Mark reports to God

Former Columbus bureau reporter Mark Rollenhagen, of Cleveland Heights , will be ordained and installed as mission pastor on Sept. 10. at Faith Lutheran Church, 16511 Hilliard Road, which has an aging congregation and dwindling membership, according Alana Baranick on LakewoodPatch.com

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Nearly 90 years ago, a mission pastor arrived in Lakewood to start a new Lutheran church in the southwest corner of the city.

The mission was accomplished. Faith Lutheran became a thriving congregation that built a large worship facility at Hilliard Road and Woodward Avenue.

Each of the subsequent ministers, who led the congregants through the 1990s until a few years ago, were called senior pastor, as a mission pastor was no longer needed.

Until now.

At 10:30 a.m. Sept. 10, seminarian Mark Rollenhagen will be ordained and installed as mission pastor at Faith Lutheran Church, 16511 Hilliard Road, which has an aging congregation and dwindling membership.

“(The term) mission pastor reflects the congregation’s interest on engaging the community here in new ways,” said Rollenhagen, who began ministering at Faith in an unordained capacity on July 1. “It was a big, bustling place 50 years ago. They’re hoping for it to be a bustling place again.”

What remains of the congregation hopes the new minister will revive the church by reaching out to inactive, disinterested or distracted members, young people and working people, who think they don’t have time for church.

Rollenhagen can empathize with such folks.

He was raised in the church – a Presbyterian church in the Grand Rapids area of Michigan – and became Lutheran-by-marriage through his wife, Alison, whom he met while attending Alma College in central Michigan.

The couple joined but didn’t become active in Lutheran churches as Rollenhagen’s career as a journalist took them to Harrisburg, PA, Toledo and finally Cleveland, where he was a reporter for The Plain Dealer for 18 years.

They moved to Cleveland Heights and became members of Bethlehem Lutheran Church, but didn’t attend regularly until their children approached confirmation age.

“They quickly tried to get us involved in all kinds of things (at Bethlehem),” the father of two said. “I became president of church council within two or three years.”

He coordinated the Interfaith Hospitality Network, an interdeominational project providing temporary shelter to homeless families.

As he became more caught up in the business of the church, the curious journalist began thinking more deeply about his own faith and taking theology classes.

“I recognized I had something to offer the church beyond the lay role - to articulate faith and how it relates to life,” he said.

In the fall of 2003, Rollenhagen began taking one class at a time at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, while continuing his newspaper work. He worked on Sunday afternoons, so he could spend a day off during the week to drive to Columbus for class.

“Things just seemed to work out,” he said.

When he ran out of classes he could take that met only once a week, an opening occurred at the paper’s Columbus bureau. Rollenhagen seized the opportunity to relocate, enabling him to take at least two classes a week.

“You can go part-time and take several years, but a point comes in the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) process where you have to do 10 weeks chaplaincy in a hospital as part of preparation (for ordination),” he said.

Providentially, that point aligned with the Plain Dealer’s announced downsizing of its newsroom staff in the fall of 2008. After much prayer and discussion with his wife, Rollenhagen accepted a buyout offer from the paper that allowed him to take the unpaid chaplaincy and a yearlong pastoral internship at Hope Lutheran Church in Cleveland Heights.

As Rollenhagen approached the completion of classes for his master of divinity degree and wanted to stay in Northeast Ohio, he was given the names of three congregations in the region that were looking for pastors.

“The other two were traditional congregations – normal operating congregations,” Rollenhagen said. “Then they gave me the information on Faith, a small inner-ring (suburb) church, in a lot of ways very similar to Bethlehem and Hope – congregations that are struggling to continue to exist.

“Part of the emphasis at Faith: It’s been in decline. They haven’t had a fulltime pastor in three years.”

The Faith congregation decided to put its money for two years into the mission project to more or less plant a new church in an existing pot (building).

“We have a building; We have lots of space,” Rollenhagen said. “On the other hand, it’s not like you can do everything new. We still have traditional services on Sunday morning. We’re trying not to throw that away, while we engage people (in new ways). It’s a fascinating challenge.”