What’s Your Ministry? Raising Saints in the Modern World

A Family’s Journey Through Faith, Family, and Formation

OYM recently had the opportunity to sit down with Protodeacon David Keim and his wife Shell, longtime members of All Saints Orthodox Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. As parents of six faithful Orthodox adult children, the Keims shared wisdom gained through decades of parenting, homeschooling, and serving the Church. In this heartfelt conversation, they reflect on how Orthodox education begins in the home, how character is formed through immersion rather than instruction, and why raising children in the faith is a lifelong, whole-life calling.

OYM: Could you both share a bit of your background—your upbringing, how you met, and your journey to the Orthodox Church?

Protodeacon David: Shell and I actually grew up in the same church—a charismatic megachurch in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Our families came from different Christian traditions, but both ended up there. We met when we were very young, as our families were close, and we basically grew up together. We knew each other through grade school and high school, started dating in high school, continued through college, and eventually got married.

I went to law school, and Shell worked as a schoolteacher during that time. After that, we started our family—eventually having six children, which, yes, is a lot!

As we continued teaching Sunday School at our church, we started to notice something troubling. The teenagers we were working with didn’t know basic biblical chronology. For example, they didn’t know that King Solomon lived after Moses or that Jesus came after King David. They had no sense of how biblical events were connected in time. They were completely biblically illiterate.

So, we decided to paint a mural that wrapped around the entire classroom, starting from Genesis and going through the Book of Acts. We charted everything out visually so that when we referenced Moses or any biblical figure, the kids could see where that person fit in the broader narrative. It was a big project, and when we finished, I felt like we had really accomplished something.

But then, one student asked me, “What happened next?”—after Acts. And I realized I didn’t know. I’d spent years learning and teaching the Bible, but there was a 1500-year gap in my understanding of church history. I thought these kids were ignorant, but I realized I was just as ignorant.

So, I decided to fill in that gap. I found a famous 38-volume set called The Ante-Nicene, Nicene, and Post-Nicene Fathers—basically everything Cambridge University translated into English in the 1880s. Christian Book Distributors had it on sale for $99, and I thought, “Thirty-eight volumes of anything for $99 is a great deal!” So I bought it and spent the next three years reading through it, trying to understand what happened between the Book of Acts and the Protestant Reformation.

That’s how I first encountered people like St. Irenaeus, St. Ignatius, and St. John Chrysostom—names I had never even heard before. And I was stunned. The Church they described was nothing like the churches I had known. I started asking myself, “Am I part of their Church?” At first, I thought the question was whether they were part of my church. But then I realized I had it backward—I needed to ask whether I was part of theirs. And I wasn’t.

That’s when Shell and I set out to find their Church. And we approached that journey very differently. I process data analytically— gather, weigh, and sift through everything. She’s much more intuitive in how she experiences and evaluates truth, so our paths were different, but they converged at the same point.

Shell: That was a nice way of saying I make decisions very quickly! But I will say—when people today go looking for the Church, they just Google it. But this was the early ’90s. We didn’t even have a computer at home. That whole process that now takes people eight minutes took David years.

At the time, I was completely content where we were. I had three little kids and no time to read these books or explore all this stuff. David had been obsessing about it for a couple of years. I was exhausted. I just kept thinking, “Leave me alone.” Honestly, I thought it was a phase—like one of his hobbies. Watches for a couple years, then shoes—so I figured Orthodoxy was just the next thing.

Eventually, he said, “I found this church, and we’re going.” And I was like, “Fine.” So I sent our two older daughters with my mom to church, and David and I took the baby to check it out. It was a ROCOR church in a strip mall—completely different from anything we’d experienced. We walked in, and the priest was right there—no narthex, no separation, nothing.

And get this: we’re in the car, and David says, “I’m not going in.” I couldn’t believe it. I had gone through all the logistics of getting the kids ready, and I was going into that church. I walked in thinking, “What in the world is this?” The smells were strange, the sounds were strange—it all felt completely foreign.

