Appeals Lawyer to Community Pastor
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| © Photograph by Alex Harris |
Ruth VanDemark was asked to deliver a sermon at her 40th reunion at Vassar College. As she thought about what she would say, a story from the book of Mark in the New Testament played in her head. “Beware, keep alert, for you do not know when the time will come,” Jesus says. “And what I say to you I say to all: keep awake.”
Keep awake, keep waiting, she thought, and your time will come. That was a pretty good description of her own life, as well.
VanDemark, 63 years old, has been a Lutheran pastor in Chicago for eight years, after more than 20 years as a successful lawyer. Her path to the ministry brought her full circle. She attended divinity school at Harvard after graduating from Vassar in 1966, but had little interest in becoming a pastor. Thinking she would perhaps get a teaching job, she followed her husband to Yale.
A prep school headmaster shot down her job application, saying, “As a matter of policy we do not consider any wives of graduate students.” VanDemark was shocked. “It was if when you became a wife, you became a non-person,” she says.
Spurred to action, she enrolled in law school and joined a mid-sized law firm in Chicago, where her husband had become a university professor. Specializing in civil appeals, she made partner in 1984, was named head of the firm’s appellate practice, and became president of the Appellate Lawyer's Association of Illinois. She and her husband raised two daughters in the suburbs.
Her career success made her family think she was crazy when she told them that at age 48 she was leaving the law to become a minister. Her husband told her she owed it to other women to stick with her successful, glass ceiling-shattering career. Her family thought she was being foolish.
But she says that once she heard the call, she simply couldn’t push it out of her mind.
Seven years after VanDemark enrolled in Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, she wound down her law practice and received a call from a congregation looking for a pastor, a requirement for ordination. In 1999, at age 55, VanDemark took over as pastor of the Wicker Park Lutheran Church in a once elegant, then struggling, now gentrifying neighborhood of the city. The church had nearly closed a few years before. It’s part-time, unpaid pastor had left and older congregants were dying off.
Fresh on the job, VanDemark learned the building would be condemned unless the congregation spent over a half-million dollars to rebuild the church’s towers and restoring the rest of the 1906 structure. She threw herself into the work of rebuilding the congregation, spiritually and physically.
A few older members of the church balked at the costs of refurbishing the dilapidated property and tried to oust her. Finding that they had no support, they left, and the congregation raised $350,000 and borrowed another $350,000 from the national church synod.
Now, with her family in full support, Wicker Park Lutheran Church is thriving, filled with young people and new energy. A night ministry helps homeless youth on the streets of Chicago; another group builds houses on the city’s south side. VanDemark has been working with the neighborhood's Pentecostal, mostly Latino, churches to advocate for more low-income housing. VanDemark figures it may take her another eight years to ensure Wicker Park’s future. By then she’ll be 70, finishing off nearly a two-decade encore career.
Arriving at Vassar, the threads of her sermon woven together, she was ready to speak. In front of her assembled classmates in the college chapel, she began: “So what are you waiting for?”