‘I had a wrestling match, and God won’ — Beloved Utah church leader and marathoner retiring after 20-year run

St. George • As befitting a devoted marathoner who has gone the distance in races around the state and across the country, St. George’s longest-serving pastor has enjoyed a long run tending to his flock.

On Sunday, June 29, the Rev. Ralph Clingan will preach his last sermon at Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church, ending a nearly 20-year run at the Spanish mission-style chapel and 42 years in the ministry. That’s when the cleric — “Pastor Ralph” to his parishioners — will step down from the pulpit and step into retirement.

“I will dearly miss seeing his friendly greeting every Sunday,” Good Shepherd member and former music director Barbara McConnell lamented.

She is hardly alone.

Friends and admirers say they will miss the pastor’s Christ-centered sermons, his clever wit, his ecumenical outreach and his encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible. Others point to his missionary zeal in helping Christians and refugees in war-torn Eastern Europe.

There also is his love of running, craft beer and his die-hard devotion to the Buffalo Bills, a team that dies hard and often in the NFL playoffs each year. Upon hearing of the pastor’s retirement, a friend who is an avid Pittsburgh Steelers stalwart couldn’t resist ribbing him.

“Congratulations on your retirement,” Clingan says the Steeler fan told him. “You can now write your memoirs about what being a Presbyterian minister and a lifelong Buffalo Bills fan has taught you about the suffering of Jesus and the patience of Job.”

Languages are another pastime for the 68-year-old bald and bespectacled pastor, who can muddle his way through Russian, Romanian and French, though English and biblical Greek and Hebrew remain the lingua franca of his ministry.

Clingan also speaks of his affection for craft beer, especially after workouts or following any of the 46 marathons he has completed, including Boston’s storied race in 2008.

Turns out, pastoral care can also brew up a powerful thirst. Scott Florence recalls accompanying Pastor Ralph on a ministerial visit to Life Evangelical Baptist Church, Good Shepherd’s sister church in the Russian town of Dorogobuzh, a small town about 350 miles southwest of Moscow.

After spending a dry week with Pastor Sergei Grokhotov and his teetotaling congregation, Clingan yearned for a beer when he and Florence returned to Moscow. Alas, their translator didn’t cotton to alcohol, craft beer or otherwise.

“So Ralph told me, ‘Don’t ask Olga to come to dinner because then we won’t be able to have a beer,’” Florence chuckled.

Following in his father’s footsteps

A pastor’s son who grew up in Canisteo, New York, Clingan wrestled and ran cross country in high school, helping his small high school claim county championships in both sports. He also played trumpet in the band and sang in the choir.

Clingan was in junior high school when he first sensed he had pastoral gifts and an inclination to follow in the footsteps of his father, the Rev. Robert Clingan. Later, while at Pennsylvania’s Westminster College, he started having second thoughts about his first impressions of becoming a minister.

Upon earning his bachelor’s degree in religion, Clingan recalls cramming his few worldly possessions into his Ford Pinto and driving to Florida, where he was a substitute teacher during the school year and worked in steel building construction when students were on vacation.

Attending Easter services at a Presbyterian Church in Florida, Clingan said the Holy Spirit provided him with spiritual direction and a course correction.

“I can’t remember what the preacher said during his sermon,” Clingan explained, “... but God and I had a wrestling match, and God won.”

Clingan wasted no time answering God’s call, enrolling in Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in Rochester, New York, where he earned his master of divinity in theology. He subsequently obtained a doctorate in ministry from Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta.

Over the first 22 years of his career, Clingan served as a pastor or associate pastor of Presbyterian churches in New York and Maryland, the latter at Neelsville Presbyterian Church in Germantown, where he began looking for other Christian pastures. Typically, the pastor said, ministers move to new churches every five to seven years.

When Clingan decided to take his ministry elsewhere, churches in Florida, Texas and Kentucky took notice and a keen interest. He then fielded a call from Presbyterians wanting to fly him out to “a place I had never heard of” — St. George.

When he interviewed in Utah, members of the Good Shepherd search committee offered him the job before he boarded his return flight home. Clingan was noncommittal in return, telling them he would decide after he finished interviewing for a pastor’s position in Kentucky the following weekend.

With his future up in the air, on a plane between Utah and Baltimore, Clingan opened the Bible to Acts and began reading about Paul’s vision of a man imploring him to come to Macedonia, which resulted in the apostle taking his ministry to Europe, a place he had never been.

“At that point,” he said, “I knew with 100% certainty that God was saying I needed to go to St. George. So as soon as I hit the ground, I called Kentucky to tell them I was not coming.”

Informed of his decision, the two-word response from family and friends was: “Where’s St. George?” His rejoinder: “I’m not sure where Utah is, let alone St. George.”

Bridging the divide

As little as he knew about the region, Clingan hit the ground running in November 2005 at Good Shepherd. One of his first tasks: Make the church more warm and welcoming.

A believer in compassionate service, Clingan brought Stephen Ministries to St. George. The program trains lay members to provide Christ-centered care to congregants and community members who are lonely, hurting or experiencing other challenges.

He further vowed to observe an important “don’t”: Don’t take on or tick off Utah’s predominant faith, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

“The last full-time pastor before I took the job decided, for whatever reason, that he was going to take on the Mormon community,” Clingan noted. “That pastor lasted less than a year and a half.”

Instead of deepening divisions, Clingan set out to build bridges. For example, Clingan became the inaugural president of the St. George Interfaith Council. He also started Crop Walk, a Church World Services program in which congregations band together each November to raise funds to end hunger at home and abroad.

