Rev. Bryan Salminen

ALPENA — Rev. Bryan Salminen, pastor of Hope Lutheran Church in Hubbard Lake, is celebrating 40 years of ministry.

There will be a dinner on Sunday at 11 a.m. to commemorate the anniversary. Tim Zimmerman and the King’s Brass will be playing at 7 p.m. on Friday.

Salminen said he always wanted to be a pastor. He remembers telling his parents while he was in the third grade, and they poo-pooed the idea at the time.

He was raised in Lansing with a twin brother, who is also a Lutheran pastor, and two other brothers. Salminen started playing sports in junior high and high school and became a collegiate athlete in basketball and tennis.

“Basketball and tennis became everything for me,” he said.

Even through his college years he knew he wanted to be a pastor. To be a Lutheran pastor, he had to go through four years of undergraduate and four years of graduate classes.

“The third year is vicarage year, internship year,” Salminen said. “And so when I finished that I remember my father looked at me and said, ‘you know, I think you might do it.'”

“I’ve always wanted to care for people, serve people, help people, however I can do that,” he said.

Salminen attended Concordia Ann Arbor where he received his undergraduate degree in theology and biblical languages.

He graduated in 1986 from Concordia Seminary in St. Louis with a master of divinity, and then got called and ordained. The first church he served at was in Defiance, OH.

Salminen is also a psychologist and earned his masters degree from the University of Toledo in counseling psychology.

He then got accepted into St. Louis University and earned his PhD. While attending there, he was called to be the pastor of a large church in Collinsville, IL. Then he was called to be an assistant professor of psychology at Concordia Ann Arbor.

Salminen worked there for four years and was then called back to Concordia St. Louis to be a professor there in pastoral counseling. He did post-doc work at Washington University in psychopathology.

He was there for a long time and got called back to pastor a church in Cadillac, and then back to his hometown in St. Johns. He was called to serve on the island of Guam for a short period, then was called to a church in Wisconsin, and has now been at Hope Lutheran in Hubbard Lake for the past four years. He met his wife when he was first in St. Louis and his three children were born in three different places: his first in Ohio, his second in Illinois, and his youngest in Ann Arbor.

“So just a variety of experiences, big churches, small churches, family, so it’s been a wonderful, wonderful time,” Salminen said.

He said Hope Lutheran has been experiencing steady growth while he has been pastor, from about 100 people coming each Sunday to now between 160 to 200.

Salminen said the best part of being a pastor is introducing people to Jesus Christ.

“There’s nothing better, nothing better than doing that,” he said. “I would tell my students at the seminary when they would come first year, I said, ‘gentlemen, gentlemen, is there anything better? We get paid to tell people about Jesus. It is the greatest thing going in the world.'”

Salminen enjoys the work of coming alongside people and being with them in the trenches of life, he said.

“We’re all different, you know…but when it comes to church, it’s a level playing field at the cross and God loves us all,” Salminen said.

“The challenge of course is that working with people?,” he said, “We’re all sinners, myself included. People get offended easily. We can misunderstand one another. We can get chippy and snarky, just because we butt heads with one another.”

Salminen said that although people may not like each other all the time, they are always called to love each other as the body of Christ.

One of his favorite memories of being at Hope Lutheran was when he visited for the first time and saw how unbelievable the church building was.

“So that’s not the church, It’s just a building, but you kind of see that people take care of a building that means they love their church,” Salminen said.

He and his wife were welcomed by the congregation with open arms and have formed lasting relationships with the people there.