had just finished chewing on him for being stuck in a rut, always wanting to do the same thing, always looking for reasons not to change, ridiculing every new idea as thoughtless.
“And you replied?”
He smiled wickedly. “I said, ‘Yeah, okay—so what’s your point?’”
Alas, one of the crosses he had to bear as the pastor of a large church with a large budget that it liked to spend on itself was having to put up with full-time, professional church musicians who loved elaborate liturgies and modern music. I’d often hear from him how unreasonably long the choir anthem was. “Nine minutes! Who in their right mind wants to hear a nine-minute anthem!”
Once, when we were on vacation, we worshiped at Ken’s church: the choir loft was in the rear of the church and, during the anthem, the congregation mainly watched Ken craning his neck to see if it was wrapping up, sighing theatrically, looking at his watch, and shaking his head. He was so furious that day about the time the service was taking that he couldn’t deliver his own sermon. While he preached, he kept looking at his watch and grimacing. (I liked telling people he was the only pastor I knew who criticized the length of his own sermons as he preached them.)
And yet he liked to point out how much his musicians contributed to community life, and he always defended their budgets. He was a ferocious champion of his entire congregation. Here’s a story I heard from a couple of people, one of them Ken himself:
There was someone dying painfully of cancer, dying young, in one of the congregation’s families. But the family had several active members in different churches, one of them in the local Assembly of God. The Assembly pastor had come around and, after assessing the situation, declared that the real problem wasn’t cancer but lack of faith. If the family had even a little faith, their prayers would have been answered long ago and the cancer would be gone.
When Ken heard about this, he went home and got a baseball bat. He was coming out of the house to use it on the other pastor when his wife stopped him and stood in front of him until some of his rage drained away.
I don’t know what the Assembly of God thought about that story, but the Lutherans loved it. I’m also not sure how exaggerated the details had become before I heard it, but, as we say about many legends, there’s a good reason a story like that was told about this guy.
Ken loved the church. I think sometimes his family had to force him to take vacations. He told me that his wife kept pointing out that the church had lasted almost two thousand years without him and could probably still hang on for a week or two in his absence. Still, if a death in his parish occurred while he was gone, he’d often fly back for the funeral.
He was the head of the synod’s candidacy committee and had an encyclopedic knowledge of every ministerial candidate’s file. He got me on the committee, and then, when my term ended, kept me on as a “consultant.” He had nothing but scorn for people who didn’t take the job seriously and would just as soon have handpicked the entire committee.
The first half of my service as a pastor was graced by Ken’s presence. I see myself driving with him, sitting in meetings and study sessions with him, walking out of the annual synod convention with him to smoke our pipes together. (I think we were among the last smokers to quit.)
Then one day he woke up and couldn’t use his arm. Then he started to lose his speech. A blood vessel had burst in his brain and a lot of us suddenly lost all the days and all the things we didn’t even know we were counting on.
I think I first heard about this from Gary, another pastor in our conference, who called me after making a hospital call in Fargo. He had seen Ken in the hospital, thought he was making a visit, then realized he was being admitted.
They operated the end of that week. No one could really be sure how much or how little he’d recover.
The bishop, who should have come up and taken the service at Ken’s church that Sunday, somehow decided he had other things to do. I took it. (The sermon I preached that morning can be found at the end of this book.)
One of my most vivid memories from my service is of sitting in that chancel before worship, listening to the prelude, trying to keep myself together. It was a big place with a high ceiling, and I seemed to myself unusually small. I really didn’t want to be there. I remember marveling at the strange twists of life that had brought me to that moment. I remember wondering how on earth I ended up doing what I did.
But, at times like that, everybody in the room wants you to get through it well and wants to get through it with you—and you all do.
Ken survived the operation, came back maybe a little better than the surgeon implied he would, maybe a little worse than everybody hoped. After a couple of years, he retired on disability.
I’d visit him at the hospital when he was in rehab. When I left, I’d sit in my car in the parking lot, pound on the steering wheel and scream.
Part Two
The Woman in the Window
You knew people in funny ways. In a small town, you were always defined by your office, so you met people from the start as your parishioners or not your parishioners. Factor in the multiple, crisscrossing family ties of a long-settled farming area and every relationship began with a shape well past changing.
We lived right across the highway from one of our parishioners, a pleasant, elderly lady. After not too many years had passed, we did her funeral, and her house was bought by a young couple with one child who had moved into town. But Angie, the wife, was the daughter of another parish family. For her it was a matter of moving back to the town she grew up in. Soon she was one of our Sunday School teachers, eventually taking a turn as its leader.
She might never have left. I was never sure I got the whole story of why her new family had returned to her hometown rather than somewhere else, but it was as though her interlude away had been erased. Even I thought of her as the daughter of Marie and Peter, an active volunteer in the church she had grown up in.
She became my personal hair stylist. One Easter morning, she pointed out that she had a lot of opportunities to study the back of my head during the service, and she had decided she could do a better job cutting my hair. She would do it for free, as a gift to the pastor.
She was actually an outstanding hair stylist, though glacial in her work tempo. I’d have to set aside at least an hour for a haircut, but I’ve never fought less with my hair than when Angie was cutting it. She was bright and fun to talk to. I got to know her well.
I have three strong memories of Angie, two of them appropriately church-related.
I could see her house from the church office. One day, soon after we had decided to accept a new call, I saw her walking over to the church and I thought I’d mention to her that we were going to move. So, when she came in the office, we had a little conversation about Sunday School and then I said, “Hey, I wanted to tell you: we got offered a call at another church, and we think we’re going to take it. We’ll probably be leaving in about two months.”
Here’s what she did: she looked at me with that vacant look people get when they have been captured by some sudden worry, some distant thought; then she stood up without saying a word and walked out of the room. I watched her leave the church, cross the highway, and enter her house without ever looking back.
