By Stephen Smoot
“Faith is God’s work in us, that changes us and gives us new birth from God.” Just over 500 years ago, Martin Luther used this passage in his “Introduction to St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans in his German Bible of 1522.
Pastors Paul Schafer and Angela Lambert, each in their own ways, experienced that “faith that changes us” in different ways that led them to service in the Lutheran church. Their “living, bold trust in God’s grace,” as Luther described it has guided them through different stops and different places in life as they made their way to Pendleton County.
Lambert was “born in New Hampshire, but never lived there,” as she said. Her early life prepared her for the life of a pastor, due to her father’s service in the United States Air Force. She spent time living in Germany, Holland, and elsewhere but “most of my life I spent in the South. I was a teacher.”
She had originally sought to major in art, but “my mom said I needed to do something practical.” That led her into a career in which she taught English and creative writing, also working as a writing specialist.
In his autobiography “Witness,” National Review writer Whittaker Chambers wrote about how the birth of his daughter set him on the road from fanatical atheism to devout Roman Catholicism. Lambert was not an atheist, but thoughts of raising children provided similar inspiration. She shared that “I was in my early 20s and wanted to have kids. I didn’t want to have that emptiness.”
“I started looking for a church home,” she then explained, going on to say “I went to every denomination I could think of.” In the early 2000s, she settled down and joined a Lutheran church in Franklin, North Carolina. Later, while living in Chilhowie, on the Virginia side of the Commonwealth’s border with Tennessee, the church she attended asked her to lead worship.
“They needed help. That’s how I said yes,” she stated. Lambert went on to say, “When I started volunteering, I said I wouldn’t do sermons.” She ended up serving in church leadership for approximately six years until deciding to attend seminary. That didn’t happen until another woman pastor assured her that she was not too old to go.
Eventually, she came to the mindset of “Lord, whatever you want me to do, I’ll do.” This perspective reads very similar to Luther’s ideal of God as described in his Large Catechism, which reads “to have a god means this: You expect to receive all good things from it and turn to it in every time of trouble. Yes, to have a god means to trust and to believe in Him with your whole heart.”
Schafer trod a much different path, saying that “I’m sort of a lifer” in Lutheranism. He grew up in Wheeling, a center of German-American culture and Lutheranism since before the Civil War. “I grew up in the Lutheran church,” he said, adding, “I was baptized as an infant.” His childhood church was St. James.
Some in the faith refer to such an individual as a “cradle Lutheran.”
After graduating from high school, Schafer attended Capital University in Columbus, Ohio. There, he majored in vocal music. According to the school’s website, it was “founded as the Theological Seminary of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Ohio in 1830 by German immigrants to train Lutheran pastors to lead their churches.”
Though devoted to his faith in childhood, Schafer started considering life as a pastor “toward the end of my college years.” That said, he shared that “I always had it in the back of my mind. The church was my second home, my second family . . . the church was there in my DNA. That’s where the Spirit was sending me”
Upon graduation, he attended Trinity Lutheran Seminary and was ordained in 1990.
Schafer first served in Moundsville and New Martinsville until 1997, then Gloucester, Virginia.
The pair started service in the Mountain Lutheran Parish in mid-January and have steadily worked to learn the area since. The parish includes churches in both Pendleton and Pocahontas counties, including the half-century old Calvary between Brandywine and Sugar Grove, Franklin’s Faith Lutheran, Mount Hope in Upper Tract (which is one of the oldest Lutheran churches in the state, dating back to 1797 when John Adams was inaugurated as President), St. John in Moyers, and New Hope in Minnehaha Springs.
The parish covers nearly 70 miles in distance from north to south, requiring the pair to adopt the traditional “circuit rider” model of traveling to different churches. The phrase “circuit riding” refers to the frontier traditions established by Lutherans, Methodists, and others of assigning scarce clergy to cover more than one congregation.
One week, the pastors travel a 114-mile-long round trip covering two churches while another three church circuit requires 70 miles of travel. Schafer noted that “people around here are used” to traveling very long distances in their life routines.
Pastoral duties also require that, at times, they comfort the sick. From this region, congregants may end up in hospitals as far separated as Morgantown and Charlottesville, Virginia.
Schafer noted that each church has its own distinctiveness that the pastors must understand. According to Lambert, one of the challenges lies in finding “ways to integrate the whole parish, but at the same time, it’s a circuit rider concept.”
Some characteristics, however, tie the whole parish together. Lambert explained that their churches all “have rich traditions and gatherings that are rich with fellowship.”
Schafer shared that “the welcome here and the food have both been extravagant.” He also praised the parish churches for being “self-starting.” Since he and Lambert have a tight schedule with a priority on delivering sermons, they by necessity must arrive in some churches after Sunday service starts. The churches they serve “don’t wait for the pastor to get there to get started.”