Participants in the event walk 6 miles, the same distance people in many impoverished nations trek each day to get food and water and go to work. To date, the program has raised $95,000 in the St. George area.

Clingan’s ecumenical and philanthropic endeavors have endeared him to Utahns across the faith landscape. Rabbi Mendy Cohen of the Chabad Jewish Community Center of Southern Utah lauds the pastor for his leadership and compassion and for being an inspiring force.

Michael Kruse, a Unitarian representative on the interfaith council, remembers showing his wife a picture of one of Good Shepherd’s stained-glass windows while telling her about how much Clingan had helped him with his anti-racism task force.

“‘Is that Ralph?’” he recalls her asking about the picture. “I told her, ‘No, that’s Jesus.’ It seems like Ralph is supposed to imitate Christ, not outdo him.”

Joking aside, Kruse and others say Clingan has helped unite the faith community. The relationship between the pastor and Latter-day Saints is so warm, for instance, that Clingan was provided with a front-row seat at the groundbreaking for the Red Cliffs Temple in 2020.

Kidding around

Perhaps few know that better than Washington City Mayor Kress Staheli, the pastor’s close friend and frequent running partner. Clingan has hosted Staheli, who is a Latter-day Saint, at Good Shepherd to talk about his religion and its beliefs. The pastor, in turn, has attended services at the mayor’s church.

Clingan remembers the time he and Staheli exited his car before embarking on a long run.

“Aren’t you going to lock it?” the pastor recalls his friend asking. “I said, ‘No, I trust my LDS brothers and sisters.’ And Staheli responded, ‘Yeah, but, you know, there are more Presbyterians around than you might think.’”

When Staheli once joked that Clingan should convert, he said, the pastor responded, “If I got baptized, I’d lose my pension.”

The only one to possibly convert was Staheli’s dog. Clingan once blessed the French Brittany at a Blessing of the Animals service. Soon afterward, Staheli and the dog were running across a bridge when the animal abruptly jumped over the railing into the riverbed far below.

Staheli was mortified. “What am I going to tell my wife and kids — that dad killed the dog?” he remembers asking himself. “But it stuck the landing and was running down the riverbed. So my family jokes that the dog must be a Presbyterian because the blessing worked.”

Clingan often trains for marathons with Staheli and other friends, rising before sunup to beat the heat. Aware that Clingan could be a bit skittish running in the dark, Staheli once had a cousin dress up as a gorilla, dart out of the bushes by the Virgin River and ambush the terrified pastor.

As much as the pastor is an ambassador of “The Way,” the term used to describe early Christian followers, Staheli said his good friend sometimes loses his way. On one run, he recalls, the reverend was trailing some younger, faster runners when he inadvertently took a two-mile shortcut and finished well ahead of the pack.

Said the mayor: “We have referred to that point on the map as ‘Preacher’s Pass’ ever since.”

Putting a pastor out to pasture

Over lunch recently, Staheli complimented his friend for being a good shepherd to his congregation and others in the community. “He kind of stopped me and said, ‘No, I work for the shepherd.’ I appreciate that. This community is better off because of his service and who he is.”

Clingan, who jokes that his success is due to his “stunning good looks,” said being a pastor is harder than appearances might suggest.

“A lot of people think a pastor gets up to deliver a 15-minute sermon once a week and that’s it,” he said. “The reality is that the job is somewhat like being a business CEO.”

Besides leading worship services, Clingan has a long weekly to-do list, including leading separate men’s and women’s Bible studies and two exercise sessions. Add to that tally choir practice, meetings with church committees and officers and, oftentimes, sessions with Presbyterian leaders in Salt Lake City.

Funerals are also part of his duties. By his reckoning, he has conducted 85 of them for members. The cremated remains of many of them rest in Good Shepherd’s Community Garden.

Church elder Ruthanne Skinner appreciates the memorial service the pastor led, and the kindness and concern he showed when her husband died. She also enjoys his exercise classes, though she often finds the accompanying rock ’n’ roll annoying, especially at Christmas when he plays Alvin and the Chipmunks.

“He gloats every time he plays it because he knows that none of us like it,” Skinner said. “We are really going to miss that.”

Scott Florence said he will miss attending weekly Bible studies at Bishop’s Grill, where Clingan mines scriptural gems from Greek and Hebrew translations of the Good Book that most Scripture buffs might miss. Then there are the extemporaneous sermons Clingan delivers sans notes each week in the sanctuary and the services he conducts that rarely, if ever, run over an hour.

Clingan is a stickler for punctuality and efficient meetings. When Pastor Joe Doherty of New Promise Lutheran Church served as president of the St. George Interfaith Council, he recalls Clingan constantly looking at his watch to ensure the meeting clipped along on schedule.

“The quicker we ended the meeting,” Doherty said, “the happier he was.”

Clingan is also known for his work with refugees.

The Rev. Mirjam Haas-Melchior, executive presbyter of the Presbytery of Utah, recently accompanied the pastor to Moldova to learn more about the Ukrainian refugees flooding the country and what the faith community could do to help them. She said the pastor has continued that work and has emerged as “one of the peacemakers for the Presbyterian church” even as his congregation searches for a permanent replacement.

“Wherever he goes or whatever he does,” Haas-Melchior said, “he is always a pastor and a minister. He does not take off his hat.”

He will, however, be officially removing his robes Sunday, though his congregants will never be removed from his heart.

“I love them deeply,” Clingan said. “And over the past few months since [announcing] my retirement, their expressions of the love they have for me have been overwhelming.”

As for where he might go or what he might do next, Clingan said he hopes to continue serving others.

“God has work for me to do,” he said. “I don’t know what that is yet, but I know he has a plan for me. It’s all in his hands.”