Coming back to Samford University’s campus after 20 years away has “been like putting one foot in front of the other and just doing the next thing,” said Jen Venable ’04.
Venable, who graduated from Samford’s Moffett & Sanders School of Nursing, has been a practicing nurse for 21 years, and while she continues in that work, she returned to campus in fall 2024 to begin Beeson Divinity School’s Master of Divinity program. It’s a return to a call that came to Venable as a young girl, one she almost forgot.
Venable felt the call to ministry as a little girl and pursued it throughout her teenage years, with plans to serve as a missionary with the Southern Baptist Convention’s two-year Journeyman program
A month before she graduated from Samford, she started dating her husband, Eric, who was coming to Beeson. She put the Journeyman plans on hold to marry him. Over the years, the Venables had four children as Eric served multiple churches in Alabama and Colorado before coming back to Birmingham to work at Daymark Pastoral Counseling.
In 2023, Venable was rereading her college journals, where she wrote about her call to ministry, when she “almost audibly” heard the Lord say, “Don’t you remember?”
“I didn’t know if it was going to be feasible. We have four kids and I work part-time,” Venable said.
But God led her to Beeson and has provided every semester, she said.
“It feels like a joy to be here,” Venable said. “I am having so much fun in seminary. I think if I had tried to think long-term, big picture, everything all at once, it would have felt overwhelming. My prayer from the beginning has been, ‘Show me the next thing.’ He’s been really faithful to do that. It’s confronted a lot in my heart that needed confronting, but it’s also been such a delightful joy to watch Him be so faithful in the next thing.”
God has used Venable’s career in nursing to help her see people holistically.
“As time has gone on, the Lord has softened my heart to understand this person in the bed is a whole human being and needs me to see them as that,” Venable said. “Sometimes I’m with them at their most vulnerable, even walking to death with some of my patients. What an honor that is.”
The work of a nurse is “great preparation” for pastoral ministry, “to see the people the Lord has entrusted to your care as whole people and to have the honor of walking with them through whatever they’re walking through.”
Venable also credited Samford with helping her see nursing as both an art and a science.
“The professors emphasized that it’s the art of caring for people and the science of the human body,” Venable said.
Venable said she’s seen more opportunities to share the Word in the hospital now, in addition to growing in her love for it because of her studies. In November 2025, Venable presented research at the University of Cambridge on Gregory of Nyssa’s homilies on the Song of Songs and how it connected with a 17th-century Reformation poet, who used similar imagery in her poetry, after a friend at the renowned university asked her to come and share what she had learned.
“It was an interdisciplinary conference, and I was the only theological presenter,” Venable said. “I don’t know that anybody else in the room other than my friend cared much about Gregory of Nyssa and his homilies on the Song of Songs, but some of the anthropological themes and philosophy of language themes resonated with other papers.”
Venable said she wants to do research on the history of interpretation of the Song of Songs and how philosophical outlooks have shaped that interpretation. In the spring 2026 semester, she did a directed study with professor Chip Hardy on the topic.
Venable said Beeson’s commitment to in-person theological education has “been a real gift” to her.
As she continues her studies, Venable said being at Beeson has felt like home.
“Beeson is the first place where I have felt like it’s okay to be fully myself,” Venable said. “I have felt welcomed and accepted and Beeson is the first place in the church where people have said, ‘these are your gifts.’ I have so much love for this place.”