GUIDING WITH A SKILLFUL HAND

GUIDING WITH A SKILLFUL

HAND by Annie S. Mitchell

The Rev. Dr. Joey Shelton has some large shoulders, which is fortunate considering what rests on them.

Serving Millsaps College as dean of the chapel, director of church relations and director of the Center for Ministry, Shelton has supported the spiritual needs of the campus and the community since joining the staff in 2017.

No stranger to Millsaps, Shelton played football and baseball while attending the college, from which he graduated in 1982. Shelton went on to earn his Juris Doctor from the University of Mississippi in 1985, and together with his wife, Connie, they both earned their Master of Divinity from Duke University in 1997, followed by their Doctor of Ministry from Columbia Theological Seminary in 2006. For the Sheltons, a family that prays — and studies — together stays together.

“It has been a joy to return to my alma mater and be involved with the convergences of faith, reason and work alongside students, faculty, staff, alumni and all our church-related communities,” said Shelton in a 2020 college interview. “I get to engage both internal and external audiences, hopefully helping each benefit from the other.”

The importance of the college’s relationship with The United Methodist Church is a central theme within Millsaps’ current and upcoming strategic plan, according to Millsaps President Dr. Robert W. Pearigen. “One of our strategic goals is to position the college as a place vital to our community and known for free, courageous and bold academic discourse that is deeply informed by a Wesleyan tradition that values intellectual honesty, integrity and civility,” said Pearigen. “The broad and important work of Joey and his leadership team is vital to the future of our college.”

Some of the many areas of Shelton’s work include teaching Wesleyan theology each spring semester and, in July 2021, assuming directorship of the Center for Ministry at Millsaps College. The Center has developed Christian leaders through lifelong learning for over two decades. Each year, more than 800 pastors and laypersons from across the southern U.S. engage in spiritual formation, theological education, leadership development and training in the practices of ministry. Strategic partnerships make it possible for the Center for Ministry to offer programs that transform clergy, laity and congregations.

Other vital spiritual areas and programs housed within the Center for Ministry include:

• The Jump Start Program, a unique series of online modules that introduce students to Wesleyan theology, pastoral care and other essentials of effective ministry.

• The License to Preach School, which includes classes on preaching, worship and sacraments, and leadership and administration.

• The Mississippi Course of Study School, an extension of the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, featuring classes that equip bi-vocational pastors for spiritually grounded, theologically responsible, relationally skilled and professionally effective ministry.

• The Thriving in Ministry program, made possible with support from the Lilly Endowment Inc., through which southern clergy women of all Christian denominations benefit from peer group support, mentorship, leadership development, retreats, congregational training and resources for clergy well-being.

• The Millsaps Youth Theological Academy, designed to guide Christian teenagers to think theologically and integrate their faith into their daily activities.

Shelton also works directly with the college community in the role of chaplain. Responsibilities include overseeing campus worship services, working with student faith organizations and offering personal spiritual counseling to students, faculty and staff.

While Shelton’s portfolio is vast, his commitment is singular — to serve. “For all my work, I stand on the shoulders of many incredible people who laid firm foundations upon which to build,” said Shelton. “Throughout my life, through sheer grace, there have always been people willing to give of themselves as mentors, teachers, coaches and friends, all the while challenging my mind, body and spirit. “I am grateful,” Shelton adds. “I never dreamed that I would be back at Millsaps College in this unique role with the opportunity to offer to others what continues to be so graciously given to me.”

DID YOU KNOW?

SHELTON WAS AN ELSE SCHOLAR WHILE AT MILLSAPS. ELSE SCHOOL DEAN JERRY WHITT WROTE SHELTON’S ACADEMIC RECOMMENDATION FOR LAW SCHOOL AND, OVER A DECADE LATER, DID THE SAME FOR HIS APPLICATION TO DIVINITY SCHOOL.

A PRAYER FOR 2022

In the Beginning God Spoke ...

“Light Appear! Day and Night! Evening and Morning!

Sky and Water! Water and Sky! Separate! Heaven and Water and Land! Earth, Green Up! Seed and Plant and Tree and Fruit! Lights Come Out! Shine in Heaven’s Sky! Seasons and Days and Years!

Ocean and Fish and Sea Life, Swarm! Birds, Fly!

Earth, Generate Life! Animal and Reptile and Bug! Human Being! Reflect God’s Image! Rest and Blessed and Holy!”

May God’s Creation of Heaven and Earth and Sky and Sea and We and Thee, Be Received as a Gracious Gift to You and Me, and by God’s Grace with Joy Anew, We Wholly Embrace the Genesis of Two Thousand Twenty-Two.

— Joey Shelton

with help from The Message Translation by Eugene Peterson of Genesis 1, adapted.

