Tom Decker

“It’s about time”. A Life in the Middle of Grief and Grace: Tom Decker’s story.

LCMS Pastor Emeritus Tom Decker did not begin life thinking in terms of vocation or calling. Like many boys in rural Idaho, life and faith were ordinary. His family was Lutheran. His mother came into the church as an adult confirmand, and Tom’s early spiritual formation was the presence of ordinary people, farmers, carpenters, and ranchers who taught in the congregation’s Sunday school. 

They were not theologians in a formal sense. They were neighbors. And yet, in their simplicity, they carried Scripture into the life of a boy who was learning to listen.

During those early years something unexpected happened. The pastor asked Tom and another boy to lead the Sunday service while he was away. They rehearsed the liturgy from the hymnal with the seriousness children bring when they sense something larger than themselves.

At the end, they even stood at the door, shaking hands with the congregation to imitate the pastor’s role without fully understanding it.

It was there that an elderly woman, a Swiss immigrant known in the congregation as “Grandma Odermott,” looked at him and said words that would not leave him alone: “Tommy, you’ve got a good voice. You ought to be a pastor.”

She said it again the next week, and whenever she met.  Her repetition—and persistence-- lodged into his memory.

In high school, Tom finally decided to “study for the ministry.”  He guarded the choice by saying that he’d give it one year at a time.   In high school, when cadets from West Point came to recruit, they asked Tom what he intended to do, his answer was simple:  “I’m going to study for the ministry.”

It was not a dramatic declaration. It was almost matter of fact, but it marked a direction that would not change, even as life took him through unexpected turns.

He studied at Concordia Junior College in Portland and graduated from Concordia Senior College and then went on to Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, graduating in 1969. The day of graduation carried its own quiet irony.  The education was grounded in theological disciplines of Scripture, the Lutheran Confessions, history, all practically pointed toward the proclamation of the Gospel in preaching, worship, and pastoral care.  Within an hour after walking for the diploma, he found himself walking into a bar to get change for a pay phone to be confronted by a man who looked him over—sizing up the newly minted clerical collar—to say pointedly, “Well, it’s about time.”

The newly graduated pastor did not explain himself, but the moment stayed with him.

Ordained ministry began in parish settings in South Dakota for six years.  There he learned the weight of pastoral presence in its most direct form: baptisms, funerals, visits, ordinary Sundays, and the slow shaping of trust within a congregation.

But parish ministry was only the beginning.

Jan, his wife, sensed his interest in military since before graduation from seminary.  She even suggested that he go on active duty as a chaplain.  In fact, she met the endorsing agent in an elevator in San Francisco where they had attended the 6th US Army Reserve Chaplains Training Conference, and she said, “My husband would make a good chaplain for you.”  The Endorsing Agent said, “Have him write a letter, and we’ll consider it.” 

The requirement was simple: at least three years of parish experience. He had that. The path opened. And for the next 28 years, Tom Decker served as an Army chaplain.

The military was a completely different world.

Assigned stateside, then to Korea, and then in Germany, infantry divisions defined ministry’s landscapes. Field exercises were conducted in winter cold and summer heat with tactical operations with tracked armored vehicles, and late-night conversations in tents filled with maps and op orders. Here pastoral care met military reality.

There were moments that never left him.

Once, while distributing New Testaments to soldiers inside an armored vehicle, he sensed the soldiers’ attention shifting to someone behind him.  Turning around, he saw the battalion commander who looked at him and said, “Well, it’s about time.”

Not criticism. Recognition. Being present with soldiers, the chaplain was doing what the calling of chaplains entailed. 

Another time, in a field exercise in Germany, he walked into a tactical operations center filled with officers and command activity. A senior officer looked at him and said: “Jesus Christ… just what we need, a chaplain.”  The words landed sharply, but he stayed.

Later, the same officer began explaining operations to the chaplain and then shifted into personal memory to speak of a commander who had recently died of cancer. The tone of the conversation changed when casual dismissal became grief. In that moment, the chaplain’s role was revealed again—not as an administrator of religion, but as a witness to human loss.

The reality of grief left its imprint on soldiers at all levels.  From sudden deaths in training areas—accidents of all kinds—as well as changes in health and welfare in families, the chaplain stood to serve where grief surfaced without warning.  The unit memorial services were undergirded by the chaplain’s personal prayer and served to strength soldiers, families, and the units for the loss. 

