Other Voices

When Pastor Kyle Delhagen writes his sermon every week, he has a prayer on his lips: Lord, your words, not mine.

“I’m in love with words,” Delhagen says in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

He was installed in late October as the pastor at Hamilton Union Presbyterian Church, established in Guilderland in 1824.

Although Delhagen grew up in a pastor’s family, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be pastor or raise his own family that way. “I fought against going into the ministry for a long time,” he said.

Delhagen grew up in the Reformed Church in America. His mother’s father was also a Reformed pastor. Delhagen himself was ordained in the Reformed Church.

He likes the Presbyterian Church because it is “much, much bigger, much more expansive, much, much more tuned in to issues of justice that were passionate to my heart.”

While the Reformed Church in America is one of the oldest denominations in the country, founded in 1628, Delhagen notes it is very small. It has about 200,000 members compared to 1.7 million in the Presbyterian Church.

Delhagen loves lots of people in the Reformed Church, he said, but feels it is “tearing itself apart over issues of human sexuality.”

“And so I have found myself to be adopted into this denomination,” Delhagen said of Presbyterianism. “And I love it here.”

His congregation has taken up the Presbyteran Church’s Matthew 25 vision. In that chapter of the Bible, Delhagen explains, Jesus “talks about that day of judgment when God is going to separate out the people and put at his right hand those who did God’s will and, at his left hand, those who didn’t.

“And he says, ‘You know who fed me when I was hungry, you clothed me when I was nakend, you visited me when I was sick and in prison.’ And the people say, ‘When did we do that, Jesus?’ and he says, ‘Whenever you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.’”

So churches that adopt the Matthew 25 vision seek to dismantle systemic racism and address structural poverty among other things. Hamilton Union this year focused on hunger, helping the Guilderland Food Pantry and the Regional Food Bank, Delhagen said.

Hamilton Union also raised $5,000 to fill a metaphorical ark, through Heifer International, with cows and chickens and goats to help people in undeveloped countries.

“I want to challenge my congregation and our community … to look at how issues of race and gender and economics intersect in creating systems of poverty,” said Delhagen.

He went on, “There’s a saying that, if a fish washes up on the shore, one might ask: What’s wrong with the fish? If a bunch of fish wash up on the shore you have to ask: What’s wrong with the water?”

With poverty, churches and society tend to focus on addressing individual needs, which is important but, he said, we also need to look at the larger picture and address the issues keeping people in poverty.