Vicar Troy Spencer will spend a year here in Alpena as the new vicar at St. Paul Lutheran Church.

“‘Vicar’ means pastoral intern,” Spencer explained of his title. “In our church, the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church of America), instead of saying, ‘intern,’ we say ‘vicar,’ which is more of a church word than a secular word.”

He is in his third year of seminary at The Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. He explained that you apply to potential sites, and churches apply to be host sites, then the school matches you through a process based on questionnaires and preferences of both the applicant and the church.

“The matching process begins after the interviews,” he noted. “It’s kind of a blind situation. You get a chance, as the intern, to rank your sites, and then the sites rank the interns that they interviewed with.”

Here is a hand-painted bowl Uncle Omar gave Spencer on his second trip, when he came back to Omar’s shop inside “Old Jerusalem.”

Originally from Hershey, Pennsylvania, Spencer arrived in Alpena in early August and started work the week of Aug. 9. He passed through Alpena last May to drop off his stuff at a storage facility and briefly see the church, but this is only his second time here. So far, he said everyone has been very friendly, and he is enjoying being in beautiful Northeast Michigan.

“I would love to end up in a place very similar to this,” he said of his long-term goals. “Small town, a lot of outdoor activities available at my fingertips. And I find a lot of my spirituality in creation, too, especially untouched creation.”

Spencer said, to him, there is no better way to be close to the Creator than to be surrounded by His undisturbed creation.

“I love backpacking and hiking, and all that stuff,” he said. “I did bike to work. I biked to work every day this week,” he said last week.

He lives about two miles from the church.

“I think it’s great,” he said of Alpena. “I have not experienced one person who has even ignored me. Everybody has had a smile and a wave, or one or the other. I’ve just felt a real warmth of the people here.”

In addition to outdoor activities, Spencer plays guitar.

“I make noise on guitar,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s music, but I make noise on it.”

He explained his personality.

“I love being around people,” he said. “I’m somewhat of an introvert with extroverted tendencies. I like my alone time, but I love talking with people, especially in small groups when you can really be intimate, and have conversations, and get to know people really deeply.”

As far as his journey into pastoral service, he took an interesting detour before hitting the highway to Heaven.

“We call this ‘The Call Story’,” he said. “I wish people would use that to talk about their professions outside of the ministry, too.

“Martin Luther was big on the priesthood of all believers, and that everyone is called to something,” he continued. “It just so happens that some people are called to ministry.”

He noted that he first wanted to go into the military, then chemistry.

“I grew up in the church, born and raised ELCA Lutheran, and I think a part of me always kind of knew this would be something I’d be involved in — I just didn’t know when,” Spencer said. “And so, I had plans to go to the Naval Academy out of high school, and those plans fell through, and so I ended up going to a small liberal arts college in Central Pennsylvania.”

“I was taking courses in chemistry — I was a chemistry major — and I was horrible at math. Horrible,” he said. “And I just thought to myself, I was so miserable. And I tried. I gave it the old college try. I really did. I was just not enjoying college. So I thought, ‘To heck with this.'”

That’s when he changed his major to religious studies.

“I always really loved religious studies and religion,” he said. “I loved youth group growing up. And so I thought, ‘I’ll do that.’ So I switched to religious studies from chemistry, and I fell in love with it.

“I love looking at scripture as a piece of literature, and as something that we can really dig into — a living document,” he added. “I just can’t imagine doing anything else … I want to be a pastor.”

He wants to incorporate his love for nature and God into one.

“I have a dream to someday … to lead spiritually guided hikes,” Spencer said.

Adventures in the

Holy Land with

‘Uncle Omar’

Spencer’s office at St. Paul is decorated with many treasures he brought back from the Holy Land, where he visited first in January 2017 and again in 2019.

“We flew into Tel Aviv, which is in present-day Israel,” he explained. “Then we were all over. We stayed two nights in the West Bank, in Bethlehem.”

He came back with a wealth of experience and new friendship with a Muslim man called “Uncle Omar.”

A blue, black and gray striped tapestry he purchased from Uncle Omar hangs on the wall of Spencer’s office, reminding him that love transcends religion.

“In the old city of Jerusalem, where the walls are still up, from, like, centuries and centuries ago — the walls are huge, enormous blocks, I mean, they are like the size of cars — inside the old city is foot traffic only, because the roads are no more wide than the hallway,” Spencer explained. “Outside of that is the new city of Jerusalem,” he said, which appears similar to other cities, with buses, cars, bikes, shops and same-colored buildings.

Omar’s shop is inside the old city.

“People live inside the old city, too,” Spencer said. “It’s wild. It’s like a place I’ve never been before.”

So he and his friends meandered into a shop, where he ended up meeting a new lifelong friend.

“This guy, instead of trying to sell us things immediately, started to have conversations, and we got to know him,” Spencer said. “This Palestinian Muslim man, in the wake of President Trump’s first election — I’m trying to remain neutral in talking about it — but for Palestinians, it was kind of a scary thing for President Trump to be elected, based on his politics and his religious beliefs. And so, for an American like myself to be treated so much like family by this Palestinian Muslim man, was — I mean, it makes the hair on my arms stand up. We shared this deep moment where he talked about his family and his hopes and dreams for his kids, and he’s now a grandfather. And I shared about my spiritual struggles, and how I was in the Holy Land, and not experiencing what I thought I would get out of these places that are supposed to be so ‘holy.’ And he looked at me, and he called me family, and he told me that I’m supposed to call him ‘Uncle Omar’ now.”

The second time he went there, he picked up a hand-painted bowl and he loved it, but he put it back down because he didn’t have the money to buy it. So Omar just wrapped it up for him as a gift.

“He put it on top of everything that I had,” Spencer said. “I told him, ‘You’re being too nice to me.’ And I’m a relatively emotional person, so I got all teary-eyed and he gave me a big hug.”

The hand-painted bowls are made by Syrian refugees, and Omar sells them in his shop to help those people earn money.

“The details of that conversation are some of the details I’ll leave for the sermon,” he said of Uncle Omar. “It’s one of the coolest stories I’ve got. He is tremendous.”

Spencer plans to tell “the whole story” about Uncle Omar in an upcoming sermon this or next week.

“There are people from all over the world who have been in his shop and met him,” Spencer said of Omar. “Some things, I think, are able to transcend boundaries. Ethnic boundaries, religious boundaries, political boundaries, geographical boundaries. And one of those is love.”

Service times are 5:30 p.m. Saturday, and 9 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. Sunday. Masks are required and social distancing will be followed at all in-person services. All St. Paul sermons are posted on the church Facebook page at St. Paul Lutheran Church — Alpena.

To reach Spencer, email vicar@stpaul.org.

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