Dr. Joseph I. Mortensen, STH ’66
This obituary was originally published by the Legacy and can be found here.
Joseph Ide Mortensen, 86, died peacefully at the University of Michigan Hospital on August 19, 2022 in Ann Arbor, MI. He was born May 28, 1936 in Cheyenne, WY to Mabel Geneva (Ide) and Axel Christian Mortensen. Joe was the youngest son of a youngest son, joining older siblings Marguerite, Charles, Jim, and Mary. He was especially close to his sister Mary, who from an early age appointed herself his teacher and guardian and once rescued him from a pond. Joe graduated from Cheyenne High School in 1954 and left Cheyenne for Wheaton College, where he majored in Greek in preparation for seminary. He met Linda Larsen in the Wheaton College Choir. They were married in 1959 in her home town of Gothenburg, NE. Both sang exceptionally well and with joy all their lives. Joe received his Doctor of Ministry degree at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, earning his tuition by teaching Greek. He was a scholar at heart, earning a Doctorate in Theology in Church History from Boston University in 1961. Ordination into the American Baptist Churches followed. He was senior pastor at a church in the Boston area before moving to lead a newly planted church in Mt Pleasant, MI. His time there came to an end in 1969 when he was called to the First Baptist Church of Midland, MI. Deciding to leave the Mt Pleasant church was very difficult and he was troubled by a terrible headache. When he decided to go to Midland, the headache immediately disappeared. This, for him, was confirmation he was meant to be in Midland. He remained there as pastor for the next 24 years. Joe moved to Midland with Linda and their three children, Anne, Charles and John. The church embraced the young family right away, welcoming Joe’s gift for preaching, his devotion, and his creative ideas benefitting the church through study, teaching, and fellowship. Then tragedy struck: Linda was diagnosed with cancer and died two years later at the age of 38 in 1974. The church surrounded them with love, but the mourning family suffered. The next spring, Joe met Kathy Nummy. Easy conversations during a church retreat developed into devoted love, and they married in December 1975. Sons Andrew and Peter were born in the following years, extending the family, and amusing, exasperating, and adoring their older sister and brothers. Right after Joe and Kathy were married, FBC had an opportunity that Joe encouraged the church to take: sponsoring a Laotian family fleeing the Vietnam War. Joe was passionate about welcoming and supporting refugees and the displaced since his father was an immigrant from Denmark. Upon the arrival of the Saechow family, Joe and other devoted members of the church made sure of work, housing, food, and friendship for them. The Saechow family spent a year in Midland, moving to Oregon after learning another Lao family they knew was living there. Jobs were plentiful, and they settled permanently in Oregon. The Saechows remain friends of the Mortensens to this day. In 1989, Joe took a sabbatical, traveling with his family to Oxford, England. There he studied under the eminent English New Testament scholar Tom Wright at Oxford University. Joe said his view of the Bible, God’s Kingdom, and Jesus were opened to him in a new way that greatly affected his preaching and life with God. It is impossible to think of Joe without his love of music. A musician himself, it was his voice that was his instrument. He sang solos or duetsespecially with Linda and Charlie Nonemanin church, but not too often, and didn’t sing in the church choir. “There’s a danger of the service having too much Joe in it. There are others with gifts to use for ministry.” Joe sang in the community with many groups, some privately organizedCanzona di Musicaand others through the Midland Center for the Arts. He was a part of the Midland Chorale for many years and sang with smaller choirs there as well. Joe loved the outdoors. He led the family on many camping trips across the country, instilling in his children the same love and reverence for nature he had. He taught his daughter to fish, though she abandoned the pursuit after discovering what it took to clean her catch. After Kathy introduced the family to downhill skiing, Joe took to it and enjoyed the skiing season for 30 more years. A tinkerer by nature, Joe loved understanding how things worked, and could build just about anything, including a deck in the backyard for his son’s high school graduation. In the 1980s, Joe discovered personal computing. He dove into it with enthusiasm, learning to code, and ultimately collaborating on the development of an early freeware database, ZDB. After a day in 1993 spent skiing and soul-searching on the slopes of Crystal Mountain, Joe decided to retire early from FBC Midland. In retirement, he continued to support American Baptist Churches throughout Michigan. He served as an interim pastor in Bay City, MI, shepherding the unification of two smaller congregations. Joe also became an Area Minister with ABC of Michigan. In that role, he traveled throughout the state, helping churches prepare to call a new pastor and mentoring younger clergy. He continued taking occasional interim positions, including in Bloomfield Hills. Teaching and learning is key in the Mortensen family. Though he never became a full-time instructor (though of course he was from the pulpit), Joe occasionally taught short courses at Northern Theological Seminary in the Chicago area. He was an adjunct at Ecumenical Seminary in Detroit, Columbia and Central Baptist seminaries. He also supervised a number of doctoral students over the years. He later got the opportunity of a lifetime to teach at the newly reopened Moscow Theological Seminary in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. The school asked Joe to teach baptism as a multi-week course with the help of an interpreter. Since Joe had never taught baptism previously, he dove into his books and developed a course that served the students well. Joe later said they were the best students he ever had, and that the interpreter was extraordinary, making it easy to communicate with the students. Joe taught there several times between 1996 and 2006. Daughter Anne had lived in various parts of Russia and other former Soviet states off and on from the early 1980s until the early 2000s, and it was his great joy to spend time with her in Moscow during his teaching visits. With whatever other free time he somehow had, Joe was highly involved in in the Midland community, serving on boards including the Pardee Cancer Foundation board, the Red Cross board, Community Center board, Stratford Nursing Home and gradually volunteered more and more at the hospital, now named the MidMichigan Medical Center and affiliated with the University of Michigan. In addition to being a merciful presence for many families as an on-call chaplain there for many years, Joe served as a corporate member and joined the volunteer board, including when the affiliation with U of M happened in 2013. Joe served as president of the board for two years, so was part of the decision to add heart surgery to MidMichigan’s services. He tested it out when he needed bypass surgery soon after the unit opened, and it was good. Once Joe fully retired following his very active early retirement, he and Kathy wholeheartedly embraced a shared love: travel. Joe and Kathy traveled the globe, including a Danube River cruise from Nuremberg to Budapest, the Eastern Mediterranean including Israel, Normandy, the Amazon River and Machu Picchu. At 81, he ably climbed the 1,600 steep steps of Machu Picchu, with his 15-year-younger wife gasping behind him. Costa Rica was rich with animal life that their excellent guide helped them see. Joe and Kathy’s last major trip together took them to Turkey, where they were truly awed by the beauty and history of the country. And then, of course, the pandemic arrived. Both Kathy and Joe stayed healthy for 2 1/2 years, but recently both caught COVID, and Joe’s general poor health in the last couple of years made it impossible for him to recover. Joe was preceded in death by his wife Linda, his parents Mabel and Axel; his parents-in-law Betsy (Ross) and Bill Nummy and Irene and Arthur Larsen; siblings Marguerite, Jim, and Charles, brothers-in-law Ed Bieber and Bob Burman, sister-in-law Genevieve Mortensen and various cousins, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews. He is survived by Kathy; his children and their spouses, Anne Mortensen and John Sartorius, Charles and Helga (Schroeder) Mortensen, John and Linda (Neufeld) Mortensen, Andrew Mortensen and Christine Veenstra, and Peter Mortensen and Kimra McPherson; his sister, Mary; 12 grandchildren and 2 great-grandchildren. Joe’s large and extended family and many friends, congregants will cherish his memory always.