Advertisement Martin, who has taken an unconventional path to her position as pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ, has been many kinds of Christian.
Sitting in her church office, just off of Hwy. 14/61 south of La Crosse, she shares the story about the building, crumbling and rebuilding of her spirituality.
The crumbling began in 1992. She was sitting with her family at the charismatic church in Colorado Springs, Colo., they had attended for 13 years. The church was their second home, a place they visited at least five times each week.
It was the place where Martin and her then-husband had been born again; the place where she had watched a paralyzed friend stand and push his wheelchair; the place, Martin said, where she learned the strict theology she would eventually outgrow.
At a Sunday morning service, the church’s pastor spoke about a family that had become lax in their faith. He spoke about a family that was only attending two or three church events each week. He didn’t use names, but everyone knew who the pastor was talking about. The Martin family was presented two options: repent or leave the church.
They left.
“We stayed with it for so long,” she said, because “God was so real there, so tangible, so present.”
On the day they left the charismatic church, a Baptist congregation contacted the family, giving them a place to start a life in a new spiritual community.
Martin got a job at Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based organization that promotes conservative
values. While there, she wrote articles titled “Grandfather Steps In, Kicks Out Homosexual Books” and “Sixth-Grader Speaks Up, Teacher Downplays Evolution.”
And while there, Martin’s life took another turn as her marriage began to fall apart.
When Martin told her boss at Focus on the Family she was filing for divorce, his hand went immediately to the phone. People in Martin’s position were not allowed to file for divorce, she said, unless the spouse had been unfaithful.
“Human resources, we have a situation,” Martin remembered her boss speaking into the phone.
Focus on the Family refused to comment for this story.
A few weeks later, she said, she was fired. While her associate’s degree and her job with Focus on the Family had given her newfound confidence, losing her support system all over again was a difficult blow.
“Where do you turn when you’re in trouble?” she asked. “You turn to God. You turn to the people of God. And when twice the people of God turn you away — it was devastating. It was the most devastating day of my life.”
At age 36, Martin even got drunk for the first time in 18 years, but she didn’t let that keep her from moving forward.
Stumbles such as these haven’t caused resentment among Martin’s family members.
“My mom probably kept me sane through the whole religious battle,” said Stacey, 22, who lives in Colorado Springs. “It was like we were experiencing all these branches of religion through my mom. She pretty much tasted everything there was to taste, so we tasted it, too.”
Martin remarried, entered the seminary and was ordained.
She said the growth in her spirituality came in three ways.
It came in those moments of pain, when she was stripped down to the big questions: Is there a God? Did God care about her? Is God manifest in Jesus Christ? She always answered yes.
Growth came as she learned to read the Bible contextually instead of literally, something she learned while attending Regis University in Colorado.
And growth came from the friends she made, such as a rabbi who became a mentor and a transgender person whose suicide she grieved.
Martin has been pastor at Trinity for 18 months. Her children live in Colorado, and her husband, Nathan, is attending seminary.
Martin, who still prays in tongues, says she’s now able to find a metaphor about her journey of faith in C.S. Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”
“It’s like stepping out of the wardrobe into this new land and seeing that there’s this whole other world out there,” she said. “There are some creatures who don’t look like me, but they’re all created by the same lion of Judah, in the language Lewis uses. It’s like the wonder of discovering a new world.”
