Longtime pastor dies after 52 years serving the Lord

Pastor Peter DeKlerk, 78, died June 29. Photo by Phil Foley LAPEER — The man known to many as “the county’s pastor” returned to the home office last Tuesday.

Pastor Peter DeKlerk, 78, spent his last Sunday in Lapeer County much as he had spent the past 35 years of Sundays here. He began the morning at the pulpit and taught Sunday school before falling ill the evening of June 27. Two days later he was gone.

“Being a pastor was a calling to him,” said longtime friend and former Calvary Bible Church board member David Cronin, “His wife said he wanted to die with his boots on.”

A native of Cape Town, South Africa, DeKlerk began his ministry in Ethiopia in 1958 and had a 52-year career that spanned two continents.

His obituary declared, “His life can be summed up in the words … ‘He loved the Lord Jesus, his family, his friends and strangers — all people!.’”

Cronin said there wasn’t a corner of Lapeer County that DeKlerk could go without someone recognizing him.

Dryden’s Phillip Sweeten, who knew DeKlerk for more than two decades, said more than 900 people crowded into Lapeer’s First Baptist Church on Saturday for his funeral. He said funeral director Larry Muir told him that it was the first time in his career he’d seen a standing ovation when the pall bearers brought in the casket.

Cronin said many Lapeer County residents knew DeKlerk from listening to his distinctive accent on WMPC, the county’s Christian radio station. DeKlerk grew up speaking Afrikaans and didn’t learn English until he was 7 years old.

He said even people who didn’t attend Hunters Creek Community Church or Calvary Bible Church knew him by his accent and would come up to say hello on the streets and in restaurants around the county.

From his earliest days as a missionary in Ethiopia until his last, DeKlerk was known for his ability to make friends quickly. “He was always pointing people to the lord,” said Cronin.

Robert Baldwin, general manager at WMPC, called DeKlerk, “a complete package,” adding he was struck by “how much he oozed Christianity.”

Baldwin noted, “He loved the Lord; loved his family; and loved people. I don’t think there was a single person that didn’t like Pastor Peter.”

DeKlerk, who grew up on the southern tip of Africa and went to Bible college thinking he’d spend his life as a missionary on the continent, came to Lapeer because a local girl slept too long on a Muskegon beach.

DeKlerk’s wife of 50 years, Norma, said she suffered sun stroke after falling asleep for three hours on the beach at Bible camp when she was 16. That meant when she entered missionary service at the age of 24, church officials sent her to the highlands of Ethiopia instead of Nigeria.

There, working in the mission bookstore in Addis Ababa, Norma, fresh from language school herself, met a likable South African on his way to learn Amharic himself in October 1958. “He was a wonderful man, so nice, so polite,” recalled Norma. In December 1959 they were married, first in the British Embassy in Addis Ababa and then again in the chapel at the Sudan Interior Missions.

The couple then went off to their first mission. “It was hard, but we hoped to spend our lives there,” she said.

The DeKlerks had three children, who they had to send to boarding school because of the remoteness of their mission.

Then in 1975, a military coupe ousted 83-year-old Emperor Haile Selassie I, whose family had ruled Ethiopia since the 13th Century and claimed descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

“We were there when he was disposed and taken away in a little Volkswagen. Our daughter was born during the first coupe,” recalled Norma.

Norma said they decided to return to her home in Lapeer, because, “We were not happy with the Apartheid situation (in South Africa). We didn't want our children to be any part of that life.”

In Lapeer, DeKlerk became pastor of Hunters Creek Community Church, the church Norma had grown up in, and remained for 26 years until he retired in 2000.

Norma said her husband “had no hobbies. People were his hobby.”

Sweeten recalled DeKlerk always paid his utility bills in person, so he could talk to the people behind the counter. He said DeKlerk refused to get an ATM card, “because if he had one, he couldn't talk to the girls in the bank. He wanted to reach out for Christ.”

He recalled that DeKlerk, who was widely known for getting up at 3 a.m. to start his day writing notes for church staff and others, for years went to the gas station at the corner of Saginaw and Genesee streets, to pick up a newspaper, but more importantly, say hello to a local man who stopped there to get his morning coffee on the way to Pontiac Motors. “I don’t think he ever attended our church,” said Sweeten.

After retiring from Hunters Creek DeKlerk and his wife traveled a little and he spent eight months as an interim pastor at First Baptist Church in St. Clair. But then in 2002 he was invited by Calvary Bible Church to head up the Golden Warriors, a ministry for people over 55. He became the church’s interim pastor four years later and was in the process of finding his successor at the time of his passing.

Norma said their daughter Anne and her husband, Kevin Mayer work in Christian Broadcasting at the Technology Center in Elkhart, Ind. Their other daughter, Jayne and her husband, Jon Frazier, work in a Christian TB hospital in Mafraq, Jordan. Their son, Bill DeKlerk is a CPA in Seattle. “He said, ‘Someone has to support the missionaries,” laughed Norma.

The DeKlerk family has requested people make contributions to the Mission Programs at Calvary Bible Church or Hunters Creek Community Church.

“I know where he is and I know where I’m going,” said Cronin.

“He loved everybody,” said Norma. “He was kind and gentle. If you met him you loved him. He was a wonderful father and friend.”