A life well lived

Brian Gentz was a pastor for nearly his entire adult life, and that’s how many people will remember him.

He pastored Immanuel Lutheran Church in Washington for 14 years before being called to Ottumwa, where he finished his pastoral career.

But Gentz’s impact reaches far beyond the walls of the church. He loved languages, theater and music, and most of all, he loved people.

After he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2007, Gentz and his wife, Julie, set out to help others fighting the same battle, even as Brian fought his.

Brian succumbed to Parkinson’s on April 1, although his wife, Julie Gentz, believes his disease was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic keeping him from the physical activities he had been taking part in to help alleviate some of his symptoms.

To honor Brian’s memory and legacy, Julie is planning on hosting an open house at her home, 1636 Highland Ave. in Washington, from 3-7 p.m. on Sunday to celebrate Brian’s life.

Brian will be buried at 10:30 a.m., Monday, July 18, in Cedar Memorial Cemetery in Cedar Rapids.

Julie said that friends and family are invited to both events.

Early years

Brian was born in Los Angeles on July 19, 1947, and his family moved to Lake Oswego, Oregon, during his childhood.

“His father was a pastor, and his mother was a teacher,” Julie said. “He comes from a long line of pastors. His grandpa was a pastor; his great-grandpa was a pastor.”

The family eventually settled in the Minneapolis area, where Brian graduated from high school at the age of 16.

“He was very gifted,” Julie said. “He was accepted at Columbia University in New York City at age 16.

“He took off on a train. He said he wanted to get as far away from Minneapolis as he could.”

He earned a degree in English from Columbia, then moved on to Union Seminary, also in New York City.

From there, Brian’s first call was to a tiny town in Montana called Wilsall.

“It was at the base of the Crazy Mountains,” Julie said. “He had a shirt he loved that said, ‘Wilsall: Where the Crazies are.’”

After a pastoring stint in South Dakota, he came to Iowa City to work on his doctorate in divinity at the University of Iowa.

New start in Iowa

While he was studying, he began serving as interim pastor at a number of churches in eastern Iowa.

“He really loved being a parish minister,” Julie said. “He did interims, where a pastor would leave a church and they would put an interim in there for a while and give them time to look for another one.

“Brian would say, ‘It’s better to follow someone who is a flop than to follow a flamer.’”

While Brian was serving as interim pastor at a church in Bellevue, he met Julie.

They were both divorced. Brian had a son, Adam, from his first marriage, and Julie had three daughters — Jun, Holli and Hillari — and a son, Hans, from her first marriage.

“Brian was doing an interim at the church in Bellevue, and that’s how I met him,” Julie said. “We dated for two years then got married.”

In the spring of 1994, Brian got the call to become the full-time pastor at Immanuel, and on June 11 of that year, he and Julie were married.

Many interests

Julie said that Brian’s first love was the ministry, and his second love was the theater.

“He loved to be in the theater,” she said. “I would tell him that it was because he loved being in front of people and being the center of attention.

“He liked costumes. I always called his robe his costume.”

Philip Hougen, retired bishop of the Southeast Iowa Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, said that Brian’s love of theater served him well as a pastor.

“He had this artistic bent, which came out in his interest in theater and music, but also in terms of worship,” Hougen said. “He was a leader in developing worship services that were creative and really spoke to people very well.

“He was one of the most creative pastors I had. His mind was always seeing the creative side of things.”

Julie said that Brian’s love of music would sometimes come out during his sermons.

“Brian used to sing songs in the middle of a sermon,” she said. “I would accuse him of being jealous of a solo I got to sing.”

Brian had a love of languages. He knew German, Latin and Greek and was working on learning Spanish.

One day, Julie saw him reading a book entitled “501 Spanish Verbs”

“I asked him what he was doing,” Julie said. “He told me, ‘I’m just reading.’ I said, ‘Brian, that book is 501 Spanish Verbs. Are you just looking something up?’ He said, ‘No, I’m reading it. That’s how I learn.’”

Love of people, cultures

Brian was fascinated with different cultures and would seek out people to learn from them.

“Whenever anybody new came to town, especially if they were from another culture, he would find them,” Julie said. “He would invite them to his film group to watch movies. They would bring food and have a cultural night. He made a lot of good friends wherever he went.”

Hougen said that Brian’s ability to relate to all people was important to the churches he served.

“He didn’t just relate to church people,” Hougen said. “He related to people in the community. He knew how to bridge the gap between traditional church people and people who didn’t have any connection with the church at all.