But somehow… it also felt right. There was something about it that just made sense deep down. And from that day, I was in. Meanwhile, David went back to analyzing and researching. But that’s kind of how we’ve always done things—he researches [vehicles] for years, and I just walk in and pick the car.

Protodeacon David: Yeah, it was funny. By that point, I had worked my way to being about 80 percent sure Orthodoxy was the right move. Shell had been at maybe 8 percent —and then overnight, she jumped to 110 percent certain. Suddenly, she was dragging me over the finish line!

Eventually, we made it. Thank God. We were received into the Church. Around that time, I was working what I thought was my dream job. I was an attorney for International Family Entertainment—a big media company. I was doing things I never thought I’d be doing at that stage in my career. But then everything changed.

The company was sold. I worked for a year straight on that transaction, under the assumption that I’d stay on. It was supposed to be a merger of equals. Then—bam—it turned into an acquisition. My job was moving to Los Angeles. I didn’t want to go. I was also offered a role in New York City, and I didn’t want that either.

So just like that, the job disappeared.

I was offered a position at a law firm in Virginia Beach, but it didn’t feel like the right fit for our family. The culture and expectations didn’t align with the kind of life we were trying to build. It just wasn’t right.

Shell: At the time, we were attending a very small OCA parish. We had the only children in the church! They’d set out three little wooden chairs just for our kids. I was pregnant again. It was beautiful, and we wouldn’t trade it for anything, but we had no idea what life would look like moving forward.

When David got that severance, we thought, “Let’s take the kids to Disney World!” On the way back, we stopped at a church in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was on the interstate, and David had found it randomly. We walk in—and it’s packed. Kids, families, energy everywhere. It was amazing. Father Nicholas Sorensen and his wife invited us for lunch. Their home had icons covering the walls—it was overwhelming in the best way. I thought, “This is where I’d want to raise a family.” And as we left, Father Nicholas said, “I’m going to pray that y’all move down here.” We just laughed. Our families had been in Virginia Beach for generations. We thought, “That’s cute—but no way.”

Protodeacon David: Around that time, I had just started asking saints for their intercessions. I prayed to St. Xenia of St. Petersburg, asking for direction in my career. Out of the blue, I got a call from a headhunter. She said SAS Institute was looking for a lawyer with public company and entertainment law experience, willing to relocate to Raleigh-Durham. She said, “I can’t find anyone who fits the bill and is willing to move to Raleigh.” I said, “Well… tell me more.”

She described SAS as what she called a “destination company”—people go there and never leave. Industry turnover might be 20 percent per year, but at SAS, it was more like 3 percent. When I looked them up, I realized they were a massive, globally respected software company. They dwarf my former company in size and revenue.

So I interviewed, got the job, and we moved. I initially served as general counsel for a business unit doing video games—oddly enough, for a business software company. Eventually, they exited that space, and I handled the sale of that unit. Today, I’m Senior Vice President and General Counsel for corporate matters, overseeing the global legal footprint of SAS.

Shell: When he got the job, we called Father Nicholas and his wife to tell them the news. We got their answering machine and said, "You're not going to believe this, but we're moving to Raleigh!" Father Nicholas later told us, "Well, obviously you prayed about this," and he was right.

We still have the icon of St. Xenia of St. Petersburg from when we were praying about that job decision. When we moved to Raleigh, we had three children and I was pregnant with our fourth. Our children were welcomed into the community at All Saints Orthodox Church, and we’ve been there ever since.

OYM: When did you become ordained as a protodeacon?

Protodeacon David: After we had been in Raleigh for about five years, I started the St. Stephen’s Course, which is the Antiochian Archdiocese’s preparation course for the diaconate. After two years, Bishop Antoun ordained me a little early, though I did complete the course. Father Nicholas retired in 2020, and now we’re blessed to have Father David Wynn as our priest at All Saints. So now we have Father David and Protodeacon David—it’s a little confusing, but it works!

OYM: What has your family’s involvement in the Church looked like over the years?

Protodean David: We have six children. One of our sons is a subdeacon, another is a tonsured reader, and one of our daughters works on the administrative team at Camp St. Thekla summer camp. All of them are active in the life of the Church in different ways. They live nearby, teach Sunday School, and stay closely connected to the All Saints community.

