The physiology junior started out at MSU three years ago, ready to begin on the journey to medical school.

She volunteers at an East Lansing crisis center, helping women through sexual assault crises.

She works as the spiritual life coordinator for the American Baptist Student Foundation, starting prayer chains and sending out sympathy cards.

And most recently, Garvin decided to devote her entire life to service by deciding to become a Baptist minister.

She said it was a big switch, considering how determined she had been to be a doctor in the beginning. But when she spent a summer shadowing a physician, she quickly realized the medical profession shouldn't be her chosen field.

"Even though it's good work and nice people, it's just not for me," Garvin said. "I want to spend more time helping people deal with the illness rather than filling out paperwork."

It took a lot of soul-searching before Garvin came up with the nerve to start telling people about her new desires to be a minister. Her mother especially wasn't thrilled she'd given up on becoming a doctor.

"My parents sort of balked at the idea," she said. "They were kind of like, 'You're all of a sudden not going to med school anymore?'"

But Garvin said the decision wasn't sudden - it was a long time in the making.

"Lots of little things along the way seemed to be sending me in this direction," she said, including the fact that she thinks she found the perfect career opportunity as a minister.

The seminary Garvin wishes to attend in Virginia offers a pastoral care and counseling program for people who wish to become hospital chaplains.

"'This is it,' I thought to myself," she said. "'This is really what I want to do.'"

And she has set high goals for herself as a minister.

She wants to encourage acceptance of diversity in people, including members of the lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender community. She wants to comfort families with relatives in the hospital. She wants to change what she knows some people perceive as a judgmental Christian.

"There are lots and lots of people who call themselves Christians," Garvin said. "I think condescending people is the last way to show them love."

And she knows it's not going to be easy. She already knows she faces challenges being a woman in a male-dominated sect of life. Garvin grew up bouncing from church to church in the South, never seeing female role models in positions of religious guidance.

"I didn't think there was a place for me or a need for me, especially as a woman," she said. "I knew I'd be rejected in many capacities.

"But the people in leadership now are over 50 years old. We're going to need a new generation of spiritual people. There is a need."

All over the country, religious leaders are seeking to attract young people to faith. Teen Mania Ministries, a national organization that promotes Jesus Christ to teens through live bands, dynamic speakers and realistic self-reflection, puts on festivals across the nation.

"Young people are looking less to organized religion, but they still want spirituality," said Richee Parks, a festival leader for the organization.

Leading the unled

While many religious institutions struggle to find leadership for a younger generation, more and more Americans are identifying themselves as nonreligious.

According to the American Religious Identification Survey in 2001, which randomly sampled the American population, asking them to identify their religious beliefs, the number of Americans identifying with no religion doubled from the 1990 results.

More than 29 million Americans, or 14 percent of the population, identified themselves under this category.

"Often lost amidst the mesmerizing tapestry of faith groups that comprise the American population," the survey said, "is also a vast and growing population of those without faith.

"They adhere to no creed nor choose to affiliate with any religious community. These are the seculars, the unchurched, the people who profess no faith in any religion."

Anthropology senior Jason Munford is an adamant atheist working to fill the social void left unfilled for non-churchgoers as a legally ordained minister for the Church of Spiritual Humanism.

Munford came to atheism after a period of intense Christianity, studying the Bible and joining a local Christian youth group.

"I started to take it pretty seriously," he said. "Which is why, ironically, I came to atheism - a passive look at Christianity, and it seems OK."

Then he started attending other religious services, visiting a Hindu temple with friends and looking into philosophy.

"It was a bunch of seeds being planted," he said. "I started to figure out that I could have a religious experience with almost any religion."

When Munford started getting involved with atheist communities and chatrooms on the Internet, his views only were solidified.

"One of the guys who ran one of the sites was the most brilliant man I'd ever met," he said. "The way things were put, they seemed so simple. Eventually, Christianity no longer clicked."

After discussions with fellow atheists on the Web, he started noticing sites where atheists could become ministers.

His friends goad him about the ease of achieving his ordainment - a few dollars on the Internet - but Munford takes his responsibility seriously.

He's performing his first marriage ceremony during the summer.

"I found one that was actually legitimate," he said.

Munford said he likes the idea of having an atheist building (to call it a church is questionable), but he questions the feasibility of it in society right now.

"There's no reason why we should forego anything good that comes with a church just because you don't believe in the premises it was built on," Munford said. "But it comes down to what do you actually do in the building. It's less this guy standing up and telling us what we think, as this guy stands up there and asks us what we think.

"Then, all of a sudden, we're thinking for ourselves."

Munford is a member of the MSU Freethinkers Alliance, which seeks to promote the separation of church and state and provide a safe space for atheists, humanists and the nonreligious.

"Campus groups like what we've got are fantastic," Munford said. "They're starting to sprout up for adults. They start to fill the gap.

"Everyone likes the peace of mind of knowing the people around you aren't judging you."

Tara May can be reached at maytara@msu.edu.