“He was very accepting. Everybody was a voice and felt welcomed by him. That means a lot to a church.”

Hougen said that Brian was good at building relationships.

“If people haven’t had any experience with the church or who had a bad experience in the church previously, when they experience an openness on the part of leadership like the pastor and feel accepted, that can be life changing for people,” Hougen said. “That’s what we’re all about, bringing people into relationships.”

Parkinson’s diagnosis

In 2007, Brian was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative movement disorder which can cause deterioration of motor skills, balance, speech and sensory function.

“His back was really stiff,” Julie said. “Then, he got bone spurs in his neck. He couldn’t turn his neck. A lot of times, Parkinson’s starts in the back because there are so many moving parts to it.

“We just thought it was getting older and getting a little harder to get out of bed. He had a very slight tremor in his left hand, but it didn’t really bother him.”

Doctors told them that patients diagnosed with Parkinson’s most likely have had the disease for about 10 years before their symptoms show up.

With medication, his symptoms were manageable, and Brian was able to continue his work with the church.

Move to Ottumwa

“I had gotten a job with William Penn University in Oskaloosa,” Julie said. “They wanted me to teach on campus. An hour each way on Highway 92 is not a good drive. So, we looked for something closer to there.”

In 2008, Brian accepted the call to serve as chaplain of the Good Samaritan Home in Ottumwa, a Lutheran continuum of care campus.

“He was always really good with older people,” Julie said. “He just had a way with them. He could talk to people with dementia. He would just enter their world.

“He was absolutely wonderful with the people there. It was really his thing.”

It was in Ottumwa where Brian began to work out with Rock Steady Boxing.

Rock Steady Boxing works with people with Parkinson’s using non-contact boxing training to help improve their motor skills.

“Brian loved it,” Julie said. “It turned into its own little support group. There were people there just like him. They all understood and talked the same language.”

Retirement

By 2015, Parkinson’s was taking a heavy toll on Brian. He stepped away from Good Samaritan that fall.

Around the same time, he fought two bouts of cancer.

“I wonder when I look back, it was around that time that his memory issues got a lot worse,” Julie said. “I wonder if the chemo had something to do with that.

“He probably wouldn’t have retired, but he started to have issues with his memory.”

Brian continued to do some fill-in services at various churches for a while, but his memory issues continued to worsen.

“He was getting lost in the services,” Julie said. “He knew that liturgy like the back of his hand, but he was losing his long-term memory.

“With the Parkinson’s, this eloquent man had trouble finishing a sentence. It would come to him, but you had to learn not to interrupt him.”

Home to Washington

Brian and Julie moved back to Washington in 2018, eventually building a new home on the north side of town in 2019.

“We knew his Parkinson’s was going to get worse,” Julie said. “We wanted to have it handicap accessible, so we built it with zero-step entrances and wide doors.”

Brian had mobility issues, having to use a walker to move around.

He also developed dysgraphia, where a person can no longer write, and began to have hallucinations.

“Little by little, he lost so much,” Julie said. “He never complained. We compensated for the things he couldn’t do.”

They started a Parkinson’s support group in Washington in 2018 with nine members.

“We started the Parkinson’s support group because I just knew there were a lot of people here that needed a support group,” Julie said. “We knew we weren’t the only ones.”

Brian continued his Rock Steady Boxing training at ICOR, a boxing gym in Iowa City.

“I started working on the YMCA to get Rock Steady Boxing here,” Julie said. “They were really interested. Then the pandemic hit.”

The COVID-19 pandemic forced Brian to halt his boxing training. Julie said that he physically deteriorated after that.

“No one will ever be able to convince me that he was not a non-COVID victim of the pandemic, as it put a swift halt to all of the things, like boxing, that kept his disease at bay,” Julie said.

Legacy

Brian died on April 1, just as the world was coming out of COVID lockdown.

Julie said that she recently spoke to the Washington YMCA, and one of the staff members is training to be able to teach Rock Steady Boxing and possibly starting a local program in the fall.

The Parkinson’s support group has started meeting again. Six of the original members have died, but Julie said that there are four or five new members, with others expressing interest.

“We’re meeting, very appropriately, at Immanuel — Brian’s old church,” Julie said. “Our goal was to help as many people to use this Parkinson’s that we couldn’t stop to do as much good for other people as they could. That’s all the good we could make out of it.

“If Brian’s death can make him the face of standing up to Parkinson’s disease in Southeast Iowa, then it will be further confirmation of a life well lived.”