A defining moment in Germany came when a soldier approached to ask if a memorial service would be held for soldiers killed in a single tragic airplane crash in Gander Newfoundland.  About 250 soldiers died. She confessed, “I knew them all.”  Prior to their deployment to the Sinai she had helped prepare wills and personal affairs.   Her determination was proof that the military is a small, tight-knit family spread over the landscape of the world.  God’s care encompassed their grief as the small chapel filled with soldiers who identified with the loss. 

After retiring from active duty, Tom received a call to serve a small-formerly-large Lutheran congregation in Long Beach, California where he served as pastor—preaching, visiting, counseling, burying the dead, baptizing young and old, and walking with people through the ordinary and difficult rhythms of life in an urban environment.

Even after retirement from that call, he never fully stepped away.  Whenever the church entered a difficult season, whenever the pastoral office stood vacant or whenever transition threatened to leave the congregation uncertain or unstable, Tom quietly returned to help carry the load.  God’s presence was tangible in preaching and the administration of the sacraments of Holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper

He described it simply as, “Picking up the pieces.”

It continued this way until around 2016, when he finally reached a difficult but honest decision that, due to the increasing care needs for his wife, he was no longer reliable to be available. 

It was not resignation from ministry. It was recognition of limits.  And yet, even then, his vocation was not over.  By 2023, with their family’s help, Tom and Janice moved into Ivy Park at Otay Ranch, an assisted living community in Chula Vista. At first, they expected simply to live there quietly, but ministry has a way of finding people.

Some months after arriving, the facility’s activity director approached Tom to ask if he would consider doing a weekly service for residents.  There was a felt hunger among residents that in some ways echoed the words Tom had heard throughout his life:   “It’s about time.”

And once again, he said yes.  What began as a simple Bible study slowly became a mission field.  Encouraged by Pastor Doug Jones at St. James Lutheran Church, Tom quietly became something like a missionary inside the senior community. Nothing official. No title.  No organizational charts. No ministry budget.  Just the conviction that somebody needed to do it.

So he did.  Every Monday morning at 11 o’clock, residents gather for a study from the Psalms. One Psalm each week. Sometimes comforting; sometimes it is painfully dark. Tom refuses to avoid the difficult Psalms. If a Psalm wrestles with despair or grief, judgment or loneliness, he says plainly:  “This one is hard.”  And people lean in.

The room is filled with walkers, wheelchairs, hearing aids, fading memory, military stories, widows learning how to live alone, and residents carrying grief nobody sees at lunchtime or in the daily happy hour.

Some participants have spouses in memory care just down the hallway. Others are grieving losses that happened within the same building. Some come because faith once mattered deeply some time ago; at other times, something inside them is waking up.  Grown children or other family members occasionally come to sit beside them.

Tom knows the stories that he’s heard in many ways over the years.  He notices when someone disappears from Bible study. He quietly learns they have moved into memory care, or been hospitalized, or died. He visits in the hallway. He listens. He remembers names when others can no longer remember much at all.

And every Monday, he opens the Psalms again.

In this place, the Psalms are no longer abstract theology. They are survival language.

The word “remember” carries unusual weight in a building shaped daily by dementia, Alzheimer’s, grief, and slow loss.

A care provider recently brought a resident to the Bible study and quietly explained,  “I just wanted him to hear about Jesus before he dies.”

Tom thanked her and responded gently:  “Jesus remembers us.”

The phrase passed quickly in conversation, but it lingered deeply in his own mind. Because that, perhaps, is what ministry is about in the end—not merely remembering God, but trusting that God remembers us, even when memory itself begins to disappear.

Inside Ivy Park at Otay Ranch, Pastor Tom Decker continues the work he has done his entire life: standing quietly in the presence of grief with the confidence and hope that God’s Word provides. 

Looking back, his life forms a continuous arc, though it never felt like a plan:

·       a boy told he should be a pastor,

·       a seminary student formed in discipline,

·       a parish pastor learning ordinary faithfulness,

·       a military chaplain encountering institutional grief,

·       a retired pastor quietly returning when churches needed help,

·       and finally, a missionary of presence inside an assisted living community

There is no pulpit of prominence, no large organization.  What is present, however, is the God’s promise where none are alone and none are forgotten.  The message of the death and resurrection of Christ is articulate in addressing the needs. 

In the end, the thread that holds Tom and Jan’s life together is not rank or title or accomplishment.  It is presence, even a willingness to stand where grief appears, and to remain long enough for grace to speak.