A Century of Ministry

A Short History of St. Francis Lutheran Church

by Paul Groth

On Sunday, September 12,1999, the members of St. Francis Lutheran Church gathered to mark the congregation's centennial. 

There is much to be proud of in our recent history, but in many ways we stand on the shoulders of the people that have come before us. It all started with two separate immigrant congregations, one mostly of Finns, another mostly of Danes. 

For its first three decades, Ansgar had parallel worship services and social groups for those speaking Danish, and for those speaking English. The Ladies Aid (for senior women) mostly spoke Danish, while the parallel Zion Society (for younger women) spoke exclusively English. There were also two Luther Leagues, split by language.

But by 1932, as one church history noted, "Danish had been eliminated, but not ties with the homeland." During this time, the Crown Prince and Princess of Denmark attended a service at Ansgar Lutheran Church. The last Danish language service was held on Christmas Day in 1969, with a pastor from Denmark officiating.

In 1951-52, getting ready for their 50th anniversary, the congregation proudly modernized the Ansgar building by adding a garage, painting the walls white, concealing the wainscoting, and installing a new organ whose pipes filled the choir loft, which was then walled off with plywood. The people in the old neighborhood were modernizing, too, by moving to the suburbs and joining churches there. Attendance at the Ansgar Sunday School began to drop. Yet, one pastor optimistically noted "an influx of young people from Denmark."

One of those new Danish-American members, was a young San Francisco school teacher named Kirsten Havrehed. She remembers in the 1950's going door to door in the neighborhood to bring children to a Sunday School with 40 children, most of whose parents did not attend church.

Making a New Congregation: St. Francis Lutheran, 1964-1987

In 1964, St. Francis Lutheran Church was formed by the merger of Gethsemane and Ansgar Lutheran Churches. As the Gethsemane congregation was a member of the Lutheran Church in America (LCA) and the Ansgar congregation was part of the American Lutheran Church (ALC), the congregation had to vote on which synod they would join. They decided to join the American Lutheran Church. The new congregation called the former Gethsemane pastor, The Rev. Henry Kangas, as their pastor and decided to use the Ansgar building for English services and the Gethsemane building for services in Finnish.

Very astutely, in 1968, the congregation bought the building next door at 132-142 Church Street for $80,000. Income from that building now supports almost a third of St. Francis' budget.

However, in the neighborhood, Scandinavian Lutheran families continued to move to the suburbs. Owners of the city's workplaceswere shifting jobs from blue-collar manufacturing and port industries towards more white-collar work. Socially, the neighborhood saw the influx of many young African-American and Latino families, who in turn were just beginning to worry about gentrification by young single people, most without children, many of them gay, and a few of them lesbian.

By 1973, with about 40 members, and only 20 to 30 attending services, St. Francis was the smallest and least likely to survive of the many small congregations of the American Lutheran Church in the city.

In 1974, a young new pastor, John Rollefson, arrived -- still a graduate student, but excited about serving a center-city parish. After being certified by the ALC, he was ordained at St. Francis in February, 1975. Pr. Rollefson's wife, Ruth, who served as the church's five-hours-a-week secretary, had experience as a parish worker. They found the seeds of a new St. Francis already in place, as Rollefson put it, "a genuine community, people who really needed each other, across all kinds of social lines."

The congregation had a few African-American families, several black children in the Sunday School, and Hispanic people from the neighborhood. As one observer put it, "The little group at St. Francis liked the place. The people were warm and friendly; and whoever came through the door was welcome. The coffee hour socializing was already very important."

In the early 1980s, the congregation's outreach to gay and lesbian people became much more intentional when Tom Tragardh solicited donations at coffee hours to place a St. Francis ad in the free gay newspaper, the Bay Area Reporter. In those years, church ads were rare in the B.A.R.

In 1982, the congregation called Rev. Jim Lokken, already an active member of the church, as a part-time non-stipendiary pastor; that same year, The Rev. Michael Hiller joined the church and, in 1984, he too was called as a non-stipendiary pastor. With two openly gay pastors, St. Francis was already making a significant statement on the issue of homosexuality and the church.

