In this blog post I wish to pay a debt of gratitude to the man who by the providential grace of God accompanied me throughout my adult journey in ministry and theology. If you’ve been reading my blogs, you have seen how often the name of Paul Brndjar reoccurs throughout. When Paul passed away early on the morning of February 17, I began my announcement of his death on Facebook with these words, “Myself being the oldest of five brothers, Paul Brndjar was the elder brother that I never had.” His memorial service will be held on March 23 at 11 AM at the Lutheran Church of the Holy Spirit, 3461 S. Cedar Crest Blvd., Emmaus, PA.
We were getting desperate. Facing a deadline to vacate our student apartment at Union Theological Seminary in New York, we looked out upon a bleak employment landscape in my field of systematic theology. I had applied for a position at Bright Divinity School in Texas but they offered only a one-year sabbatical replacement. I didn’t think it would be a good match and, in any case, the prospect of uprooting the family year after year to take temporary positions was tremendously unappealing. Ellen had sacrificed to put me through four years at Union and I felt strongly that I should now return the favor. Soon she would be pregnant with our second child, adding to the urgency. She roused me out of my stupor and helped me send out about 100 inquiries with my CV attached to anybody and everyone we could think of. When I expressed skepticism about this fishing expedition, she announced a rule that has become legendary in our family over the years: “You can always say no. But you can’t always say yes.”
There seemed to be little if any response to our mailing campaign until a letter arrived from right down below us in Manhattan, where the Lutheran Church in America had its national headquarters on Madison and 34th. It was signed by Paul Brndjar and it was an invitation to come for an interview. I later found out that Paul recognized my last name, as he had been a pastor of a Slovak Zion Synod congregation in North New Jersey and he knew my father’s name from the Missouri Synod-associated Slovak Synod congregation in central New Jersey. For the first time in my life the Slovak connection was helpful! But Paul was in fact impressed with the CV and the geographical proximity was convenient. I did well in the interviews, and when the director of the division, Rev. Kenneth Senft, offered me the position of a research associate for Church in Society, I remember saying incredulously, “You mean you’re going to pay me to sit in my office here and read books and write about them?” That was an offer I could not refuse! That employment is how a friendship began with Paul and his wife Pam and their children.
Paul was a good and patient boss, who assembled an excellent team and invested in teambuilding with in-house brainstorming and off-site retreats. We needed this solidarity, because we faced daunting issues in the early years of the Reagan administration, which I have written about in previous blogs. But personally, I was impressed right off the bat with Paul’s moral courage. He was willing to travel to Moscow to attend a Soviet “World Religions Peace Conference.” As Jacques Ellul pointed out in his devastating book on propaganda, the Soviets had perfected the fine art of preparing for war while posturing for peace. Paul knew the risks involved. As a bishop, he had pioneered opening relations between the Slovak Zion Synod and the Lutheran Church in Slovakia behind the Iron Curtain. On one occasion I recall sitting at a restaurant with a visiting Russian bishop in NYC on another such “peace mission,” as Paul stretched from his native Slovak into the Russian language to sustain hours of dialogue. His tremendous facility in language, as well as savvy gained through such personal experience, equipped him for this trip to the Soviet peace conference.
Paul went as the representative of LCA Bishop James Crumley and was photographed side-by-side with ALC Bishop David Preus, the Kremlin churches in the background. This image was published as the cover for an issue of The Lutheran. The accompanying article recorded Paul’s courageous (and lonely!) dissent from the alternately blatant and subtle Soviet propaganda that framed the conference. That witness signaled the battle to come over the social statement Peace and Politics.
Paul tasked me with writing the background theological study, which I entitled The Nuclear Morass. It argued the painful truth that weapons of mass destruction cannot be disinvented, only managed, and that the reality, not the ideology, of mutually assured destruction has actually functioned since World War II to constrain war between the two great powers. I brought such Christian realism with me from the Union tradition of Reinhold Niebuhr, but Paul helped me to see clearly and think clearly about what Reagan unartfully but truthfully called “the evil empire.” Interestingly, my otherwise friendly theological advocate, Robert Jenson, profoundly disagreed with my position as he supported unilateral nuclear disarmament (although his close comrade at Gettysburg Theological Seminary at the time, Eric Gritsch, an émigré from postwar Germany, endorsed my position with equal passion). Jenson and I ended up publishing a literary debate between us on the topic of nuclear deterrence in the journal Currents in Theology and Mission.
