Word of Life Lutheran Church’s new pastor is Jason Christensen

FAIRFIELD — The congregation at Word of Life Lutheran Church in Fairfield is happy to have a permanent pastor again after spending many months with a series of rotating pastors.

Pastor Jason Christensen has been in the role as Word of Life’s pastor for about a year, and splits his time between Fairfield and his home in Marion, where he works full-time for Collins Aerospace. Christensen said he’s enjoyed getting to know the Fairfield congregation, which draws a typical Sunday morning attendance of between 50-80 people.

Apart from his duties on Sunday mornings, Christensen can usually be found in Fairfield on Saturdays and most Wednesdays for church meetings.

“Everyone knows about preparing sermons every week, but as a musician, I’m also working on the music for the church,” Christensen said about his duties. “If people can’t come to church, you visit them, or if someone is in hospice care, you’re visiting them and their families. A lot of the job is being a presence in people’s lives, in good times and in bad.”

Christensen’s decision to enter the ministry is one he made fairly recently, and it was certainly not the career path he expected to be on as a young man. Christensen was born in Waterloo, spent most of his upbringing in Gilbertville, Iowa, and attended high school in La Porte City, Iowa. Though he was raised Catholic, Christensen said his interest in religion started falling off in high school and played a minor role in his identity.

At age 15, Christensen learned to play guitar and joined a band that he would perform with for the next 15 years, playing shows all over the country.

“During high school, we were playing gigs on the weekends, and after I graduated, I was a musician for the next 12 years,” Christensen said.

By the time he was 30, Christensen was married with twin daughters, and he realized that life on the road was not what he wanted anymore. He started taking classes at Hawkeye Community College in Waterloo, and then studied engineering at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

“I don’t have any engineers in my family, and my parents didn’t go to college,” he said. “I was always teaching myself how to fix amps and work with software, and I wanted to learn more about it.”

While Christensen was in school, his wife was working as a nurse. He said the couple did not instill any religious beliefs in their children, and said they were all essentially atheists back then.

“I fell in love with science, and I figured that science had all the answers,” Christensen said.

However, Christensen’s attitude toward religion began to change once he got a job working for Rockwell Collins, now Collins Aerospace, in Cedar Rapids. He discovered that a lot of his co-workers were Christians, and they had no problem reconciling their faith with their understanding of science.

“I was meeting a lot of people who were not the stereotypical Christians that I thought they would be,” Christensen said. “I had a moment where I was lying in bed, and I asked God to show me if he was real. I had an experience the next morning where I felt that God had made it possible for me to see how science fits in, and you don’t have to choose one or the other. That’s when I wanted to go to school so I could responsibly teach people the way I wish I had been taught.”

Christensen said he had an elementary understanding of the Bible and of Christianity at the time, and he was meeting people who had a more adult and mature understanding of these subjects. He was eager to join a church and learn more, so he just picked the church that was closest to his house, St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Cedar Rapids.

“I just drew a circle on the map, and that was the closest church,” he said. “I didn’t know anybody who was going to that church, and I didn’t know anything about Protestant denominations. It was just the first church I walked into.”

St. Mark’s happened to be starting a seminary program at that time, which Christensen entered. For a couple of years, he stepped down from his position with Collins Aerospace to serve as the church’s worship leader. After those two years, he went back to working full-time for Collins Aerospace and maintained a part-time role at the church.

Christensen was one of four people in the church’s seminary program, and one of their duties was to fill in for churches that needed a pastor, such as Word of Life Lutheran Church in Fairfield. The seminarians rotated into serving as Word of Life’s pastor. Christensen said he had never been to Fairfield before this assignment, but he fell in love with the town and the church congregation.

“As our internship was coming to an end, and it was time for us to be pulled out of Fairfield, I didn’t want to leave them,” Christensen said. “I loved the people there, so I applied to be their pastor.”

Christensen said he cherishes any opportunity to meet new people. He can be reached at pastorjasonlc@gmail.com, or via the church’s phone number at 641-472-1463. Word of Life Lutheran Church was founded in 2010, and is located at 2090 Libertyville Road on the south side of Fairfield.

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Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com