Bishop Chilstrom’s Autobiography
By Ralph W. Klein
What does it take to be a leader? What does it take to be the church? These are the questions that engage Herbert Chilstrom in his lengthy autobiography, and they are answered proleptically in the book’s title A Journey of Grace.
His family of origin was low income, blessed with eight children. Of those siblings he writes most of his brother David, who is developmentally challenged and who has lived out his calling in a simple and profoundly faithful way. In that family his faith and piety were nourished, but those loving contours were deepened and transcended in a lifetime that has now reached eighty years.
After an undistinguished record in elementary school and high school, he found himself academically at the Lutheran Bible Institute in Minneapolis, Augsburg College, Augustana Seminary, Princeton Seminary, and New York University, where he earned a doctorate. LBI and Princeton especially seemed to have kindled his love for and knowledge of the Bible. He wrote a masters thesis at Princeton on baptism in the early church and published a book Hebrews—A New and Better Way in 1983.
After serving several years at two small parishes in northwestern Minnesota, Chilstrom became a professor and Dean at the Lutheran Bible Institute in Teaneck, New Jersey, and then served as pastor at First Lutheran in St. Peter, MN. From there he was elected president/bishop of the very large Minnesota Synod, and then became the first bishop of the ELCA, an office now known as presiding bishop, thanks to his recommendation at the end of his eight year tenure. His recommendation to reduce the number of synods from sixty-five to thirty-eight failed.
In 1954, he married Corinne Hansen, and her life and vocational choices play a major role in the autobiography. Trained as a nurse, she later earned a B.S. and M. Div. and became ordained in 1985. Together they adopted three children, one of whom, Andrew, took his own life. Corinne published a book about that experience, Andrew, You Died Too Soon.
In addition to the first person narrative, this book is full of excerpts from sermons, letters, position papers, and his personal journal. It names outstanding fellow leaders and identifies others who were less than outstanding or were very contentious. Chilstrom played a major role in the Commission for a New Lutheran Church, a seventy-two person committee that put the ELCA together. Chilstrom suggested the name for this church body and was among those who opted for Chicago rather than Milwaukee as its national headquarters. He does not mention the controversy about the naming of the Trinity in the CNLC.
Most people, I suppose, will start with the two chapters dedicated to his tenure as national bishop since that is the context in which most of us know him. He praises the competence of the executive officers and the Church Council, and shares honestly about the loneliness of leadership and the exhausting challenges of travel. His proudest accomplishment was Mission90, a program designed to foster Bible reading, stewardship, and evangelism and that established a companion synod program between the sixty-five synods and international Lutheran churches, especially in the developing world.
From the start, the ELCA ran into money problems that have continued and even worsened over the years. There were already major cutbacks in personnel and programs during his tenure. The issue of homosexuality was controversial back then, too, and the book records his gradual evolution from an initial advocacy only for civil rights for these sisters and brothers in the Minnesota Synod, to his strong advocacy of including gays and lesbians on the clergy roster in more recent years. A premature release of a study of sexuality in 1993 made all hell break loose (p. 561) and deluged him with seven hundred very angry letters. Through it all he kept an even keel, and cites a humorous newspaper column in Minneapolis headlined “If Lutherans don’t like sex, why are there so many of them?”
Historians will scour this autobiography in future years when the history of the ELCA will be written since it is only part of the story. Those of us who have known Herb personally can relive the effects of grace in a great life by savoring this book. Any profits from this book will help fund the Herbert Chilstrom chair in New Testament at LSTC.