Interview: Lutheran Minister Recalls Campus Experiences

"We come to this place to testify that the light of love cannot be defeated. Amid all our pain we confess that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. We cannot do everything, but we can do something."

Reverend William "Bill" King spoke these words at the convocation held at Virginia Tech on April 17, 2007. King has served as a Lutheran campus minister at Virginia Tech for more than 25 years and was selected to be the Christian speaker at the convocation held on the day following the shootings that occurred on April 16.

It was an experience he describes as being both awe-filled and intimidating.

The work King does on a daily basis is no less important than the short message he gave on that day. As campus minister, King spends a lot of time working with and ministering to the students who are a part of the Lutheran Campus Ministry at Virginia Tech.

It would be hard to find a time when King isn't doing some kind of ministry. Whether he's meeting with someone in his slightly cluttered, yet cozy office, preaching, teaching or eating dinner with a few students on a Tuesday night King is always doing what he feels called to do.

In addition to his responsibilities as campus minister, King also serves as one of the pastors at Luther Memorial Lutheran Church in Blacksburg and the assistant director for Campus Ministry Program Resources for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

In order to become ordained as a Lutheran minister and serve at a member church of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (the largest Lutheran group in the U.S.) one has to fulfill a number of requirements. Two of these requirements are to obtain a Master of Divinity from a seminary and go through at least one unit of Clinical Pastoral Education.

A student going through his/her Clinical Pastoral Education must serve in a clinical setting for at least 400 hours. King makes a reference to his Clinical Pastoral Education experience, which he fulfilled by working in a South Carolina psychiatric hospital.

King says that he doesn't remember the exact circumstances, but one day during this tenure at the psychiatric hospital he was "sitting a nurse's station on the orthopedic floor when [a nurse] looked earnestly into [his] face and said, 'Pastor King, I believe in you; I really believe in you.'" This brief anecdote demonstrates what it is like to listen to King. There is an earnestness about him that encourages you to trust what he is saying and doing, and this is a valuable gift in his profession. After spending some time with him, it would be hard not to believe in him.

King works out of a humble office reminiscent of a college professor's. This isn't too much of a surprise, because King was enrolled in a political science Ph.D. program before deciding to enroll in seminary.

There was some comfortable seating for a few students to visit, two slightly cluttered desks and a computer which had Microsoft Outlook open. Out of his humble office, this equally humble man does work that he very much enjoys and is well gifted to carry out - serving the people of Virginia Tech and the Blacksburg community. His passion for his religion and ministry is infectious and is evident throughout the following interview. What follows is an edited selection of questions and answers from an interview that King recently granted Planet Blacksburg.

Q: I read in one of your sermons online that you grew up in a Baptist church, and I was wondering, are there certain distinctions which led you to shift into the Lutheran Church when you were in college from the Baptist church?

King: Boy that's a long, long pilgrimage. I grew up Baptist in the heart of the civil rights movement in the Deep South and was deeply disillusioned with my church's perspective. Basically loving Jesus and hating blacks and I didn't know at the time that Lutherans were having the same struggle. All I knew was that up close and personal my Baptist congregation was in that place, so I was close to leaving the church completely out of disillusionment. I was a poli sci grad student and I had to write a senior thesis and my first choice was on Jonathan Edwards' political theory, but my library didn't have enough primary sources for that. They did have 55 volumes of Luther's works, and there's four volumes of that that are specifically the Christian in society so they're very nicely packaged. Long story short, I realized in reading that that Luther's vision of what it means to be Christian was what I had known for a long time or what I had believed for a long time but didn't know what you called it. So that was the general thing. Specifically, I experienced the Baptist perspective as essentially God's conditional love. If you are sorry enough, God will love you. What I really found appealing about the Lutheran perspective is this radical, radical emphasis on the graciousness of God. God's grace comes, and our only job is to respond to it. So that's basically how I became Lutheran.

Q: Have you been able to use any of those skills or abilities you developed while studying political science in your ministry?

King: I hope so. I think any rigorous academic discipline invites you to ask strong, penetrating questions and that's one of my gripes with a lot of what passes for Christianity is that the first thing it says is, "This isn't going to make any sense what so ever, so put your brain in neutral." I don't think Jesus did that. I think both Jesus and Paul demonstrate an incredible awareness of theological thinking and deep wrestling with the faith. That's what I think is really important about ministry in the campus. It's not just pep rallies for Jesus. It's inviting people to say you really can integrate all this learning that you're getting in the classroom with your Christian faith, and if you can't then there's something limited about your vision of God and the Christian faith. The other piece I suppose that I would say that I have brought from the poli sci is this deep commitment that the faith has got to be integrated with its implications on society. Paul always uses the plural when he talks about the community. He doesn't talk about: work out your salvation singular, it's the plural. Jesus always invites people into a community. So I am pretty attuned I hope to those social implications of the gospel.

Q: In seminary, is there an experience that meant the most to you? I have read a number of sermons where you mentioned your clinical pastoral education.

King: Yeah, there were a lot of experiences. Are you talking about the incident at the state hospital? That was certainly formative. That's the only mystical experience that I think I've had in my life. I was distributing the sacrament, and I heard audibly the voice of God saying, "You did not choose me. I chose you." And certainly that is about as succinct a statement of the Lutheran emphasis of theology. It is not my response that is the important thing. Even though that's important. I can't respond before God first chooses, so that was certainly very formative and one that kind of brings me back.

