Homecoming: 50 years after his father built the pulpit, Trinity Lutheran Rev. John Jankens was sent to serve the Hanceville church his family now calls home.
Apr. 8—HANCEVILLE — Back at the turn of the new millennium, Rev. John D. Jankens had no ministerial appellation before his name. He was a civilian; married with two kids and working as an electrical engineer for the U.S. Department of Defense in Maryland — and a lifelong member of the The Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod.
But for the past 20 years and counting, Jankens has been shepherding the congregation at Hanceville's Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church, having previously never lived farther south than his Washington, D.C. career haunts. Switching career gears after "God grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and said, 'Hey, I have different plans for you,'" as Jankens puts it, he headed off to Concordia Theological Seminary in Indiana, earning a 2002 Master of Divinity degree before his first post-seminary assignment placed him in the heart of the Deep South.
Hanceville is where the church sent Jankens, and though he'd never spent much time in Alabama, it was still a sort of homecoming. "The very first pulpit I got to preach from as an ordained minister," he says, "was a pulpit at this church that my father built with his own hands — ten years before I was born."
Hanceville, you see, had already claimed a chapter of Jankens' family history well before his growing-up years in the northern suburbs of Detroit, Michigan. His father, Rev. Edward Jankens, had served as the church's pastor in the late 1940s and early 1950s — more than decade before John was born in Michigan — and a full half-century before John himself was first ordained.
"Yes, I was ordained in the building my father helped to build ten years before I was born," John muses, believing not in coincidences, but in the inscrutable will of the Divine. "I call it a 'God' thing," he explains. "My father was quite a woodworker, and while he was here in Hanceville, the altar, the pulpit, the lectern, the baptismal font, and the communion rail — all the wooden features that the church still uses — were all built by his hands."
Missouri Synod ministers don't pick their congregation; the Synod, instead, picks for them. "You have no idea, after seminary, where you're going to go," says John. "The first time I heard them call out, 'John Jankens, Trinity Lutheran Church, Hanceville, Alabama,' I was like, 'Wait a minute! — That sounds vaguely familiar!' They had no idea, in sending me, that this was also my father's church, and that my first call would be to this same congregation many years later."
Trinity was founded in the 1880s, and experienced a major expansion — including construction of its current main sanctuary — during the elder Jankens' time at Hanceville. With 70 years separating the "new" structure's 1952 dedication from its latest time-marking milestone, the old sanctuary, a simple wood-framed building and the oldest Missouri Synod Lutheran church still in use in Alabama, received a marker commemorating its entry onto the Alabama Historical Commission's Register of Landmarks and Heritage.
Jankens energetically guides talk of the church's history toward its present-day vitality as an active evangelical presence in the Hanceville community.
Each year the church serves a German lunch during the city's annual Mud Creek Arts & Crafts Festival, and then donates all the proceeds to Fine Arts programs at Hanceville schools. At Christmastime, the church raises money for Hanceville-based Cook Ministries. and it periodically donates to the First Source for Women pregnancy center just down the street — all part of an overarching mission to "find places in the community," as Jankens says, "to help the widow and the orphan as the church has been commanded. We look for ways, as a congregation, that we can do that."
John and Judy, his wife of 40 years, have been at Trinity for the past two decades, and thanks to the Synod's missionary structure, they're in no danger of being sent away from the small Alabama town they long ago learned to call home.
"I made the purposeful decision, when I first got here, that I was going to stay," says Jankens, "because I saw that what Trinity needed at that time was some kind of stability in the pastorate. Most Christian congregations in the U.S. start and then die within 60 years — and we've doubled that! And, we see no end. The big thing that will keep the Trinity congregation going until the Lord returns is that we stick to His truth; that we stick to the Bible, and that we don't wander off to follow the latest trends or whims."
Decades of service in the same pulpit ministry inevitably sets up a seasonal conundrum: What, after arriving in Hanceville in 2002, is Jankens going to preach about on Easter Sunday of 2023?
"I was just talking with my wife about that last night!" he says with a laugh. "I've been doing Easter sermons for 20-something years, and I said, 'It's hard to be fresh!' and she goes, 'You don't need to be fresh' — and she's right. But I do always try to look at it from a little different angle.
"So this Sunday, the lesson is from First Corinthians 5, where Paul was writing to the Corinthian congregation. In one verse he says, 'Therefore let us celebrate the festival.' So that's going to be the theme this week: 'Why?' Why and what are we here to celebrate? What is the real reason we're here? ...How can we sincerely celebrate what Easter truly is: the resurrection of the Savior of the world? It's an opportunity to talk about the truth of what Easter is: Jesus Christ dying on the Cross on Good Friday to pay for the sins of the whole world and rising again, for the Father to say, 'That's enough — there's nothing more that is necessary.'"
Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church at Hanceville meets weekly for Bible study and Sunday School at 8:45 a.m. on Sundays, with a single, full-congregation worship service in the sanctuary at 10 a.m. Visit the church's website at trinityhanceville.com to learn more about the church, its extensive local history, and its present-day ministry in Hanceville.
