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A Good Messenger Moves On

Pastor Michael Brecke is heading to Kansas City after his final sermon at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Juddville on Oct. 13.

Michael Brecke might have become a journalist. He was editor of his high school newspaper and worked at his hometown weekly, the Mellen Weekly Record (Wis.), before going to college at the University of Wisconsin – River Falls for a double major in history and journalism.

But he was meant for another calling, one that was first conveyed to him when he was 13, by an itinerant religious educator who spent a week in Mellen with the people of the Congregationalist church Brecke’s family attended.

“He said, ‘You need to become a pastor.’ I then proceeded to go in the exact opposite direction. As a teenager, if it was there to be done, I did it. I really thought becoming a journalist would be as far away from a religious enterprise as you could get.”

During his senior year at UW-River Falls, Brecke was trying to score a job on a newspaper, and was offered a poorly paid spot with a weekly in Red Wing, Minn. But one of his professors said he should go to seminary, in particular Yale Divinity School.

“Yale accepted me and gave me quite a bit of money to go to school there, so I went to Yale and thought I’d study this religion stuff for a while,” Brecke said. “I had those two passions in my life. Journalism was the first one, then I got sidetracked by this religious stuff.”

With his humor, intelligence and inquiring mind, Brecke was welcomed into the fold at Yale, so much so that he was encouraged to continue in his religious studies, obtain a PhD and become one of them, an ivory towered professor of religious studies.

But by then he did feel the calling.

“I needed to be with people and in a church,” he said.

His congregation at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Juddville for the past 11½ years agrees that is exactly where he needed to be.

“For somebody who’s only been here a decade or a little better, he is so ingrained into the community, it’s really amazing. It’s a good testament to what one person can do,” said Karen Peterson, who has served for years as St. Paul’s council president and was one of the first to hear from Brecke that he was leaving.

“The thing about his leaving, the thing that’s tough from our end, he is such a rock star personality,” she said. “He’d hate that analogy, but people are so drawn to him. He really makes the connection between himself and the message and the people. I think as a pastor, he’s a very good messenger of the message but he would never want to get in the way of the message. He is so good at delivering a sermon that really burns a point home. He preaches a lot about forgiveness, so people relate to him very well. He doesn’t care whether you’re Lutheran or whatever you are. He will take you in and pastor to you. I think that has really endeared him to the community.”

Oct. 13 will be his last day as pastor of St. Paul’s. On Oct. 8, Bishop James Justman of Appleton will meet with the congregation to begin the process of calling a new pastor. He will also be responsible for appointing an interim pastor.

On Oct. 20, one week after he delivers his last sermon at St. Paul’s, Brecke begins his new calling as interim pastor at a church in Kansas City, where his wife Betsy’s family lives.

“Wednesday (Sept. 25) of last week I turned 67,” Brecke said. “I work about 65-70 hours a week. I’ve been thinking about the possibility of retiring after the first of the year. I got a job offer from the Central States Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Church of America to be an interim pastor for one year. I had a very narrow window of opportunity to accept that job offer. So, I said yes.”

While he talks easily about it now, Brecke said making the decision to leave was “absolute agony,” but he also recognized it was time.

“I’ve talked to a lot of people about this (retiring) in the last year,” he said. “The reality is that in fairness to the church that I serve and in fairness to whoever will be my successor, I can’t retire here. Because I would have people from the community and that other group that I take care of that will never darken a door of the church and my congregation would continue to call me to do baptisms and weddings and funerals. So that would be terribly unfair, both to the person who succeeds me and to me, if retirement is what I want to do.”

“As a church, we are really blessed to have had him this long,” Karen Peterson said. “Our church is in a good spot. We will bleed him white if he stays any longer. This is very, very good the way circumstances came for him and Betsy. It really is a great move. It was a gift that way.”

Someone who has been involved in the community as much as Brecke has a lot of work to do before making such a move.

“I’ve been resigning from boards for about a year, just because I was on too many,” he said.

