Kenda Creasy Dean is an ordained United Methodist pastor in the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference and Professor of Youth, Church and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary, where she works closely with the Institute for Youth Ministry. She also currently serves as the coordinating pastor of Kingston United Methodist Church in Kingston, NJ, supervising the student interns there. She has authored numerous books on youth and the church, including The Godbearing Life: The Art of Soul Tending for Youth Ministry with Ron Foster, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church, and The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry with Andrew Root.

Kenda hails from a long line of Ohio farmers and Kentucky coal miners, although she herself is a P.K.—a politician’s kid. At fifteen she attended a United Methodist church camp on Lake Erie that pretty much changed everything.

A graduate of Miami University (Ohio) and Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, Kenda served as a pastor and as a campus minister before earning her doctorate at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1997. She and her husband Kevin are the ridiculously proud parents of two grown children, Brendan (a filmmaker in New York City) and Shannon (a college sophomore). Her guilty pleasures include watching “Downton Abbey” with her husband and digging her toes in the sand in Ocean Grove, NJ.