Longtime Santa Rosa minister Lorents Flak dies at 83

Lorents Flak was the Lutheran minister who rode a red scooter, worked with Cesar Chavez and invited the Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays to gather for meetings at his congregation’s Santa Rosa church.

“He was always pretty open,” said the pastor’s high-school sweetheart and wife of 58 years, Jean Flak. She said he loved his work in the ministry, a long career capped by a 20-year run at Faith Lutheran Church.

He’d arrive hours early each Sunday to make certain everything was ready and in place for the morning’s service. With the preparations completed, his wife recalled, he’d stand in the center of the sanctuary near Spring Lake Regional Park that was built under his direction and he’d slowly spin, performing a 360-degree inspection and inventory of blessings.

“He’d say to himself, ‘Company’s coming. The people of God are going to be here.’?”

The Rev. Flak died Sunday at a Santa Rosa care home. He was 83.

He was leading a church in San Jose when, in 1973, an assistant to the region’s Lutheran bishop encouraged him to look into a pastoral opening at what was then a church in the country in Santa Rosa. Alongside the sanctuary and fellowship hall at Faith Lutheran on Newanga Avenue were an old, red chicken coop and a good deal of open land.

Hired as the congregation’s new minister, Flak quickly came to feel at home in Sonoma County. In 1977, he presided at the funeral for Elizabeth Waters Burbank at the landmark home and gardens she’d long before shared with her late husband, Luther, the renowned horticulturist.

A few years later, while serving as president of the local ministerial association, Flak offered the prayer at a groundbreaking ceremony for the disputed Santa Rosa Plaza. When years passed without construction beginning, his wife remembered, “He said, ‘If they don’t start pretty soon, I’m going to take my prayer away.’?”

At Faith Lutheran, he shepherded a capital campaign that in 1986 brought the construction of a new, larger sanctuary. He served there until his retirement in 1993.

Flak was born in Pontiac, Mich., and grew up in Minneapolis - and in the Lutheran faith. His wife smiled as she recalled that as a boy, his best friend and partner in youthful mischief was a lad also destined to become a Lutheran minister.

Jean Flak said their Sunday school teacher once confided, “He used to pray every Saturday night that one or the other of them wouldn’t come to church the next day.”

Jean Flak didn’t have to venture far to meet her future husband: As kids, their families were neighbors in Minneapolis.

“I was the girl next door,” she said. She and Lorents Flak married in 1957.

The future minister discovered early on that he loved to sing. He took voice lessons and joined the choirs both in high school and at the Augustana Seminary in Illinois.

He was ordained and served first at a Lutheran church in Albia, Iowa. After several years, he became responsible for a second congregation located about ?10 miles away.

“He had a half-hour between services,” Jean Flak said. He’d tell the organist at the second church, “You start the first hymn, and I will be there before it’s done.”

From Iowa, the Flaks leaped at the opportunity to move west to California and to a congregation in San Jose.

It was 1968, a time of frequent and sometimes-violent or destructive campus protests. Jean Flak said that when her husband heard a demonstration was forming, he’d mobilize with fellow pastors to go, march with the students and hope to help keep the action peaceful.

Flak’s social conscience compelled him also to join with Cesar Chavez to work to improve the lives of farmworkers, and he welcomed people who might be shunned by other churches.

He said upon his retirement nearly ?22 years ago, “I always sermonize on the Gospel; The nature of God is to forgive, to accept us the way we are.”

His wife said that foremost he was a kind and gentle man. “He wasn’t afraid to cry, and he didn’t care if it was in front of the congregation.”

Flak lived for the past several years with Alzheimer’s disease and mantle cell lymphoma.

Jean Flak said it has been gratifying in recent days to have many people reach out to her and her two grown children to say, in essence, that Pastor Flak “touched our lives and our whole family; he will always be remembered.’?”

In addition to his wife, Flak is survived by son Jon Flak of Santa Rosa, daughter Beth Pettek of Fernley, Nev., brothers Marvin Flak of Redlands and Thomas Flak of Minneapolis, and four grandchildren.

Services will be at 3 p.m. March 28 at Bethlehem Lutheran Church on St. Francis Road. Flak’s family suggests memorial donations to Thanksgiving Lutheran Church, 1225 Fulton Road, Santa Rosa 95401, or to Sutter Care at Home, ?3209 Cleveland Ave., Santa Rosa 95403.