Shell: And now we have four grandchildren as well.

OYM: Shell, how did your vocation in education evolve alongside raising your children?

Shell: I homeschooled all six of our children through sixth grade. When our youngest son Joshua started seventh grade at a private Christian school in Cary, I was invited to help start the school at the Coptic Church in the area. I worked there for five years.

Protodean David: It was a classical Christian school, and Shell was the administrator and one of the driving forces behind getting it started in Chapel Hill. Later, she pursued a teaching credential through the Circe Institute—a classical Christian think tank here in North Carolina. It’s highly respected, and many of those involved are Orthodox. In my view, it’s one of the leading voices in classical Christian education.

OYM: Obviously, raising six kids is no small task. How did you go about educating them in a way that was rooted in the Orthodox Church? Where did it all begin?

Shell: One of the decisions we made very early on—actually when we were pregnant with our first—was to homeschool. And again, we’re… well, we’re old! [laughs] That was back in the late ’80s—our first was born in 1991. Homeschooling wasn’t quite as popular then as it is now. But we really felt like it was the best thing for our family.

At that time, we weren’t Orthodox yet, so we didn’t even know how much that would eventually shape everything. But even then, we had started looking into classical education. We both went to private Christian schools growing up, but we liked the idea of having the whole family immersed in a kind of unified way of learning and living—especially during the early years.

So, when she was 4 or 5, we started homeschooling with a curriculum we found. And honestly, we loved it. It was great. Our family was always together. We ate meals together. The kids played together. When we eventually moved to Raleigh, David was home much earlier from work, and we had dinner as a family every night.

When we became Orthodox, it was a huge gift—one we didn’t even know we were receiving. We couldn’t have predicted how much the Church would shape our home life. What we found was that life can become so fragmented. You’ve got the kids in school, doing sports, your husband at work—everyone’s pulled in different directions. But if you can consolidate those things, it takes so much pressure off the family.

The Orthodox Church helped us do that. It gave us structure, rhythm, and peace. We had icons in our home, regular prayers, and we went to services all the time. Because the kids were home, we could attend weekday liturgies. We’d go to evening services without worrying about bedtime, because they could sleep in the next morning. That kind of flexibility was a real blessing.

And once we did that with our first few kids, it just became our way of life. When they eventually went to school, it was a small Christian school right around the corner. They could walk there—well, they didn’t always want to, but they could. [laughs]

Even then, the school didn’t have sports on Wednesday nights or weekends because they expected families to go to church. Our kids could play sports without it interfering with liturgical life. They also learned to clean candle wax off the church floors, to serve in the altar… it was just a part of who they were.

There was never a separation between our home and our faith. We were never “not being Orthodox.” It was just woven into everything. That’s what we wanted, and by God’s grace, that’s what we got.

We had no idea back then—when we were first married and pregnant—how life would unfold. But I’m so grateful that the Lord was guiding us the whole time. All the decisions we made allowed our family to grow deeply in that life. Church was the center, and the Church calendar always went on our calendar first.

That’s just how we’ve always done it.

Protodeacon David: I think prioritization is a big thing—and kids, they draw conclusions. Even if you say to your kids, “We’re going to go play baseball on the weekends, so we’ll just be away from church for the season,” I mean, that telegraphs to your child that baseball is more important than church. I never figured out a way to send that message without undercutting what I wanted to teach about the Church’s importance. So we never did that.

Shell: And that even carried over when the kids started getting jobs. They didn’t work on the weekends—we went to church on the weekends.

Protodeacon David: And I made career decisions based on that. That’s why I didn’t take that job in Virginia Beach with that law firm. I knew the workload would be so heavy I couldn’t be present for my family the way I wanted. One of the reasons I loved working at SAS is because work-life balance is a huge value there. They don’t expect 70-hour work weeks.

Shell: By modeling that, when our kids went to look for jobs, it was kind of a no-brainer. They’d just say, “I’m not going to work Sunday mornings.” And there are jobs where you don’t have to. You go to Vespers on Saturday night, and you do the things. So those patterns—they stuck.

