Leaders at Hope and Trinity First Lutheran Retire

Many incredible people labor in our midst, although we rarely hear about them. They go about their work quietly and patiently, and then they retire. Warren Elness directed music for 39 years at Hope Lutheran Church, 5728 Cedar Avenue South. For 27 years DeLloyd Wippich was the pastor at Trinity First Lutheran, East 19th Street & 15th Avenue South. Both men celebrated their farewells in September of 2003. Both churches felt strongly that a story should be written to honor them and recognize the gifts they gave.

Warren Elness

A love for worship and a love for children are the trademarks of Warren Elness' tenure at Hope Lutheran. As the full-time organist and choir director, he established a very beloved choir program for young people which, in recent years, has included the grandchildren of his first groups of kids. Its outstanding feature is the annual, trust-building, memorable camping trip for which Elness built his incomparable "chuck wagon" traveling kitchen.

Elness is very self-giving, devout, open to life and not worried about achievement in the traditional sense. People at the church say things about him like, "He's the most interesting person I've ever met." His endearing sense of humor is always in evidence; his phone message at the church used to say, "The recording time is two minutes, so if you're planning to sing, please skip the repeats."

Two celebrations marked the end of his ministry at Hope. A service on August 17 brought out 300 people and an 85-voice choir of former choristers. Chris Horn, a parishioner for 21 years, said before the service, in spite of all the fussing over him, Elness said, "Now it's time to worship God. That's what it's always been about."

The roast took place on September 14. He said he couldn't be interviewed until after the 14th because until then he had to plan his defense.

Elness was gifted from the beginning with an unobstructed inclination toward music. It is not common to find someone whose life has so naturally fallen into place. When his choir director father needed a keyboard player, Elness became that player. Although not fond of watching his friends play outside while he practiced the piano, he got enough satisfaction out of music to keep going. Finishing high school a year early, he entered Augsburg College at 17, where the organist/choir master "took me under his wings." The big break came when Augustana Lutheran Church, in downtown Minneapolis, was "left high and dry without an organist" for the following Sunday. Elness filled in and became the "interim" organist/choir director while the church kept looking for a "real" person, an older person, for the position. In the meantime he started to work with the junior choir and it went very well. He discovered his gift for working with kids.

During what turned out to be five years at Augustana he developed a choir school for children ages 10 to 12. There were no auditions. The kids learned religious choral music, liturgy and comparative religions. The choir school was interrupted by Elness' two-year stint in the military. When he got out, in 1963, he enrolled at the U of M to study music and child psychology.

By that time his dear friend who had been the pastoral intern at Augustana was at Hope Lutheran and invited Elness to transfer his choir school to Hope and combine it with the confirmation class. It was a perfect fit. The pastor taught doctrine and the internal aspects of faith while Elness taught the external aspects of faith, the sensory input of worship. "Church gave kids a chance to do music that had meaning, that was worth singing and worth singing about ... "

For 30 years Elness' life as full-time music director/organist at Hope Lutheran hummed along smoothly. In the old church with the Hammond organ and the new church with a soundproof sanctuary and eventually an electronic/acoustic hybrid pipe organ, he had adult choirs, youth choirs and lively Sunday mornings. He invented enough spur of the moment changes in the traditional music that the congregation started to call his improvisations "Elnessizing." Along the way he created the famous choir trips.

In 1994 Elness was involved in a serious auto collision. He said, "I was just about not here anymore." As a result of traumatic injuries, including a shattered pelvis, an aortic aneurysm began to develop. By some miracle, an attending medical person noticed what was happening and it was surgically clamped on both sides just minutes before it burst.

Elness credits the people of Hope, whom he considers to be family, in a real sense, not a polite sense, with his successful recovery. He has a small amount of paralysis which can cause him to "sound like I'm playing in snowshoes." However, he's been able to redo his technique, and is satisfied that "I can still do enough—I'm not the musician I was, but nobody's been throwing hymnals at me."

With Elness' retirement, there will be changes for the church. A young school teacher will direct the choirs and a retired gentleman will play the organ.

And there will be changes for Elness, too. He is filling in as organist at a church in Farmington where a former Hope pastor is serving. Overall, he sees a "big adventure ahead." He wants to "see how things open up."

DeLloyd Wippich

Trinity First Lutheran Church and School is a historic Minneapolis institution which has had its ups and downs over the years. The church was founded in 1856 by its Scandinavian forefathers. A school for children of the congregation followed two years later. The school closed briefly during World War II. After that setback it later reached its largest enrollment in the mid-'50s with 120 children. When the inner city began moving to the suburbs in the early '60s, the school floundered and church membership dwindled. The school could easily have crashed.

Wippich's challenge since 1976 has been to rekindle enthusiasm and support for the school and help to redefine its vision and mission. He has always been among those who had a strong belief in the importance of the school, enough to brave a difficult neighborhood when he brought his wife and five of their seven children to live in Phillips. Although they moved to Robbinsdale after six years, Wippich continued to fight for the school. Thanks in large part to the conviction of his leadership, the school has survived as a mission school, serving the children of the immediate area who might or might not be connected to the church.

For the past 10 years, 70 children, representing African American, African immigrant and Hmong cultures, have been enrolled. At this point there are six teachers for the nine grades, preschool through eighth. A special education program was added in 2000. The teachers are excited about the multicultural group of kids and are not trying to turn them into "little Lutherans." They are working to make their staff more multicultural, as well.

Funding has always been touch and go. Now, a network of grant resources and other churches inspired by the school, keep it going. Wippich's daughter-in-law Sara who is principal of Trinity First School said, "He was very instrumental in keeping the school open. I've been here 13 years. I don't know how he did it."

Wippich celebrated his retirement Sunday, September 14, with a church full of former parishioners from Trinity First as well as from other churches he led. Sara Wippich, describing the wonderful day, said after the service there was a salad luncheon and a power point presentation of Wippich's accomplishments.

She said right now Wippich, 69, and his wife, Barb, are in Maine, just relaxing and taking it easy. When they come back he will start figuring out what to do next. She commented that most pastors don't really retire.

"He's excited about the possibilities. Maybe he'll go back to school. He's open to where the Lord leads."