Elizabeth Butler
The Valdosta Daily Times
VALDOSTA —
Several years after the ministry of the Rev. Richard Pieplow began at Messiah Lutheran Church in 1977, Jan Bristow’s family of four was sitting around the dinner table discussing people in their lives who had been influential in a positive way.
“I believe it was my daughter, Stacey, who mentioned Pastor Richard, and we discussed that many of our choices were either gone from the earth or gone from our lives at that time, but that Pastor Richard was right around the corner. ‘So, why don’t we call him and let him know how we feel?’ I was chosen to make the call, and he answered on the first or second ring.
“Good evening,” she chirped. “The family has been discussing influential people in our lives, and we all want you to know that we appreciate all you have done for us.”
Dead silence greeted her excited message.
“After what seemed like five minutes, but was probably no more than 10 seconds, I heard him ask hesitantly, ‘Have you been drinking tonight?’”
Bristow said the pastor would later explain that he was quite shocked at the call because no one had ever told him that before.
Pieplow (pronounced “Peep-low”) retired March 31 from Valdosta’s Messiah Lutheran after 33 years as the congregation’s spiritual leader, with his last sermon preached on Easter Sunday.
“I hope to stay in Valdosta and eventually I’ll probably do some interim ministry and supply preaching,” said Pieplow, now a pastor emeritus.
He also plans to continue traveling, including a cruise to the Western Caribbean to celebrate his 40th wedding anniversary on June 27.
Messiah Lutheran will honor him with a retirement reception from 2-4 p.m. June 5 at the church.
“Pastor Richard has been a confidant, a mentor, a role model, a counselor, a sounding board, and a true friend to my family,”
Bristow said. “He has confirmed both of my children (Stacey Bristow Harris of Marietta and Steven Bristow of Boston, Mass.) and eulogized my husband (Jim).
“Our families have shared our parenting problems and prides, laughed together, cried together, worshipped together and worried together. We miss him greatly in the pulpit and keep him in our hearts and prayers always.”
Pieplow, a native of La Porte, Ind., who was raised in Janesville, Wis., began “preaching” when he was somewhere around 6 years old. He would spend hours setting up his “church” for visiting aunts and uncles from Indiana, and he wouldn’t forget to collect an offering from them.
“I knew I was going to be a pastor when I was little,” he said in a recent interview at his home with his wife of 40 years, Cyndy, sitting across the table.
“My uncle was a minister (the late Edwin Pieplow of Fort Worth, Texas) and was once pastor of the largest Lutheran congregation in the Missouri Synod. My brother (Charles Pieplow of Birmingham, Ala.) six years older went to preparatory school in Milwaukee, the largest in Wisconsin, and became a minister. He paved the path and kind of influenced me.”
After Richard attended Lutheran parochial school through the eighth grade, the company of his dad, the late Elmer Pieplow, who was a dye chemist in woolen textiles, moved to Brownwood, Texas. Richard would begin attending Concordia Preparatory School in Austin, Texas, a boarding school for boys, in the ninth grade. While there, he was turning 16 when his parents moved to Ohio.
“I stayed to finish high school and junior college where Cyndy and I met,” he said.
Potential danger
During his sophomore year of college in the fall of 1967, Richard was one of six students asked to attend a black school in Selma, Ala., for a semester.
“My brother was pastor of a black congregation in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and my roommate and I would go visit him on the weekends. There were times we were driving on country roads that we were mindful of the potential danger, but there were no incidents. We got stopped by the Selma police on the way back, and they wondered what we were doing at the (black) school. It was a privilege to be one of a group to do that.”
After returning to school in Austin, Richard would later attend Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne, Ind., for two years and receive his Bachelor of Arts in liberal arts. Two weeks after he graduated in 1970, he and the former Cyndy Behrens were married in her home church in Pasadena, Texas.
The couple moved to St. Louis where Richard started seminary and Cyndy got a job teaching school. He picked up odd jobs, yard work, handyman, washing windows, waiting tables, and bartending for large gatherings.
After two years in St. Louis, they spent one year in Cape Girardeau, Mo., where he did a vicarage (internship) at a church of 5,000 people with three services.