The AIDS epidemic had stimulated part of the outreach to gay men, and would prove to overshadow the next fifteen years at St. Francis. Several people who were already members became ill; others, diagnosed with HIV, joined St. Francis to reclaim their faith and their relationship to the church. By 1987, more than half of the now-larger congregation was made up of gay men. Membership was growing enough to have three membership classes a year. St. Francis was ready to plunge into a new national advocacy for full inclusion of lesbian and gay people in the life of the church and society.

Since 1987: Ordinations, Trial, Expulsion, and Rebuilding

In 1987-88, three young seminarians at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley declared their homosexuality as they were in the process of being certified for ordination with the newly formed Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. One of those seminarians was Jeff Johnson. They were briefly certified, and then de-certified because of their unwillingness to agree to a stipulation that they would take a vow of celibacy.

The outcry was immediate from around the Bay Area. People packed St. Francis for a March 1988 support service. Twenty pastors lobbied futilely the new Synod Bishop, Lyle Miller, to change his mind. Eventually 40 ministers and 230 lay people signed a Covenant of Support, an agreement to defy the ELCA's ban on openly gay or lesbian candidates for the ministry.

In the spring of 1989, a steering committee drawn largely from San Francisco and Oakland congregations (including St. Francis) organized Lutheran Lesbian and Gay Ministry, for three purposes: (1) to call openly gay and lesbian pastors to serve the growing, out, gay and lesbian population; (2) to advocate within the church for gay and lesbian rights; (3) and to minister to people with HIV and their families. First United Lutheran of San Francisco agreed to call Jeff Johnson as one of the new LLGM pastors. St. Francis agreed to call a lesbian pastor and a nationwide search was begun. Two people on the short list, Ruth Frost and Phyllis Zillhart, flew from Minneapolis to San Francisco for their interview in October, 1989, the weekend after the Loma Prieta Earthquake.

Quickly, more than the earth was moving among Bay Area Lutherans. Ruth, Phyllis and Jeff were all called; the bishop refused to ordain them, and with ample precedent in Lutheran tradition, the two congregations decided to perform the ordinations without the bishop's consent. Knowing they risked censure or expulsion, St. Francis and First United took on the 5.3 million member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and its policy of excluding openly gay and lesbian pastors from the ministry. Once again, it was "a big project for a little church."

The ordination ceremony for Ruth, Phyllis, and Jeff was held on Saturday, January 20th, 1990, at St. Paulus Lutheran Church, on Eddy and Gough Streets. Even beforehand, people referred to it as "the coronation," and it was indeed an exciting national event. In front of all three national television networks, nine hundred people, many people from around the country, crowded the century-old Gothic-style church. Listening by telephone links were another 700 people at support services in seven other cities. At St. Paulus, in addition to organ and brass there was a choir of 90 voices, a 20-member drumming corps, clouds of incense and a liturgical dancer. The first words spoken were from Isaiah, "Behold, I am doing a new thing." .

Presenting the sermon was the Rev. Dr. Carter Heyward, an open lesbian Episcopal priest, and a professor at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She herself had been ordained in an unauthorized ceremony before the Episcopal church accepted women as priests. In lieu of the bishop, over thirty Lutheran ministers filled the chancel to perform the ordination service and laying-on of hands. Nearby were 30 other clergy, representing Roman Catholic, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and other denominations, who outstretched their hands and added their prayers in the blessing of the newly ordained ministers. When the Presiding minister, The Rev. Lucy Kolin of Pacifica, announced the three to be Christian clergy, cheers, applause, and accompanying drumbeats resounded for several minutes. The next day, at the morning Sunday services, the new pastors were installed by their respective congregations.

On Monday, January 22nd, as had been expected, Bishop Lyle Miller and the Sierra Pacific Synod Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America filed formal legal papers against First United and St. Francis, charging the congregations with violating the ELCA constitution. Six months later, in July, 1990, at St. Mark's Church, the ELCA held three days of disciplinary hearings, since referred to as "the trial." Once again, national television and print media were on hand. The New York Times reported the event as "the first public hearing by a church on the issue of ordaining homosexuals."

