Joyce Ann Mercer is associate professor of Christian education at San Francisco Theological Seminary. She has served as chaplain in an adolescent chemical dependency treatment center, as a social worker for a community-based clinic for teens, and as a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission coworker in the Philippines. While in graduate school at Emory University in Atlanta, Mercer assisted in the establishment of the Youth Theology Institute (now Youth Theology Initiative), a residential summer program for youth to help them encounter theology.(Bio dated 2002)