Former LDS proselytizer embraces a new mission — as a Lutheran pastor

 

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St. George • There but for the grace of God, Katie Langston might still be a Latter-day Saint.

That’s the Lutheran pastor’s message to people intrigued by her faith journey — one that began as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, serving a mission to Bulgaria and marrying in a temple, and later morphed into becoming a Lutheran pastor.

Langston is the first to acknowledge her spiritual pilgrimage has been a strange trip in which she said she heard and answered a divine call to orthodox Christianity and the ministry.

“This has totally been a God thing,” said Langston, who has served as the part-time outreach pastor at New Promise Lutheran Church in St. George for 3½ years.

The Rev. Joe Doherty, senior pastor at the Pueblo-style church, doesn’t skimp in his praise for the former Latter-day Saint, calling her a fantastic preacher, an incredible wordsmith and a typist blessed with supersonic skills that supersede his hunt-and-peck style.

“She is dearly loved at New Promise,” Doherty said. “People immediately fell in love with her and have appreciated all the things that she brings to the ministry.

The Rev. Jill Doherty, who splits the pastoral chores with her husband, said Langston is especially adept at helping those who have been hurt or traumatized by religion and are struggling with their faith.

“Katie is good at meeting people where they are,” she said. “She doesn’t make assumptions about where someone should be, but takes them and loves them.”

Langston typically delivers the Sunday sermon at New Promise once a month. When she is not using her voice to spread the word, she is raising it in song as the church’s musical director and the keyboardist in the praise band.

And as outreach pastor, she is always seeking creative ways to build bridges with the community and to make Jesus and his message relevant in the lives of those who typically don’t show up at church.

Still, for all Pastor Katie’s virtues, her colleagues confess she has a small vice.

“We tease her a little bit because she is perennially late, always sweeping in at the last minute,” Pastor Joe quips. “She’s never really super late, but she’s always kind of right on time or just a bit behind.”

A possible explanation: Langston may still be operating on Mormon Standard Time, the seeming tendency of Latter-day Saints to show up late at church functions. A more plausible reason might be that she has to commute to church from Hurricane and is also a busy wife and 44-year-old mother of two (she and her husband, Lanny, recently celebrated their 20th anniversary).

Langston blames her latish ways on a sign — not of the times but on the wall hanging in her home office.

“It says, ‘Good things take time,’” she quipped. “That’s why I am always late.”

Langston’s tardiness is consistent with the fact that she came to the ministry late in life. The eldest of five children — four sisters and a brother — she was born in Magna and raised in a Latter-day Saint home in the Cache County town of Providence.

Reared by loving, ultraconservative, letter-of-the-law parents, Langston was homeschooled from grades three through nine and indoctrinated with a history curriculum that centered on the Bible, the Book of Mormon and the founding of America.

Langston remembers, as a 15-year-old, sweating over religious rules that discourage dating before age 16 and asking her mother if she could attend homecoming if the event happened just one day before her 16th birthday.

“Absolutely not,” she recalls her mom answering. “You would not be allowed to go, because how could you ask me to disobey the brethren?”

Wrestling with scrupulosity

Complicating her strict upbringing, Langston said, she developed religious scrupulosity, an obsessive-compulsive disorder in which a person frets about committing sin.

Langston became so obsessed that she remembers confessing to her bishop or parents to sins she did not commit on the off chance she had done something wrong.

“When I was on my mission, I went to the mission president and told him, ‘I ate a salad that had white wine vinegar in the salad dressing, and I’m not sure if that’s OK,’” she said. “Or I would tell my bishop, ‘I kissed a boy I didn’t even like. I just wanted to kiss him, and I am feeling so guilty about that.’”

On her 2002-2004 mission to Bulgaria, she became bedeviled by inconsistencies she found in Latter-day Saint scriptures.

“I could not turn the worries off,” she lamented. “I would worry about my doubts, wondering if they were due to me not being worthy to serve a mission. … I would tell people I was teaching that I knew the [church] to be true when I would say to myself, ‘I actually don’t know if this is true.’ Then I would remember church apostle Boyd K. Packer’s advice that ‘a testimony is to be found in the bearing of it.’ So, I thought, ‘I’ll bear my testimony and hope it is true.’”

