About Our Pastor

                                            Pastor Bill Thalacker has been serving St. John’s since March of 2003.
                                                     His pastoral work has been in congregations in Northeast Iowa and
                                                     before coming here he served recently at Trinity in Waterloo.  He is a                                                   graduate of Wartburg College and has post-graduate degrees from
                                                     Wartburg Seminary, the University of Iowa and Luther Seminary.  He  
                                                     and his wife Marilyn who was originally from Oelwein are the parents
                                                     of five children and fourteen grandchildren.  Pastor “T” (as he is
                                                     known) has been active in church and community affairs including local
                                                     minister organizations, the Alliance for the Mentally Ill and Exchange
                                                     Club.  He is a former registered Iowa high school sports official for
                                                     basketball, baseball and softball.  His hobbies include golf, bicycling 
                                                     (he’s ridden Ragbrai for thirty years), hunting and fishing, and
                                                     gardening.  His special pastoral interests are in personal and marriage
                                                     counseling, ecumenism and the relations of the Church with other
                                                     religious groups and in adult education for and in the church. 

          ******Pastor Thalacker's Word's for February 2012******

       I've been in a kind of reflective mood lately for several personal reasons. I'm reminded as the days lengthen after the first part of the year of several things...

        ...of course I think about how quickly time passes for all of us, whether we think about it or not. It seems that the older I get, the more quickly that time goes;

        ...about how all of us are given a limited time here on this earth. It seemed for many that persons like Joe Paterno or my father or others would go on forever but that didn't happen. Persons may do their work for longer than many would have had a reason to expect but that ends too. So I think also about my parents and their parents and their parents, as the Scripture says, "to the third and fourth generation" which is about as many generations as any of us get to know personally;

         ...I think about how the seasons change and how our lives change with them. I think that most will say that we've had an unusually mild winter without the bitter cold weather that sometimes comes in January and that for me the mild times make me think of spring and the seasons for planting crops and growing in this lush rural paradise in which we live with some of the greatest and most fertile soil on the planet.

          ...about how children grow and change. The children who were small when we came here have now considerably grown over the last nine years. And there are other smaller children who have taken their place in our families and congregation and community. For me, that's an amazing thing to observe.

           ...I think of persons who are sick in body but well in faith and spirit and heart and people who are well in body but sick in faith and spirit and heart and of their respective triumphs and disappointments.

           ...and I think about God who rules all time and seasons...the Scripture tells us that God is "from everlasting to everlasting" (Psalm 41, 90, 93) and that all of our life and our lives are lived within the boundaries of his eternal presence as has every person who graced the face of this earth...all heroes and villains / saints and sinners / wise persons and fools...

      I'm going to suspect that the year ahead is going to be like that too. Do you also think about what a strange and wonderful thing it is to stand with Jesus before the one who judges the ages...when the days of the world have shortened to nothing (and as Magnus Brostrup Landstad writes in his great hymn) "when dawneth eternity's morrow"? (SBH 333 / LBW 313).

                          
                           Have mercy upon us, O Jesus

                           God bless us all,

                           Pastor T. 

          .