Q: The moment in the hospital I was actually referring to was when one of the nurses came up and said something to you. Would you mind talking more about this moment when you were giving the sacrament?

King: .I was doing clinical work at a psychiatric hospital, South Carolina State Hospital. Anybody who has ever lived in South Carolina knows about people being sent to Bull Street, which is the state psychiatric hospital. So I was working as a chaplain there. Part of what you do is lead worship there, and the people who are not on lock ward can come and worship. It is still a pretty wild experience to lead worship at a psychiatric hospital because by definition these folks have something going on. You have to get this image: it's not air conditioned, the doors are opened, the windows are opened. It's hot as it can be. People are taking off their clothes because it's so hot, and we've been told to be real careful as we were distributing the bread. For the sacrament it can be a little chaotic. We started doing the distribution and it went well for a little bit. Suddenly, someone in one of the middle rows got this fear that we were going to run out before we got to him and so he just started crawling over people, and that sort of started this cascade of people running up to the front of the church. People were grabbing fistfuls of bread (or crackers) and pushing around and I have had one year of seminary so I am so aware of exactly the way worship is supposed to be conducted and the sacramental significance of what's supposed to be going on here, and we are not discerning the body of Christ and I am getting angry as I can be. I wasn't actually distributing; my supervisor was in the front and I was kind of in the back and I was getting so upset, and that's when I had this kind of mystical experience, a quotation from the gospel of John. It was as though the Lord was speaking to me in this moment saying, "Bill, you didn't choose me. I chose you. So if these people are needing to receive in this way, it's ok with me if it's ok with you." Like I said, it kind of really emphasized to me most of these people were mentally retarded and the other half were psychotic, and if God can come to them, then maybe God can use a priggish first-year seminarian too.

Q: You have been at Virginia Tech specifically for over 25 years now. What drives you to continue working at the college age in ministry?

King: I think I alluded to it earlier. Personally, it's just that I know how pivotal campus ministry can be. I know what it feels like to be that person who comes to college and suddenly has to integrate a whole bunch of new learning that has that Sunday School faith challenged in the same way that elementary school math gets challenged. Arithmetic doesn't explain it all if you want to be an engineer - you have got to take seriously other stuff. You have got to move on, and I think deep in people's guts they realize that their faith needs to grow a little bit too. Some people have a real crisis at that point: if I can't believe God did it in seven days, zap, the whole bible is out the window. I want to say, that's just not true. That's not the dichotomy you need to have. That's just not what the church has believed for 1900 of its 2000 years. That kind of approach to scripture is a product of the 20th century. It's that being there at a critical, pivotal point in people's lives that keeps me going. I love ministering in an academic setting because you get paid to think, which is good. And to integrate this powerful stuff that's going on in people's lives: research and all that kind of stuff. Not to mention Blacksburg is a great place to be. Just a good, good town.

Q: I'm changing gears here. The events on April 16 happened a year before I was even accepted to Virginia Tech. I was wondering if you might be able to describe what it was like to speak at convocation in front of that specific audience to someone who wasn't here.

King: It was intimidating to say the least. I didn't know I was doing it until just a couple of hours before I was asked to do it. What it was like was trying to say something out of my own tradition that would speak to a deep need in the whole community, and that's why I quoted from the Gospel of John, "the light shines in the darkness". It has been mildly amusing to me that I got a lot of hate mail asking me why I didn't quote the scriptures or talk about Jesus. I thought, if you don't recognize the first chapter of John I don't know what I can say. I guess that was what the challenge was for me. I know that people can approach that task differently. For me, it was trying to be pastoral to a whole community that didn't necessarily share my confessional perspective. But it was kind of awesome, not in the good sense. Awe-filled, intimidating, but you do what you have to do in those moments, and I would say there was a sense of being lifted up and finding the capacity that I certainly had no sense of having before that moment. It gave me a strong sense of the movement of the Holy Spirit. Whether everybody thought the Holy Spirit spoke or not is another question, but I felt it anyway.

Q: Do you have maybe one or two other specific learning experiences, maybe like April 16, that you might be able to give to someone thinking about going to seminary? Or, what did you wish you knew before going into seminary that you could tell us now?

King: Well, I guess I've learned that it's important to know what you believe and have good reasons to believe it, but precious few people are truly argued into the Kingdom of God. People are more moved by having their own concerns taken seriously, so that one needs to constantly think of the Gospel not so much as me laying my shtick on you but as. a good doctor saying, "What do I have in this bag here that might speak to your particular situation?" If you're talking alienation, "I just don't know if there's anybody who cares for me." If I start talking the gospel to you in terms of guilt it's true, but it's not going to be terribly helpful. So it's really important in ministry to hear what the particular need is that's being brought before you, that the one size doesn't fit all. There is a great allure of simple answers. For every complex problem, there is a simple answer, usually wrong, so there's an awful lot of traffic in religion these days that panders to simplicity because when a world is chaotic you want somebody to tell you "It's not chaotic, it's simple," but the reality is it is chaotic. To go back to 4/16, what I found that most helpful was being able to draw on the scripture's frank acknowledgement of that chaos. It's right there in Lamentations. It's right there in Job. It's right there in the crucifixion narrative. It is important to take seriously the world as it is, then ask, "How does the Gospel try to address that?"