Reprinted by permission
From the September 3, 2001 Spokesman Review - Spokane, WA
Kelly McBride - Staff writer

The Rev. Tom Starr was the quintessential pastor. A good ol' boy from Texas, he fell away from the church as a teenager and was born again at age 20, minister of his first church by age 21.

For the better part of five decades he did the Lord's work the old-fashioned way -- he was there when it counted, walking with the members of his flock as they celebrated and mourned.

It was disconcerting Sunday morning that he was not there, at tiny Maranatha Bible Church in Otis Orchards.

Starr, 67, and three of his grandsons are missing in the Pacific Ocean. They put out to sea Wednesday afternoon from La Push, Wash. A fog set in. They never returned.

The U.S. Coast Guard found his 17-foot Boston Whaler washed up on the shore Thursday morning. A two-day search produced a cooler lid, a seat cushion and a tackle box.

The grandsons are brothers Ryan and Andrew Floch, ages 21 and 20, from Odessa, and James Starr, 19, from Spokane.
If the boat did overturn in the open ocean, the cousins would never leave each other or their grandfather, one family member said. And Starr would never leave them.

He was their shepherd.

On Sunday morning at his church, they were his disciples, huddled together in his absence, trying to keep their faith.

And the miracle was this: Pastor Tom showed up, not in body, like they were praying for, but in spirit. He was there.

In traditional Bible church style, the service opened with a blessing, followed by petitions from the congregation _better known as praises and prayer requests. One by one, Starr's teary followers reached for the microphone to pray for and to praise their minister.

"Pastor Tom has been my family's pastor since 1981," one woman said. "He was there for deaths and surgeries, in jails and prison. When the demons were there, he was there."

The Rev. Don Ensor, assistant pastor at the church, had shadowed Starr for three months, preparing to assume leadership of the congregation.

"I learned more in three months from him than most people learn in three years of seminary," he said. "Oh my gosh did we visit the sick. If you are sick or suffering then Pastor Tom was there."

At age 67, Starr was preparing to take on a new job, as the full-time head of Mission Spokane, a coalition of churches working toward Christian unity in the Inland Northwest.

From humble roots in small-town, dirt-poor Texas, Starr became a man of stature.

He attended Multnomah Bible College in Portland and worked for Campus Crusade for Christ in Boise. He came to Spokane in 1971 to run the Circle Bar J Boys Ranch, a Christian home for wayward boys.
He was hired as pastor at Valley Fourth Memorial in 1975 when it was a small church, and grew it into a congregation of several hundred people, with a full time staff and a thriving Christian school.

He transformed the Greater Spokane Association of Evangelicals from a tiny prayer meeting of a dozen pastors into a social and political force representing more than a hundred churches.

When he came to Maranatha Bible six years ago, he was in a sense returning to his roots -- a small country church.

He was giving up the luxuries of a big church -- nice salary, assistants to help out, a decent building. He traded that for a church that meets in an old dairy barn, so he could once again be there to share in the joys and sorrows of his flock.

At Maranatha, the phone rings to the pastor's house, because there is no office staff. Volunteers brew coffee right in the sanctuary.
"You can't be a pastor to big church," Ensor said. "You have to be a manager."

But along the journey of his life, Starr developed an incredibly large view of a complex world.

He overcame many personal prejudices and often spoke openly about his past mistrust of Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants.
He was a leader in the Churches Against Racism, a network of Christians that banned together in 1998 to counter the Aryan Nation's message of white supremacy coming out of Hayden, Idaho. It was the first group to encompass Christians from Evangelical, Pentecostal, Protestant and Roman Catholic congregations.

"Tom had come to believe that there is no part of the church that has a full understanding of the Gospel. Rather we all have a small piece of understanding and together we can see the whole Word of God," said Dan Grether, a minister who often worked with Starr. "That is an incredible journey. Even among Evangelicals, Baptists and Bible church people tend to be more insulated and thinking that they are right and other people aren't.

"Tom indeed has risen far above that."

In an essay Starr wrote for The Spokesman-Review in 1998, he confessed his shortcomings.

"Being white and part of the majority, I fail to understand what it means to be in the minority. I fail to understand how those in minority communities feel about racism and prejudice," he wrote. "I have in large measure ignored the problem. My failure to seek to understand and my failure to care enough to find out is a contributing factor in perpetuating racism."

Although he grew enormously from his roots, he never lost his Texas style. His Southern drawl and laid-back approach were legendary among the Spokane Christian community. And he used them to his advantage.

"He came off like a country bumpkin and that was intentional," Grether said. "It was disarming and he used it to great advantage."
In meetings Starr had a habit of throwing out one-liners that his fellow pastors called Starrisms. One pastor was even collecting them in a notebook.

"We would be getting off track and he would come up with a one-line wisdom statement that bring us right back on track," Grether said.
It was for want of a Starrism that Sunday morning services at Maranatha Bible stretched into Sunday afternoon. One church member after another stood up to talk about their beloved pastor.

"This isn't a memorial service," the assistant pastor kept reminding them.
But then he went on, just like the others, unable to articulate the gaping hole left by Starr's absence.

"Maybe they were so close to God out there in that boat that God just said, `You're closer to my house, than your own. Come on up,"' Ensor speculated.

Second only to his love for God and God's people, was Starr's love of fishing. He gave his catch away to anyone who would take it.
Christians teach that Jesus transformed his disciples from fishermen into "fishers of men."

Jesus did the same for Tom Starr.

Kelly McBride can be reached at (509) 459-5449 or by e-mail at kellym@spokesman.com

Click here for memorial service pictures and story
Click here for a tribute to Tom Starr by pastors and friends
Click here to read the Spokesman-Review article covering the memorial service - written by Isamu Jordan