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Faith search ends in pastorate
The new pastor at St. Michael's
has seen the insides of more churches than most people.
By MARVIN READ
THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN
Brad Powell looks as though
he might be rightly configured to be a professional type person:
attractive hazel-green eyes, engaging smile, handsome, well-built
and articulate.
In a Brooks Brothers suit and
Gucci shoes, and carrying a Forzieri briefcase, the 25-year-old
man might appear to be at home on Wall Street, Madison Avenue
or ready to try a case in a courtroom.
Instead, Powell - Father Barnabas
Powell, these days - is the newly assigned priest and pastor
of St. Michael the Archangel Orthodox Christian Church in Pueblo,
the 21st man to head the almost 102-year-old Bessemer congregation.
The congregation worships at 801 W. Summit Ave., in an 80-year-old
church that replaced the original, swept away in the 1921 flood.
St. Michael's is his first
assignment; he was ordained a priest just last May 25, and he
approaches the job, which he's had since late July, with enthusiasm:
"I'm honored to be assigned to such a historical church.
As I go through the records, I'm continuing to gain a greater
respect for the parish and its people."
He's equally enthusiastic about
another new aspect of his life - a baby his wife, Elizabeth,
is expecting about four months from now. The two met at St. Vladimir's
Theological Seminary in Crestwood, N.Y., just a half-hour or
so from Manhattan. She was visiting her brother, one of Powell's
fellow seminarians, and she later studied liturgical music (she
heads the choir at the church these days) and he was studying
theology and working toward ordination.
He earned his master's degree
in divinity (cum laude) and, in his final year, won an award
for academic excellence.
He completed undergraduate
studies at and won his bachelor's degree (magna cum laude) from
Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash.
His journey to the parish is
interesting, a destination he might not ever have expected when
he was growing up in the northeast Nebraska farming towns of
Plainview (pop. 1,300), the even-smaller Neligh, about 20 miles
southwest and, later in Tacoma.
Baptized as a Lutheran, Powell
said he nonetheless "was raised in pretty much a nonreligious
household."
"In the seventh grade,
I had developed a more than just intellectual curiosity about
religion. I had a sense that my life as it was had no meaning
because it was not directed toward anything ultimately meaningful.
At a teacher's suggestion, I read the Koran and the Bible, and
contrasted the images between Christ, as a prophet in the Koran,
and then as God in the Bible," he said.
By the time Powell had discovered
Orthodoxy in 1996, when he was but 16, he'd investigated and
worshipped in a variety of formats - the United Methodist Church,
Missouri Synod Lutheranism, Baptist, Assemblies of God, Messianic
Christianity, Roman Catholicism and Tridentine (traditional)
Catholicism.
"I was too young to drive
in those days, so my parents had to drive me to the various churches
and pick me up afterward," he recalled.
He said his search for a faith
was, to a degree, "shaped by my political ideology."
"There were so many denominations,"
he said. "It seemed the process of choosing a religion was
to decide what you believed, then find a church that matched
your principles. I was unprepared for that task. So, it made
more sense to instead look for the church that had come first,
and trust it to teach me what the truth was.
"I'm not sure how it was
that I ‘discovered’ Orthodoxy, but I had attended a
couple of churches in Tacoma, one Greek, the other a parish of
the Orthodox Church in America. I asked for advice about what
I should read to understand Orthodoxy and I eventually became
intellectually convinced that this was the original Christian
Church.
"I was blown away by the
richness and beauty of the liturgy and its symbols - the icons,
the candles, the music, the incense, but the Greek language was
an insurmountable barrier for me."
The Russian Orthodox, reliant
in the United States on the English language, "was more
accessible, and in April 1998, he received the sacrament of chrismation
- essentially confirmed as an adult Orthodox believer, a convert
to Orthodoxy. It was then that he took the saint's name, Barnabas.
Elizabeth Drobac, his wife,
needed no such conversion; she was born and raised as a member
of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Toronto, and this week is being
visited by her paternal grandmother, Zivka Drobac, also a Toronto
resident.
Father Barnabas is lighthearted
about the couple's different roots.
"My father was a farmer
and my mother a homemaker. They divorced and I moved with my
mother to Washington state, where she remarried. Like my mother,
my stepfather had no religious affiliation, and I never attended
a church until I was 15.
"Elizabeth, on the other
hand, was born into a Christian home. Her father is devout Orthodox
and both parents, now divorced, are medical doctors (her mother,
a specialist in kidney diseases, is dean of medicine at the University
of Toronto and her father a cardiologist).
"She's more cultural than
I am - she likes ballet and music, but I love hiking and backpacking,"
said the robust, young priest who says that, as a youngster,
he wasn't much into athletics because he had asthma.
He faces challenges at St.
Michael's: The congregation is small and, while not poor, there
are few people to bear the cost of running the parish. There
are only four children in the congregation, and most of its parishioners
are well over 50 years old. The parish, like most congregations,
suffers from its own internal squabblings, as well, a situation
Powell hopes to mollify in months and years ahead.
In the meantime, he's becoming
used to Pueblo, and said he's "fascinated by its history,
architecture - I covet, as a church, the building at 12th and
Main streets that's being used as the Impossible Players’
theater - Pueblo's proximity to the mountains and Mexican food."
All in all, the Nebraska-born,
Washington-raised Powell, looks, acts and is as American as the
proverbial apple pie, but he's come a distance in his few years
to serve a religious culture 2,000 years old. |
