Retired Pastor Clifford Schmidt

Retired on July 19, 2009 and will be missed.

Interim Pastor Alice Horton

Come and worship with us!!

RETIRED PASTOR CLIFF SCHMIDT

With roots in the heritage of German, Norwegian and Swedish immigrants who all came to Wisconsin, Cliff grew up in West Allis in a house his grandfather built from the Sears and Roebuck catalog.  He Dad worked in the foundry at Allis Chalmers (where Cliff spent one summer during college to “get a taste of it”).

Much of his experience in childhood and youth years grew out of the connection with the church, and the strong influence of pastors and others lead him to an easy choice of entering the seminary following college at Luther, in Decorah, Iowa.  He completed seminary in 1972, and has served in four parishes in Watertown, Camp Douglas, LaCrosse, and Madison.

From 1992 to 2004, he was away from parish ministry and worked primarily for the Alliance for Children and Families with headquarters in Milwaukee.  He trained more than a 100 local teams in cities across the U.S. and Canada to carry out a program called, “Families and Schools Together”, and later did development work in the area of Community Centered Ministries, supporting social service agencies to put the “social” back into social work.

He is married to Linda, and they adopted two children from Russia in 2004, Andrew and Natalya.  He has three grown children, Peter, John and Karen.

As the area around Twin Lakes – and therefore the congregation of Messiah – grows, his gifts in community building, training and education will serve our faith community for the next few years.  He especially loves worship and teaching, and facilitating people’s involvement in being the body of Christ today.

INTERIM PASTOR ALICE HORTON

My name is Pastor Alice Horton.  I live in Port Washington. I have been a pastor for 27 years, twelve of those years in two parishes of my own, one in Minnesota and one in Wisconsin.  The other fifteen years I have served congregations as interim pastor.  I sincerely believe that congregations need good, intentional leadership in their “in-between” times, that is, during those historical times when its pastor resigns to accept a new call or retires.  In the course of my ministry, I have led some 28 congregations through the complexities of the call process.

I am single, my husband having died more than twenty years ago, and have one daughter who lives in a southern suburb of Denver, Colorado.  My hobbies include cooking, reading, hiking, and scuba diving.  I am a great adventurer, seeking to effect at least one unique adventure vacation per year.  This year I plan to take a balloon ride.  The two greatest adventures I have indulged in have been a charity climb of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and floating 222 miles through the Grand Canyon in a rubber raft.