NUrturing Faith

Sharing Stories from LCMNU

December 2025

a place to breathe: ethan flood

One of the beautiful parts of Lutheran Campus Ministry at Northwestern University is how our students do not fit into only one box or come from only one faith background. Ethan Flood is one example of this.

Growing up in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Ethan alternated between attending an ELCA congregation with his mother and a Seventh-day Adventist congregation with his father. Though each has different belief systems, Ethan enjoyed attending each church and added he “never attached my faith to one specific denomination.

Ethan marked down Lutheran and Seventh-day Adventist backgrounds as an incoming freshman at NU. With no Seventh-day Adventist church in the area, Ethan heard instead from Pastor Deanna Langle and started attending LCMNU. It offered him not just a good place on campus but also a place to focus on what he believed in after years of switching between the two churches

“I started coming here and kept coming,” Ethan, a junior studying industrial engineering and economics, said. “And I think that it's challenged me to think more about what I believe and start to form stronger opinions about things and make conclusions for myself rather than just being more passive and just going to church.”

Ethan has continued to contribute to LCMNU in numerous ways since he first stepped inside the Center on Orrington Avenue. He stepped up his freshman year to serve as communications leader among his fellow students on the Leadership Board and is currently the secretary. Ethan is active in various other ways on campus, including through the NU Solar Car Team and a finance-focused club he helped launch. But LCMNU is his favorite, he said.

The Boy Scout has seen the ways service can touch others, and one moment in particular exemplifies how LCMNU touches not only people in need in the Chicago area but also fellow students on campus who we may not initially expect to visit the ministry. Ethan also spoke about this moment during his freshman year Showcase talk.

Ethan’s freshman year roommate had been looking for a place to practice the violin and had started using LCMNU for that while also playing at worship services. The roommate was seemingly not as interested in the other parts of the ministry. But sometime during the winter quarter of that freshman year, Ethan and other students passed around a sign-up sheet to help out with the nonprofit Concordia Place by spending time with young refugees in Chicago. The sign-up sheet got to Ethan’s roommate, who immediately wrote down his name and email to join the other students in talking, coloring and playing with the children.

“I was like shocked, because he wasn't really there for the service or religious aspects. It seemed to me he was more there, you know, so that he could play,” Ethan said. “But that was just like a moment where I realized, ‘Wow, he's so willing to do that.’ And so I signed up as well, and it ended up being a really phenomenal experience.”

Ethan will continue to stay involved in LCMNU, and it’s hard for him not to, given he is living in the Lutheran Center’s third-floor apartment this year. For other students who are afraid of committing more time to LCMNU amid everything Northwestern students do each day and everything they have to balance, Ethan said the ministry is “worth it” and “gives you some time to breathe.”

That time of quiet and sitting still, of enjoying a meal and worship with others, of simply being present and not always being on the move, is vital for Northwestern students like Ethan. Those who have supported LCMNU and who are considering doing so in the future are so important to making that possible.

“It’s the community that you get here,” Ethan said. “And then to grow in faith, in your personal journey with faith, with all of these other people who are also going through that, is a very powerful experience.”