After returning from her mission, marrying Lanny in the church’s Logan Temple and graduating with a bachelor’s degree in theater from Utah State University, Langston’s OCD overwhelmed her yet again. She began fretting over whether she was worthy of her blessings or to attend the temple.

She then attended a lecture at USU by renowned C.S. Lewis scholar Jerry Root that brightened her outlook and helped dispel the darkness.

Grace, not works

After years of being taught that God’s grace kicked in only after people had done everything they could do, and feeling she could never do enough to receive his unmerited favor and love, she said Root turned that teaching on its head.

“He said, ‘I am a Christian because I know enough about my deficiencies to be devastated, and I couldn’t live without the grace of God and Jesus Christ,’” she recalled him saying. “That changed my life. Reflecting on it, I heard the gospel for the first time and the Spirit brought the word into my heart, and I believed it.”

Newly arrived as a convert to the doctrine of grace, Langston said she was not ready to leave her longtime faith. For the next decade, she underwent therapy for OCD and felt a call to ministry, though she didn’t know what that might look like as a Latter-day Saint.

Imbued with that desire, she spoke at a Sunstone Symposium, wrote blog posts for Femininist Mormon Housewives, recorded podcasts and talked about grace and the trauma she said male priesthood leaders inflicted on children and adult church members in worthiness interviews.

In general, Langston said, she explored whether grace could coexist and flourish in Mormonism.

“I left,” she said, “because I concluded that [church leaders] could talk about grace until they are blue in the face, but the practice of … giving you a checklist of things you have to believe or do to qualify for a temple recommend to get into heaven is the antithesis of grace.”

Healing and heeding the call

Still, Langston’s decision to become a Lutheran did not come until she and her husband moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where she ended up studying theology and working as director of digital strategy at Luther Seminary.

In 2017, she graduated with a master of divinity and was baptized by Kathryn Schifferdecker, an Old Testament professor and her mentor at the seminary.

“It was the most healing experience of my life,” Langston said. “I felt the shame and the anxiety and the pain that I had carried for so long wash out of my body.”

When the newly minted Lutheran’s parents learned about her conversion and plans to become an ordained minister, they were not pleased.

“My mom was like, ‘I’m just so sorry that you are leaving the faith,’ and my dad said something to the effect of, ‘You know, this isn’t the real priesthood,’” Langston recalled.

Even though her parents still wish she would come back to her former faith, Langston said they are now proud of her, recognize that God is at work in her life and have become supportive of her ministry. Her husband is equally supportive, though he remains a member of Utah’s predominant faith.

Ditto for her friends, including her former Latter-day Saint missionary companions. Langston said she never felt shunned by anyone, though she avoided telling her missionary friends about her conversion to avoid being judged.

But when she got together over dinner with two former mission colleagues a few years ago, Langston learned she was mistaken.

“I realized during our conversation that I had separated myself from them out of the expectation that they wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore,” she said. “But they were so gracious. They were like, ‘We want to hear you preach and see you in action.’ So they have attended church at New Promise.”

An article Langston wrote for Faith+Lead, Luther Seminary’s website devoted to theological education, brought her to the attention of Pastor Jill Doherty, who invited her to come to New Promise, where she could fulfill her ambition to do evangelical work in her home state.

Since her arrival, Pastor Joe Doherty said Langston has been taking her ministry outside the church. She solicited feedback from those outside New Promise, for instance, before turning a home adjacent to the church into a community meeting-type place.

“So she got a team together, and we took cookies around to our neighbors,” he said, “We must have knocked on a couple of hundred doors, which was initially terrifying to members of our congregation because that is not something Lutherans do. … But the neighbors were not only willing to tell us what they thought about plans for the house, but they were honored to be asked.”

Langston also organized All That Remains, a support group she leads each Tuesday for people from many faiths who feel they have been traumatized by religion. The focus of the 10-week group is on healing, she said, not to steer them to any particular faith.

Langston plans to start additional outreach ministries.

“I’m really excited about one that is going to be art-based and [involve] things like music and storytelling,” she said. “It will be a ministry where we explore questions of life and meaning through art.”

The irony of Langston’s evangelical efforts is not lost on Lutherans at New Promise.

Said Pastor Joe: “Here we are with an ex-Mormon who is teaching us how to be missionaries. It is comical, but it is so consistent with the way God works. You know, God has a wonderful sense of humor to pick a former Mormon missionary to teach us how to be mission-minded.”

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