Taking a big risk
Their first child, Philip, was born in St. Louis during Richard’s last year of seminary. Simultaneously, Richard had participated in a walk-out at the school after the president was removed by the board.
“There was a lot of turmoil while I was there. If our teachers are charged with false teachings, that puts a question into what we have been taught. Our stance was they needed to be identified. (The walk-out) was taking a big risk because we did not know after spending 12 years of study, that we would be placed (in a church). Most of my classmates and I received our assignments and finished at St. Louis University.”
Pieplow’s first assignment was two churches — one in McComb, Miss., and the other in Hazelhurst, Miss. — 50 miles apart, almost an hour drive.
“The highlight of my ministry there was driving the soybean truck of one of my members,” he said.
“We endured one tornado which almost destroyed the town where we lived (in McComb). It leveled two elementary schools and a shopping center. We were within a hundred yards of the main path.”
“It was like a bowling ball rolled across,” Cyndy added.
Three years later, Richard received a call from Messiah Lutheran and became its seventh pastor in 20 years. Their son, Andrew, was born a year later. Together, their sons have given them four grandchildren, Bailey, almost 10, and Addison, 2, born to Philip and Libby and Drew, 6, and Caden, almost 4, born to Andrew and Brandi.
The pastor is known for the humor he dishes out in his pastoral duties. For 32 years, he never had a certificate of ordination. When he was asked to officiate a wedding in Virginia, the state required that he get one. He held up his certificate of ordination the Sunday after got it and told the members of his congregation whom he had married, “Now all of your marriages are official.”
“Church does not have to be a solemn place,” said Dick Rockey, president of the Messiah’s church council. “It is OK to smile and even have some laughter. Pastor was good with the humor both intended and unintended. During communion, youth not yet confirmed received a blessing from Pastor. One Sunday as we knelt at the altar, he offered me the chalice and moved to my wife where he placed his hand on her head and began to bless her as if she was one of the youth. Dena looked at him with a big grin, and only then did he realize what he had done and immediately had a big grin on his face.”
‘A joyful noise’
“Richard Pieplow convinced many of us in the congregation that we should join the choir because God does not request that we necessarily sing on key, only that we make a joyful noise,” Jan Bristow said. “I sing in the choir with confidence now — and with a smile.”
Richard was here for both the 25th anniversary of Messiah in 1981 and the 50th anniversary in 2006. Highlights of his ministry here have been “moving off subsidy as a mission congregation in 1980, burning the mortgage in the 1980s, building our new sanctuary which was dedicated in 1996, remodeling the former sanctuary into a fellowship hall and kitchen a couple of years later, and purchasing the Pine Tree house in 2008 to use for small group meetings and Sunday School.
“Overall, the highlight is ... Messiah has a good record for service to the community. AA uses our facility. We’re an election polling place. We support LAMP (Lowndes Associated Ministries to People).”
Pieplow, himself, has served in the community as a football, basketball, baseball coach for many years for the YMCA; a baseball and band booster at Valdosta High School, where he was in the pit crew for the VHS band. He has served both as treasurer and president of the Valdosta Area Ministerial Association, president of Hospice of South Georgia advisory board and poll manager for Precinct 21.
Pieplow is described as “a person who would immediately make you feel at ease and you will like at once” upon meeting him for the first time.
“Someone mentioned to me that when they met Pastor for the first time, he felt a ray of hope because his demeanor gives a person calmness, acceptance and love,” Rockey said.
“My wife (Dena) and I will always remember how Pastor accepted my mother when we had to move her and my dad to Valdosta from Fort Pierce, Fla., after my dad’s stroke. When Dad passed away, Pastor performed his funeral service. He really did not know my dad, but his funeral service was as if he had known him forever. Later on, Mom began attending Messiah Lutheran on a regular basis, and even though she was not Lutheran, Pastor accepted and made her feel comfortable and part of the church family. As her health continued to deteriorate he comforted and prayed with her. Each time as he finished his visit with her, she would say ‘Love you, Pastor,’ and he would respond, ‘Love you, Ruth.’ At her funeral he ended his message with ‘Love you, Ruth.’”
And when Messiah’s beloved pastor retired, amidst many tears, many of his congregation were heard to say, “Love you, Pastor.”
