THE RECORD
Friday, July 27, 2001

Former Executive Now Working For God
By Charles Austin

New Paramus Pastor joins many second-career clerics

Until God bashed him in the head, Kent Klophaus was a top executive in the insurance industry.

Last Sunday, the 54-year-old Klophaus stepped into the pulpit at Christ Lutheran Church in Paramus to begin a new career. On his desk in his new church offices is a piece of wooden board, a gift from his wife to remind him of the revelation that changed his life. “It was as if I had been hit on the head with a two-by-four,” Klophaus says of the moment at a religious retreat when fate was sealed.

“The leader asked, 'What are you going to do tomorrow that is different from what you do today for the sake of the gospel?' I felt it was directed straight at me.”

Arriving at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Klophaus found 70 percent of his classmates were just like him – older people choosing to become pastors as a second career. They included a woman in her 80s and a chemist who had been a “food designer” for major candy companies. These new pastors bring to their ministries a wealth of experiences that affect not only their preaching but also their understanding of the workday worlds inhabited by their parishioners.

Maxine Beach, vie president of Drew Theological Seminary in Madison, says as many as 70 percent of the students at the Methodist school are older. She suspects some second-career pastors once bought into the idea that they should “get out of college and then go make a lot of money,” but didn't find their work spiritually satisfying. Others, like Klophaus, saw their work in business or industry lose its luster. Early on, he says, he thought the mission of his employer was to help people plan for a secure financial future.

“Management changed and then the emphasis shifted to a concern focused on our own bottom line,” he says. Klophaus had been with the company for 26 years, eight as a top director of information systems, managing programmers and offices in New Jersey and Minneapolis. As his uneasiness with the job grew, he talked with pastors and asked friends whether they could imagine him as a clergyman. He wondered whether he should go to work for another insurance company or switch to the computer industry.

The retreat ended the indecision; Klophaus enrolled in the seminary in 1997. To pay for his education, his wife went back to work – ironically, as a life insurance underwriter for his former employer.

In the seminary, Klophaus earned academic honors, though the three years of instruction in Greek, Hebrew, theology, and biblical studies were quite different from his former work in pension consulting and managing a team of computer programmers. Klophaus thinks older seminarians have an easier time during the rigorous academic preparation because “of the disciplines we learned in business, the need to meet deadlines, the pressure to get the job done.”

The second-career clergy also bring to their churches something younger pastors often lack – years of knowing what it is like to be a lay person in a congregation. In a recent study on the backgrounds and goals of more than 2,500 seminary students, Barbara Wheeler, president of New York's Auburn Theological Seminary, concluded that second -career students have often been deeply involved in their local churches.

The Rev. Teresa MacAnally of First Presbyterian Church in Clifton spent many years as a lay volunteer in churches. She, too, came to the pastorate later in life, after raising children and working in the computer industry. Her teenage children were at home while she attended Princeton Theological Seminary. “They did homework; I did homework,” she recalls. Ordained in 1989, she was a pastor at other area churches before Clifton. As a lay person in churches, MacAnally had been an energetic volunteer, teaching Sunday School, running youth programs, helping in church administration and fundraising. Now as a pastor, she says, “I know how valuable these lay people are and work very hard to encourage them.”

The Rev. John Mills, pastor of First Congregational Church in Closter for the past five years, is slowly making the transition to the pastorate from decades in the telecommunications industry. “When you're in in a big company, you have to deal with a lot of people, and those people skills transfer to the ministry,” he says.

Klophaus was presented to Christ Lutheran Church in Paramus by the New Jersey Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America earlier this year. Julie Wagner of Bogota, who chaired the search committee, says some questions were raised about the candidate's background. “At first we thought, 'He has no experience!'” But, she says, “he did have life experiences, and he had been a member of a church council.” Wagner also believes that the new minister's work experience has made him less “protected and sheltered” than a minister who spent an entire career in church work.

Seeing his employers struggle through mergers splits, and downsizing has given him some empathy for his parishioners, says Mills, the Closter pastor. “ I know how it feels when my people go through those things,” he says. Klophaus thinks the church and business worlds van learn from each other. “The corporate world has a lot to teach the church about responsible organization,” he says, “and the church has a lot to teach the world about what real values are and how you treat the people you serve.” But both Klophaus and Mills suggest that there will always be tensions between religious values and corporate needs. “In the technical world,” says Mills, “what counts is how well you perform; and in the church, Jesus teaches that everyone has value, just by being human.”

Some church executives have expressed concern about the second-career clergy, says Wheeler, the Auburn seminary president, wondering if what the church invests in training will pay off in length of service. But Klophaus says that in deciding to become a minister at age 50, “I probably have as many years ahead of me to work as I have behind me.” And, he notes, there are no guarantees that someone ordained in his or her 20s will remain in the ministry until retirement.

On his first Sunday in the pulpit, Klophaus received a round of applause when he concluded the one hour liturgy and greeted his new parishioners. Seated near the front of the church were his wife and the couple's two children, a boy of 11 and a daughter who is 14. Klophaus also has a grown son living in Texas and two grandchildren. He said it may take time for him to connect names with faces, but added, “Of course, that will be easier if I see you here every Sunday.”

Klophaus alluded to his move from the business world when he called the children of the congregation forward for a special message. He showed them how busy he was unpacking boxes and throwing away items he didn't need, such as a map of Philadelphia. Withdrawing a Bible from the box, he said, “but you will need this, wherever you go, all your life.”

Jack Michael, a longtime member of the church, said the new minister was off to a good start. “This is a new experience for us, too,” he said, “and we're all learning about how it will be to have a second-career pastor. I could see some real advantages in it.”

The new minister says that though his career has changed, he is still not far from the world of business and industry because “that's where my people go when the service is over Sunday morning. I want to equip people to take the church's message of how we are to live with one another into their business world.”