GC graduate retiring after 26 years of ministry in Knapp

By Cara L. Dempski

KNAPP — If anyone expects Pastor LeRoy Nelson of Knapp to kick back and relax after his retirement, they are in for a surprise.

The minister preached his last church service at Gospel Mission Baptist Church June 18 after 26 years of service to the congregation and community before he and his wife of nearly 50 years, Beth Ann, moved to Woodville June 19.

They plan to attend the Baptist church there, and Nelson still plans to engage in pulpit supply work, because, as he put it: “I don’t want to roll over and play dead, I still want to preach.”

Which tells you everything you need to know about his spirit and love for his work.

Nelson explained he will miss the church and community who have come to feel like family for he and Beth Ann, but said he wanted to retire from preaching while he still had his physical health and mental faculties.

The retired pastor’s route to the church in Knapp was a circuitous one that started with a church revival meeting in 1960.

The road to Knapp

Nelson attended a revival meeting in 1960, and said it led him to ask himself what would happen after he died.

“I went through a time in my life where I thought ‘when I die, where am I going?’ I believed the scripture that said there’s a heaven, and there’s a hell,” Nelson explained. “Through those meetings, I got the assurance that I am headed to heaven, and I more or less took God at his word and accepted it.”

Once the pastor received his answer on where he would be going, he started wondering where other people would go after life on Earth.

He headed to Pillsbury Baptist Bible College in Owatonna, Minnesota, for four years before heading to Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Minneapolis.

“I finished four years in three years, so that was crunch time,” Nelson said, laughing.

Nelson met Beth Ann and they started dating during that time, and he proposed to her while they were both working as camp counselors at Camp Chetek. They were married December 30, 1967.

The couple moved to Genoa, Illinois, approximately 60 miles west of Chicago, to start his ministry work with a church there. He said it was an interesting experience being just 29 years old and joining an established community.

“Everyone else was 60-65 years old, and you’re looked upon as a kid,” Nelson recalled. “There was a feeling of ‘we’ve been here all our lives, you’re just the new kid on the block, so we’ll teach you.’”

Despite his start with the community, he grew to enjoy the people he worked with there, and he and Beth Ann remained in Genoa for nearly three years before he learned his parents wanted to retire from farming.

Nelson said he was feeling discouraged in Illinois, so he and Beth Ann decided to return to Glenwood City in 1972 to take over his family farm. They worked there regularly until he had what he calls a “Jacob Moment” in 1984.

The Jacob Moment

In the Biblical book of Genesis, Jacob wrestles with an angel who leaves him crippled.

Nelson’s “Jacob Moment” came in 1984 when he started having difficulty walking.

As he put it, “Any time you get in a wrestling match with the Lord, your walk will be different.”

Well, in life, his walk was definitely different. So different, in fact, that Nelson wound up seeing a doctor because of his increasing difficulty with walking. What the doctor found on an x-ray was disquieting.

The images indicated Nelson’s hip bones were black, which caused the doctor to think the minister-turned-farmer had bone cancer. The doctor sent the images to New Jersey for a second opinion, and the 10-day wait for confirmation of the results seemed more like 10 years for Nelson.

“It put a definite scare into me, because I did not want to face God being out of his will,” Nelson said of the time period. “I told the Lord, ‘if you want me back in the ministry, I’ll go back.’”

The verdict from the local doctor was Nelson would not be able to farm any more. Oddly enough, the same doctor told the former minister “you could be a banker, or you could be a preacher” as alternatives without knowing anything about Nelson’s prior ministry work.

To make things more difficult, Nelson had not told Beth Ann he potentially had cancer.

“He was going through this struggle by himself,” Beth Ann recalled. “I knew something was wrong, but not what or the severity of it.”

Nelson was out in the fields working when the letter with his results arrived from New Jersey. Beth Ann remembers being almost flippant when she asked him if she should open it to find out what it said. The couple breathed a sign of relief when the letter indicated the black spot on the x-ray image was not cancer, but instead a shadow caused by a malfunction in the machine.

The minister made good on his promise after he and Beth Ann left the farm. They couple moved to Menomonie, where they became involved in Emmanuel Baptist Church. The minister there knew Nelson had the same training he did, and asked the former minister to lead his adult Sunday School class.

“I had to do that to get something else in my mind and stabilize my thinking,” Nelson said. “A lot of this was an emotional roller coaster.”

It was not long before Nelson learned the church in Knapp was in need of a new pastor. He submitted his name for candidacy, and said he was happy when he was the person selected.

The Knapp family

Nelson preached his first service at the Knapp church on a steamy July Sunday in 1991.

His flock was not large – he estimated there were between 20 and 25 people in regular attendance – but he liked both the age group there and the community. The majority of the congregation at that time was between 60 and 65 years of age, which led some people to joke with him that he was not serving a church so much as he was serving an “old folks’ home.”

The retired pastor said he loved his people, something that figures heavily into his approach to ministry.

“You have to love them. You have to meet them where they’re at spiritually and go from there,” Nelson said. “And they have to see you loving them.”

Nelson and Beth Ann are the parents of three children, but are only children themselves, and so it did not take them long to start accumulating friends and family in the community. Beth Ann considers their “family” one of their two main blessings from their time in Knapp, with the other being the Wednesday night youth group they have run out of the local elementary school gymnasium.

Beth Ann worked for many years in the health care field, but has stuck to helping Nelson with the church in recent years, and laughingly said she is busier now than she was while she was working.

It is obvious the duo are a team when you see them walking down the street from the parsonage to the church just a short distance west on Main Street. They converse easily as they walk hand-in-hand to the building that has served as their focus these past 26 years, and laugh at how they’re walking down the street instead of the sidewalk.

“It was winter when we first moved here, and the sidewalks were covered in snow,” Beth Ann explained. “I got in the habit of walking in the street, and it just sort of stuck.”

The couple was looking forward to one last chance to spend time with church and community members who have come to mean a great deal to them over the years during a surprise retirement party held June 19 at the Knapp park.

Neither knew what to expect during the interview, after only being told to be at the park at 5:30 p.m.

“It’s something of an enigma,” Nelson said. “We’re not sure if the church is putting it on, the town is putting it on, or if it’s both of them together.”

They were only told about the party so they would know when and where to be, since June 19 is moving day.

Beth Ann said June 19 will be a tiring day, between the move and the party. Both Nelson and his wife admitted they are saddened to be leaving Knapp, but excited to start this new chapter of their lives.