The problem with parenting is you can say a lot, but they don’t hear most of it. What they do is watch everything. You make a mistake and they’ll call you on it. If you say, “We don’t eat this,” and then you put it on the table—“I thought we didn’t eat this?”—they know. And that’s the crux of how we parented. We didn’t do it perfectly, but we were always unified.

And I think a lot of that comes from our upbringing. Our parents were deeply involved in church. It was never optional. We were always the first ones there and the last ones to leave.

Protodeacon David: Yeah, Shell’s dad was an associate minister at the church we grew up at. My mom ran a home for women in crisis, connected to the church. So when Shell says “first ones there and last to leave,” that’s not an exaggeration. It’s the truth.

Shell: We never knew any different. We just thought that was the priority. If the toilets were dirty, my dad cleaned them. If there was a job to be done, David’s mom did it. My mom too. So we grew up that way, and we didn’t want our children’s focus pulled away by other things.

And we’ve seen that over time. Families who put their priority elsewhere... now we’ve got grown kids in the parish, and you wonder—where are they? You never see them. They’re working, they’re busy, doing something else. But we made the decision early to put church first, and it seems to have worked okay.

Protodeacon David: Sunday School alone is not enough. It takes a consistent life at home, where Church is a lived priority—not just something said. Those are the households that tend to make that leap through the tough college years.

OYM: What you just touched on is exactly the issue OYM is trying to address. At some point—after camp or Sunday school—a lot of young people feel like there’s no longer a place for them in the Church. Especially in college or the workforce, they feel lost. What advice would you give to young people—especially those who feel like their gifts or talents aren’t being used? 

Protodeacon David: The Church needs everyone’s gifts. People have a myriad of talents. I have a daughter who’s a financial wizard—those skills are just as valuable. But sometimes it takes creativity on the part of parish leadership—priests, deacons, parish council—to help people find a way to plug in. Music is easy, there’s always a choir or a chant stand. But other gifts require more thought.

And I’ll say this—I’m on the OYM board, and at every meeting they ask, “What can we do to bridge the gap?” And I always say the same thing, and they’re probably tired of hearing it—but it’s this: we have to be converted.

Everyone who works with youth ministries has to be in the process of being converted. That’s the authenticity Shell was talking about a minute ago. You can’t just say the right things and not live them. Words are of secondary importance—it’s how you’re living your life. We have to live in a way that reflects Christ so that we are imaging Christ to the young people we’re serving.

If we, as adults—ministers, clergy, leaders—are doing that, then I believe the kids will want to be plugged in. They may not even know why they want it, but they’ll see something in us that they need. So the bigger burden is on us to be Christ to them. If they see that authenticity in us, they’ll want to be there.

There’s often an “authenticity gap” in our parishes. Kids see that we say the right things but aren’t living as the right people. I forget who said it—maybe Father Alexander Schmemann or Tom Hopko—but the idea is: “Orthodox Church: right faith, wrong people.” We have all the right tools. We just don’t always apply them to ourselves. If we did—if we truly focused on our own salvation—that alone would save those around us too, as St. Seraphim said.

Shell: Young people, especially those who’ve been in church their whole lives, often take the sacraments for granted. They’re used to them—it’s just part of their breathing. The mystery of the sacraments still shocks me sometimes, but for them, it’s just life.

What helps them connect is feeling needed. Too often, we expect them to come forward and offer their gifts. But they don’t know what’s needed. They just think the church runs itself—like how my kids used to think dinner just magically appeared in the kitchen.

We need to ask young people directly: “Hey, can you do this? I need you.” But when we do, we have to let them actually do it. That’s the hard part. I’ve led the Antiochian Women in our diocese for over 10 years—I’ve seen it. You ask a young woman to take on a task, and she’s not going to do it the way you, an 80-year-old, would do it. And that’s okay. They don’t know how at first. They need the space to learn.

At our parish, we have a bookstore, and many of the young people work there. They come on Sunday because they’re scheduled. Yes, they should come for the Eucharist—and they do—but they also feel that sense of responsibility.

