Brian Pingel

Forty-year-old Brian Pingel from Maple Grove, MN is a professor at North Central University (NCU) in downtown Minneapolis and plays a major role in the youth department as a pastor. He’s a full time pastor at NCU and also works at Life Church in Maple Grove.

According to Pingel, God called him to be a pastor when he got saved in his sophomore year of high school. “With being a pastor,” he says, “I really had to know for sure that that was something God was calling me to do.” After a series of confirmations, one specific instance stood out and that’s when he knew he was called into the ministry. Pingel’s youth group traveled around cities doing drama through outreach musicals and on their way to Davenport, Iowa to do a performance, their bus had broken down three times in Illinois. Pingel stated, “Every time it broke down, I went outside and was really praying for my life and the bus and everything. When we finally got to Davenport, this lady came up to me after we had performed our musical and she was like, “Are you called to the ministry?” and she was telling me prophetically things that I had been praying about. That was confirmation that I knew I was supposed to be and called to be a pastor.”

Pingel feels that he’s called to reach out to teenagers in life. “The youth really need advocates to start their journey right. I just really want to see them transformed. Once you start out the journey right, then your life has a better chance of just staying with God,” he said. One of the things he wants youth to take from his preaching is that teenagers have what it takes to fix what’s wrong in the world and that they need to know they can do it. “I love the “God-moments” when their eyes just light up and they just get what you’re talking about. I love when they finally understand that you know what they’re going through and that you truly do care about them,” Pingel said when asked what he enjoys the most about working with teenagers.

Pingel’s greatest strength in the ministry is pastoral care. “I am able to walk along side of people and encourage them,” he says, “I can help with whatever they need without having to carry their baggage with me. I think that is an important ability in this area.”

The most influential person in Pingel’s life was his mother. “A true prayer warrior,” he says. Another influential person was his youth pastor. “I learned from both his examples and mistakes and it really took me awhile to realize the influence he really had on me.”

Pingel does have a real heart for youth, supports them, and wants to see them do something with their lives; which is something we all should be doing. Some advice he would give to someone aspiring to become a pastor or be involved in the ministry is, “Do the hard work of developing your character so that your character can support the weight of your dreams and can support the weight of your ministry.”