Keeping the faith:
Janet Young serves two congregations in Hot Springs
By VINCE DEVLIN of the Missoulian | Posted: Monday, September 21, 2009 8:00 am
HOT SPRINGS - For one day, at least, there was definitely no shortage of ministers in Hot Springs.
More than 20 of them showed up and "robed up" just over a week ago for the ordination and installation of Janet Young as a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.
The ceremony, however, took place five blocks from Hot Springs' Trinity Lutheran Church, in Hot Springs' First Presbyterian Church.
Seating capacity - the Presbyterian church has more - wasn't the only consideration.
Since April 2008, the Lutherans and Presbyterians of this small Sanders County community have worshipped together, two separate congregations from two separate religions joined together by similar beliefs, and similar realities in rural America.
"Lutherans and Presbyterians are in full communion with one another, and we can exchange pastors," Young says.
With rural churches often facing closure, it's not uncommon, especially in small towns, for a single pastor to lead two separate congregations, conducting services at one church, then moving across town to lead worship at another.
"But that's not what we are," Young says. "We worship together, do ministry together, do fund-raisers together. We are breaking ground in Montana as a joint congregation."
There are five churches in Hot Springs but, until Young was ordained on Sept. 12, just one resident pastor, Jim Hunter of the Hot Springs Bible Church.
Catholics are served by a priest, and Seventh-day Adventists by a minister, who drive to Hot Springs each week.
The First Presbyterian Church stayed afloat with the help of Rev. James Dickinson, a retired United Methodist minister who drove from Dayton each Sunday for eight years to serve Hot Springs' Presbyterian congregation. Dickinson's "re-retirement" led to the combination of the two congregations.
Until Young's ordination, meanwhile, Trinity Lutheran hadn't had a full-time pastor since Rev. Allyn Larsen died, from a brain tumor, in 1996. After that, like the Catholics and Adventists, area pastors drove to Hot Springs to conduct Lutheran services.
Then Young and her husband Charlie moved to town from Helena after Charlie retired in 2001.
Young, who had lived in Hot Springs in the 1970s and served as the town clerk and treasurer, says she and her husband both wanted the slow pace and friendliness of small-town living, and Hot Springs fit the bill.
"This congregation raised me up," Janet says, and she began serving as a lay pastoral associate.
Lay pastoral associates are one way that some, like the Lutheran Church, deal with serving congregations located in areas of small or shrinking populations and resources. Rev. Bob Nagy, then of Plains, mentored Young as she completed a two-year program to be certified as a lay pastoral associate.
Janet Young felt she was called to do more.
Traditionally, one who is called will enter a residential seminary for three years and then complete an internship before being ordained in the Lutheran Church, but that would take Young from her congregation - not to mention her husband - for three years.
That's where TEEM - Theological Education for Emerging Ministries - came in.
Sponsored by two Lutheran seminaries, the program provides a nonresidential seminary education for men and women over the age of 40 who already serve the church in various ways.
"It allowed me to continue to minister while going to seminary," Young says. "It's been a godsend for places all over the nation."
She studied with people from 40 to 70. There were some who had retired from private industry, others who had retired with 20 years in the military. There were people who had been nurses, ones who had been teachers.
All, Young says, "feel called to the ministry."
TEEM allows them to pursue it without leaving home.
Well, that's not quite true. Three times a year for three years, they met at one location for weeklong intensive classes. The rest of the year they worked closely with mentoring pastors - Young's was Pastor Wayne Pris from Eidsvold Lutheran Church in Somers - to study and prepare.
"There were many times over these past 3 1/2 years when all I could do was say to God, 'I know and trust that you have called me to ordained ministry, but I don't have a clue how I'm going to be able to accomplish it, so it's in your hands, Lord,' " Young wrote before her ordination.
"It was intense," she explains later, "pastoring a church and going to seminary at the same time."
A couple of years into the program, some of Hot Springs' Presbyterian congregation approached Trinity Lutheran about forging some sort of relationship that would allow them to continue in the absence of their own minister.
The result - the Lutheran and Presbyterian United Churches - didn't please everyone, Young admits.
"In each congregation there was a handful of people - maybe three of each - for which this has been particularly difficult," Young says. "I think the hardest thing for some is the connections to the buildings - they've had children baptized in one church or the other, confirmations, marriages."
The United Lutheran and Presbyterian Churches of Hot Springs have sought to minimize that by keeping both churches open and in use. For 17 months the joint congregation has alternated between the First Presbyterian Church and Trinity Lutheran, worshipping at one for a month, then switching to the other.
"To think about the changes necessary to being a joint congregation means there are sacrifices," Young says. "I am a Lutheran pastor serving a joint congregation. In the sense that Jesus Christ calls us together to be a church, as a people who do ministry, it's worth making those sacrifices."
There have been blessings they didn't anticipate, Young says, such as the "sense of losing track of who's Presbyterian and who's Lutheran, and all being members of one congregation. We're all richer for it, because we benefit from two faith traditions."
The primary differences in the two religions, Young says, are "in the understandings of baptism, Holy Communion - the sacraments. Each has a little bit different understanding of the meaning, but it's not significant enough at all to keep us from being in full communion with one another."
Sundays usually find between 25 and 50 people in whichever church is being used for services, but the recent ordination drew 150.
There was lots of family - in addition to Charlie (who was raised Presbyterian, by the way), Young's daughter, father and stepmother came from Phoenix; her sister from Syracuse, N.Y. There were friends - Claudia Kuric, Young's best friend, traveled halfway around the world from Kyrgyzstan. There were the 24 priests and pastors from the Lutheran and other religions, 23 of whom "robed up" and participated as Rev. Jessica Crist, bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church's Montana Synod, conducted the ordination.
And, of course, most of Young's joint congregation was present.
She thanked the Lutherans who have helped and encouraged her from the beginning, and the Presbyterians who joined a year and a half ago.
"Thank you all for welcoming me, trusting me, believing in me, teaching me and journeying in faith with me," Young wrote to her joint congregation. "Thank you for all the ministry you do in quiet ways as you go about your everyday lives."
On a sunny September day last week as she showed off the two churches where she preaches, Young said she's excited about the future of the joint congregation.
"This is new ground for all of us," she said, "but the sense that we've overcome some divisions is powerful witness to who Jesus Christ is. There are not divisions now, but unity."
In Hot Springs, Lutherans and Presbyterians still worship under two roofs - they just do so together, with one pastor.
Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at (406) 319-2117 or vdevlin@missoulian.com.