Lutheran pastors explore relevant ministries to unchurched Northwest

c. 2008 Religion News Service SKAMAKOWA, Wash. _ Answers. Pastors have them. Sometimes, though, they wrestle with questions. Especially in the unchurched Northwest. What does it mean to be spiritual but not religious? To be a minister in a place where salmon fishing is sacramental, and old-growth trees are cathedral spires? Seven Lutheran pastors went […]

c. 2008 Religion News Service

SKAMAKOWA, Wash. _ Answers. Pastors have them. Sometimes, though, they wrestle with questions. Especially in the unchurched Northwest.

What does it mean to be spiritual but not religious? To be a minister in a place where salmon fishing is sacramental, and old-growth trees are cathedral spires?


Seven Lutheran pastors went looking for answers. Their three-year journey began and ended on the Columbia River.

From the beginning, people in the Northwest lived close to the land. Missionaries brought a foreign message and flung it over native peoples like a blanket. Settlers who needed to lighten their wagons threw off the churches they knew. Homesteads were remote.

That nurtured an individualism as rugged as the landscape and a skepticism toward everything _ including organized religion.

“Things are different here,” says John Rosenberg, pastor at the Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in Olympia, Washington. “If you took this place seriously _ the land, environmentalism, history, poetry, art, indigenous expressions _ how would that effect being a Lutheran pastor out here?”

That question launched the quest.

The Louisville Institute, which encourages ministers to know the unique people and the places they serve, gave Rosenberg and six other pastors $40,000 and three years to find some answers. They adopted a name for the project: Salmon Nation Spirituality.

At sunrise on a rainy Tuesday in April, the Columbia River at Skamokawa, Wash., looks still as glass. It’s not. The morning tide recedes; the ocean, 33 miles away, pulls the half-dozen kayaks down the river.

These seven ministers, who gathered in this tranquil setting, graduated from seminaries in places where Lutheran is a brand name. They didn’t learn much about proudly unchurched places. But back in school, they studied the Scriptures. Now they are taking it a step further: They are looking for what God and faith mean in this place.


“Exegesis is taking every word in Scripture,” says Laurie Larson Caesar of Mission of the Atonement in Beaverton, Ore., “holding it, looking at it, dancing with it, playing with it. Holding it as holy, a potential vessel of the divine.”

In another century, in another place, she says, Martin Luther resented a theology imported from Rome and thrust on ordinary Germans. He translated the Bible and church services into the language of his people.

Now, this exegesis tackles a particular culture. “It sounds like a whole new way of doing theology,” Larson Caesar says. “And it is, but it isn’t.”

In the past three years, the seven pastors listened. They paid for and organized retreats to meet with writers, artists, scientists, sociologists and people who had never set foot in a church. And these pastors chose new words to preach and pray.

“Creator God, we give thanks for the return of the spring chinook salmon, and for the life they share with this region,” Aaron Couch began to pray with his congregation at First Immanuel Lutheran Church in Portland. “We praise you for this beautiful world that you entrust to us, and pray for the wisdom to care for it well, that its bounty may be a blessing for the generations that come after us.”

His wife and co-pastor, Melinda Wagner, realized that adults who didn’t grow up in church didn’t understand the language of Scripture. She found new phrases. “Jesus, the great high priest,” became “Jesus, whose life showed others his love” when she read from the Bible during services.


Back on the river, the kayaks slip by osprey and put in on a narrow strip of beach. The pastors gather around a driftwood cross. Martha Maier of St. Andrew Lutheran Church in Vancouver, Wash., reads a Native American prayer.

Over lunch, the pastors talk about what they’ve learned during the three years of study: Don’t equate church attendance with faith. Offer a peaceful refuge, community, a connection to the Earth, a strong moral center, opportunities to serve others. Stop preaching and let others tell their stories.

“This may be the time to create a church from the ground up, not impose one from somewhere else,” says Franklin Wilson of St. Mark Lutheran Church in Salem, Ore. Lutherans have reformation in their blood. “This isn’t about the survival of the church. It’s a search for deeper authenticity, for telling the truth as we know it.”

The three-year project was an experiment in collaboration. “The idea of the lone wolf pastor is very much alive,” says Larson Caesar. “We work in isolation _ even in competition.

“This feels like planting seeds that will grow into great trees. It may be the beginning of a transformed ministry _ for the seven of us, for Lutherans, maybe for others.”

(Nancy Haught writes for The Oregonian in Portland, Ore.)

Photos of Lutheran pastors on and near the Columbia River are available via https://religionnews.com

AMB/LF END HAUGHT

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