The directors of television newscasts lead intense, even frantic professional lives. They work long, caffeinated hours weaving together the up-to-the-minute contributions of producers, photographers and anchors into — they hope — coherent broadcasts.
It’s much the same as shepherding a congregation, says Erica Van Brakle, a veteran of TV news production-turned-American Baptist pastor.
Erica Van Brakle is the pastor of First Baptist Church of La Grange, Ill. Van Brakle was a television newscast director before becoming a pastor. (Photo/Courtesy of Erica Van Brakle)
“I use so much of my TV background” as pastor of First Baptist Church of La Grange, Ill., she said.
That background helped prepare her for the demands of coordinating worship and balance the competing demands of pastoral ministry, community outreach, church administration and ecumenical relationships, she said.
“I plan and think through worship very much like I would as director of a newscast.”
Van Brakle is a third-generation American Baptist who grew up heavily involved in her home church in Peoria.
“I was the kid on the board of Christian education at 16 who helped make changes to the bylaws to allow youth to serve communion,” she said. “I was the kid on the search committee to call our associate pastor.”
Youth ministry was her passion, one that she felt called to serve even as a broadcast journalism career took her to television stations in Chicago, Washington, Boston and Kansas City.
“I pursued television production because I felt this was also a gift God had given me, and I was honoring that.”
That gift helped sustain her through the long and agonizing day of the 9-11 terror attacks. Although she remained at the station through the day, she was exposed to much of the pre-broadcast television images as they arrived on monitors hung on every wall.
“It was a surreal experience,” Van Brakle said. “The station was kind of like a bunker.”
At the end of a nearly 15-hour day, one of the anchors announced that he was headed home, finally, to cry.
“None of us had any processing time at all,” she said. “It is something I do not forget about — especially as a pastor.”
Van Brakle credits her professional training for getting her through those hours. Faith played a larger part in the weeks ahead.
“I had excellent professional training and I also had my faith upbringing, so those two pieces are what got me through that day and the days after,” she said.
But in the months and years that followed, Van Brakle said the calling to ministry that she felt as a fifth grader began to tug more strongly.
Initially, she assumed it would be part-time youth ministry and full-time television work. But the pastor at her home-town church urged her to stay open to the idea of the pastorate by pursuing a master of divinity degree.
She did, and, after meeting and marrying David Van Brakle, a pastor, the two served a non-denominational church in upstate New York — she as associate pastor of worship arts and student ministries.
The family eventually returned to Illinois when David was called to a church in Wilmette, where they now live. She was called to First Baptist in nearby La Grange nearly four years ago.
When Van Brakle arrived at her congregation, she was initially overwhelmed with how to organize all the facets of worship.
“I wondered, how do you plan worship with all these people, musicians and everyone else, when people are not in the same space?”
She started searching for software similar to that used by television stations to manage all the written and photographic work that goes into a newscast. Van Brakle found Planning Center, which helps manage the entire process at First Baptist.
“The pace of life has always been that frantic pace that you find in the news. It’s a pace I am used to.”
In both television and church settings, she said, “you do have people having to collaborate.”
The congregation — with about 25 to 30 on Sunday mornings — may be small but it has a strong presence in the community, Van Brakle said. Its sizeable building is used by a neighboring Catholic school, Boy Scouts, a theater group and others.
“These are not programs of the church, but this is absolutely a ministry of the church. We don’t have a huge youth ministry, but we are serving youth and that is for us a ministry.”
The building-as-ministry approach is also a way that First Baptist offers stewardship, Van Brakle added.
“We are not tithing in big dollars, but we are tithing with the gift of our building.”
She and the church also are heavily involved in ecumenical efforts in the area, with different congregations and ministers bringing varying skillsets to bear to tackle local challenges.
All of it, Van Brakle said, reminds her of her television days.
“The pace of life has always been that frantic pace that you find in the news. It’s a pace I am used to.”