Meet The Chaplains
Reid Carpenter | January 27, 2022
Special to The Echo | Reid Carpenter
Hoffman and Spencer working in the Spiritual Life office.
The Warren Wilson College Spiritual Life is staffed by two chaplains, Reverend Shannon Spencer and Reverend Matt Hoffman. Spencer and Hoffman are co-supervisors of the Spiritual Life Crew, and they instruct and advise within the Interfaith Leadership minor.
Spencer took the chaplain position in January 2021. She knew about WWC through previous experience with social work classes and PEG 3 internships at Asheville Poverty Initiative (API).
“... link(ing) both the experiences and the relationships that I have in Asheville with students became very exciting to me,” said Spencer.
Spencer founded API, a nonprofit, in 2011. API was born of Spencer’s qualms with the Christian church’s ministry and relationship with charity.
“We need to find ways to balance out or have equitable distribution, but the way that we do it is toxic and more transactional than it is transformational,” Spencer. “I became really convicted, both personally and professionally, to begin to create spaces where people weren’t identified by the resources they had or the resources they lacked.”
API’s goal is to foster connections between community members, regardless of what they have or don’t have: everyone is welcome to share a meal.
Spencer has a passion for creating welcoming and safe spaces for all people regardless of their relationship to religion.
“Anyone for whom has and/or think they might be able to find meaning in something, this space, Spiritual Life, the chaplain’s office, is truly a space of curiosity,” Spencer said. “It's a space where people can come and be exactly where they are and be supported, be left alone, share resources.”
Spencer has big dreams for her time at Wilson.
“I would like to see students have more opportunities to engage in relationships and work in ways that bring the lens through which they view spirituality to life: it’s not just an intellectual assent or it’s not only what we read in textbooks or sacred scripture,” Spencer said. “What does that look like on the ground? How does that inform our lives or does it not? Really just being able to play that out experientially, and then providing time to reflect on that and integrate that. I’m really excited about instituting, facilitating spaces where that can be, both on campus and in other spaces with other people off campus.”
Spencer works closely with Hoffman.
“The reason that I work here is because of the Reverend Matt Hoffman,” she said, laughing.
Hoffman has been at WWC for 6 years. He was adjunct for some years, slowly taking on more classes, including introduction to Islam, religion and food, and religion and environmental justice. He also began to work more closely with the previous chaplain, Brian Ammons, on Spiritual Life programming as well as developing the interfaith leadership minor.
In 2018, Hoffman was asked to take another title, associate director of Interfaith Initiatives. He understands this position and his role as a chaplain as overlapping.
“I think, for me, chaplains can show up in a few ways,” Hoffman said. “One of those, and what interested me in this kind of hybrid position, is, I think, interfaith work and being a chaplain for all, not just students, but also staff and faculty on a campus, being able to hold space, hold difficult conversations, kind of differently, frankly, than our counterparts in the counseling center, being able to hold a space that allows for more conversation around deep meaning and meaning making.”
Hoffman takes his role as a chaplain seriously and is interested in understanding how modern chaplaincy shows up on increasingly diverse college campuses.
“Increasingly, DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) work is not just a purview but is part and parcel to the work of the chaplain’s office,” Hoffman said. “Not just because religious diversity is an important part of DEI work but because that religious diversity is so intertwined to conversations of justice and it’s so part of folks’ intersectional multi layered identities, and so helping folks see that, not only should we be in those conversations because of that but it is because we are in these conversations that we can do the work of justice together.”
Hoffman’s other great passion is food.
“A lot of my interest in food and the reason I talk about it all the time is because I finally feel like I get to be authentic and true to myself when I do it,” Hoffman said. “And I dare say that that interest is an interest shared by many folks at Wilson, by many students, by many of our staff and faculty, because food is this place of connection, because food is this thing we have to do every day, pretty much, and because it reminds us of the larger values and the larger ritual things.”
The Spiritual Life office and crew, under the chaplains’ guidance put on Interfaith Dinners, Jewish Shabbat programs, Christian Dinner Church, Pagan events and more.
Aria Hansen, a sophomore craft and business major, soon to be Fine Woodworking Crew member and Unitarian Universalist, is an avid attendee of many Spiritual Life events.
“I talk about community so much here at Wilson, and I feel like in every other aspect I am not getting that community feeling but in interfaith work, I am,” Hansen said. “I’m not even close with any of these people in the room. We don't hang out on any other front but that’s when I feel the most sense of community, because I feel like we’re all coming together to find that sense of peace within that space and within the work we’re doing.”
The chaplains’ office, located in Ransom House, to the left of Boon looking at the mountains, is open to all students, staff and faculty. Spencer and Hoffman are available to meet to discuss anything and everything.
“It's a very privileged space to be in, to walk alongside folks when they’re really excited, when they’re really down, or when they’re really piseed or when they’re really curious. All those are really sacred spaces and to be invited into that with a student is really meaningful,” Spencer said.
