Roanoke College chaplain has led a charmed life

When the student fell from her dorm room window and died, he was there to tell her boyfriend.

When the basketball player collapsed on the court, he delivered word of his passing to his friends waiting in the emergency room.

Midnight pig roast on the campus lawn? He was there, too. And to discuss theology over beers, to welcome the freshmen, send off the seniors, to marry and to bury.

For 31 years, Roanoke College Chaplain Paul Henrickson achieved a kind of omnipresence that would exhaust many, but has invigorated him. The former NASA engineer turned ordained Lutheran minister, who has taught both religion and physics classes, has become the conscience of the college, President Michael Maxey said, always there with perspective, wisdom, a prayer.

“It was really ministry by walking around,” Henrickson said.

But while Henrickson, 65, still loves his job, he can foresee a time not too far off when overnight pig roasts and 11 p.m. meetings of the misleadingly named Men’s Breakfast Club might be a bit too much for him. So he’s retiring, having in a sense graduated with the class of 2013 on Saturday after delivering their commencement address.

“I’m going to be listening, just like you, for the calling that comes next, to find out what depth of life I’m called into,” he told the 461 graduates. “My prayer for you this day is that you’ll listen to the call that gives you fullness of life. That you can say when you wake up in the morning, ‘I’m fully alive today, because of what I have been called into.’”

Also at the graduation, Maxey announced the creation of a fund to pay for service opportunities for students, the Rev. R. Paul Henrickson Program Endowment for Community Service and Experiential Learning.

The event brought to a close one part of what Henrickson calls his “charmed” life in which opportunities “fell out of the sky,” including the chance to be a college chaplain in his hometown.

Ministry geared to students

“I never thought I’d come home,” Henrickson said.

He had grown up in Salem, where his father, assisted unofficially by his mother, ran the Lutheran Children’s Home on what is now Roanoke College’s Elizabeth Campus.

He earned a degree in engineering at Virginia Tech, worked at NASA in the early days of the space shuttle program, and was working on a graduate degree when he was asked to help with some youth programs at his church.

That was where he felt the call to become a minister.

After seminary and ordination, his first job was as assistant pastor of a church in Manassas. While there, he was asked to sit on a discussion panel for seminary students, and there he met Tim Swanson, then the chaplain at Roanoke College. During a break, they talked, and before they were done, Swanson had asked him to consider joining him at Roanoke College.

Henrickson arrived in 1982 as assistant chaplain, and two years later became chaplain when Swanson left to take a parish in Kansas.

He quickly discovered that being a college chaplain was nothing like pastoring a church. Sure, you preach a few sermons a week, he said, but your parishioners show up every day, seven days a week. They live there.

So Henrickson’s ministry became one that reflected the habits of students.

“You don’t just show up where the students are, you show up when students are,” he said. Moreover, he added, “You can’t just engage those who have no issues and who just want to talk about God for a while. You have to engage everybody.”

Over the years, he developed all manner of ways to reach students, from canoe trips to chat groups in his own home.

One program began years ago as a Friday lunch meeting called “Faith and Real Life.” Henrickson always bought pizza for the group, so the name morphed to “Faith and Free Pizza.”

It’s still going, only now it meets on Monday evenings at Mac and Bob’s restaurant, and its called “Theology on Tap.” Yes, those of age have a beer if they like.

The Men’s Breakfast Club is exclusive only in terms of gender. Out of that group grew an annual pig roast, conducted overnight outside the chaplain’s office. They made barbecue and sold it to raise money for Habitat for Humanity.

“Those guys thought it was about the pig,” Henrickson said. “It wasn’t about the pig. It was about 20 or 30 students out on the front porch at 2:30 in the morning.”

There have been more formal programs, too. Henrickson leads students on three trips a year to build houses for Habitat, plus he founded the “R House” program, in which all freshmen join in building a Habitat house in a campus parking lot that is trucked off to be installed on its permanent lot.

“College students always surprise me,” he said.

Not long after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, he and a group of students traveled there on a mission trip. While working one day, a boy of about 8 was next door shooting a basketball at a pretend hoop. The students called a meeting and told Henrickson they would forfeit their lunch stipend for the day to buy the kid a basketball hoop. The students kept their lunch money, the hoop was bought, and a lot of the rest of the day was spent playing ball with the boy.

Between meetings and trips, there’s been lots of walking around, eating in the student commons and visiting dorm rooms.

There are crises to respond to, as well. Sept. 11, 2001, for one. The start of the Iraq war.

“The death of a student is the worst thing,” he said. “Those are very, very real times where life is laid bare … you’re expected to say something and be something that gives balance to a world that seems out of control.”

You don’t try to make sense of things, he said. You confess your bewilderment.

“He doesn’t judge,” said Sarah Ellison, a rising senior and president of the college’s Habitat chapter. “He does care about your faith, but if you aren’t as faithful or you’re not a believer, he will act the very same loving way toward you.”

Bridget Gautieri, who just finished her freshman year at Roanoke and is president of the Roanoke College Lutherans, has both leaned on Henrickson when she needed him and watched him talk with others less devout than she is.

He’ll find an opportune time to ask them a basic question about what they believe, she said, and then “he’ll sit there and listen and ask another question to make them think a little bit deeper into what they just said.”

Henrickson credits the students for making him a better chaplain.

“They’ve helped me to be more honest and more spontaneous,” he said. “I know how to mess up being a chaplain, and that’s by being untrustworthy and inauthentic.”

Whatever God has in mind

To keep reaching students, Henrickson said, you have to be nimble. “They’re a moving target.” But fundamentally, he said, students haven’t changed much in his three decades on campus.

“They’re unfinished business,” he said. “They aren’t aware of what their gifts are and how they might be used. … They are desperately looking for those things they can depend on.”

What has changed is how they interact.

Thanks to mobile phones, texting and social media, “they are more connected now than they’ve ever been, but they’re also more isolated than they’ve ever been.”

Part of the growing up you do at college is supposed to be learning how to have civil, face-to-face conversations, even when you have a disagreement.

“They have too many ways to avoid that kind of engagement,” he said.

That has compelled him to stay the course with using every means and venue necessary to get them to sit down and talk, though Ellison said she trades text messages with him.

It all seems kind of cute to her. “I think he’s trying,” she said.

But it can start to wear a guy down, and make him start to ponder retirement. That and a first grandchild, which arrived via Henrickson’s daughter a month ago.

“He’s going out at the top of his game,” Maxey said. And Maxey respects Henrickson’s desire to leave before he has stayed too long. “I think it would be difficult for Paul not to do things really well.”

Henrickson will miss, above all, the students, though it’s hard to imagine he won’t be loitering around future student Habitat projects, anyway.

What’s next, he can’t precisely say. His life has rarely followed his own plan, after all.

“I know that my plan is just goofy compared to whatever God has in mind for me.”

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