GOOD

FOR MILLSAPS AND FOR MISSISSIPPI

DEAN GOOD WITH THE EASTER BUNNY; 1987 BOBASHELA

JEFF AND DEBBIE ALONG WITH DAUGHTERS ALEX (LEFT) AND CARLY

The lives of Mississippi’s future foodies and Latin students were sealed on Presidents Day in the early 1980s.

That’s the day Millsaps student Jeff Good knocked on the first floor Bacot window of Debbie McGregor and presented her with a George Washington stamp he bought at the student union. Debbie thought it endearing enough that she eventually started dating him. And like the stamp, they stuck.

Their initial introduction, however, was about a year prior.

“I first met Debbie in a zoology class our freshman year at Millsaps, but I did so poorly that year the dean of students sent me home,” said Good.

That dean of students was Stuart Good, Jeff’s father. The Goods had relocated to Mississippi a few years earlier from Utah, where the senior Good was dean at Westminster College in Salt Lake City.

“Whatever success I’ve had in life did not present itself during my first year at Millsaps,” said Good. “But after getting the lowest score in zoology class and living at home on academic probation for a semester, I took my return to Millsaps pretty seriously,” added Good, who ended up with straight A’s in the school of business from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Business Administration in 1986.

It was from her American history teacher at St. Mary’s Episcopal School in Memphis, Tennessee, that Debbie first heard of Millsaps. “I fell in love with the college on my first visit,” said Debbie. “My roommate was also from Memphis, and I knew other girls from my hometown, so it was a perfect fit.”

Debbie joined the Kappa Delta Sorority and majored in classics. “I took my share of

Latin, Greek and culture courses, which were taught by amazing faculty,” said Debbie. “In fact, I still visit with Dr. Catherine Freis a couple times a year.”

Jeff and Debbie married after graduation, and Jeff worked in computer sales with the NCR Corporation while Debbie taught Latin at Jackson’s Callaway High School. Jeff put his Millsaps degree to good use and, together with his best friend from high school, Dan Blumenthal, raised every penny needed to open their first restaurant, BRAVO!, in 1994. “There wasn’t GoFundMe back then,” said Jeff. “We got in the trenches, found people who believed in us and used hand-to-hand combat to realize our dream.”

Fast-forward a few decades, Jeff is president of Mangia Bene Restaurant Management Group, which owns and operates BRAVO! Italian Restaurant and Bar, Broad Street Baking Company and Sal & Mookie’s New York Pizza & Ice Cream Joint, all located in Jackson. He’s the founding chairman of the non-profit Refill Jackson Initiative, a workforce training program designed to empower young adults so they are more confident, better equipped and more motivated to enter into, navigate and stay in the workforce. He is also chairman of the Greater Jackson Chamber Partnership’s 2021 Executive Committee. Debbie taught Latin at the high school level for three decades and is now an adjunct classics professor at Mississippi College. Together they raised twin girls Alexandra (Alex) and Caroline (Carly). Debbie also currently serves the college as president of its alumni association, a board on which she has served for two years. “It’s too easy for alumni to become removed from their alma mater,” says Debbie. “Millsaps needs people to be engaged. To get involved. To come back and to come home.”

Debbie was home recently for Millsaps’ Homecoming, and is excited about the college’s largest first-year class in nearly a decade. “It’s vital to our city and state that Millsaps thrive,” says Debbie. “I’m honored to serve the college in this way, and look forward to building on our current momentum.”

“I’m proud of Debbie for paying it forward,” adds Jeff. “We all need to remember where we came from. We need to show up and show out for Millsaps. That’s how we will ensure the same experience we received will be received by others.”

Both Goods credit much of their individual and combined success to the profound impact Millsaps College had on their lives.

“Millsaps does an excellent job of teaching its students one of the most valuable skills – the ability to think critically,” said Jeff. “Through Millsaps, I found my place, my passion, my talent, my first job and my wife.”

MILLSAPS SOPHOMORE DEBBIE MCGREGOR, 1983 BOBASHELA

MILLSAPS SENIOR JEFF GOOD, 1986 BOBASHELA

LIVES WELL LIVED

By John Sewell

Saturday, Oct. 11, 1969. The Millsaps football team had just trounced the Southwestern (now Rhodes) Lynx by a score of 44–0 at homecoming, and a first-year student from Laurel, Mississippi, named Janet Sanderson strolled onto the football field to meet her date for the weekend, an offensive tackle named Luther Ott.

“I met Luther for the very first time on the football field,” Sanderson recalls, “because in Laurel, if you had a date with a football player, you walked him off the field. I just got up from my seat, walked down there and he was talking to his daddy, who always came to see his football games. The rest is history.”

History, indeed. Fifty-one years later, they are still a team.

