THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 1, 1994 TAG: 9405280187
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KRYS STEFANSKY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: 940601 LENGTH: Long
Most make him smile.
{REST} Not the one in a curved plexiglass frame. It shows a beaming young couple in their wedding clothes, a younger, thinner Stegemann standing proudly by their sides.
Stegemann, 64, lifts that picture off the wooden shelf in his church office and holds it for a moment, solemnly studying the smiling newlyweds.
``I keep this one to remind me that even the deepest affection can fail,'' the minister said, blinking sudden moisture from his eyes. ``They promised me they wouldn't divorce, and they did.''
The burly, plain-speaking, fundamentalist pastor of the non-denominational Open Door Chapel knows something about loss and broken promises. More than once, since he was ordained 20 years ago, his convictions and firm religious beliefs have put him at odds with the leadership of his own congregation.
Members have twice left his church in large numbers. The last time, Stegemann stood by accused child killers, saying they, too, deserved the solace of Christian fellowship. Since then, his church has not recovered financially or in enrollment.
He is not your usual minister. ``Unique'' is the word used most often by fellow clergymen trying to characterize the New York native. He came to his ministry down a twisting, rough road.
Much of what he preaches comes from his own experience, not all of it easily gained. He openly tells troubled parishioners who come to him for counsel that he was an alcoholic. Drinking nearly ruined his life before he stopped, almost 30 years ago.
Since then he's owned a successful business. He once ran for state legislature. Then 20 years ago, he turned his back on financial rewards to start his own church.
His ministry in the former movie theater-turned sanctuary on Virginia Beach Boulevard is to people just short of being middle class and to the down-and-out.
They feel comfortable here, where fake green ivy dangles from wall sconces at the ends of rows of worn seats.
It is an atmosphere that does not intimidate.
``Modest- to low- to no-income people come here,'' he said, frowning at the hole in a brown seat cover, the yellowing foam picked out by the twiddling fingers of a worshiper. ``I consistently hand out 10 bucks to people for gas and for bus fare.''
Fellow clergymen admire the way Stegemann reaches out.
``He does feel for the underdog,'' said Rabbi Israel Zoberman, leader of Beth Chaverim, the Reform Jewish Congregation of Virginia Beach. ``I really think that he's a friend one can turn to. He's very, very generous.''
Stegemann's church is a busy place. Ledgers record 1,000 members in the ethnically mixed congregation; about 300 come to church each Sunday. It's not uncommon to see worshipers in three-piece suits sitting beside those in tank tops, shorts and bare feet.
The sprawling building holds a 300-watt religious radio station, a Christian school for grades one to 12 with about 100 students, a day-care center, space for more than 45 different Alcoholics Anonymous meetings each week, a food pantry and a kitchen meeting room that also feeds the homeless twice a year. In the parking lot are the city's Alcohol Detoxification Facility and a popular thrift shop run by the church.
``We sell things for one or two dollars. The idea is to give people some dignity so they're not moochers,'' said Stegemann.
Doug J. Ross, his assistant pastor, figures that many in the congregation buy their clothes at the church thrift shop.
``About 60 percent of the congregation is below median income. The average family is making between $10,000 and $18,000 a year and raising three and four kids. You can see guys in the congregation wearing the same suits every Sunday for 10 years,'' Ross said. On Sunday mornings the parking lot is lined with cars 9 or 10 years old. Some worshipers hop off public buses that stop along the Boulevard.
The church itself is no stranger to financial needs.
``Our treasurer has to pray,'' jokes Judy Knight, the pastor's secretary for the past 10 years. The church constantly pinches pennies.
That suits Stegemann just fine. This pastor says he was not cut out to wear expensive ministerial robes or to preach from a mahogany pulpit in a church built with money tithed by generations of wealthy parishioners.
His voice speaks to a different kind of sinner. A kind he identifies with.
``A lot of pastors have bad backgrounds, but I was a rogue,'' he says, smiling grimly. ``I was ordained a Baptist minister. But I was a rough, tough alcoholic. I had no polish in language. I was not the kind of guy you'd take home to mother.''
Years before his life took these more respectable turns and he came to the pulpit, someone did take him home to meet her parents.