One of the most important of those to Brecke was serving as chairperson of the $8 million Good Samaritan – Scandia Village Partners in Compassion Capital Campaign.

“So I chose to find a replacement for myself,” he said. “I wanted to be sure the whoever took my place would have the capability of doing the kinds of things that I did for that campaign. My replacement, this is a scoop, is Lars Johnson. His dad, Al, and a small group of people started Scandia. It’s a good thing for him to do, the next generation getting the torch. Lars is going to be the new campaign director, along with the three members of the executive committee, Judy Bush, Delmar Dahl and Paula Hedeen.

“The other major project I was involved in was the Door County Community Foundation. They’re in a great position now. Bret Bicoy is a marvelous leader for that group.

“Ultimately, I think it’s going to be OK, and it’s going to be OK for everybody,” Brecke said. “I have a lot of energy and I still have a lot of excitement about being alive and all that other kind of stuff. Retirement to me is not the end of anything. It’s a vocational transition to something else.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do when I’m no longer a parish pastor,” he continued. “I’ve got a couple of children’s books that I’ve been neglecting for a couple of years and really need to finish. Find an illustrator. I’ve got another book on theology that will probably get me drummed out of the church. Lots of those kinds of things. The only thing you won’t see me doing is playing golf seven days a week.”

 

The People Make Parting So Hard

 Michael Brecke’s relationship with Door County goes back much farther than his nearly dozen years as pastor of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church.

“I’ve been coming to Door County for decades,” he said. “I first came here in 1961 with a couple of my friends and an old canvas duck tent. Our intention was to make our fortune picking cherries. But our real intent was to chase girls from Chicago. After living in a tent for maybe 10 days – we weren’t making any money picking cherries because we couldn’t get the hang of it. The girls from Chicago wanted nothing to do with these foul-smelling guys, so I went back home to northwestern Wisconsin.”

It would be 20 years later, in 1981, that he started coming to Door County regularly and got involved with the Bethany Lutheran Church in Ephraim.

“Every summer until 2001 we came here on a regular basis,” he said.

That was the year he tired of the politics involved in being pastor of a large metropolitan church in Kansas City and moved to Door County with his wife, Betsy.

“She had visited before we got married and fell in love with Door County. She was at a point in her career that she wanted a change as well. We just moved up here and thought we’d do something. We tried a pizzeria and that fell flat on its face. I did other things. I bussed dishes.”

Then he heard from some folks on the board of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Juddville who knew him from Bethany Lutheran in Ephraim.

“They asked if I would take a half-time call, which became a three-quarter-time call, which became a full-time call,” Brecke said.

Eleven-and-a-half years later, Brecke is preparing to answer another call, to serve as interim pastor at a Kansas City church for one year.

Asked what he’ll miss about Door County, Brecke said, “I will miss the water, the sun, the greenery, the orchards. I’ll miss the back roads on my bicycle. I’ll miss so many wonderful places to go eat and have a drink. But most of all I’ll miss the people.

“Because of all the years I was up here, I knew a lot of people, and because I have a shy and retiring personality…” he pauses briefly at the joke. “I just got to know a lot of people in the community. The people here are truly extraordinary. The characters and the non-characters, the writers, the artists, the guys who go to AC Tap every day. They’re all wonderful. That’s what’s heartbreaking about leaving here.

“In my brief time as a full-time resident, we’ve lost an awful lot of characters. Freddie Kodanko was a friend of mine. He was an absolute award-winning character. Recently we lost Rik Warch. He was just such an intellectual giant. What he did with Lawrence, wow. My friend, Norb Blei, I still have a hard time believing that he’s gone. And there are so many more. Norb and I talked about this a lot. You could write volumes about the people in Door County, the ordinary people, because they are the ones who make such an incredible difference in the life up here.

“I wish I could tell everybody I’m not leaving because I don’t love you. I’m just leaving because I think it’s the right time and the right thing for my family.”