I will certainly miss you on Sundays this summer as I now return to my seasonal chapel (Emmanuel Church) in Manchester-by-the-Sea, MA, for our summer calendar of worship (June 2 through Sept. 1). However, I will still be coming up to Holy Trinity on most Wednesdays during the summer and hope to see you then, especially during one of our three afternoon BBQ events (see below). If you would like to make an appointment, or otherwise reach me, please contact Mark in the office.
In my absence, we are blessed indeed to have our old friend, Pastor Don Larsen, join us on Sundays to lead worship, beginning this Sunday through Labor Day weekend. Pastor Don was here last summer and is known to most of you. He and I first got to know each other as fellow chaplains at Harvard and have been friends ever since. I am so grateful that he is able to be with you these coming months, even though he is technically “retired.”
From Chicago, Pastor Don earned his undergraduate degree in church music from Concordia Teachers College in River Forest, IL, and prepared for ordination at Christ Seminary-Seminex in St. Louis, and at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. He was ordained in 1983. Pastor Don pursued further theological study at a number of other schools, including Union Theological Seminary of New York and Yale Divinity School.
Pastor Don has served congregations in the Slovak Zion Synod-ELCA and the New England Synod in Danbury and Brookfield, CT, Riverside, IL, and Hartford, CT. During his ten-year ministry at Grace Lutheran in Hartford he also taught biblical Greek at Hartford Seminary.
More recently, Pastor Don led University Lutheran Church in Cambridge, MA, where he was also Lutheran Chaplain to Harvard University and an instructor in Lutheran studies at Harvard Divinity School. Most recently, Pastor Don was pastor of St. John Evangelical Lutheran Church in Sudbury, MA, from which he retired in 2020.
I hope you will give Pastor Don a warm welcome-back!