Welcome to Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church

September 9, 2007

Pastor Kate Schlechter was born and raised in sunny Southern California, which explains her love for water, sailing, and the beach. In combining her love of writing with her love of the beach, she is currently working on an inspirational book entitled Sand Castles of Grace.  She would love to have it chosen for Oprah's Book Club. Won't it be fun to watch her when she is invited to be on Oprah's show?  We'll be waiting, Pastor Kate!

Kate has a brother who is 15 years older than she is who lives in Boise , Idaho where her paternal great grandparents moved to homestead from North Dakota . Kate's father, Bob is retired from General Telephone Company and lives in Meridian , Idaho . Pastor Kate's family roots date back to Prussia and the reign of Catherine the Great.

Her family valued education, and her imagination was big.  At the age eight, she plotted to sail single handed around the world.  She was told she could be anything she wanted -- there were no limits. Her morn was a stay-at-home mom and family vacations centered on sailing out of Los Angeles harbor for San Diego and Catalina Island .

Early in life, religion or church attendance were not a part of the family routine. When Kate was 8 years old a neighbor invited her to VBS. She was baptized in the Missouri Lutheran Church and the family joined in regular church activities. One year later, the family left due to a church conflict. Kate credits this as the beginnings of her interest in conflict resolution in congregations. Transition and change are always inevitable. Ten members of Kate's family were teachers, and her dream was to become a kindergar­ten teacher.  However, her love of Shakespeare didn't seem to fit that age group, so Kate majored in English Literature with a high school teaching option.

Prior to receiving her BA in English Literature, Kate studied Fashion Merchandising and Design and was mentored in the fashion world by the West Coast Editor of Seventeen Magazine.  Her first byline was an article she wrote with a friend on the workings of a large fashion executive in San Francisco.  Hired by a retail establishment in management, Kate became a trouble shooter for the women's retail chain store and traveled throughout the LA basin training employees on loss prevention and sales techniques.

It was during her years at California State University Long Beach and working as a passenger bus driver for the YMCA one summer, Kate was invited back to church. Her mother was very ill with a heart condition. Shortly thereafter, Kate's mother died and it was the memory of a Christmas Eve candlelight service which brought her back into the workings of the church for good.  Pastor Kate's strength in ministry comes from the parts of her background which have dealt with grief, loss, transition, organizational systems.

During her sophomore year at CSULB and a Lutheran Student Movement gathering in Bozeman, MT in 1983, Pastor Kate received the call from God to go into the ministry.  She attended a session on church careers and learned about a need for missionaries in Japan.  After a grueling interview process in New York, Kate was hired as a short term missionary position, She worked with a deaf/hearing impaired congregation in Tokyo, learning Japanese and Japanese sign language on the job.  The Pastor and his wife be­came very good friends of Kate. He would practice his English with Kate, and his wife taught Kate how to cook Japanese food. During their conversations Kate would encour­age him to rethink his position on women in ministry and how Japanese women should be permitted to be ordained.  After Kate returned to CA, this particular pastor became the bishop for the JELC and paved the way to open the Lutheran Church in Japan to the ordination of women. Today, Japanese women have access to the pulpit through ordination, Pastor Kate believes that her time in Japan was a great opportunity to live in a country which does not take Christianity for granted.  Less than one percent of the entire nation is Christian and people travel by train up to two or three hours each Sunday to attend church.

Kate knows that one of the hardest parts of entering into a new ministry is learning the topography of the land and the heart of the people she has been called to serve. She lives with the motto, "The church is my life, but there is more to life than the church".  She has many interests and passions, and hopes to continue to follow in the path she started in Japan, "I went to Japan a teacher, hut returned a student of life and culture. Moving into the community at Beautiful Savior and the wider Tucson area means God will provide me with more to learn."

Pastor Kate has had the same prayer partner for 25 years and disciplines her spiritual life with an ongoing covenant relationship of prayer and process with a licensed Spiritual Director, With the help and guidance of this intentional Spiritual Director and an intentional prayer partner she has spent time praying, reading, discussing, and questioning God's hopes and desires for her life, the church and the world.

Pastor Kate invites us into this hope for our ministry together: "May Beautiful Savior Lutheran Church always remember that it is God's church and as such God grants us, together, united through the waters of our baptism, the permission, the love and the grace to take chances and to risk for the sake of the Gospel. Let's soar like an eagle, and dance to the tune of the Spirit!  Enjoy God's experiment!"

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