Tracy Lutheran Church welcomes new interim vicar
Talk about keeping it local.
Vicar Angie DeSmith was officially welcomed to Tracy Lutheran Church on Sunday as its new interim pastor as she started her one-year internship.
DeSmith and her husband, Dale, live south of Walnut Grove and farm corn and soybeans north of town; Dale, too, is also from the Walnut Grove area.
“This is where I want to be,” DeSmith said while stepping away from her welcome ceremony at TLC on Sunday. “These small, rural churches, there’s just so many beautiful people and are doing whatever they can to stay open.”
DeSmith said the opportunity to serve locally and in a comfortable environment is a reflection of a change in the way pastors are educated. In the past, a Synod would place someone somewhere other than their home Synod.
“I went to the Synod and said I’m really feeling this call, but we farm and I can’t relocate,” she said. “There’s plenty of need here. Some changes have happened within the lager church that allow this to happen. I get the culture, and that’s a blessing. It makes the transition (for the church) a bit easier.” DeSmith grew up north of Revere and went to high school in Walnut Grove, graduating in 1992 after the consolidation with Westbrook. From there, she went to South Dakota State University, earning a degree in human development and family studies.
DeSmith worked for about 11 years for the Center for Independent Living, working with people with disabilities and went back to school to get her counseling degree in 2007. She was a school counselor at Russell-Tyler-Ruthton High School for 13 years. She started seminary in 2024 through a program at Wartburg Theological Seminary called Theological Education for Emerging Ministries, an alternate pathway toward ordination with a focus on rural ministry.
“It was a way for me to get through it a little faster and not have to leave the workforce,” she said. “I’ve been serving the last year-and-a-half at Grace Trinity Lutheran Church in Westbrook. “I’m about two-thirds through seminary, and now I’m in my last year of internship.”
DeSmith said she wants her congregation to know they are loved and claimed by Christ every Sunday morning.
The church’s call committee will meet again after DeSmith’s one year is up and decide at that time how to move forward.
