At a glance, there is nothing imposing about it. It is a modest-looking church that blends easily into the residential neighborhood in which it is nestled. There are no fancy stained glass windows – no towering steeple – no architectural grandeur whatsoever. It’s small. It’s simple. And yet, I think it’s as beautiful as any church on earth – and it truly means the world to me.
I’m talking about Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Decorah, Iowa- which my father served as pastor from 1965 to 1974. The church just celebrated its 60th anniversary this past weekend, and as soon as I learned that my dad (its only former pastor who is still alive) was going to be preaching for the celebratory service, I knew that I had to be there – not to sing a solo or play any sort of special role in the festivities, but just to be a regular person in the pews, joining in the celebration. And I am so glad that I was there.
We moved to Decorah when I was 5 years old and just beginning kindergarten, and we moved away the summer before I began 9th grade – so those years in Decorah and at Good Shepherd were incredibly important for my development in just about every respect. Only in retrospect have I come to understand and appreciate just how blessed I was that this was the church where I got to grow up. I was a shy kid- sometimes painfully so- and I think it would have been really easy for me to get lost in a larger congregation. Instead, I was part of a community of faith where it was possible to know everyone – and to feel special and cherished. Moreover, it was a small enough church that all kinds of exciting opportunities opened up to me such as playing organ at a very young age. (I played the prelude for Christmas Eve 1967, when I was 7 years old- and one year later, I was the organist for the entire service.) And as junior high students, my best friend Marshall and I were able to sing in the senior choir, something that I’m sure would not have been possible in a larger church. I can even remember a handful of occasions when my dad invited me to choose the hymns and the readings (under his watchful eye, of course.) I was fortunate as well to be part of a really special group of classmates in Sunday School …. me, Marshall, Steve Olsen, Paul Erdman, Gary Wicks, Kim Pilgrim, LeAnn Melby, Nancy Chaffee and Jackie Bahr. They were some of my very closest friends – and when we moved away from Decorah in 1974, I think the single hardest thing for me was leaving those Sunday School friends. And although I wasn’t particularly aware of it at the time, I was so fortunate to be part of a vibrant church family filled with interesting people, young and old alike- including people who were from other countries or who had lived exceptionally interesting lives. Even in that small church in that small town, I was already being shown just how big and diverse and amazing the world was.
I thought I was already well-grounded in Good Shepherd’s history, but I actually learned something really important during that morning’s children’s sermon. Pastor Amy Larson, the current pastor at Good Shepherd, asked the little children who came forward if they knew what was there before their church had been built back in 1958. None of them knew- and neither did I.
It turns out that the church was built on land that at the time was a pasture – which is why the new church was given the name Good Shepherd. I found that to be absolutely beautiful- and it made me smile to think of the scene the played out on the church grounds earlier this fall during Amme Anderson’s funeral … when three deers peacefully grazed. What a wonderful sight. And in the rest of the children’s sermon, Pastor Larson asked the children what a shepherd does for their sheep- and they knew! “Guard them.” “Feed them.” “Keep them from wandering away.” What a nice reminder of what Jesus does for us.
The whole service was wonderful from start to finish and included the exciting contribution of a ten-piece brass ensemble comprised mostly of members of the congregation. (Amazing for such a small church!) The hymns were stirring- the lessons uplifting- but for me the high point was my dad’s sermon. He said a lot of meaningful things but one of the most interesting was when he hearkened back to a self-study that the congregation underwent while he was pastor there. A subcommittee was tasked with exploring the question of What Is The Church? Their answer was surprising: The Church is an Event. It is the act of hearing the Word of God and then acting upon that Word. And as I heard that, I realized that this has continued to be a hallmark of this particular congregation – and if anything, it has become increasingly true over the years.
