Deborah Kelly Biography

The volunteers at this church offer their time and talents to us because they love our church. It is that love that signals the presence of Holy Spirit as you walk onto the campus here. No doubt you have read Reflections, the weekly column by Deborah Kelly. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the work Deborah has done for us over the past twenty years or more.  She has spent countless hours doing strategic planning for our future and being open to the guidance of Spirit to use her amazing abilities.  Deborah earned her BS and MS in Economics and found that the way she liked using math was to examine past results and predict what could happen in the future.  Her Master’s Thesis was predicting demographics for the future.  This knowledge has expanded into analytics in many different areas.  She worked for General Dynamics for six years planning missions for cruise missiles and F16s!  You may wonder how Deborah could go from doing this to planning for our church’s future. The staff and volunteers of our church family helped guide her path.  She pursued a Doctorate in Strategic Planning in 2008. In 2019, she completed a Harvard Business Analytics program and was amazed to see how analytics and strategy was used in so many different ways.   When Bruce was pastor here, Deborah worked with him to collect memorabilia for our 40th anniversary celebration.  Later she worked with Bryan’s Focus Team, implementing his plan to use analytics to project our future.  She put that information to work as chair of the recent Mission Study Team that we needed to prepare a picture of our current church family for our new pastor search.  How have all Deborah’s accomplishments related to her faith and her effort in building God’s kingdom? On the surface, analytics don’t seem very spiritual.  She grew from an econ major, to charting cruise missile paths, to planning the future of our church.  God asked Deborah to trust him and to accomplish amazing things to his glory.  Deborah’s accomplishments came from her unwavering faith in following his call. She grew in her professional life as a college professor, learned to be comfortable in public speaking and was willing to offer years of her time to our church family using her skills.   God works in mysterious ways. All he asks of us is to show up to be part of that mystery.  Deborah has done just that. She has been greatly blessed to be a blessing to us all. Her gifts to us of her amazing mind, her time and her love, have added to our awareness of the presence of Holy Spirit here at RB.   Thank you, Deborah. From Irene Dunny