The Rev. Delwyn X. Campbell Sr., MA ’15, a graduate of Concordia’s Cross-cultural Ministry Center, was recently called to lead two Lutheran congregations in Lansing, Michigan, after serving in his hometown of Gary, Indiana, where he became a trusted voice in the community. At each assignment, he takes a missional view of local church work which was strengthened during his time at Concordia.
“The CMC’s training at Concordia helped immensely, because I’m always approaching ministry from the standpoint of translating our culture to the surrounding culture,” Campbell says. “I never assume I am in a place where everybody knows what it means to be Lutheran.”
Campbell grew up in Gary when it was a company town essentially designed for the needs of U.S. Steel. “I grew up in a time when the average guy graduated from high school and didn’t have to go to college,” Campbell says. “He could walk across the stage and the next day go down to U.S. Steel and get a job, and within five to ten years he’s making enough to buy a house. The children and young adults of today know nothing about Gary in its heyday. To them it’s a city in decline.”
Campbell’s father owned a garbage collection company there and fixed his own trucks and equipment, but the younger Campbell “had a religious bent and was always interested in spiritual things,” he says. As a young teenager he was already teaching Sunday school classes and speaking in his church. After high school, he enlisted in the Air Force and served four years before being honorably discharged and going into the civilian workforce. One day a fellow parent at his son’s taekwondo studio invited him to a multi-ethnic Lutheran church in Murrieta, California. Soon, Campbell was playing drums for the worship band, then speaking Sunday mornings when the pastor was away.
There, he learned about the Cross-cultural Ministry Center at Concordia University Irvine and enrolled in 2012. “I loved it,” he says. “It was the most wonderful experience. Concordia was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. One professor called us ‘Navy SEALS for Jesus,’ saying, ‘You’ll have to go into places without a lot of resources, and you’re going to have to make it happen.’ I took that in, hook, line, and sinker.”
After graduation, a call came for a missionary position in Gary, and Campbell stepped into the role of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod Strategic Mission Developer with Mission Field USA. He was installed at St. John’s Lutheran Church, historically a German church, on Epiphany Sunday 2016, and also took oversight of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, a traditionally Black church also in Gary. His main job, he says, was “to keep people from giving up and get the rest of the city aware that there was a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, and to open Ascension Lutheran Christian School.
A K-6 school indeed opened in 2017, and Campbell upgraded the Bibles, hymnals, and computers at the churches. Following in the footsteps of his Concordia professor, Rev. Dr. C.J. Armstrong, he taught his congregation chanting as a form of worship, something they fully enjoyed. “I felt like the Lutheran worldview could turn Gary around — our view of vocation, and of two kingdoms,” Campbell says. His message was broadcast even more widely on a local talk radio station when he had the opportunity to host programs for several hours a day, over the course of a year. “I was able to become famous,” he says with a laugh. “I was a radio personality. In the inner city that’s a big thing. You are like a voice of the community. People were listening to me talk about all kinds of things from a Lutheran perspective. People would come up to me at the grocery store to say they had heard the show. They called me ‘the Rev.’ I tried to get them to call me Del. That’s because in communities like Gary there is no separation of church and state in that way. People expect Black pastors to be community involved. The church is the center of community life.”
In early 2023, a call came out of the blue for Campbell to consider becoming pastor of two churches in Lansing, two-and-a-half hours from Gary but a world apart. “I did not see the call coming,” he says. “Someone had seen me online; they were looking for a pastor.”
Prayerful consideration led the Campbells and their two daughters to accept the dual-parish call in Lansing, the Michigan state capital and home of Michigan State University. Both churches are located on the same avenue, one, Trinity Lutheran, in the downtown area, the other, Good Shepherd Lutheran, in the suburbs. The churches are different in their social and political views, and how they express ministry and community involvement, but both share a passion for how the gospel can transform lives. Campbell serves three days a week at each and preaches in person at both on Sundays, in addition to superintending Bible studies, visitations, prayer services, and more. “Both congregations seem to love us being here; they are plumb tickled,” he says. “I have yet to have a Sunday where they didn’t say it was a wonderful sermon.”
Trinity’s building also hosts a Sunday afternoon Sudanese Lutheran congregation, Living Word, which worships in Arabic, Sudanese, and English. His Concordia education continues to inform Campbell’s ministry.“My theme for the past year has been the Missio Dei and our role in it,” he says. “I’m a product of the CMC program. That’s not just a suit I take off and put on a different pair of clothes. It’s in me. I look at our city missiologically because, even in Lansing, with the wonderful things they have, it’s still a city that needs the pure gospel. My goal is to see all Christians be confessionally grounded. In terms of community, we ought to be the best of citizens because we understand there are two kingdoms, both actively under God’s sovereign hand and both subject to him.”
Campbell remains passionate about the LCMS' mission rooted in the Augsburg Confession’s fourth article on justification. “It’s the article upon which the church stands,” he says. “With justification we are the expression of God’s will on the earth. He has given us the ministry of reconciliation into the world. We carry the simple message that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. He’s done it. All He needs you to do is be a servant of reconciliation. Be a means, an incarnated means of grace, that channel that conveys God’s grace to your neighbor."