Fran Ricco, an Italian from Yonkers, met her husband, the only child of German immigrants, on the Fourth of July in 1956. They married 10 days later. Stegemann says it was the best thing to happen to him since his adolescence.
Twenty-six years earlier, Stegemann was born in Queens to parents who had both emigrated to the United States from Germany and met here. His mother, Gesine, died when her only child was 13. His father, August, was part-owner of a fish store.
``I never saw much of him after Mom died,'' Stegemann recalled, passing a hand over his own graying hair. ``Dad was working so hard.''
The fishmonger sent his young son to Germantown in the summers to live with cousins on their fruit orchard. During the school year back in Queens, Stegemann spent most of his time next door with an uncle and aunt.
He was raised in the Lutheran church and today wears around his neck a silver crucifix and chain that once belonged to his childhood pastor.
``His name was C. Layton King and he was pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Prince of Peace,'' Stegemann said, fingering the cross. He gave the eulogy at King's funeral and was presented the cross afterward.
That boyhood church was part of what Stegemann remembers as a wholesome atmosphere for a youngster growing up in the city.
But one family tradition was to mushroom into his nemesis.
``The adults would get a keg on Saturday night and dance and sing,'' he recalled. Nobody worried about alcoholism or about children having a sip or two. ``I had my first drink at my uncle's wedding in 1939.''
About five years later, when Stegemann was 14 or 15, alcohol was already a problem. At parties, he found he couldn't stop at one drink. He drank until he was drunk and had to be walked home.
Today he says that innocent, early introduction to a glass of beer is the root of the philosophy he holds most dear and is what has caused him to fight some unpopular battles as a minister.
In the early 1980s, when Cox Cable of Tidewater was airing The Playboy Channel, Stegemann spearheaded a drive of 80 local pastors to get the soft-porn selection off television. He spoke his mind before the City Council and campaigned vigorously against the programming. The dispute eventually led a Virginia Beach grand jury to indict the cable company for violating the state's obscenity law. The cable company agreed to drop the channel to avoid a legal battle.
At the time, some of his followers felt Stegemann was mixing church with politics, and so they left the congregation. He says it was a purely moral issue.
``That filth was coming into my home. That's what I was against,'' he said.
Allowing that sort of adult entertainment into the area unchallenged, he felt, could have opened the door to other unwholesome activity.
Alcohol had worked that way with him.
``Innocent things hurt me, like having a drink with my father at dinner. You can destroy an innocent life in the formative years by putting smut and filth and garbage in here,'' he said, touching one large hand to his forehead.
At 17, Stegemann joined the Army and in 1950 went to Korea.
``I wasn't wounded, didn't get any medals, didn't do anything spectacular,'' he said. Three years later, when he came home and left the service, he drank heavily.
Looking for something to do, he joined the Navy and was an aviation electronics technician for 13 years.
Changes of duty stations led him, his wife and four children all over the country - to Texas, Florida and Tennessee.
``I was always in trouble, always for drinking,'' he recalled. ``I got good marks for my work, but poor marks for character and behavior.''
And Fran Stegemann, he said, his eyes welling with tears, never faltered.
``I haven't given her a lot of reasons to stay sometimes, but she stuck with me,'' he said. ``Through all that stuff she never gave up on me. I thank God for it now.''
She says simply that it was her upbringing that made her stand by her husband.
``My parents were European and Catholic. I always thought once you're married, that's it. And I also believed in stability for the children. No matter what was going on, they knew everything was OK. This is your home, your life, your mother, your father. That's it. Everything's OK,'' she said.
Stegemann and his wife, a petite woman with a ready smile, dark hair and olive complexion, have six grandchildren. Three of them belong to son Frank.
Stegemann is Frank's biggest fan.
``I'm so proud of my son. He's so involved with his children, takes them to Scouts and baseball, all kinds of things I didn't do with my children,'' he said.
On Jan. 1, 1966, when he was 36 years old, Stegemann got help for his alcoholism and stopped drinking.
Two years later, he left the Navy and began selling insurance. He soon launched his own successful insurance company, but the work left him unsatisfied.
``I was driving a Lincoln Continental. I had a big office in Koger Executive Center and lots of employees. Everything was as it should be,'' he said.
