The Austin family is yet again in mourning. Just a year and a half after the loss of my mother Sarah and her sister Jenny on the same day in January 2022, their sister Jane has now been called beyond the veil. With Jane’s passing, an entire generation of the Austin family is gone in under two years.
But I am not writing to expose our grief or wail in lamentation. We are a resilient family. And if there is one thing my mother and my aunts instilled in me, it is to speak up when something is not right. So in honor of the three strong women in our family who have passed recently, I write to tell the story of two pastors. By the end of this letter, I ask you to make the decision as to which of these pastors behaves in a Christlike manner and enacts God’s will on Earth as it is in Heaven.
Something most in town knew (but only spoke about in hushed tones) was that my mother suffered from intense mental illness. During the worst of that mental illness, while she was hallucinating that nefarious people were poisoning her well (the one source of water to her home), Pastor Mike of the Primghar Church of Christ would bring her bottled water and just chat with her, human to human. She was not a member of his congregation. He saw a person in need of compassion, and he gave it.
When my mother was passing, we knew she would want a funeral in a church, even though she had not been to a church in years. Mental illness will do that to you. It has a terrible way of isolating you, as many illnesses do. But she still maintained a strong sense of quiet faith. When we asked Pastor Mike if he would be willing to officiate her funeral, all he asked was how he could be there for our family during our time of grief. He opened his church to us in the spirit of extravagant welcome and performed a lovely funeral that ended up being for both my mother and her sister Jenny due to her passing on the same day.
While Sarah and Jenny hadn’t expressed specific wishes for their funerals, Jane had made her wishes clear: she wanted her funeral to be in the same church she had received the sacraments of baptism and confirmation: Bethel Lutheran Church in Sutherland. In recent years, she has been suffering from both cancer and COPD. This made congregating in group gatherings such as church services both difficult and dangerous in the wake of a certain global respiratory virus. She has been so weak as of late that even walking down her hall was difficult. So even though she had not attended in several years, that wish as she passed was important to her faith journey.
So imagine our family’s surprise at how differently Jane’s funeral was treated than that of her sisters. Her grieving husband notified us that Pastor Brett Witmer had refused to hold her funeral in the church because he stated “she was not a member.” We called to correct him, as she was baptized and confirmed into that church and had never transferred her membership to another church, but he told us it came down to a lack of attendance.
I am relatively certain that in all of the teachings in the gospels, attendance was not a virtue that Jesus upheld and prized. And wasn’t it Martin Luther himself that broke from the church at the time based primarily on the church linking tithing with entrance into Heaven? Isn’t that the very basis of the Lutheran faith, which gets its name from Martin Luther? I’m no religious scholar, so please correct me if I am mistaken. Didn’t Jesus himself seek out the imperfect first? James and John had violent tempers. Peter denied him. Judas betrayed him. Paul had previously persecuted Christians and became the greatest evangelist of the church in its infancy.
In the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans, he wrote: “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” Of all the teachings of the early church, this should be one of the simplest teachings to execute. Simply put: Use your sense of human empathy and be there for each other in both happiness and sadness. But apparently, concepts that can be grasped by Sunday School children are beyond certain learned pastors of today.
This is a prime example of why young people are leaving churches in droves: The absolute hypocrisy of church leaders placing greater importance on self-created rules than on actually living and operating in the image of Christ himself.

Ashley Schroeder

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