About
The site name, Argicolae, is latin for either plural Farmers or singular of a farmer. Latin was originally a high school language dodge so that I didn’t have to actually speak a language. Little did I know that I’d actually like it. Mine is a little rusty right now - I’m not sure that I could identify an ablative absolute to save my life - but it gave me the website name. Originally I had intended to include a bunch of people, but it seems to be more and more of a farmer.
Agricola, the farmer, is Mark Brown - son of a real farmer and John Deere salesman who is now grown into a parish minister with a few interesting stops in between. Mark has been an engineer, a sales engineer, a financial engineer and corporate politician and a life long student. It would be tough to be as overeducated as Mark is. For High School he attended IMSA - an experimental public residential magnet school for geeks all accross Illinois. He eventually went to Grove City College as a Mechanical Engineer and a very bad basketball player. Picked up an MBA at the Katz School at the University of Pittsburgh. Prayerfully the last educational stop was Concordia Seminary.
Having a farmer ethos, Mark has worked the vast majority of that schooling. After having a beautiful first job playing with fire for a burner design and manufacturing company, He jumped to IBM after completing the MBA. After a 9 year run at IBM, he completed seminary studies and moved to his first parish. A little sales, a little marketing, a little politics and a bunch of hard core number crunching. The jack of all trades and the master of none.
Theologically agricola is part of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod, and pastor of St. Mark Lutheran in West Henrietta, NY (yeah, Mark from St. Mark is a big line.) What that means is Mark believes teaches and confesses the Book of Concord which is the book of doctine originating from the Lutheran Reformation. The short version is: Grace Alone, Faith Alone and Word Alone.
Hopefully that odd mixture makes for interesting reading.
