Citation for Rev. Lucille Kolin

Lucille (Lucy) Kolin was raised in Glendale, New York, in the borough of Queens, by Henry and Lillian Kolin.  Henry worked for the Brooklyn Army Port of Embarkation and Lillian was a secretary, homemaker, and civic leader.  Lucy attended St. John’s LCMS school and was baptized and confirmed at St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church, a ULC congregation. She was a Girl Scout and, even in elementary school, served as a church musician.  She loved reading the Encyclopedia Britannica.  She aspired, in what she thought would be her one lifetime chance to travel abroad, to go somewhere in Africa.  She was valedictorian of the first graduating class at Martin Luther High School.

Lucy attended Concordia Junior College in Bronxville and then Concordia Teachers College in River Forest in Chicago, where she studied Education, Music Education and Sociology. 

Lucy first taught elementary school in Berrien Springs, Michigan, an Adventist community.  She returned to New York City to become a parish worker at Trinity Lutheran Church on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  There she worked with Art Simon, who had yet to start Bread for the World.  She lived in a tenement along with her Puerto Rican, Dominican and African American parishioners.  She also met beat poet Allan Ginsberg and Ruthie the prostitute.  Ask her.  She also learned that she had a talent for writing.  And she was married to Jim Lawer.

No surprise that her next job was at The Rockefeller Foundation as an editor/researcher/press conference organizer.  Simultaneously, she earned a master’s degree in Library Science at Columbia University.  She loved books and organizing knowledge for others.  She had her first daughter, Brynna.

The family moved to the Bay area in 1979, pregnant with second daughter Megan.  Lucy served as housing coordinator at PLTS, then studied here from 1981 to 1985.  Her first call was to the congregation she had served as intern, Westlake Lutheran Church in Daly City.  It was an ALC congregation that had been neglected by the authorities, serving as a port of entry for pastors who felt a call to California, who got a foot in the door and then moved on.  Lucy helped the congregation move into closing, using liturgy to enable the people to bear and move through their grief.  She wrote a chapter on the process for the Alban Institute.  She got warned by synod staff that closing a congregation was not good for getting another call.

While seeking a new one, Lucy worked part-time as a substitute teacher in the Daly City Schools and as an organizer at the Mid-Peninsula Housing Coalition where she helped form Shelter Network, having attended community organizing trainings in Chicago and at Bay Area organizations.  The network got a Community Block grant to purchase an apartment building for transitional housing for families.  Religious communities showed up en masse at the public hearing and gave eloquent speeches, and permission to open the transitional housing center was granted.

Lucy became interim pastor at Central Lutheran Church in Oakland, then settled pastor.  She conspired with Walter Pieper, pastor of Grand Lake Lutheran Church nearby, to merge the two churches into one, Resurrection.  They spent two years together, co-pastoring the flocks.  When the Central property was sold, and the congregations merged, Lucy remained as sole pastor.  She thought she might carry too much baggage and sought other calls.  But Bishop Mattheis told her that her call was still to Resurrection.

And soon it became clear the call was turning into something new.  Over the next decades, Lucy developed a multi-cultural, multi-racial ministry.  She continued healthy traditions of worship and music while also inviting and commissioning new materials and rites, especially from the Tanzanian Church.  She helped the congregation reconnect with its neighborhood, Adams Point, and encouraged participation in the PICO national network (now called Faith in Action) and in its local affiliate, Oakland Community Organizations.

Lucy was instrumental in the formation of the Lutheran Church of Rwanda, evidenced by a plaque that lists her so.  She mentored Pr. John Rutsindintwarane, now Deputy Bishop of the LCR.  She supported the small group of Rwandan pastors who walked home from exile in Tanzania after the genocide, who formed congregations that were neither Hutu or Tutsi, but rather included perpetrators and survivors sitting next to each other in the pews.  Lucy traveled with Pr. John in Rwanda every couple of years and supported the LCR becoming a companion synod with the Sierra Pacific Synod.

Lucy learned that many East Africans, especially Tanzanian Lutherans, lived in the Bay Area, and were great inviters.  She went to their parties where she was introduced to their friends and heard them brag that she was learning to speak Swahili but left hopelessly early on Saturday nights!  She helped other members of Resurrection to accept East Africans into leadership and to realize that Lutheranism is indeed global.  After several years, the congregation employed a lay coordinator for African outreach.  Along the way, Lucy looked for “culture brokers” to help her understand her cultural mis-steps.  “Ask three times,” she learned, to find out what you’ve done wrong and to assure folks even pastors can learn from their mistakes.

In community organizing, she served as co-chair of Oakland Community Organizations twice, first with Dr. George Cummings of Imani Community Church and then with Fr. Jesus Nieto, a Catholic Priest.  She was deeply involved in actions to pressure banks to be accountable after the mortgage crisis and in creating affordable housing and seeking just immigration policy.  She rode PICO’s Recovery Express bus cross-country to Washington, DC, along the way meeting with folks in major cities who’d lost their homes.  She worked in DC and locally to pressure banks to reform their policies, speaking at Bank of America’s shareholder meeting and chairing a meeting with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on government reforms. 

In 1993, when local pastor Ross Merkel came out to his congregation as gay man in a committed relationship, an ecclesiastical trial ensued.  Ross chose Lucy of the gilded tongue to be his defender.  He told her, “Make a witness that we are following the gospel.”  That’s what happened.  Witnesses gave testimony of Gospel-led, effective ministry.  Although the verdict went against Ross, the needle was moved, paving the way for changes in ELCA policy.

Several times over the past years Lucy has served as an Adjunct Faculty member at PLTS in the areas of worship and pastoral formation.  She especially enjoyed creating a course in pastoral leadership for returning interns.  One class featured illustrating St. Paul's varied approaches to his congregations utilizing small wind-up toys that spun, waddled, and flipped across the desktops.

Lucy describes her ministry in these terms:   listening, encouraging people to talk together, preaching the Gospel creatively and faithfully, and making God’s love visible – through political and economic means as well as by “praying with one’s feet.”  Ministry, she believes, is not “I” but “we,” so she is always looking for what congregational members have to teach her.  Lucy retired in 2016 and is currently bridge pastor at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Oakland, for the second time.

For these and other reasons, Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary is pleased to give to Rev. Lucy Kolin the 2018 Alum Award for Distinguished Ministry as a Parish Pastor.