Davenport Lutheran Pastor to Hold Book Signing at Rock Island Café June 10
Sara Olson-Smith is used to dealing with death, but in her new book, she addresses perhaps one of the hardest endings of all in her line of work – the death of a church.
In “Eulogy for a Faithful Church: The Story of a Congregation’s Courageous Ending and Enduring Legacy” (Resource Publications), the associate pastor at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, 2136 Brady St., Davenport, looks back to her experience at closing her parish at a New Jersey church.
“A pastor’s life is made up of goodbyes,” Olson-Smith – a 48-year-old married mother of two – wrote in the introduction. “We’re invited into holy moments at the end of life. Silent hours passed in hospice rooms or loud, traumatic minutes in emergency rooms. We accompany people and their loved ones through heartbreaking goodbyes, bearing witness to hope.
“Nothing, not even the grave, can separate us from the love of Christ,” she says. “In showing up, pastors embody the promise of God’s presence through the valleys of the shadows of death.”
The cover of Sara Olson-Smith’s new book.
Every All Saints’ Day on Nov. 1, Pastor Olson-Smith (who is married to Rev. Clark Olson-Smith, the pastor at Zion Lutheran Church, Davenport, where I have played piano since 1999) remembers the people “whose living and dying have shaped me into the pastor and person I am,” her book’s intro says.
“But each year, I light candles not just for individuals, but for a congregation, a congregation that is no longer,” she wrote of St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in North Plainfield, N.J., which closed on All Saints’ Day 2009. “That candle burns in memory of a community of people who I had the honor of accompanying through their last years. This church ended its ministry just as I was beginning mine.”
A community book launch party and signing for Eulogy for a Faithful Church will be held on Wednesday, June 10, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at NEST Cafe, 1524 4th Ave., Rock Island. The evening will include books for sale, a signing throughout the event, and special remarks and a book reading at 7 p.m.
Eulogy for a Faithful Church tells the story of a congregation’s courageous ending and enduring legacy, offering a thoughtful reflection on faith, community, grief, and hope. Through the lens of this New Jersey church’s final chapter, the book honors the people, ministry, and witness that continue to shape lives beyond the closing of a congregation. While a story about a pastor and a congregation navigating loss and new beginnings, the book offers a lens of seeing God’s work in all of our lives, bringing new life out of death in countless ways.
Olson-Smith has been an associate pastor at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Davenport since 2011.
On All Saints’ Day in 2009, St. Peter’s Lutheran Church closed its doors for a final time (today it houses an Indian Orthodox Church). This book is a love story, a eulogy, good words spoken from and about the last years of a congregation’s ministry.
This book is not an instructional handbook, it’s a memoir of a pastor and her people written to provide comfort and encouragement for others walking through similar journeys. The chapters narrate the challenging conversations, bold generosity, and faithful witness they chose in closing. Olson-Smith notes that a popular church song sings the praises of “the church is not a building,” but is in fact, made up of the people.
Eulogy for a Faithful Church speaks of a congregation who looked at their resources and capacity and asked, “Given this reality, how do we be the church? How can we best make the gospel known?” Then, with grief, sacrifice, and trust in God, the people chose to say goodbye to both a sacred place and a beloved community. Their story, woven together with Scripture, names the faithfulness of a community of faith which chose to die and, in doing so, found new life.
Sara Olson-Smith’s father was a pastor, who briefly worked at Zion Lutheran Church, Davenport (her husband Clark has been pastor there since May 2021).
Sara Olson-Smith is a 48-year-old married mother of two and a Lutheran pastor.
Born in Prairie du Chien, Wis., Sara grew up in Colorado, and graduated high school in Appleton, Wis. She met Clark at seminary in Chicago. Sara earned degrees from the College of St. Benedict (St. Joseph, Minn.) and Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.
Growing up, Olson-Smith saw her father’s ups and downs in the ministry. “You know, it wasn’t always easy. And the gift was that I grew up in congregations where I just felt loved, you know, like, I just saw the gift and the beauty of what congregational life is and what kind of community can happen,” she said in a recent interview. “My dad, in many ways, was really supportive of my going into ministry, but also, I think he worried for me, you know, because it’s not an easy ministry. He actually died my first semester of seminary, so he never was able to see all of the pieces of it.”
He died in 2002, and she finished seminary in 2006, starting at St. Peter’s in New Jersey that summer. Before arriving at St. Paul’s in 2011, Sara Olson-Smith served two congregations in New Jersey. Prior to that, she served as a youth minister in Minneapolis, and chaplain for the Moscow Protestant Chaplaincy in Russia. In Denver, she worked with homeless Colorado youth through Urban Servant Corps.
