40 Years of Speaking Truth to Power

Rev. Dr. Kim Beckmann is a master weaver of words. Which is why it’s no surprise that the homiletics teacher’s own story at LSTC, through all its many twists and turns, found a poetic ending in the same place it began: the courtyard of the Lowrey building.

The graduating class of 2023 invited Beckmann to preach at their baccalaureate service and to attend a courtyard party on graduation day. They couldn’t have known that their professor had lived at the Lowery building as a student in the 1980s, but as she turned from the celebration, the students’ goodbyes ringing in the air, she could easily summon that young, brave woman with her entire career still before her.

Beckmann grew up in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. She was aware of at least 18 ministerial leaders in her extended family and her own first call was as a fourth grade Lutheran School teacher in Queens. When she made the decision to leave New York City to attend The Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, her parents disowned her, believing church leadership was no place for a woman. 

“When I drove to Chicago, I knew nobody,” Beckmann recalled. “But even though others thought it wasn’t possible for me to serve God as I was, I had the conviction and a spirit-led calling, so I struck out to make it happen.” 

In the more than four decades since, Beckmann has trailblazed a path dedicated to curiosity, inclusion, equity, and justice, with LSTC a cornerstone both professionally and personally. She met her husband, Fred Kinsey while they were students together at LSTC. They married in 1984, in a campus wedding that doubled as their class graduation party. 

The couple worked side-by-side as co-pastors in the Northwoods of the Upper Peninsula at Bethany Lutheran Church in Amasa and Trinity Lutheran Church in Iron River, Michigan from 1987 to 2006. But LSTC never was that far away. During that 20-year ministry, Beckmann returned as a student in the 1990s, while also serving as an alumni board member and chair and remaining a part of the LSTC community in various ways for decades to come.

“LSTC and Hyde Park has always been a place of homecoming and challenge,” Beckmann said. “Both warm, and a place of being stretched and provoked, but held to do it in ways that made me less fragile, and more gritty.”

Beckmann’s talents for writing and teaching continued to be developed in her roles as a practical and constructive theologian, publishing and preaching out of the common and holy spaces of daily life. 

In 2006 she took a call into church administration, serving as Director for Candidacy and Women in Ministry in the ELCA. There, she continued to partner with LSTC until the position was eliminated in late 2009. 

She served 15 congregations in transitional pastoral ministry roles for over 13 years and became known as both a “transitional specialist” and an inspiring orator. She organized faith leaders for Equality Illinois in the successful effort for marriage equality and served as a member of the Goodsoil legislative team for ministry policy change and LGBTQIA+ advocacy in the ELCA until 2016.

It was around that time that Beckmann was approached by then-Dean Esther Menn who asked her to step in and teach homiletics for a year while LSTC conducted a faculty search for the position.

Beyond teaching homiletics, Dr. Menn was also hoping Beckmann, who knew LSTC so well, could offer the community the gift of her transitional specialist skills, which included entering and learning systems quickly, dealing with the anger and grief transitioning communities are going through, all while holding space and actively assisting them as they move toward their next missional callings. 

“As a transition specialist, I have the rare temperament required for this kind of work,” Beckmann explained. “To love deeply and loosely, to make the most of and enter fully into what you know will be a limited timeframe, to expect chaos and be as wise and graceful as possible in dysfunction in transitional and anxious moments.

“This is the ‘value-added’ skill set that was the basis for the asks I began receiving from Dean Menn,” she concluded. “To fill discrete, bounded, transitional moments in LSTC’s life.”

And while the position itself was “transitional,” Beckmann continued to teach both homiletics and contextual education until 2019, before returning to LSTC in 2022 to teach another two years. Within and beyond her classroom, Beckmann also used her experiences as an early ordained woman in the Church to help model possibility and create an inclusive, justice-driven space for her students. 

“I didn’t see myself always represented in the church,” Beckmann said. “At one point, I even asked a professor to use both he and she pronouns as examples of pastoral leadership so that I could imagine myself in those roles as pastor, but I was turned down. We fought for the binary pronouns 40 years ago. Now the use of non-binary pronouns is just as important.”

Throughout her years at LSTC, she fostered a dynamic and inclusive learning environment. She worked with others to ensure underrepresented students including women, LGBTQIA+ and those of color felt supported by language, examples and identification that assisted them in growing in their leadership and gave them an open platform to raise concerns and ask questions. She also made significant contributions to the revision of evaluation criteria for the James Kenneth Echols Prize for Excellence in Preaching. 

“Through her journey at LSTC, Beckmann has excelled in being consistent at promoting the values of DEIJ work, in the classroom, the public square, and through the Echols Preaching Prize,” shared Vima Courvertier-Cruz, the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice Director at LSTC. “What an honor and a joy it was to partner with Beckmann, and a team of three professors for the preaching competition to propose themes and texts focused on the proclamation of the Gospel from the perspectives of diversity, equity, inclusion and justice, making this opportunity broader and more accessible to our students of color.”

Now that Beckmann’s time at LSTC has come to an end, she can look back fondly on her time, the many changes that have taken place, and the ways the community continues to evolve – a new building, new and diverse faculty members, a more global student body – all ready to learn, grow, and embrace new possibilities for what’s next. 

“I feel grateful that in a critical time where we needed to take what was good from the past and incorporate it into something wholly new, I was able to make that journey with everyone,” Beckmann said. “That’s the story of celebration for me, that we got to this place together and God’s future opens up for us in ways we have yet to live into.”