The struggle over the social statement Peace and Politics exhausted Paul, who had previously been the very young Bishop of the Slovak Zion Synod. He was not only feeling burnt out but realizing that he had been neglecting his family. He agreed to be the godfather of our son Will, but some obligation kept him from attending the baptism at St. Peter in Manhattan. As this happened to us, you can imagine what his work obligations had done to his family life. To my great sorrow but not surprise, he announced his resignation and return to parish ministry in northern New Jersey. Around the same time, we had to leave our student housing at Union and found a strange little house in polluted Jersey City, which was, however, affordable, and a reasonable one hour commute under the Hudson River back to Madison Avenue. At some point here, Pastor Paul visited us in this hovel and almost immediately proposed that we move to Garfield, where his congregation had a vacant parsonage. We jumped at the chance, not only for better housing, but to deepen our friendship with Paul and Pam.
Living in Garfield, we attended his Zion Lutheran Church across the street from the parsonage and, as I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, he became a model for me as I was reconsidering pastoral ministry as a possible future. He consoled Ellen when news of a former boyfriend’s suicide caused her distress. In these years, Ellen and Pam grew their friendship into a partnership in preparing food for a caterer, work they enjoyed doing from home and also a nice supplemental income. Paul and I were able now to pal around in the fun but iffy Slovak tradition of drinking, typically a six pack of Rheingold beer to chase down a fifth of Scotch between us. We would talk and talk and talk until late in the night. We enjoyed many gatherings and celebrations in their Montclair home. The first time Slovak Zion Synod Bishop John Adam met Ellen at a party there, he followed my pretty young lady around the room saying, “God is a Slovak.” Finally Ellen turned around on him and said, “Yes, Bishop, I’m sure She is.” Bishop Adam wasn’t expecting that! The otherwise loquacious bishop fell speechless.
Our daughter, Sarah, and the Brndjars’ daughter, Elizabeth, were the same age and developed a friendship. After we had moved upstate to Delhi, Sarah received a letter from Elizabeth which disturbed her. She decided to show me the letter. I sealed it back up and sent it back to Paul, simply noting that he should be aware of this. I think we talked on the phone a little about it. They were realizing that precious Elizabeth was troubled and needed special attention. Ironically, many years later Ellen and I had to deal with a similar situation with our son Will. It is very hard for parents to realize that a precious and beautiful child has problems. But in the Brndjars’ case and in ours, thanks be to God, we woke up soon enough to love a troubled child back into stability and health. This was a shared parental experience which Paul and I had talked about but especially just before his death. He was above all grateful to God that his Elizabeth was faring well, living on her own nearby, and he could leave the scene in peace.
Naturally, when we moved to Delhi NY the frequency and intensity of our meetings decreased, but never the goodwill. Paul and Pam have been the kind of friends that, after even long intervals, one could resume face-to-face conversation as if no time had expired. I had been at Immanuel Delhi for four years or so when I called Paul to ask if he had any kind of project from his knowledge of the church in Slovakia which I could work on with my retired but disabled father to get him intellectually engaged. Paul gave me a copy of Slovak Bishop Jan Michalko’s dogmatics. My father knew Slovak and I knew dogmatics, so we made a team translating it into English (a lengthy section of this was published as “The Doctrine of the Church" Parts One and Two, by Ján Michalko, translated by William Hinlicky, edited and with an Introduction by Paul R. Hinlicky, Lutheran Quarterly (Autumn 1990: 4/3) 271-316: (Winter 1990: 4/4) 439-469)..
After we had worked on the translation for about a year, Paul told us that Michalko was coming to the USA to receive an honorary doctorate at Muhlenberg University in Pennsylvania. He invited my father and me to attend a reception for him. (A Judas in our midst photographed my father with a glass of wine in his hand, looking as if a little tipsy, side-by-side with the “communist” Bishop, and published the picture in Herman Otten’s scandal sheet, Christian News.) It was on this occasion that the arrangements were made for us to receive an official invitation to Slovakia to visit Michalko in order to discuss the translation work. We needed this invitation to secure a visa. So in the spring of 1989--just months before the fall of the Berlin wall – my mother, father and I traveled to our ancestral land, both to look up long-lost relatives and to meet with the church and seminary authorities in Bratislava.
Several years later, when the possibility of my coming to the seminary in Bratislava to teach became actual, Paul was again indispensable. We didn’t want to wait and go through the laborious process of getting recognition and funding from the brand new church’s Division for Global Mission, so we went through the Slovak Zion Synod to obtain the call. Paul found a volunteer in his congregation to manage the funding of our mission. I appealed for support to my large network of readers and, astonishingly, we received enough in pledges to make the move viable, even though we were right back to where we started at Immanuel Delhi eight years earlier in terms of absolute dollars in salary. (Thankfully, the cost of living in Slovakia in that post-communist time was affordable on that salary and, after three years, the ELCA Division for Global Mission saw fit to adopt us into their roster of overseas missionaries). We couldn’t have done this without Paul’s direct advocacy and ongoing support.