The other moment from the sermon that stays with me is when my dad shared some of the deep misgivings about accepting the call that Good Shepherd extended to him back in 1965. It was an exciting opportunity, to be sure, but it was also more than a little intimidating to think about serving a congregation with so many college professors in it. As my dad put it, no matter what he would talk about or preach about, chances are there was someone out in the congregation who knew 5 times as much about it as he did – if not more. My dad must have either explicitly shared some of those misgivings or at least hinted at them at the last meeting with the call committee, because as he headed back to the car, a member of the call committee- a religion professor at Luther named Harris Kaasa – ran after him to say these words (or words to this effect) …. “It’s true that we’re a highly educated congregation, by and large, but please don’t hold that against us. More than anything, we are sheep who need a shepherd; we are people who are hungry to hear the Word of God.” Those encouraging words helped convince my dad to accept the call to Good Shepherd- and I am so glad that he did!
After the service, we moved from the sanctuary to the fellowship hall (which used to be the sanctuary) for a delicious brunch and a short program that included a moment to recognize the church’s charter members – some of whom were in attendance. Those charter members included my first piano teacher in Decorah, Connie Bolson, who helped nurture my gift for playing by ear and also introduced me to playing the organ. Reconnecting with her many years was one of the very best moments of the whole day – especially when I saw that bright smile of hers.
My dad was invited to speak for about five minutes at the brunch, and he couldn’t imagine how he could summarize ten years of ministry at Good Shepherd in such a limited amount of time. What he decided to do instead was to simply string together a series of brief reminiscences of some of the people who were part of Good Shepherd during our time there – people who are now gone but not forgotten. My dad so easily could have assembled a list of those parishioners with whom he was especially close- those who were among his most devoted and helpful supporters during that tumultuous time. (My dad’s tenure at Good Shepherd coincided almost exactly with the Viet Nam War, and the congregation – like the town – like the country as a whole – was painfully divided over the issue.) But instead, my dad’s list of parishioners he misses included people like Ransom Bolson (wife of my aforementioned piano teacher), a crusty chicken farmer who saw the world very differently than my father did and who spoke vehemently against pastoral pay raises at nearly every annual meeting. But a day or two after each of those contentious annual meetings, Ransom Bolson would show up at the front door of the parsonage with a fully dressed chicken- his unique peace offering, his way of saying that he hoped that they could still be friends despite all of their disagreements. And as my dad said in his remarks, “a pastor can never have too many friends.”
He also included in his list a woman by the name of Charlotte Hexum, an elderly pastor’s widow who hobbled around with a severely stooped back – yet who possessed a spine of steel. She was a formidable woman with very strong opinions about how things in the church should be done, and she had no hesitation whatsoever in sharing those opinions with my father in Monday morning phone calls to the church office that occurred pretty much without fail. I’m sure it was no fun for my dad to have to endure those conversations in which Mrs. Hexum had something to say about his sermon, the hymns that were sung, etc. (I remember how my dad, at one point, had Good Shepherd order copies of a new paperback hymnal supplement titled Hymns Hot and Carols Cool, one of a number of examples of the church trying to stay relevant by the introduction of modern new hymns. This is the kind of thing that would delight many members of the congregation but cause a great deal of consternation to people like Mrs. Hexum- and she would let him know it, too! ) But he knew then- and appreciates even more today- how Mrs. Hexum’s suggestions and criticisms sprang out of a deep and sincere love of the church and a burning concern that the church should hold fast to its most cherished traditions in those bewildering years of perpetual change. And by the way, those criticisms and suggestions were almost always laced with affection and humor- and I can well understand how my dad could miss someone like Charlotte Hexum.
<It makes me wonder who I would choose to talk about if I were supposed to give some sort of speech about my life and who had maybe been especially important to me. I would hope that my list would include at least a couple of the more ‘difficult’ people who have been part of my life. After all, they play a role in shaping who we are.>
I suspect that dad’s short list of just some of the people he misses had the effect of getting all of the old-timers there … including me … to think back to those days and remember people from Good Shepherd that perhaps had not crossed our minds in many, many years. It got me thinking, for instance, about the Bass family … who lived out in the country in what I remember as a small, run-down house like nothing I had ever seen in town. (The first time I saw it, I thought of the run-down farm house on the old TV show Green Acres.) One could just tell from how they dressed that they did not have much money – and Mrs. Bass had only one arm, while her husband Clarence had some intellectual limitations. So life was not easy for them- and I can remember more than one Thanksgiving in which we delivered a free meal to their doorstep. (And I suspect that mom and dad made a point of bringing me and my siblings along to have our young eyes opened to this sobering reality.)
