A staple during examens on Thursdays, 3 Minute Theology, started in 2021 when Spanish teacher Kelsey Grimm became the director of Campus Ministry. When she took over she looked for a way to engage the entire De Smet community in faith.
“I wanted to have an extra way to teach people about our faith,” Mrs. Grimm said. “I thought doing a weekly video could be cool to have little tidbits of our faith, or questions that people have always wondered about.”
The goal is to challenge people to grow in their faith and to reiterate important topics that people often forget. The videos have made an impact on the students, faculty, and parents who watch them.
“It’s cool to hear about the things we don’t always learn about in our theology classes,” Senior Santiago Castillo said. “It’s made me think about my faith in ways I never have before.”
Each video focuses on answering important questions about our faith like: Why do we pray? Why do we make the sign of the cross? Why do we use statues? Why do we use prayer cards? What’s our purpose?
“I try to think of a curriculum and a themed series,” Mrs. Grimm said. “To use as another avenue of teaching outside of theology class.”
The first 12 episodes only featured guest speakers, mainly priests but it grew over time to feature teachers, students, and herself.
“At first I didn’t want to be in it, I didn’t feel qualified,” Mrs. Grimm said. “But then I realized I was able to cater a message directly to the De Smet students.”
Although the videos are tailored to the De Smet community, they are put on YouTube every Thursday for the world to see. 3 Minute Theology has had success outside of the school with multiple videos receiving over 1,000 views.
Even though the videos are around three minutes, creating them takes hours. Many things go into it such as coming up with topics and themes for videos, writing the script or choosing a guest speaker, editing it, choosing the music, reflection questions, and images.
“All the video editing that she does is crazy,” Retreat Coordinator Howie Place said. “She’s become a wizard.”
In the early days she had to learn how to do a majority of the tasks which were time consuming.
“It’s so clear this is from the heart, people would pay a lot of money for the video production she does,” Mr. Place said. “But she does it because she wants to make videos for us. It’s pretty cool to see someone live out their faith in such an authentic, real way.”
Mrs. Grimm wants to continue to motivate the entire school community through these faith-filled videos.
“It’s something that I feel strongly and passionate about,” Mrs. Grimm said. “We have a really beautiful deep faith, and there’s so much to it, and I just want to pass that on to the students and faculty.”
