By Emily Jenkins, volunteer
Jason B. Palmer, Dean of Spiritual Life and University Champlain, recently announced his intent to resign June 30, 2025.
Palmer informed UMHB students via email that he intends to join his church planting team in launching a church plant in Whitefish, Montana in October 2025. Jason Palmer in an interview on October 12, 2024 further clarified his intentions and motivations for his future at the Montana Church Plant.
Palmer has been thankful to be part of UMHB’s journey for the last 5 years where Christian leaders have been raised up for 179 years. Palmer’s primary desire was to celebrate the local churches and have a generation of disciples who knew God’s voice and have courage to follow and obey God and His calling for their lives. To know God’s voice, Palmer said,“People have to become biblically literate; people have to become embracers of biblical community; and people have to practice biblical prayer.”
To encourage students to better know and follow God through His Word, Palmer mentioned that UMHB hosts initiatives like the Baptist Student Ministry, Revival, Missions Emphasis Week, The Big Event, and the Psalms Conference.
However, Palmer said, “What we do here in the Spiritual Life Department is intentionally designed to be excellent but supplemental to what goes on in the local church.” Palmer pointed out that although UMHB’s Spiritual Life Department is excellent, UMHB cannot provide multigenerational worship or pastoring like the local church can.
Overall, Palmer said, “I hope if I’ve done anything here, I have caused students to see that the love of Christ can be winsomely presented in a way that draws them into a love relationship with Jesus, and for those that already know Jesus, that draws them into a deeper understanding of his affection for them.”
With his time left at UHMB, Palmer wants to invite the UMHB campus community to join Moses in the words of Exodus 33:18, “Please show me your [God’s] glory” (ESV). Palmer said, “Moses is concerned because God’s asking him to leave a place that he does not want to leave, and Moses is bold enough to look at the Lord and say, ‘I don’t want to go unless You go with me.” (See Exodus 33:12-17). Palmer prays that believers at UMHB walk with a posture of obedience to whatever land, people or culture to which God sends them.
Palmer is thankful for the Montana church plant that is firm on the nonnegotiable truths but willing to meet people where they are and say that they are loved and called by God. Palmer further clarified what is nonnegotiable: the Trinity; salvation by grace through faith; the brokenness of man; God’s identity and attributes; and what God has done through Christ Jesus. Palmer explained that these truths are vital elements of Christian theology; without them Christianity is not Christianity.
These truths are what Palmer is thankful to see in the new church plant. Palmer is hopeful that the new church will be made up of locals in the Whitefish, Montana community who desire Christ’s name to be lifted high.
Eventually, Palmer hopes that the new church will have a growing congregation that becomes an outpost for the gospel in Whitefish, Montana and one day creates more church plants. Although Palmer is fully supportive of UMHB and believes, along with his family, in God’s ongoing work at the university, he said, “I cannot have called those students to a faith that I’m unwilling to practice personally.” Additionally, Palmer said “My Prayer is that… people will be encouraged to be responsive to the Holy Spirit’s call, and that any memory they have of me will be one that gave them another encouragement of what it could look like when the Spirit calls us to something that is not what we personally wanted. But, we have to be faithful in obeying, and obedience needs to be the mark of our lives.”
