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Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

Creating a Spark

Growing kids in God’s Word

Her home-based workspace is littered with the stuff of creation. Hymn verses. Lively verbs. Scripture texts. Published books that swarm with monkeys and toucans, elephants and bees.

Typically, the family computer is surrounded with the fragments that will become engaging faith curriculum for kids. Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez is an active freelance writer with Augsburg Fortress, the publishing ministry of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Akaloo. SPARK. Fed and Forgiven. Jennifer’s words and classroom wisdom for the youngest learners come to fully-illustrated life in Augsburg curriculum materials that serve congregations across the nation.

But here in the Ohman-Rodriguez home, sons Rick (11) and Paul (7) brush up against the creative process daily. Rick picks up a newly-created samba rhythm exercise and beats it out on his drum set. The boys see Mom thumbing through her Bible, feeding her own soul and searching for ways to make God’s Word accessible for preschoolers. Suppertime often turns to questions about faith.

Says Jennifer, “As a parent, I can connect in a way that I couldn’t have five years ago.” Curriculum-writing has enlivened her curiosity and confidence in making “the connection between real life and faith and the Word.”

It’s relationship that is the grounding of Jennifer’s professional and personal life. “All curriculum is based on relationship. Jesus was all about relationship. Over the years, perhaps 100 kids have come through my (St. Paul) classroom doors on Sunday mornings. I know I am a part of Jesus’ love for them.” She strives to remember each child’s name and something about them. When these children grow up, “they’ll know that there were people at church who took the time for them.”

For Jennifer, growing up meant Scandinavian smorgasbords in her Moline Lutheran church. Tables were heaped with lefse, lutefisk, potato sausage, and homemade pickled herring. Jennifer’s mother modeling the habits of faith: reading devotional books and the Bible, attending weekly worship, and directing the Sunday School.

As a young adult with a college degree in music performance and voice, Jennifer took off for a performance career in New York City. She struggled. The city was a “tough and lonely place.” To pay the bills, she took jobs waiting tables — until she spotted an ad for “play facilitators” in a children’s center. And she fell in love. “I fell in love with the whole development process, from baby to toddler to preschooler. I wanted to know more,” she recalls. When “I was struggling to find connections in New York, it was young children and their parents who fostered my passions.”

Equipped with a degree in early childhood, Jennifer’s newfound vocation has unfolded. Freelance work has offered flexibility for parenting her sons, but there have been “dark moments” when assignments were few. She has followed her heart.
And now, with the ELCA publishing house committed to developing materials that engage people of all ages in God’s Word, she’s cooking. Literally. Jennifer’s most recent assignment is to write the cooking and music modules for next summer’s Vacation Bible Experience. What comes after that cool Discovery Canyon? This writer isn’t leaking the secret.

Jennifer Ohman, a Scandinavian Lutheran, married Tony Rodriguez, a Roman Catholic Filipino. “Our ethnic identities were wrapped up in our churches.” The two needed to find “a faith home under one roof,” and their journey eventually brought them to St. Paul, worshiping then in the “old” sanctuary.

They knew they were home when Paul, then 2, stood up on the pew and shouted, “Where’s Jesus? I can’t see him!” No one shushed the family. People smiled. The congregation’s love for children came through in a “pattern of welcome.”

“Every time a child is born, hope is born. Hope for the world,” Jennifer says. “If we treat every infant born as Mary and Joseph treated Jesus, maybe we can move to a different level of humanity. How we treat that infant in the home, in group care, in churches, in schools impacts all of our futures. It’s the preciousness and potential of life that compels me at this point.”

In Jennifer’s Sunday classroom for St. Paul’s first-graders, week to week, activities are centered in the lectionary. Kids learn the same scriptural texts that the whole church hears in worship. Much of Jennifer’s creative spark and musical passion in the classroom end up in SPARK, the extensive new Augsburg curriculum organized around the weekly lectionary.

When a person approaches the end of life and memory, often it is the traces of “a hymn, the rosary, the Lord’s Prayer that remain,” reflects Jennifer. “I want that embeddedness in children, so that when they walk out of this church, they’ll carry these things in their brains. We’re building a faith neural highway by repetition.”

Jennifer writes lesson plans and supportive words for people who pass along God’s Story to kids. She’s helping craft an avenue for faith. She’s a pencil in the hand of God, to be sure. And she is in awe of this journey.

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"For the Benedictine spirit, work is not simply work. Whatever kind of work it is...it has to be good work, work that makes the world a better, more just, more fair, and more humane place for everyone." ~Joan Chittister