Brehm team grows with two new hires

Jordan Poblete joins us as Brehm’s marketing and project manager; Christina Yen joins as our events and office specialist

The Brehm Center is pleased to share that we have welcomed two new employees to our team.

Jordan Poblete, aka Jordie, is a creative advocate and strategist. Having started his professional career in digital media/marketing and strategic consulting, he now joins Brehm as our Marketing and Project Manager. He loves storytelling in all its forms, but mostly movies having most recently worked as a producer with relationships at Disney, Universal, and A24. He also leads worship at Mariners Church in Orange County, California. You’ll most likely find him at a coffee shop in Irvine, CA, where he resides with his Alaskan Husky, Augie. He’s always looking for running partners and people to go to Denny’s with.

Christina Yen joins our team as our Events and Office Specialist. She grew up in Florida, surrounded by alligators, manatees, and shuttle launches. She graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with a degree in International Studies, focusing on Economics and Asia. She completed a senior honors thesis on Asian American Identity and worked at Duke University’s Center for Multicultural Affairs, advocating for diversity and inclusion on a historically white campus.

After moving to LA, Christina worked at Fuller and Caltech. She took a sixteen-year break from the traditional workforce, volunteering with elementary and middle school students while advocating for inclusion and diversity. She also coached Future Problem Solving teams during the pandemic, teaching creative and critical thinking. Christina enjoys swimming, hiking, camping, mixed martial arts, and sometimes running. She loves reading and listening to music, often simultaneously.

Brehm Center receives $1.25M from the Lilly Endowment’s Nurturing Children Through Worship and Prayer Initiative

We are pleased to announce that the Brehm Center has received $1.25M from the Lilly Endowment’s Nurturing Children Through Worship and Prayer Initiative. With this grant, we will develop new programming to support the religious and spiritual formation of children.

Help Children Grow in Faith and Deepen Their Relationships With God

The aim of the national initiative is to support faith-based organizations as they help children grow in faith and deepen their relationships with God. One of the Brehm Center’s founding donors, Dolores “Dee” Brehm, shared a lifelong passion for the spiritual formation of children, and we are honored to continue her legacy through this project.

Our mission is to gather diverse ministry leaders, artists, congregations, and families to create and test art-based children’s resources which foster nine formative practices for intergenerational worship.

Through this endeavor, our goal is to enable and serve church leaders, pastors, worship leaders, children’s directors, and families nationwide through the development of art-based resources to incorporate children more fully into the worship life of congregations. We will work with a team of pastors, educators, theologians, psychologists, and artists to develop resources for children focused on nine spiritual disciplines.

• Worship

• Prayer

• Wisdom

• Examen

• Humility

• Hospitality

• Purpose

• Shalom

• Celebration

We will represent each practice through the methods of word, theology, song, body, and arts—producing resources for congregations and families that incorporate multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multi-generational values.

Partner With Us

For the next four years, through the collaboration of our advisory board comprised of authors, church and worship leaders, and children’s ministry practitioners – we will consider the challenges and needs of the church today as it seeks to engage young worshipers through art-based methods.

If you have any questions, please contact either Ed Willmington (grant director) edw@fuller.edu or Grace Lee (grant program director) gracehlee@fuller.edu. We look forward to sharing our resources and partnering with you on this journey!