It’s like when there’s a potluck: people show up because they had to bring food. It gives them purpose. Or when one of the men at church said, “I’m too old to clean this wax off the tile, but I’ve got a heat gun—I’ll show you how to use it.” And the boys spent the day cleaning wax. They were thrilled. On Sunday, they were like, “Look how good the tile looks!” And I said, “Thank God you were here.”

We need to let them take out the trash. Literally. Give them the keys. Ask them to do real things. We have teens moving mulch now—it’s sweaty, hard work. But it’s theirs. And slowly they realize, “If I’m not doing something here, this place won’t keep going.”

That’s what I tell my kids: if you don’t bake the bread, sing in the choir, clean the wax, or teach Sunday school—this won’t go on. And eventually, the older generation has to step back and say, “I need you to do this for me.”

You’ve seen it—80-year-olds doing all the jobs. 

Protodeacon David: And no 20-year-old is going to help if every time they try, they’re told they’re doing it wrong—like carrying a pan the wrong way, or not putting something on the tray just right. They get corrected for little things that really don’t matter. The truth is, no offense, the older folks aren’t going to be around forever. The younger ones are going to have to carry the load eventually. So just let them do it in their way. If they need help, they’ll ask.

What I’ve noticed is that sometimes, their way is even better. Like with the parish directory—we used to make printed books. Now, it’s all online. I had no idea how to do that, and honestly, didn’t know where to begin. But these young guys figured it out. They got everyone’s information in there, uploaded pictures—it looks great. And they felt important doing it, because we needed them. That’s the key to handing over the Church: making young people feel wanted and needed.

When they go off to college and don’t feel needed by the Church, they’ll go where they do feel needed. They’ll find a job where they’re given real tasks, a paycheck, and responsibility. And they’ll think, “Well, this place values me. The Church never did.” That’s not their fault—that’s ours.

I’ve seen it happen again and again. An older priest looks at what a young priest is doing and says, “Why are they putting that there?” But in the end, it doesn’t really matter. You’re not going to be here forever. They’ll have to figure it out. And they will—if you let them.

That’s why I tell my kids: “What are you doing just standing there? Go light the candles. Go ring the bells. Go pick up the trash. Set up the chairs in the parish hall, then put them away.” All those little things—they build the Church. And when young people start to take ownership of those things, the Church becomes theirs. That’s what keeps them here: when it’s personal. When they feel like they belong. When they know the Church needs them—that they’re essential to the Body of Christ.

Young people don’t want to feel obsolete. But too often, that’s exactly how they feel.

OYM: Do you have any other  advice for our readers or any concluding thoughts, especially anything you'd like to tie back to the Orthodox educational practices you're living out in your own lives?

Protodeacon David: I think that—and I try to emphasize this to my Sunday school class, 'cause my Sunday school is teens up to graduation—you know, a lot of people think about education as a means to an end. Like a career. And so when they think about, "I’m going to college," it's "I need to go where it's gonna get me the best job, the best career."

And so what I try to tell them is that that’s not really the most important thing. The most important thing is your relationship with Christ. And so if you're picking a school, the most important thing needs to be: is this school—well, not just this, for every decision point that you have, that you're at as you become an adult, you will have hundreds of decision points—but you're gonna make a choice to go in one direction or another.

And each one, you need to decide: is this decision going to bring me closer to Christ or farther from Christ? And that needs to be the criteria by which you make that choice.

So—this relationship: is it gonna bring me closer to Christ or farther from Christ? Is this school gonna bring me closer to Christ or farther from Christ? Is this job gonna take me closer to Christ or farther from Christ?

That is the question that you have to ask at every single juncture. And if you are always saying, "It’s bringing me closer to Christ," that is the right answer.

And so if you consistently make your decisions based on that criterion, then you will be making the right choices, and you will be drawing closer to Christ. And that is the highest value. And the purpose of education is to inculcate values. The real, the true purpose of Orthodox education is to draw us to Christ. And so that has to be the end that we are trying to seek.

