Artist's Statement

Welcome to my Web page, which is especially about my passion for woodturning and the way I share that with many others. Please explore my Web site, find out about my turning workshops and the video tapes I have made, look at the resource list and tools I have available. Let me know how I can be helpful to you as you explore woodturning.

I'm a Lutheran pastor too, formerly a campus pastor at Concordia College in Moorhead for 23 years and now at Calvary Lutheran Church in Perham, MN.

What both vocations have in common is my calling to explore the gifts we have from God and use them for the service of others and the praise of God. That means making beauty with wood and making joy, justice and community with other people.

Working with wood is my passion. I love everything about it,

• the wood itself, especially in its most humble and distressed forms,
• the energizing burst of a new idea and the painstaking pace of problem solving,
• the challenge of mastering tools to bring into being what I had only imagined,
• the community formed of loggers and clients and fellow turners, And when all goes well,
• the serendipitous harmony of color and curve, touch and translucence.

For me it is an act of both faith and imagination to turn a bowl. In my callings both as a pastor and an artist, I am reminded that God doesn't work with perfect materials either. So i also must trust that in this distressed and unlikely wood, burled, decayed, worm eaten, twisted, bird-pecked, in this least likely looking material, most of all, there is the promise of beauty. This is my calling, to be a good steward of the things and people God has placed in my care.

I like very much a quote by Sam Maloof, one of the master woodworkers of our age. "The reverence the object maker has for the materials, for the shape, and for the miracle of his skill transcend to God, the Master Craftsman, the Creator of all things, who uses us, our hands, as his tools to make these beautiful objects."