From my personal website: https://watchfullove.wordpress.com/about/
Fr. Jeremiah is from a small town in Northern California. Through his upbringing he was involved in Christian activities and leadership, and his adolescence he considered that he might be interested in church ministry “someday,” and hid this consideration in his heart.
Fr. Jeremiah attended Simpson University, a private Christian school, where he was a student of Bible and Theology. During this course of study his involvement in various ministry activities continued; he became involved in campus worship ministry, was involved in serving the homeless, and reaching out to youth and young-adult counter-culture. He was also involved in leading weekend retreats for groups of college students seeking to apply spiritual disciplines to their lives in an effort to cultivate a more profound ‘intimacy with God.’
The communal context of the learning environment provided opportunity for reflection upon the communal nature of the church, especially from a biblical perspective, and the obvious discontinuity between the “Ecclesia” of the New Testament and the church that he had experienced in his upbringing. In his studies he began to naturally develop a stronger incarnational and, therefore, sacramental view of the Church of Christ, often writing on the themes of the “present reality of the Kingdom of God,” and the call of Christians to an inextricable unity by virtue of life in Christ lived out by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit.
During his latter years in college he attended a conservative Episcopal church, and also became best friends with the woman who was to become his wife—now Kh. Kara Vollman. After graduating from college they moved to Seattle where he continued working with youth and also embarked on self-directed studies in the history of Christianity in an attempt to discern where he belonged in the midst of the complex lineage leading up to contemporary Evangelicalism. These toilsome and prayerful studies resulted in an interest in the Orthodox Church, the reading of various Orthodox writers, and eventually the pursuit of becoming Orthodox.
By grace, Fr. Jeremiah and Kh. Kara became inquirers at St. Paul Orthodox Church, where they were catechized and received into the Holy Orthodoxy on Lazarus Saturday, 2007. Over the years Fr. Jeremiah was especially drawn to the liturgical life of the Church and became a cantor, choir member, choir director, and acolyte. Fr. Jeremiah was tonsured as a Reader in 2009, was elevated to the Subdeaconate on the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, 2013, completed his education with the Antiochian House of Studies in 2014, was ordained to the holy diaconate in August 2015, and to the Holy Priesthood in Febuary 2017, at the hands of His Eminence Metropolitan JOSEPH.
In his words: “As we continue this sojourn of life on earth, I can humbly and sincerely state that I have no greater desire than to be a servant of the people of God, to bow low and to wash their feet, to become an agent of grace as a pastor, teacher, and steward of the Holy Mysteries. From the moment I fell in love with our Lord he enlarged my heart, such that I find no greater joy than that which comes from seeking to do the will of our Lord – serving Him, whose very body is the Church.”