Stephen Helreich took a roundabout route to pastoring his first church, but he has found Hobbs to be “friendly and welcoming.”
At the age of 72, Stephen Helmreich is beginning the career he prepared for when he went to seminary almost 50 years ago.
He’s the newly ordained and newly installed pastor at Trinity Lutheran Church in Hobbs.
“After I graduated from high school in West Lafayette, Indiana, I went to college. The Vietnam War was on and I started going to a prayer group and that prayer group changed my life,” Helmreich said. “It was kind of the beginning of the charismatic renewal and being part of it changed my perspective on the world.”
Helmreich, who was a math major, started graduate school with the intention of continuing math studies and perhaps teaching when he completed his master’s degree, but after a year, he decided to enter seminary as a candidate for pastoral ministry.
“Pastoral ministry wasn’t foreign to me,” he said. “My grandfather and several uncles had been pastors and I was a church musician, playing piano and organ. But I didn’t feel comfortable in the branch of the Lutheran church I belonged to and when I finished seminary, I went to work for the Social Security Administration.
“I worked for them for five years and then a friend told me about a project at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. I didn’t want to stay with the Social Security Administration for 30 years and retire with a gold watch, so I came to New Mexico.”
The project, computer linguistics, involves using computers to transpose one language into another, for example, German into English or vice versa. Although it sounds as though it might be classified research, Helmreich said it’s not.
“It’s language processing, getting computers to handle translation programs,” he said. “We can get a document online in one language and get it into another. We can get the program to write a summary.”
After 21 years, Helmreich, who was playing the piano and organ at Peace Lutheran Church in Las Cruces, decided to retire and found himself drawn once more to the idea of pastoral ministry.
“I was asked by the Rocky Mountain Synod’s pastoral candidacy committee to be part of the clergy and during my sessions with them, I realized that I wanted to be on the other side of the table instead of being on the side where you’re answering the questions,” he said. “I wanted pursue the path of Sacrament and Word.”
When the opportunity to come to Hobbs presented itself, Helmreich said, “It was a little bit scary. In spite of living in Las Cruces all those years, I hadn’t ever been to Hobbs so it was and is brand new. And even though I’ve been in church all my life, I have never been a pastor. But I’ve found the people in Hobbs to be friendly and welcoming and I think I’ve found a home.”
While Helmreich is eager for Trinity’s congregation to grow, he doesn’t want it to become so large that it becomes impersonal.
“I want us to be large enough to be effective but I want us to be small enough to know and care about each other,” he said. “And I want us to absolutely be inclusive. Everyone is welcome in our congregation.”
Helmreich is still in the process of moving from Las Cruces to Trinity’s parsonage, where he will soon be joined by his dogs and a cousin who has been part of his household for several years.
“But while I’m getting settled, we’ll be having church every Sunday and we’ll be starting Sunday School and some other programs this fall,” Helmreich said.
Trinity Lutheran Church, 718 W. Bender, is an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America affiliate. Worship service starts at 10:15 a.m. on Sunday and can be attended in person or by ZOOM. The ZOOM meeting code is 827 5289 5853. The ZOOM pass code is 12345.
