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Pastor can't dillydally, drone on
By WAVENEY ANN MOORE, Times Staff Writer ST. PETERSBURG -- The Rev. R.M. "Buz" Van Horne doesn't dawdle on Sunday mornings. At Redeemer Lutheran Church, the service begins at 9:30 a.m. A few blocks south, worship at Trinity Lutheran Church starts at 11. Van Horne is pastor of both churches. That means Van Horne has to dash from the first Sunday service to the second, occasionally dodging armies of orange cones that pop up to regulate weekend traffic in the city's downtown. The commute takes about 10 minutes. Because of the time constraints, Redeemer's service must last no more than an hour, and the traditional chats with parishioners occur before the service rather than after. "I unfortunately have to be pretty time conscious," said Van Horne, 58. The pastor and the two churches he serves are part of a unique experiment launched by the Florida-Bahamas Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Hired by Trinity Lutheran Church in 1997, Van Horne started leading both St. Petersburg congregations in December. Trinity and Redeemer have established a "cooperating" agreement, which means Redeemer bears partial financial responsibility for Van Horne's services. "Each congregation, as it is now, has its own facility, its own worship tradition and its own fellowship tradition. At Trinity, for instance, worship is very traditional. At Redeemer, it is more of a blended service," Van Horne said. "If this goes on and works well, there might be the possibility of forming a single parish," he added. What that could mean is uncertain. "It could take several forms, and I think it's premature to even speculate," Van Horne said. The current arrangement was spurred by declining membership at Redeemer, at 4355 Central Ave. Trinity, with its Gothic Revival sanctuary and spectacular stained glass windows from Munich, has also lost members through the years. The downtown church, at 401 Fifth St. N, was founded in March 1911 and was the springboard for congregations such as St. Andrew on 62nd Avenue S and Trinity in Bradenton. In earlier times, said congregation council president Ralph Napolitano, Trinity had a congregation of more than 2,000. Virginia Anderson said that when she and her husband started attending Trinity 30 years ago, it had about 800 members. These days, about 125 people attend Sunday service during the peak winter months. At Redeemer, which once held two Sunday services for its large congregation, Sunday attendance is now about 60 to 80 people. Two other area Evangelical Lutheran churches also are taking action to deal with membership decline. St. Stephen's in Pinellas Park and Bethel on 62nd Avenue N will merge, said Van Horne, who is dean of the Florida-Bahamas Synod's Suncoast Conference, a jurisdiction that covers St. Petersburg to Dunedin. The Pinellas Park and St. Petersburg congregations plan to worship at the 62nd Avenue N site under a new name, Van Horne said. John Brooks, spokesman for the Evangelical Lutheran Church, which has its headquarters in Chicago, said the denomination, formed in 1987 through a merger of three Lutheran bodies, has 5.13-million members in the United States and the Caribbean. "In terms of actual members of the church, we are fairly static and we've been that way since the church was formed," Brooks said. "We are working right now on a churchwide evangelical strategy," he said. The denomination is trying to woo members of ethnic groups such as Hispanics, African-Americans, Asians, Pacific Islanders and American Indians, he said. It is not unusual for churches to share a pastor, Brooks said. "We do have a number of pastors who serve more than one congregation. These tend to be fairly small" and unable to afford a full-time pastor, he said. There is no overall shortage of pastors to serve the Evangelical Lutheran Church's 11,000 congregations, Brooks said. In fact, the denomination has 17,000 active and retired pastors. The demand, though, is for newly graduated pastors, who generally require lower salaries and tend to be more flexible about where they will serve, the church spokesman said. At Trinity and Redeemer, a working relationship had been in existence for several months before Van Horne began leading the two congregations. At the time, Redeemer was being served by an interim pastor, the Rev. Mark Peterson, now an interim pastor at St. Paul's in Clearwater. "We were already doing some cooperative things and roughly he preached both places on one Sunday and I preached at both churches on one Sunday," Van Horne said. For the past few weeks, Van Horne, who is recovering from gastric bypass surgery, has had to call on U.S. Navy chaplain Peter Rosa to serve the two congregations. Van Horne said he likes his new responsibilities. "It is a challenge to make a new idea work as well as possible. But it's been a real joy from both ends," he said. The pastor said he receives invaluable assistance from members of both churches. Eucharistic ministers, for instance, take communion to the sick and homebound. Other church members serve as office volunteers and run social service programs, youth and other ministries. Though members of each congregation are committed to their particular community, there is a deep interest in their sister church, Van Horne said. Napolitano, Trinity's council president, joined the church about seven years ago. "I like the friendliness of the people and the caring of everybody in the congregation," he said. "We try to help each other out." That spirit impressed Kim and David Padgett, who joined Trinity three years ago. But it was its music that first drew them to the church, said Mrs. Padgett, who plays the violin professionally. The people "are for real," she said. "You are just accepted. I went through a scary medical procedure recently, and the phone rang off the wall." Mrs. Padgett likes the new relationship with Redeemer. "It seems to be working and already we're seeing new perspectives," she said. Ingegerd Norman, a volunteer in the office at Redeemer and a member since 1984, feels the same way. What about the pastor who must hold both congregations together? "He seems to be energized by it," Mrs. Padgett said.
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