Small and struggling
When she started at St. Peter’s, it was already small and struggling, but they had a pretty significant multi-year grant from the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) as a redevelopment congregation “with some hopes that we would be able to kind of sustain some change, and that just didn’t pan out,” Olson-Smith said.
“So we ended up started drawing down from our endowment, and we realized, probably my second year, that we just couldn’t continue as we were going,” she said. “I think we would run out of money and just couldn’t keep going. So we pulled a team together to say, what are our options? What can we do? How do we respond? They were just a beautifully faithful bunch. And I write this little story in there, but there is a woman, her name, I call her Grace in the book, we had a Bible study, and we were standing in the hall one day and, like, looking at our bulletin board.
The former St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in North Plainfield, N.J., which today houses an Indian Orthodox Church.
“Every church has bulletin boards with pictures of all the things they’ve ever done, you know. And they had done these beautiful, at one point where they had resettled refugees, and they had pictures of those families. And they gave money to this missionary in Chile. And for a while, they were part of lots of congregations, do kind of a rotating shelter ministry where families come for a week at one church and then they go to. And so they had been a part of that for many years, and they just didn’t have the people to sustain it. And sweet Grace, we were standing in the hallway and she was telling me all these stories about all the things she had done. There are other women there from our Bible study talking. And she said something like, we know what it means to be the church. You know, we know how what we’re called to do. And she’s like, we just can’t do it anymore.
“So there was a sense that they just understood that their purpose was so much more than just existing,” she added.
A positive “Eulogy” book blurb from former senior pastor Peter W. Marty (editor/publisher of The Christian Century), who left St. Paul in 2024 after serving 28 years says: “She’s as warm and compelling in print as she is in person – a truly gifted pastor, full of grace, integrity and an unmistakable love for people.”
“He was very gracious,” Olson-Smith said. “He’s been a good friend and he’s been just a gift for me in terms of a writer and support for all. It’s been interesting as people have been reading the book, how many people find, it’s like lots of good memoirs, and it’s partly memoir, it’s partly Bible study, it’s partly about leadership. It’s a little bit of all those things. But when we tell our stories, people find their way into it and connect it to their own story, and so it’s interesting whether or not people have experienced a church closing.”
New life and beauty
After these chapters, people often see “the new life that God has brought to them. And so that’s the kind of beauty of it, and that’s the gift that I hope it can be for people is to be able to say, look at what God’s up to in the world and look who we get to be together and look at the gift the church is,” Olson-Smith said. “In the last chapter, I have some insights, like, what have I learned? But, you know, of all things, you know, people often say, oh, all these churches are closing. It must be some sort of failure of the institution or something like that.
“And I actually think, especially given my own grief and others too like it, it proves to me the importance of what our churches are,” she said. “And what our communities are, more than anything. It’s like these things really matter and the communities that we have and the congregations we have really matter and how do we figure out how to invest in them and sustain them. And maybe we shift the model. We will have to close churches. And that doesn’t mean that the church is done, you know, or like God is done with us.”
After her dad died, Olson-Smith’s mother Elaine (in her 50s) went to a United Church of Christ seminary in Minneapolis, and became an ELCA pastor (she is retired now and has filled in for Pastor Clark at Zion several times).
“Every day I wish he was around his grandkids. And at the same time, the person I have become because of living through the grief and heartbreak of his death is, that formed me in such significant ways, it’s hard to even imagine,” Olson-Smith said. “I’m sure we all know that in our experiences that I would not want it, and yet I’m grateful for it.”
Sara and Clark Olson-Smith, with their kids Susannah (left), and Amos, on a trip to Tanzania in October 2025 with a group from Zion Lutheran Church, Davenport.
Sara’s maiden name is Olson, and when she got married, she and Clark Smith decided to combine their surnames. They have two kids — Susannah is 14 and Amos is 11.
“We took two very common names and made an uncommon one,” she said. “We just decided to. I don’t know. It’s one of those things. We just wanted to have both of our parts of who we are.”
Olson-Smith decided to wait years after the church closing to write the book, partly to process her own grief and healing.
“There was a lot I just internally needed to work through in myself, you know, and some of this is in there, but there’s so much making sure we’re still doing okay,” she said. “There was a kind of sense of, a narrative of failure, that there’s something that we did wrong or that maybe we would have done X, Y, or Z, or this could have happened.
