All Hands Stand By to Repel Boarders. Cordell Strug
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once, worrying over something that had someone angry and agitated. He listened, nodding, then said, “Yeah. There’s a problem there.” Then he leaned toward me. “But it’s not your problem. Don’t start assuming everybody’s anger is your fault.” On another occasion, he told me: “Look: wake up. It’s not that you can’t please this guy. It’s that he’s unpleasable.” (That single phrase was a gift that, fairly or not, often guided and consoled me.)
He liked to point out, in his down-to-earth, deflating way, that pastors have a bad habit of thinking themselves the center of the universe, for good or ill, taking both the blame and the credit for things that usually had nothing to do with them.
He was better at getting things done without friction than anyone I know. He had patience and took a lot of time to lay the groundwork for things he wanted to happen. He had an effortless connection with people, and he really did know a lot about his community. We were talking once about the habit church councils have of reporting complaints while refusing to reveal who made them. He said he once had a meeting in which almost every council member reported the same complaint; it seemed the entire congregation was enraged.
No one would mention a name, so here’s what Ken did: he told them he’d write two names on a piece of paper and hand it around the room; he wanted to know how many other people, besides the ones on the paper, had complained—no names, just a number. He handed the paper around. It circled the table and returned to him in an increasingly embarrassed silence. No one had heard it from anyone else. What seemed like a congregational crisis was an issue limited to two individuals, notorious malcontents.
To do something like that, you have to be secure and calm enough not to get defensive and start arguing the issue before you know how big the problem is; you have to have a good enough relationship with the council for them to trust your instincts and your judgments; finally—and this is the hard one—you have to be able to come up with those two names.
I’m trying to illustrate how canny he was about the dynamics of a church community, but the real gift to me wasn’t his example or his inspiration, but his presence, the ready welcome when I was feeling bruised, the ready wisdom when I called looking for specific advice for a specific situation.
Ken was a great defender of ordinary pastors and the ordinary life of the church. He hated hearing the synod staff talk about churches being in “survival” mode; he thought if a rural church was surviving it was doing well. He hated seeing articles in church magazines that praised attention- getting innovations, like baptismal services done in hot tubs; he loved declaring that a ministry devoted to faithful preaching, teaching, presiding at the sacraments, and visiting would never get you a write-up: it would only enrich your congregation.
In general, he thought most of the agitation for change and novelty that marked the time of our church service was silly and beside the point, leaving the real tasks of ministry at best untouched, at worst ignored.
We were driving to a meeting one day, and he told me someone 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