It got me thinking back to Pastor Finn Magelson, who at the time we moved to Decorah was 100 years old and completely deaf- and I remember as youngster how strange it was to hear somebody sitting in the congregation talking so loudly right in the middle of the service. I looked at Pastor Magelson with fascination without fully appreciating how I was looking at a bit of living history- someone born right after the end of the Civil War, whose life and ministry spanned two world wars and who was alive to witness the invention of the telephone, the phonograph, the airplane, etc. I shake my head in wonder at the thought of it.
It got me thinking back to a formidable woman named Helen Strand, a professor at Luther who was also (I believe) the first woman elected as president of the congregation. I remember watching her chair the congregation’s annual meeting and wielding a big spoon from the kitchen as her gavel. (My mom later noticed that the pounding of that spoon had left deep gouges on the table.) This was an era when it was quite uncommon for a woman to hold this kind of responsibility …. but in a congregation like Good Shepherd, it wasn’t all that shocking – although it still made quite an impression on me as something quite out of the ordinary.
It got me thinking back to the Kjome family and to their son Mike who was a civilian POW in Viet Nam. I can still remember the POW bracelet that my dad wore that was emblazoned with Mike’s name on it. Those bracelets were worn to demonstrate that those POWs were not forgotten. And it got me thinking back to the wonderful day when Mike finally came back home to Decorah. We were part of the crowd standing in his front yard waiting to welcome him- and in the background, one could hear all of the church bells in town joyously ringing – and I can remember my mom or dad suddenly saying “there’s Good Shepherd! there’s Good Shepherd!” when the sound of our own bell joined with the others.
It got me thinking about Jean Bruemmer, who was my dad’s secretary at the church – and someone who was smart and efficient and very funny. I remember one Thanksgiving when I was organist and the daughter of Lyle and Lucy Sacquitne had been asked to sing a solo for the service. She had found two possibilities but couldn’t decide which one to sing, so she asked Jean to come in and listen to them both and help her choose. One was the old hymn “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing.” The other was a vocal solo called “Thy Great Bounty” which began with the words “Because I have been given much, I, too, shall give.” I remember that Jean liked them both, but preferred the second one. “I like it,” she said, “because it isn’t just about what we have- but doing something about it!” Even as a junior high kid who didn’t know much about anything, I knew that she was on to something. It comes back to that whole notion that the church, more than anything, is meant to be an event.
And on and on and on I could go. It’s amazing how coming back to Good Shepherd for this particular occasion and hearing my dad’s reminiscences unleashed a flood of memories of my own from so many years ago – memories wrapped up in a profound sense of gratitude for this place and community that provided me with such rich grounding for all that has come after. The current president of the congregation said it beautifully when she pointed out that this anniversary celebration happened to fall right between Thanksgiving and the beginning of Advent. The one is a holiday in which we primarily look back and give thanks for all of the blessings we have been given – while the other is a season for looking to the future with a spirit of expectation and hope. What a beautiful place to be, no matter what time of the year.
Some more photos from the day:
The brunch. (It was nearly a full house.)
Dad and Sonja reminisce with Phil Finanger, whose parents – Kent and Lucia Finanger, were charter members of Good Shepherd. Kent Finanger was a celebrated coach at Luther who appreciated excellence in all kinds of things beyond athletics. He was famous for sending homemade congratulatory cards whenever anybody he knew did something special. They would be fashioned out of paper plates and he would use various colored magic markings for the words. I got one from him for my first Messiah solo at Luther and another for my senior voice recital. I wish I had kept them.
Although my dad is the only former pastor of Good Shepherd still living, an interim pastor at Good Shepherd- April Larson- was on hand to give her own greetings. She grew up in Decorah and vividly remembered the circumstances under which Good Shepherd came into being back in 1958. I loved what she had to say.
This photograph from Good Shepherd’s 25th anniversary celebration shows the first three pastors with their wives- from left to right: my mom and dad … Carol and Paul Hasvold (he followed my dad at Good Shepherd) … and Lydia and Palmer Russeth (who was Good Shepherd’s first pastor.)