“And I carried with me a lot of guilt and a sense of disappointment, and I had to work through that in ways,” Olson-Smith said. “A lot of this book is part of working through that, but also with a hope to shift that narrative, to say, everything has a season, as Scripture says. You know, there’s always a beginning and end. Nothing will last forever.
“And we don’t say when someone dies, they somehow failed at living,” she said. “We just celebrate what they did in their life. And so that’s why I call it a eulogy – the roots of the word eulogy are ‘good words.’ And so what does it mean to share good words about this congregation that did really faithful things? And among those faithful things was their ending, their closing.”
Not failure, but faithfulness
“And so my hope is to shift some of those narratives we have about congregations ending that it’s not a failure. It’s not like that,” Olson-Smith said. “It can be an act of faithfulness, and that generosity that can happen, is a beautiful thing. And God has a way of making good, and bringing good things out of him.”
She has always kept journals, so they were valuable and helping her reconstruct the church’s story, and she began writing in 2018.
“I’ve always loved writing,” Olson-Smith said. “Then it just sort of kept evolving, and I would get up early when the kids were asleep and write. And little by little by little, as things happen with your creator. It happened. It came together.”
She also reconnected with former church members by email and Zoom.
“I started reconnecting more intentionally with the folks in New Jersey. Members of our church have had some conversations with some of them, and then we would meet on Zoom periodically,” Olson-Smith said. “It was fun to reconnect with them.”
Many churches nationwide (like Zion) are facing similar challenges of declining attendance and graying congregations.
“There’s lots of churches that are figuring out how to be sustainable even with very little resources and do tremendously faithful things, like Zion does, and the worship you have and the generosity you have,” Olson-Smith said. “Then there’s other kind of bigger places that also figure out how to be generous and faithful.”
“I think the kinds of things like deep welcome and a spirit of hospitality and intentional worship and the kinds of relational ministries that can happen and all those kinds of things. And the wonder of it is that spirit leads people where they need to be, and there are massive cultural changes happening,” she said.
“There’s just so much that the church is trying to respond to,” Olson-Smith said. “How do we keep growing and turn our attention to how do we love our neighbors and how do we be faithful in our proclamation and how do we draw people into participation, worship, and life together?” Olson-Smith said. “People will be magnetized to that goodness, and our faithfulness will be growing. Our evangelism is about sharing Jesus.”
St. Paul’s has a much larger staff (including several pastors) than Zion; she is one of two associate pastors, and averages preaching at services every 2-3 weeks.
“I really love people and having the chance to walk alongside them and their joys and struggles is really a total gift,” Olson-Smith said. “I love to preach, I love to write. I’m grateful that I can have the kind of work where I get to allow that greatest side of me to be there. But it is just a total joy. And I love to be able to have worship be such an essential part of our life. But it’s the people stuff that I am most stressed about.”
Olson-Smith is occasionally a guest on St. Paul’s podcast, and has her own three-year-old children’s podcast that will restart this fall, called Little Bird and Jesus.
“It’s like imagining a little bird who is best friends with Jesus,” she said. “It’s pretty fun. I mean, there’s so much biblical illiteracy in the world and people just don’t know our stories. And so I’m like, how do we — our kids love listening to podcasts, and so I thought, how do we help kids know the stories of Jesus? And so I created this little podcast where Jesus best friend is a little sparrow and they hang out.”
While Zion livestreams (and records) its services, St. Paul’s doesn’t, but features recorded sermons on the podcasts. Olson-Smith said there’s no substitute for being together in church.
“I just don’t think there’s anything comparable to being together in our bodies,” she said. “As much as possible, I think there’s something really meaningful about it. And I know there’s studies that have shown about how we do differently, how we engage differently. I mean, I know it at myself that it’s just a different experience to be together.
“There’s something too about the way community shapes us and changes us,” Olson-Smith said. “When you’re sitting down, and you’re having a great day and someone down the road is grieving and the world gets opened up a little, or vice versa. When you’re having a really hard time day and you walk in and you can’t even get the words of a hymn out, you know, and yet you can stand there and everyone else will sing for you, you know, that there’s something about that that is just irreplaceable.”
Sara has been at St. Paul’s since January 2011, and Clark started at Zion in May 2021. She said they don’t have a rivalry, but sometimes compare notes.
“It’s kind of less than we used to, but about what we’re thinking about for our sermons,” Sara said. “Clark always has some crazy, beautiful insight, and I’m so grateful for it. And I think sometimes it’s less of a rivalry and more of just the gift of being able to support each other and understand, there’s something about, we get what each other is navigating in a way that is a real gift.”
You can find Sara’s podcast and more of her writing at her website HERE.
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