to gather with folks. My wife and I like to explore the city and surrounding area with other people from restaurants to museums, to parks, and nature, etc… and I have gotten more into taking care of and propagating our house plants over the pandemic.

I am very excited to learn and grow with the Augustana Community! I have many interests related to ministry and am eager to both engage a lot of areas and also further discern what more specific areas I feel called to. I look forward to meeting many, if not all of you in the year to come!

In peace & joy,

Kyle Duff