He is not your father’s pastor
By Kari Sayers, Special to the News
Tuesday, October 2, 2007 11:46 AM PDT
When you see him driving around the Peninsula in his sleek white convertible, casually elegant with postmodern stick-up hair and a Hollywood smile, “pastor” isn’t the first word that comes to mind. But Stephen Lien, a former singer who can still croon with the best of them, is indeed an earnest and scholarly minister, whose “sermons are an inspiring blend of personal testimony and sound biblical scholarship,” as one longtime churchgoer put it.
“The stereotype of Christianity and pastors is wrong,” Lien said last week when we sat down for a chat in his office at Ascension Lutheran Church in Rancho Palos Verdes, which he joined earlier this summer. “I’m on a mission of sorts to try and convince those I meet that faith is not dull, boring, lifeless and funless, but exciting, adventuresome, relevant, engaging and winsome, and it’s the best possible life there is.
Among people on the West Coast in particular there is almost a disparaging attitude toward religion and Christianity because it’s so associated with right-wing fundamentalism. There’s downright animosity toward the church, but [right-wing fundamentalism] is an aberration of Christianity; it is not essential to the Christian faith.”
His wife, Joanne, a registered nurse and hospital administrator who grew up in Zululand, South Africa, agrees. “And they think we’re perfect,” she added. “We probably don’t fight and we don’t have sex except when we have children. Honestly, in my first job, they just couldn’t believe it when I got pregnant because I was working nights.”
One major obstacle to Lien’s mission is the public perception that religion and Christianity in particular is dead. “Many people, boomers in particular, have been disenfranchised, marginalized, hurt, offended, wounded and betrayed by the church,” he said. “In their perception, the church has failed them, God has failed them. You constantly hear the question that if God is loving and kind and merciful, then how could the Holocaust have happened or the AIDS epidemic? If God is so loving, Why did my mother die when I was 6 years old? Why did my daughter die when she was an infant? Why can’t I get pregnant? I’ve prayed and have tried to live a good life.
“I love the line from William Willimon,” he continued, “a university dean who every fall would have students come in and say, ‘I don’t believe in God.’ And he would say to them, ‘Tell me what kind of God you don’t believe in because I probably don’t believe in that God either.’ It’s easy to set up a straw man or a straw god and say, ‘There’s no way I believe in that.’”
The goal of both Lien and his wife is to live authentic and transparent lives. “We have the same struggles that anyone else does, yet we have found a source of help and encouragement and purpose and meaning, and if there is a time to share something of our faith with someone, we’re ready to do that,” he said. True, it is not up to us to judge what other people believe in, he said and added, “But I think I’m called on to make a defense of what I believe when that opportunity is given to me.”
“He reads a lot, so he knows a lot and is able to converse with people on every level,” Joanne said. “He can meet them where they are, and he’s not afraid to talk to non-Christians, agnostics or atheists and answer their questions.”
“I’m a student, at least to some degree, of contemporary culture because these are the people to whom I’m called to minister,” he said. But he talks about religion only when it’s a natural part of the conversation. “Once you listen, people talk about personal issues, their lives or their marriages, or children, or their challenges or their jobs or whatever.”
“He has a gift of being able to weave things in, so all of a sudden people are telling him everything,” Joanne added.
Lien did not start out wanting to be a pastor. “It was the last thing I wanted to be,” he said. “My father was a workaholic pastor, and I grew up resenting the church and the fact that it robbed me of my father. I have vivid memories of planning a family outing and then the phone would ring and somebody else needed him, and the family outing was cancelled.”
However, when Lien was in his early teens, his family moved from New York City to the small town of Willmar in Minnesota, and he started singing with a group called Youth for Christ. “It was an enlightening experience for me,” he said. “This was the most fun group of people; I don’t know when I have ever laughed so hysterically and for such protracted times as when we were together.”
After a year of Bible school in Seattle, he joined a six-member singing group that traveled internationally and domestically for two years. “It was rock’n’ roll, and we had an electronic keyboard, bass, guitar and percussion,” Lien said.
But he gave all that up to attend Augsburg College in Minneapolis, where he was reacquainted with Joanne. “Our families had known each other since 1959,” Lien recalled. “My father was a pastor in New York City, and his congregation sponsored my in-laws on the mission field.”
Joanne was the first white baby born in the South African mission hospital where her father, an American medical doctor, worked. She later went to boarding school in the town of Eshowe, over a hundred miles from the mission station. It was during Apartheid, and she, as well as the other mission children, had to go to an all-white government school. Although she played with the Zulu children before she went to school and can still understand the Zulu language, when she went away and was separated from them, she didn’t play with them any more.
The transition to the American culture when the family returned to Minneapolis was difficult, Joanne recalled. “The cold was awful, and I thought the kids were wild. [Also,] when you grow up in a boarding school and are used to uniforms and a strict English upbringing, the emphasis is not on clothes, and it wasn’t on money, and you come back here and everything is about what you wear and how you wear your hair. And [if] you have a different way of speaking and different slang, you just don’t fit in.”
There also was the attitude to contend with that the American way is the best and everybody should be adopting the American life style. Academically, however, she adjusted well, for she was valedictorian at Edison High School, a large high school in Minneapolis.
Much has been written about the difficulties of being a minister’s wife. “I don’t think the pressure is there as it was before,” she maintained. “The unique thing about being a pastor’s wife is not that you’re necessarily put on a pedestal, but it can be a lonely life.” Not that the pastor shares what he knows about the people in the congregation, she said, but there may a certain level of discomfort. “And being a pastor’s wife, you can’t always share what you feel because it can come back to [haunt] you. You share things, and then a year later it’s gossiped around.”
In December, the couple will be going back to South Africa for three weeks. “My brother is a pastor in Ventura, and we’re going with his church on a mission trip,” Joanne said. “We’re going to be helping build an orphanage for AIDS children, children who have been orphaned by AIDS, and I’ll go back to my birth place.” The hospital where she was born and her father worked now is one of the largest AIDS hospitals in South Africa.
There will surely be more stories to tell when they return.
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