Strietelmeier retiring

The pastor apologized for the disarray in his study.

“This is what moving looks like,” said Mark Strietelmeier.

After 40 years in the clergy — 36 of them at Portland’s Zion Lutheran Church — he is retiring.

He’ll preach his final sermon in Jay County on the last Sunday of June.

“I don’t know how 36 years happened,” he said. “I really don’t. … I don’t like moving. I’ve lived here longer than anywhere else in my life. This is home.”

His first service at Zion Lutheran was on Palm Sunday 1981, coming to the Portland church after a four-year stint in Edinburgh, Indiana.

“The bishop called one day,” he said. “I didn’t know where Portland, Indiana, was. I had to look at a map.”

Zion Lutheran was in search of a new pastor, and the bishop urged Strietelmeier to go through the process of being considered.

It wasn’t something Mark and his wife Cindy were enthusiastic about.

There were family ties to the Edinburgh church. Mark’s parents were just 15 miles away in his hometown of Columbus, and Cindy’s grandparents were part of the congregation and had played matchmaker to bring the two together.

So, while agreeing to go through the process in order to please the bishop, the couple made a list of all the reasons they thought it would be a bad idea to make the move.

But that began to change after meeting with the late Tom Hunt, who chaired the pulpit committee, and visiting the church.

“Gradually, little by little the list started to evaporate,” said Strietelmeier.

After he had conducted a service at Zion Lutheran, the congregation took a vote and “issued a call.” A two-thirds majority was required. In Strietelmeier’s case, the tally was just one vote short of being unanimous.

“We made the switch and came up here,” he said.

From the beginning, the couple’s commitment to Zion Lutheran has been a joint effort.

“I couldn’t have sustained this if we hadn’t done it as partners,” he said.

When Tom Hunt died after suffering a heart attack at the beginning of a Christmas Eve service in the 1990s, it was Cindy who immediately stepped in to assume his leadership role in the area of music for the church.

Eighteen years after making the move to Zion Lutheran, another call came, this one from a church in West Lafayette that wanted Pastor Strietelmeier for their own pulpit.

Zion’s congregation responded with a renewed call of its own, making it clear they wanted the Strietelmeiers to stay. That time, the vote was unanimous.

As pastor on Sundays, Strietelmeier tries to take a light approach. He’s never been one to take himself too seriously. “We run kind of a loose ship here,” he joked.

But the pastoral role aside from services can take an emotional toll.

“That’s why I’m tired,” he said.

He recalled being asked to say a few words of prayer as a young woman slipped away after giving birth.

“When I stepped away, she was gone,” he recalled. “You don’t just bounce out of bed the next day after something like that. … That lives with you.”

Retirement will include relocation.

The Strietelmeiers will be moving to a neighborhood on the northeast side of Indianapolis, only a two and a half minute walk from their daughter Kate and grandchildren. Their son Ed is pastor of a Lutheran church in Swanton, Ohio, west of Toledo.

“I want to paint,” Strietelmeier said. “I want to read stuff that’s not theology.”

Under the boundaries for retired pastors, he won’t be coming back to officiate at weddings or funerals at Zion Lutheran.

“When I leave here, I’m done,” he said. “I respect the boundaries. There’s a reason for them.”

For Zion Lutheran, the search for a successor will begin this summer with assistance from the office of the bishop of the Indiana-Kentucky Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

That could be a challenge. There’s currently a shortage of clergy in the denomination. Eighty of 180 churches in the synod have vacancies.

“This congregation has an awful lot to offer,” said Strietelmeier. “It’s a church community that watches out for each other, that appreciates each other. … That happens here.”