Sanderson came with a strong connection to Millsaps. Her aunt’s mother, Fannie Buck Leonard, was one of the four founders of the Kappa Delta chapter at Millsaps. Sanderson’s mother and three aunts all attended Millsaps, as did her brother Joe, sister Sarah and her cousins, O’Hara Bass Croswell and Marilyn Thompson. Ott hailed from Hattiesburg, where he was a starting tackle at Hattiesburg High.

“I was a terrible football player until my senior year,” Ott said. “My coach called me in his office and said Millsaps Coach (Harper) Davis had seen me on film and wanted me to play for him. I got on a bus and came up to Millsaps. I was still basking in the glow of having succeeded in football and was so thrilled that someone thought I could play in college, so the next thing I knew, I was a Millsaps Major.”

Ott laughed as he remembered his time as a player under the legendary Coach Davis as “a joyful, character-building experience.” That experience paid off when Ott was voted into the Millsaps College Sports Hall of Fame.

Listening to the Otts, who married in March 1970, it’s easy to imagine their life together as the same type of experience. They speak with a gentle humor and affection about each other and what they have done together.

And they’ve done a lot.

BY JOHN SEWELL

Luther Ott graduated with a history degree from Millsaps in 1971, and the next day he and Janet moved to Oxford. Ott earned his law degree from the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1973. He went on to practice law for the next 30 years and established the Ott & Purdy law firm in 1981. His education at Millsaps definitely prepared him for law school.

“People were asking questions and challenging assumptions at Millsaps and trying to move past immature, unformed thoughts toward thoughts that had structural integrity and could withstand questions,” Ott remembered. “That's the currency at Millsaps. When I got to law school, there were no clear right or wrong answers — you just had to pick the best answers, and to do that, you had to ask a lot of questions. By the time I got there, that was something I had already learned how to do.”

By 1993, however, the practice of law was set to the side for a while as Janet and Luther decided to attend Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a time in which they sought to simply study, and they pursued it with no intention of being ordained.

“It was an outstanding time,” Janet Ott said. “We said, independent of each other, that we're going to immerse ourselves in biblical studies and biblical history. I had been founder and director of children's services at Stewpot (Community Services) and had basically been doing pastoral care with those kids and their families. I began to have thoughts of the priesthood and got into the track for ordination.”

They graduated from Episcopal Divinity School in 1996, and Janet was ordained into the diaconate in June 1996 and the priesthood in March 1997. She served three parishes in the central Mississippi area — St. Columb’s in Ridgeland, Church of the Creator in Clinton and St. Mark’s in Raymond. It wasn’t long before Luther followed suit.

“Luther went through the process after I was ordained,” Janet said. “He just did it. He just said, ‘I see now.’”

Ordained in 1998, Luther Ott is quick to admit he didn’t follow the ordinary process in the Episcopal Church of discernment before seminary.

“I had a contentious relationship with religion,” he said. “I expect a lot of religion, and I expect a lot of myself. When I got to Millsaps, I began reflecting critically on the role of the church and things I saw as injustices in the community I lived in and the church I grew up in.”

As Janet and Luther built their lives together and shared their talents with others, they also stayed busy raising a family and strengthening their legacy at Millsaps. Luther served as a member of the Board of Trustees for the college and was selected as alumnus of the year in 2012. In 2015, he and Janet each were awarded an honorary Doctor of Public Service degree at commencement.

Their son, Luther, graduated from Millsaps in 1993; his wife, Gabrielle (Sciortino), graduated in 1995; and their daughter, Abby, is a current student in the class of 2023 and pursuing a degree in psychology, with minors in Spanish and communication studies. Their daughter, Sara Katherine Beckett, is married to Ryan Beckett, a 1996 Millsaps graduate and current member of the Board of Trustees.

With her parents in Texas, Abby Ott is happy to have her grandparents nearby.

“Having them right down the street from me is such a blessing, and their love for Millsaps is immeasurable,” Ott said. “They are always there for me, whether it’s preparing a home-cooked meal or visiting with me in the rocking chairs on their front porch.”

Now retired, Luther and Janet spend their time with their grandchildren and working their cattle farm in western Hinds County. Millsaps, however, is always close to their hearts. In fact, Luther will be on campus in the spring of 2022 as an adjunct faculty member, teaching business law in the Else School of Management.

Harvey Fiser, interim dean of the Else School, was particularly concerned with selecting the right person to teach core business law classes.

“Luther was the first name that came to mind,” Fiser said. “His character and legal knowledge are unparalleled, and his expertise in ethics will help infuse a sense of social responsibility into the discussions.”

Janet is quick to note the formative experience Luther had — and continues to have — at Millsaps.

“I promise you, every time they draw blood from him, I expect it to be purple.”

RETURNING TO A SENSE OF NORMALITY

Battling through a Pandemic, Staying Vigilant

and Coming Back in Full By Chris Lawrence

In sports, as in life, there are the highs of big wins and the lows of heartbreaking defeats. When the world was halted by COVID-19 in spring 2020, sports and life began to ride the same roller-coaster of emotions.

