Today we’d like to introduce you to Sarah Pierce.
Hi Sarah, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
All Saints Lutheran Church was founded in 1987 in Blue Springs in a storefront and moved into our current building on 19th Street in the mid 1990s. I am the fourth or fifth pastor to serve here; the previous pastor left in 2017 or 2018. In the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), our process is that when a pastor leaves, there’s a period where an interim pastor comes in to work with the congregation for a time, to help them discern how their identity as a group since the last time they called a pastor, and to work with them to be ready to call a new pastor. I was just finishing up my seminary internship at a church in Gladstone when the interim pastor who was here at All Saints sustained a serious injury and was unable to finish that work. The bishop asked me if I would be interested in stepping in as a Synodically Authorized Minister (SAM), a trained layperson who does the work of a pastor. I wasn’t eligible to be called and ordained as a pastor until I graduated from seminary the following May, and that would give both the people of All Saints and me some time to determine if we would be a good fit for each other.
My first Sunday as a SAM was the last Sunday in November of 2020. We weren’t worshiping in person; different people were recording different parts of the service, and we had someone who was posting some music, the readings, the prayers, and my sermons online on Sunday mornings. It was a strange way to start at a church! We worshiped together for the first time on Easter Sunday, in the parking lot. By Pentecost, at the end of May, we had decided that as long as we masked and socially distanced and didn’t sing, we could worship together in the sanctuary. Over the months, I got to know the members of the church council and the call committee, and people who would stop by the office on Wednesdays, my weekly day in the office.
In August of 2021, the Bishop’s Associate came to worship with us and to facilitate a congregational meeting at which they voted unanimously to call me as their pastor. I was ordained on September 25, 2021 at my home congregation in St. Joseph, Missouri, and All Saints and I have been growing together ever since.
We are a small worshiping community; we typically worship about 25-30 people on an average Sunday. But we are creative and joyful in our worship, with a handbell choir and regular seasonal changes to our liturgy (much of it written by me), and regular opportunities within our worship services for people to move purposely around the sanctuary, whether we’re dissolving prayers in the baptismal font or pinning butterflies to the cross on Easter Sunday.
We are deeply invested in our community, both locally and around the world. While many churches have food pantries and the like, we recognize that Blue Springs already has that infrastructure in place in a much more effective way than we could; so we choose to support the Community Services League, both with regular benevolence giving and with monthly and seasonal in-kind donations. Our sanctuary has served as a rehearsal space for the Blue Springs City Theater on several occasions, and we welcome the opportunity to partner with them when they ask us. During Lent, we do a “noisy offering” to raise money for an ELCA ministry called “God’s Global Barnyard,” which allows us the opportunity to purchase livestock or honeybees or trees, etc., for small farmers in countries with emerging economies. This past year we chose to finance micro loans with the money we raised.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Overall, it has been a smooth road. I am bi-vocational; I work full-time (32 hours a week) for Mosaic Health System in St. Joseph, Missouri, as well as being a pastor. Having been in a professional career before (and concurrently with) ministry, and coming to ministry in my 40s both helped, as I already had developed leadership skills that I could draw on. There are some similarities between the two roles, although there are also some differences as well. At Mosaic, my role as a leader is to provide guidance and structure to my team, and remove roadblocks from them so they can be successful. In ministry, my role is to nurture my parishioners’ spiritual health, to help them see the ways they have been called by God to love and serve their neighbors (often in ways they are already doing), to preach and teach, and to preside at communion and to baptize.
The challenge and the gift of bi-vocational ministry is that I’m not always immediately available if something happens in the life of someone in the congregation; I have other work commitments that I have to fulfill. This means that the members of the congregation really take a very active role in the day-to-day life of the congregation. At All Saints, even before I came, the members of the congregation were already very active day-to-day, but having a part-time pastor who works elsewhere means that, for example, if someone has surgery on a Tuesday, I won’t necessarily be there, but if their family needs a presence in the waiting room, someone will be. But I will absolutely rearrange my schedule and take a day off for a funeral during the week.
But, especially in the beginning, it was hard for me to find my balance and to figure out where the boundaries are in my work-work-life balance. But my wife has been incredibly supportive and helps me find my balance when I need to recalibrate. My supervisor at Mosaic, who recently retired, was incredibly supportive. The first thing she told her successor about me was my work schedule! And I’ve learned that I have to live into it and understand that there will be some give-and-take, and that the most important part is to give myself grace – because everyone else will.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
My “office day” at the church has a kind of rhythm to it. When I come in, I spend some time proofreading the bulletin for the upcoming Sunday before diving into the text study that I do for my sermon preparation. During the fall, winter, and spring, we follow the Narrative Lectionary – a journey through the Hebrew Testament in the fall, starting with Genesis and going through the prophets following a narrative arc, and then picking up one of the gospels starting the fourth Sunday in Advent, right before Christmas. This year we’ll be in Matthew until the Sunday after Easter, when we’ll move to Acts and one of Paul’s letters until Pentecost. In the summer, we do sermon series.
So I do exegetical work – reading commentaries and listening to podcasts about the preaching text for the week, teasing out meaning for when it was written as well as for today, for the people here at All Saints. I write and edit my sermon, and I record it and post it to YouTube, to go live on Saturday. Seasonally, I write liturgy that we use in our worship on Sundays and for special services. And I pray for people, and I visit with people in the office, or if they request, at their homes.
Sundays, we worship at 9:15 followed by Bible study for anyone who wants to join us. We are a Reconciling in Christ congregation, which is the ELCA designation for congregations and other communities that have chosen to publicly state that we are open and affirming of all sexual orientations, gender identities, races, national origins, socioeconomic classes, and we welcome people of every ability status, people of any level of health, people who are suffering from or in recovery from addiction. We remain mindful that we are part of a larger community, as we regularly pray for places around the world that are suffering from war and natural disaster.
As I said previously, we are big supporters of the Community Services League in Blue Springs, donating to their food pantry every month, as well as to their back to school initiative and their Christmas store, in addition to our regular benevolence. We also make small but meaningful benevolence gifts to World Hunger and Lutheran Disaster Response.
In addition, we have a fairly robust creation care ministry; we have two butterfly gardens that are recognized Monarch Waystations. We have raised monarchs in our sanctuary for three summers now, and as of late August/early September we have a few monarchs that are in various stages of development in our garden. One of our members is tagging them so we can eventually check to see if they made it to the place in Mexico where the monarchs winter.
Can you share something surprising about yourself?
I really like to play around in Excel. (There are a few people who know me as a pastor who know this, but it doesn’t come up often.) At Mosaic, I spend a fair amount of time dealing with data. I probably spend more time in Excel than any other program. I really enjoy it, and I’ve gotten fairly good at it.
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