For pastor, a new chapter

The Rev. Norman Fowler retires this month as the longest-serving pastor in the 144-year history of Moscow’s First Presbyterian Church.

He has accomplished much for the church and the community in his 18 years there, but if you want to see his eyes light up, don’t ask him about leading church committees, a campus center board of directors or regional denomination task forces; ask him about tomatoes.

After long days and weary weeks at the church, he has put in hundreds of hours planting and harvesting vegetables and fruit trees, helping build three greenhouses and manhandling pens for more than 300 chickens on the family’s 5.5 acres north of Moscow. His son, Ames, and daughter-in-law, Delaney, developed Hands and Hearts Farm there.

Fowler maintained their 120-year-old farmhouse, where he and his wife, Helen Brown, hosted dozens of meals and overnight visitors, demonstrating their commitment to community, which is central to his faith. Renters, who are committed farmers, will soon take over house and land, when the couple begins retirement travels May 31.

The pastor, church members and the community were tested less than two years after he arrived. Late Saturday and early Sunday, May 19 and 20, 2007, a man killed his wife and, from the church, shot and killed a police officer, church sexton Paul Bauer and himself. He wounded a sheriff’s deputy and a college student.

“First, my concern was for the community,” Fowler said recently. “I felt our church had been used to traumatize the community.”

“Second, my concern was for the church itself, Paul living here (in an upstairs room) and what that meant. Unfortunately it meant he died,” Fowler said, his voice breaking. “That certainly punctuated the beginning of my ministry in a way that I never expected.”

That same weekend, two church mission groups were headed to Mississippi to help with recovery from Hurricane Katrina. Fowler stayed behind, but joined a third post-Katrina mission that fall.

Mission trips were important to him as much for what church members learned as for what they accomplished. He encouraged missions to Puerto Rico and Nicaragua, never missed a springtime work session at the regional church’s summer camp for kids and led a pilgrimage to Christian communities in Europe.

Perhaps one thing that helped the church recover from the shooting trauma was the establishment early in his tenure of a Stephen Ministry program, which trains church members to walk beside people who are grieving — not to try to counsel them, but to support them with weekly visits on that painful journey.

Fowler strongly encouraged a meditative worship service on Wednesdays followed by a supper fellowship.

“So much of the way I thought about doing church was getting people together,” Fowler said.

Then came COVID-19. It meant “all that had to be stopped. And initially we had nothing to replace it with.”

“It was incredibly hard,” he said, describing preaching to video cameras in an empty sanctuary.

A church member cut out photos of member’s faces, attached them to sticks and set them out where the members usually sat.

“It really did help to look out and see pictures of people that would normally be there.”

Not everything was a church project, Fowler said. He supported members who, in living out their faith, brought great leadership to the community. For instance, several people recognized a need for a program to help homeless families with children. Long-time church member Bruce Pitman, retired University of Idaho dean of students, recruited enough churches willing to host families for a week, several times a year, to get Family Promise under way.

The highlight of Fowler’s 18 years at the historic brick church east of Moscow High School?

“Not one thing as a high point,” he said. “Those mission trips, Camp Spalding, taking people on pilgrimage, the first full sanctuary after Covid, worshiping on Sunday with the congregation, our fellowship on Wednesday suppers. Those were punctuation points.”

Without those points in retirement, he said, “I’ll find a new way to punctuate it.”

After May 31, Fowler and Brown will take a six-month sabbatical to visit family and friends in California; son Ames in Colorado; daughter Jessa, her husband and two grandkids in western Virginia; and daughter Micah, her husband and one grandchild in London — and “find out what we’re doing next.”

Brown, who is a clinical associate professor at the University of Idaho, will take emeritus status. She successfully advocated for needed sidewalks in Moscow through the Safe Routes to School program. She has taken students in comparative public health classes to England and Nicaragua nine times. Brown expects to continue working with the state to document the health of Idahoans and how the health system might care for them better.

Rozen is a retired Moscow-Pullman Daily News managing editor and a member of the Presbyterian Church.