Nicki Jorgenson

It’s Never Too Late to Hold the ‘Both And’ of Life

Niki Jorgenson gave her first sermon as pastor of Central Christian Church in Denver on a Palm Sunday, just two weeks after the church’s previous pastor had died. She was, the congregation agreed, the obvious choice to fill the role. She was an ordained minister with years of experience who had volunteered with the church in every conceivable capacity. No one was better qualified, but also, no one was deeper in grief, for the pastor the congregation had just buried was Niki’s husband.

The symptoms had shown up only six weeks earlier. Canaan, Niki’s best friend and husband of over twenty years, had been complaining of stomach pain. Over the coming weeks, what began as a nuisance morphed into something far more debilitating. In February 2023, he told Niki that she would have to lead the service that Sunday; he was too sick to do it. He would never set foot in church again. Canaan was admitted into the hospital, where doctors discovered, far too late, that he had an aggressive form of neuroendocrine cancer. Ten days after being admitted, and only four days after being diagnosed, he was gone.

Unbeknownst to Niki, Canaan had prepared for what he alone understood to be inevitable. “I’m dying,” he had said in a call to church leadership. “I’d like you to consider Niki.” The 150-year-old congregation had never had a female pastor, but they knew her; they trusted her; and as they walked through their shared grief together, they accepted her to lead them through it. Had anyone told a thirteen-year-old Niki this was where she would find herself in mid-life, she might not have believed it. Not that she was a stranger to life in the church; her grandmother was a
church elder, and in the small town in Oklahoma where Niki grew up, there wasn’t much that didn’t revolve around the church. It was where they went to socialize every day after school, not to mention worship every Sunday, but still, Niki saw church more as just what her family did than anything she had chosen for herself. What she had chosen was sports. She was a star soccer player, already playing on the 18 and up travel team and dreaming, with good reason, of her future athletic career, when everything changed in an instant.

She had gone in for a goal, but after she kicked the ball, her hip went out and seemed to simply stop working. After dragging her useless leg behind her for two weeks, she underwent a surgical procedure that would end her athletic aspirations for good. As she lay in her hospital recovery room, immobile, in pain, and angry, she began to notice the two girls sharing her room. They were older, closer to 18, and both had been there for months as they, like she, went through horrific medical experiences to get their limbs back into working order. But unlike her, they weren’t angry; they were positive and peaceful, an outlook that seemed to stem from the Bible study they spent so much time immersed in. For Niki, who had just been robbed of her entire identity, the faith those older girls shared with her gave her something essential to hang on to just at the time she needed it most. That faith helped get her through the rest of her challenging school years, which included another painful surgery, along with trying to navigate three flights of stairs at school and the stares of classmates who once viewed her as a star but who now saw her as “the girl on crutches.”

As her commitment to faith grew, Niki joined her church youth group on a mission trip to Colorado, where they were serving at Tennyson Center for Children, a residential program for troubled young people. Niki felt profoundly moved by the plight of those kids, so much so that before leaving, she pronounced to the chaplain, “One day, I’m going to have your job.” It took a long time, years that included a Master’s Degree in Community Counseling, mission work in South Central LA, and eventually a Master’s of Divinity, but eventually, she made good on her promise, returning to lead the ministry at Tennyson Center for several years. Niki and her husband, whom she had met standing over the donut table during Divinity School orientation and with whom there was an instant connection, built their lives serving others in the church.

They had two children together, 6 years apart. It was the arrival of the youngest that prompted Niki to take a step back from her official church duties to be able to focus more on motherhood. Through it all, the church remained something of the family business, and so it wasn’t surprising when her youngest gave Niki her blessing to take on the role of pastor when the offer came. “If you can’t stay home,” she told Niki, “being pastor is the next best thing.”

Since then, Niki has been striving to lead her congregation and her family through loss and pain into a place that also leaves room for joy, understanding that life will always be “both and” and never one or the other. The strength others see in her is one she tends to swat away, joking that her strength is only going to get her as far as eating Snickers bars in bed. It has been faith that has provided her real fortitude, a strength that she calls upon to raise her children as the single parent she never imagined she would have to be and as a pastor who teaches others that they, too, can find pockets of joy, even in the darkest of times.

It is never too late to find the ‘both and’ of life.