Pastor Drebes is marking 25 years since he was ordained on Aug. 19, 2001, at Zion Lutheran in Palmyra, Missouri, his home church. But young Bryan wasn't always certain that he would become a minister.
"Ever since grade school, I had been thinking about going into church work," Drebes said this week. He was considering working as a teacher or a principal -- perhaps at the high school level. He also was thinking about the pastoral ministry.
After graduating in 1991 from St. Paul High School in Concordia, Missouri, he enrolled that fall at Concordia College (now Concordia University) in Seward, Nebraska, majoring in education and preseminary work. After his first semester, he took a break and sold insurance full time for 2 1/2 years and then part time for another 2 1/2 years. He had gone back to college in 1994. He finished his undergraduate degree at Concordia University in River Forest, Illinois, in 1997 after studying in 1995 at Oak Hill Theological College in London, England. "I felt that God was calling me more to the pastoral ministry," he said, and he enrolled at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis in the fall of 1997.
In 1999, he was assigned a vicarage at a church in Wisconsin, but he soon learned that the congregation had been trying to remove its senior pastor. After four months there, he was transferred to Bethany Lutheran Church in Overland Park, Kansas, where he finished out his vicarage.
The senior pastor there, the Rev. Ed Trost, told him that members of the congregation would like to issue him a call when he graduated. In 2001, after interviewing at Bethany and other churches, he learned that he would return to Bethany. He was installed there on Sept. 9, 2001, two days before 9/11.
Drebes said he and Trost worked "hand in glove," and it became almost a father-son relationship. In November 2015,
Drebes received the call to Pacific Hills, and he has served as senior pastor here since then. "My goal is that I continue to remain faithful," Drebes said, "serving the Lord and serving His people.
Article by Bob Glissmann, Chair of the Board of Elders
Pacific Hills Lutheran Church is a member of the