Lakewood Ranch pastor no longer fights the call

The epiphany I experienced at the age of 48 told me to seek out new challenges.

I had spent the previous 26 years as a sportswriter in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was time to do something different in my life.

So I struck out to new lands, and new adventures.

Three months later, I was a bartender.

Not exactly what I had expected.

Terry Courter underwent his own somewhat-late life transformation. After he turned 50, he started listening to a strong memory before he could go forward.

He thought back to a time in 1977 when his grandfather, Earl Courter, was on his deathbed. Earl, a Lutheran pastor, pulled Terry close. It was his wish that Terry would follow in his footsteps. "He must have seen something inside of me," Terry said.

The problem was that Terry was about to get a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. Granddad had a nice thought, but do you really pull the plug on your career?

At that time, Terry's cousin, Skip Courter, took some of the load off Terry's shoulders.

"He told me to fight the call as long as I could," Terry said. "Until then, he said to be the best electrical engineer God has created."

And so Terry Courter went about life, learning lessons during 20 years with Whirlpool he had no idea would help him when God decided to turn up the volume.

After Terry turned 50, and even though he had been working as a lay pastor (he explained it as kind of a substitute pastor who tended to the community during the main pastor's vacations or other such leaves of absence), the call became too loud to ignore.

"It was something working inside of me," he remembered. "God was calling me to do this full time."

Thus, he attended Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio, before taking his first assignment at Bethlehem Lutheran Church near Okolona, Ohio. It was rural living at its finest, and an awkward fit for a guy who grew up in Evansville, Ind., and liked urban life.

Still, he worked a sort of internship for three years, and then filled out paperwork for a new challenge.

Welcome to Lakewood Ranch.

On April 3, he became Pastor Terry at Living Lord Lutheran Church, 

"So many people come from different places here and they are looking for a community," Pastor Terry said. "What a wonderful thing, building relationships."

With an average attendance at services of 224, Living Lord isn't the smallest church around, and it certainly has room for growth.

Obviously, the church's leadership felt they had found a man to draw interest from an rapidly expanding community.

"They are looking for growth in younger families," Pastor Terry said. "This is a total family ministry and we have a preschool.

"Part of my job is assessing needs. If we want to attract younger families, why are we not drawing from that demographic?" he said. "The bottom line for growth is invitation, and I'm an extrovert. More people and more interactions feed me.

"I hope to build on what is existing. We want to make Living Lord more recognizable in the community."

On the job just a month, he isn't ready to assess his performance. "There isn't anyone who has this down pat," he said. "I hope to use my God-given gifts and abilities to lead. I need to be able to walk with people through life."

He also calls himself a problem solver and an agent of change.

"Some churches don't necessarily like change," he said. "God always is leading us, though. It's our job to discern where God is leading. We are supposed to make disciples, not necessarily to make members."

Now 58, Terry and his wife, Ann, will embrace their church community all the while listening to that calling.

Yes, he might have been late to the party, but it appears his grandfather was right.