The panel of 12 committee members heard 30 witnesses and the arguments of lawyers. The case hinged on two competing foundations of Lutheran theology: obedience to the law, and obedience to conscience. Rev. John H. Frykman, the senior pastor at First United, put it simply: "Ecclesiastical disobedience in the face of unjust practice in the church was in the best tradition of Martin Luther."

Nine days after the hearings, in a 24-page statement, the ELCA Discipline Committee announced the suspension of the two congregations from membership in the ELCA. In a separate 7-5 decision, the Discipline Committee said If the congregations did not rescind the ordinations within five years or the ELCA did not change its policies, the congregations would be expelled.

Neither side changed their minds and on December 31, 1995, St. Francis held a major service to mark the moment of their dismissal from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. A new hymn, "By Paths as Yet Untrodden", based on one of the prayers in the Vespers service, was commissioned especially for the occasion. Written by Pr. Michael Hiller, it was set to a new hymn tune entitled "St. Francis" by noted composer Dale Wood, who offered it as his gift to St. Francis.

The suspension and expulsion brought an enormous surge of life and national identity to St. Francis. While the national church refused to change its policies, St. Francis' church members wanted to find a way to get their story out to the whole church. They came up with something traditionally Lutheran: They published a cookbook. Between the recipes, the cookbook would explain our witness to the church, our ministries and our lives. Wayne Strei, a St. Francis church member, corralled the congregation, along with an enormous amount of production talent, into Those People at That Church: The St. Francis Lutheran Cookbook. Published in 1994, and immediately sent to the 66 bishops and the 35 members of the Churchwide Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, sales were especially brisk and the 6,600 copies of the book sold out in four years. To everyone's surprise, particularly Pastor DeLange's, the book also became a money-maker for the church.

Most importantly in the years from 1990 to 1999, St. Francis gained a surge of new members, including more lesbians, and more straight people. At one point, there were four newborn babies and their moms in the church, perhaps more infants than the church had seen since the 1950s.

In 1982, Pastor DeLange had urged the congregation to establish The St. Francis Foundation, a separate endowment fund to receive bequests and other gifts. By 1999, the endowment had grown to over $750,000 and the annual income was providing $20,000 in annual support to the mission and ministry of St. Francis and a like amount in grants to community, national and international projects. Financially and personally, commitment to the mission and ministry of St. Francis Lutheran Church had expanded.

In 1994, the pastors and governing board of Lutheran Lesbian and Gay Ministry decided the organization needed to expand its ministry nationwide. Pastors Frost and Zillhart joined the staff at St. Francis as associate pastors. Pr. Jeff Johnson became the full time pastor at First United Lutheran Church.

In May of 1999, St. Francis commissioned its first international missionary, the Rev. Pieter Oberholzer, for outreach to gays and lesbians in South Africa.

The years since 1987 have seen a surge, too, in the congregation's pride in its church buildings and the need to address decades of deferred maintenance. In 1987, the parish hall, kitchen, library and conference room were renovated. In 1992, the sanctuary was restored to much of its original 1906 decor and the chancel expanded forward to accommodate the modern liturgy. Major repairs were made to the stained glass and brickwork on the south side of the church building that had been damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The pipe organ was greatly expanded, the church office and the Belcher Street parsonage were renovated, and the entire Belcher Street building repainted.

In March, 1999, construction began on a $1 million comprehensive yard and building project at 152 Church Street, including new wiring, a fire-sprinkler and fire alarm system, exterior lighting, and a new memorial courtyard and handicap entrance. On the renovation projects from 1987 to 1999, combined, the congregation has invested $1.3 million.

Back in 1981, a $23,000 project for a new organ in a church with a not-yet-full-time minister had galvanized 40 valiant members and spurred them to new action. We pray that the recent expansions of the church staff and mission and ministry support, and the congregation's material commitments, prove to be platforms for larger and bolder steps in the witness and ministries of St. Francis.

Paul Groth, a member of St. Francis, is professor of architecture at the Unov. of California, Berkeley, and the author of Living Downtown : The History of Residential Hotels in the United States . 

Last updated 10 Aug 06 by MP.