During our six years in Slovakia we saw Paul frequently once again, as he regularly flew the Atlantic to visit the church in Slovakia. Paul was good friends with my Slovak mentor, Július Filo, so he had a double reason for stopping to visit the both of us. And during this period, Paul’s son Mark and his new bride Teresa came to Slovakia as DGM volunteers, teaching English in the Lutheran Church’s high school system. So we got to know them as well. And a tremendous blessing fell upon us when Paul’s retired sister, Judy, also came to the seminary as a volunteer to teach English. Judy had excellent facility in Slovak and she was a great friend during these years. She relieved me of the English language program so that I could focus on teaching in Slovak. We had many good times together.
At one memorable Christmas party we gathered with another couple volunteering in the school system to teach English, Rev. Dean Lueking, pastor emeritus at Grace Riverside outside of Chicago and his wife Bev, sister, if I remember correctly, of Jaroslav Pelikan. We sang together from childhood memory the Slovak carol, Čas radosti. Dean and Ellen looked on with wonder at the tenacity of Slovak tradition erupting from the lips of Judy, Bev, and me--although I sometimes think Ellen has become more of a Slovak than I, with all the zeal of a convert!
I mentioned earlier the particular pastoral care Paul gave to Ellen when she was grieving. In 1996 he performed that same pastoral service for hurting me when my mother died tragically and prematurely at the age of 71 from a botched carotid artery surgery. We took an emergency flight in early November to her bedside and stayed for almost three weeks, while she lingered as her organs slowly shut down. When it was obvious that there was no hope, we returned to Slovakia with a stopover in Newark airport where Paul met us. He had a knack for saying just the right thing. After I had poured out my heart detailing the tragic missteps that were taking away our mother and my father’s life partner, I was feeling a little embarrassed and said something like, “I know the world has been much bigger problems. This is not the end of the world.” And Paul gently said the hard truth back to me, “But it is the end of your little world.” No sidestepping or sugarcoating, but the truth spoken in love. How he thus helped me face my grief at real loss! We flew back to Slovakia to await word of my mother’s death, which came the day after we returned home.
Paul had never been robustly healthy. He retired from parish ministry and with Pam moved to a condo in Northeastern Pennsylvania. We talked on and off through these past twenty-some years and after we built our home at St Gall Farm, he would say regularly how they hoped to get here to visit us and see our place. We still traveled regularly to upstate New York to visit family and friends and tried as often as possible to stop in Pennsylvania to visit Paul and Pam along the way. Two years ago, Paul was waylaid by Covid. He became a victim of long Covid and his pulmonary function was increasingly compromised. The last time we visited them, he was dependent upon oxygen. Still, it came as a shock when Pam let us know two months ago that Paul had gone on home hospice care. After checking with Pam about it, I began to call Paul weekly until the time of his death.
We would talk just like in the old days for as long as his energy and wind would hold out. We talked about our battle times together, we talked about the sorry state of the Church, we talked about pastoral ministry, we talked about politics and international affairs, we talked about Slovakia and all our mutual friends, we talked about our children and what it meant for us to be fathers. When he once expressed to me some diffidence about his path in life and whether he was already a forgotten man, I told him that in my experience wherever he had gone he had left a trail of goodwill. We agreed that in our brokenness Christ is for us, lives in us and in spite of all works through us. Toward the end, Ellen and I talked with Pam to lend strength and courage for the death that was approaching.
In the final conversation I had with Paul, he was excited to share with me in detail the memorial service that he had just planned with his pastor. With astonishing energy, he lingered over the hymns he had chosen. His joy radiated through the phone and his labored breathing as he recounted a recent gathering of his children and their children – his daughter Leah published a picture from this occasion on Facebook showing Paul pointing at the first martini he had taken in three years to make sure that the class was properly filled! So in response to this final great joy in his earthly sojourn, I told him a story about my own father, two weeks before he died, when all of his sons and their families and also a nephew gathered in his hospital room for the Lord’s Supper. And how he interrupted the pastor’s benediction declaring, “Now I want to say something.” And Dad began to pray, saying, “Lord, I thank you that I have been able to be a part of my own funeral…” Paul liked the story and recognized himself in it. We are pastors to the end of our days, a vocation, not a job.
Well done, good and faithful servant! You rest in peace to rise in glory. Soli Deo Gloria.