He tried politics. In 1973 he ran for the state legislature and lost by 1,000 votes.
``God protected me from that mess,'' he said, chuckling.
He had been studying the Bible for five years. He said he'd felt like he was looking for something he hadn't found yet.
``After I lost the election, I didn't know what to do. I started working more with alcoholics than the insurance business,'' he said.
That seemed to be part of the answer. He went to seminary by correspondence courses and sold his company. Six months after he gave up his business, on June 30, 1974, he was ordained a minister by Jim Woodland, the pastor of the former Open Door Church in Portsmouth.
``When God created Fritz he threw the pattern away,'' said Woodland, recalling the day 20 years ago that he and church elders laid hands on Stegemann.
Fran Stegemann says that was the most difficult time in her marriage.
Through military moves, her husband's drinking and career changes, she felt relatively secure.
``Now, when he wanted to start the church . . . he rocked the boat a little bit,'' she said, laughing in their modest Great Neck Farms home.
Fran Stegemann liked their more comfortable lifestyle.
``We had two cars, a boat, a pool and a house in Thalia,'' she said. She was raising three teenagers and a pre-adolescent when her husband chose the ministry. ``I just hung onto Fritz's coattails and figured if God called him, He must have included me and the children.''
Because of what Stegemann called his inability to communicate in the intellectual dimension that most pastors use, he had trouble finding his place in a church.
For a while he found fellowship with others who also felt like misfits - alcoholics, drug addicts and their families - and met with them in his home.
``Eventually the idea was to have a church where you could come in Levis, you could come without shoes, a place where you wouldn't feel uncomfortable,'' he said.
By August of that summer the church had been established. Stegemann's followers met with him first in an Elks Lodge, then a barn.
Four years later the growing congregation moved into a movie theater on Virginia Beach Boulevard that had stood empty and neglected for several years. In those first years, 1,000 faithful flocked to Sunday services, forcing ushers to put extra chairs in the aisles.
Stegemann called it the Open Door Chapel, partly to honor his own beginnings at the Portsmouth church that ordained him and at the Virginia Beach Community Chapel where he'd studied the Bible. And partly to send a clear message into the community: Anyone is welcome here.
That attitude was what led Stegemann to reach out a hand to Karen and Michael Diehl in 1986 when the couple was accused of killing one of their 17 children, 13 of them adopted.
Other ministers advised him not to take the Diehls in.
``But the bulldog German rose up in him and he said the church is about taking in somebody like the Diehls,'' recalled Bill Smith, a church elder for the past 10 years. ``He lost clergy friends from that and we lost about 100 people from the congregation. He will stick his neck out 100 miles to help an underdog.''
Stegemann says he had no choice.
``If you come to me, I'm going to help you. That's my job,'' he said, remembering the Diehls' phone call from prison.
He was a character witness at the couple's bond hearing on murder charges and conducted funeral services for their dead son.
``What's a pastor to do?'' he said. ``The church is not a playground for saints but a sanctuary for sinners. We have to get past this place where we're judging other people's sins. That makes me so angry.''
But shrugging off convention and embracing the neediest members of society costs him the public following of people who could enrich his church coffers.
The church sometimes struggles to stay afloat. Church members say they suspect their pastor has emptied his own pockets several times during his 20 years as minister to keep his flock together.
He says he relies on the help of businessmen like Ken Hall, owner and president of Hall Auto Mall, the church's neighbor across the street.
``If I didn't have him,'' said Stegemann, ``I'd have gone under several times.''
Hall has given the church cash and financed new projects.
``I hear from Fritz if he needs a car for somebody, if he needs to help somebody there or if he needs to buy a radio station,'' said Hall, chuckling.
Stegemann's congregation includes politicians and doctors, he said, but he said also counsels many people who don't want to worship at the church because of their high visibility in the community. And that's OK with him.
``People come here, get fixed and then leave to go to other, more conventional churches. They start new lifestyles and become successful,'' he said, beaming.
He and his faithful followers stay behind and pray for money that allows their mission to go on.
``This is free light,'' the minister said, screwing open the vertical blinds in his church office and ignoring the electrical switch on the wall. ``We're not in the business of getting rich. The less you spend on frivolous stuff, the more you can spend on folks.'' by CNB