In an instant, collegiate and professional sports were quick to respond with action, but with a cloud of disbelief, sadness and hints of fear as spring seasons were cut short last year. The season turned into a waiting game of both uncertainty and watching the clock for a return to play.

On March 12, 2020, NCAA President Mark Emmert and the Board of Governors canceled the soon-to-be-held March Madness basketball tournament as well as the remaining winter and spring NCAA championships in an attempt to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

At that point, it became evident that the spring sports seasons would be curtailed. Coaches across the country did everything in their power to find ways to honor their seniors, if possible. Some schools ended sports abruptly, while Millsaps and others were able to fit games in a few days after the NCAA’s announcement.

“We scrambled to find opponents to get seniors last games to play,” said Millsaps head softball coach Caroline DeLoach. “It didn’t feel real at first, and we thought the virus would eventually go away.”

Softball was fortunately able to travel to Conway, Arkansas and play a final pair of games, where the efforts of the seniors from Millsaps College, Birmingham-Southern College and Hendrix College were all recognized on March 15. Millsaps baseball was hosting Berry College that week and was able to honor both sets of seniors.

“I had several Berry parents email us saying how classy that was of Millsaps to not just recognize Millsaps’ seniors but Berry’s as well,” said Millsaps baseball coach Jim Page. “We put in the work, and we had no idea how much that meant to other people.”

Coach Page garnered a unique perspective as both a coach and parent when his son’s senior baseball season ended at the same time. Still, adequate advice was hard to find.

“None of us had been through [a pandemic],” said Page. “What words could I give the team? That was a big struggle for me as a coach, feeling I couldn’t find the right words or an experience to base something like that on.”

Coaches across the country felt the same way, but the efforts of several top decision-makers, including Millsaps College President Dr. Robert Pearigen and Millsaps Director of Athletics Aaron Pelch, did not go unnoticed. The Millsaps leaders attempted to complete as much of that spring as possible and were able to give their seniors a tribute. “I think the fact that [leadership] showed they cared, the players listened and there was respect coming from that,” said Page.

The next question was, when would sports return for the upcoming fall semester? The answer arrived on July 16, 2020, when the Southern Athletic Association (SAA) Presidents’ Council approved the decision to move all fall sports entirely to the spring semester.

A modified schedule, featuring a condensed conference-only model was then approved on Oct. 12. All 18 Millsaps Athletics programs were officially slated to play at certain points between January and May.

While in season, student-athletes were required to be tested for COVID-19 three times a week and wear masks during indoor activities, per SAA guidelines.

The Millsaps Athletics and Millsaps College communities took it upon themselves to limit possible spreading activities with mitigation measures, which they continue to implement today.

“We definitely played that season with a lot more passion and emotion because we knew it was limited and this is what we get,” said Millsaps softball infielder Brooklyn Wascom. “We had to make the most out of it, especially for those seniors.”

Games could be rescheduled because of COVID-19, but this never occurred for the Majors. In total, only one athletic competition was canceled during the spring 2021 season — which was an away event.

“In our heads, we just wanted to play and didn’t want to miss out on that much,” said Millsaps women’s soccer midfielder Mattie Marks. “We just worked hard to make sure that we knew all of the rules and that we knew what we were getting into. We were just thankful to get any minutes that we could.”

Today, a feeling of gratitude shines through as sports return to their proper place on the calendar. Precautions and protocols continue to be taken to keep student-athletes and fans safe, but a sense of normality is returning to fields and courts across the country.

In August 2021, fall sports returned to their usual format with fewer restrictions. Fans and students are returning to the stands while wearing masks indoors. Testing will continue for unvaccinated student-athletes for the foreseeable future.

Though things may not be completely back to normal, teams could not be more ready for a return to a full slate of games. “I have this excited perspective, as I did when I was a freshman,” said Wascom, entering her senior year. “It’s been so long since we had a full season, I just want to go in and get after it!”

Getting used to a complete schedule has actually been an adjustment for some upperclassmen who competed for the Majors in 2018 or 2019.

“Yeah, it’s kind of weird because I almost kind of forgot what it was like,” said Marks. “It’s kind of like a whole new feeling; it’s like everything restarted. We’re all really glad though, especially with me being a senior.”

All student-athletes who played or were scheduled to compete during the spring, fall and winter of 2020 were granted an extra year of eligibility by the NCAA. Several seniors during that period were unable to commit to another because they had career plans or graduate school options lined up thanks to their Millsaps degrees.

A total of three Millsaps women’s soccer seniors are planning to return and use their extra season of eligibility while continuing their education at the college.

“That’s also a great thing about a Millsaps education,” said Page. “Our guys were already prepared. Athletics teaches that life goes on, there are bumps in the road and you fight through, and some things are out of your control. I couldn’t be prouder of how our team handled it.”