And so that means then, that there are some choices that some rational people would make that you may not make. And that may take you out of the mainstream for some things. You may make some decisions that are not what everybody else would make in the end. But that's okay. Because if the reason you're making that decision is because you're trying to stay close to Christ, then that's the right answer.

But I would say that is not something—that is not something that can be instilled in a person in 45 minutes a week. Orthodox education is not something that you do in church. It's not something that you do in a Sunday school. It is something that you do every moment of every day.

And the problem is that people—our education system is fractured. We send the child to school, and we send them to different classes. In this room they're gonna learn this, and this, and we just splinter their entire thinking process. People say, "I'm not good at math. I'm not good at music. I'm good in history." And they don’t see the cohesion of learning as one—as one mind and one body.

And what we do in our families and what we do in our lives is we go, "Okay, well this is an hour and a half in the morning, we’re gonna go and get this done and we’ll get a donut and coffee after, and that’s gonna be our Orthodox education." And then over here we're gonna have school education. And over here we're gonna have baseball education. All these different things—not realizing that children are not built like that. We are not built like that. Education is something that we do all of the time.

And so if you don’t have this— the holy mindset, the mindset of the Church, the mindset of Christ every moment—they are walking with your children throughout the day. Whether you're painting a picture—you’re not Jesus 24/7—but are the values and the things that the Church has instilled in us, are we valuing those with our children? Are we doing that all day, in everything we do, in all of their decisions?

If they choose to snatch something from somebody else and you get into a big fight—well, that’s something you need to deal with. But you deal with it in a way that is Christ-like. And you explain to them.

Are they learning about the lives of the saints and modeling that? Are they learning about all of these things?

And I think that’s really the problem: children, if they grow up with that fracturing, and that hour and a half in the morning on Sunday is all they have of the Orthodox faith, of the Orthodox Church, of Orthodox education—it’s not enough. It’s not big enough. It’s not heavy enough to hold them.

It has to be something that they breathe, that they think about, that they live. And I think that’s the problem. People look back and go, “I don’t understand. I told them that we’re gonna go to church on Sunday morning,” and now they’re not.

But again—it has to be something that your life lives. And Orthodox education has to permeate your life, and your children’s lives, and your home—or it’s not.

The reason is because we are immersed in a culture that is contrary to everything we believe. And you can’t counterweight that. You can’t counter that with a little bit here and there. You have to counter that with a counter-immersion. That’s the only way that you can successfully sort of outweigh the drag of the culture.

We pray the Akathist to the Mother of God, Nurturer of Children, and we pray that with the mothers. And when I'm reading through that book, it makes me chuckle a little bit, because I think everything in this Akathist hymn is contrary to how you actually raise children in our society.

She’s like, “Let our kids be humble.” Nobody goes, “We know—I got the most humble kid around.”

Shell: We don’t do it. We say, “He’ll let him take the fiery dart.” And he really wants to take a dart on the enemy.

And so we say these things, and then when our kid does something that is humble—you allow somebody to go first—we're like, “What are you doing? Let them go first? You should’ve been first! You’re better at that!”

And not that we shouldn’t tell our kids they should be good at things, but I just—it’s that kind of—we live in a culture that’s contrary to everything that Christ taught. And in order to make our children be contrary to what the world is giving, it has to be something that they know.

Like, if you want your kid to be a swimmer, they don’t swim for an hour on Sunday morning. They swim every day at 5 a.m. And they are a swimmer. Even if they’re not going to the Olympics—they swim.

And I love when people say, “Oh, quality over quantity.” No. Good tennis coaches will tell you: quantity. They will always say, “I have to play the piano.” That’s right. You can’t play a Dvorak piece for an hour and a half a week. You have to—even if it’s whatever Yamaha—you gotta bring it out every day for hours.

And if we want them to be holy—if that’s what our goal is, and that should be our goal in Orthodox education, and in our parenting, and in our churches—is to raise holy people. If that’s what it is? You can’t be holy instantly. There’s no instant oatmeal. It’s gotta be your slow-cooked, over time.

And that has to be something that they—that they just breathe.

Slow cook. Not instant. No Instant Pot here.