When a pastor's suburban flock disappears

"Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?" - Matthew 6:25-26

That section of the Bible reads as if it were the Gospel of Bobby McFerrin. Don't worry. Be happy. Birds don't toil, and God feeds them. Lilies of the field are total slackers, yet God arrays them in a colorful display greater than any robe donned by Solomon.

Preachers are confident that God has put aside treasures for them in heaven. Even so, a pension plan that kicks in before the Grim Reaper arrives certainly would be appreciated by 78-year-old preacher Edward R. Franz of Hanover Park.

Franz has been preaching since he was 8.

"I baptized our cat," the preacher chuckles with a boyish, maybe even devilish, glint in his eye. "I don't know if she liked it or not, but she backslid many times. She sinned a lot."

As the middle of 13 children born to a pair of Russian/German Lutheran immigrants, Franz always wanted to be a preacher. The boy even preached to other kids in his neighborhood on the Northwest Side of Chicago.

"I would recite John 3:16 and the 23rd Psalm and I'd raise my voice, 'Thus sayeth the Lord!'" Franz recalls.

He served as a minister during his eight years in the Air Force and studied theology at several universities in Texas before getting his divinity degree from the Southwestern Evangelic Association and his credentials from the Assemblies of God. His late wife, Gretchel, whom everyone called Gretchen, was the daughter of a minister and the sister to seven more ministers.

When Franz and his wife came back from Texas, they ministered to people near his old neighborhood.

"We had a little of a hippie following," Franz recalls. "We had 23 smokers, two bouncers, two men who wore those T-shirts where you could see their armpits showing, and two women from the old country who wore hats every Sunday."

That idea of bringing God to a diverse group of folks who might have problems or be down on their luck remains central to his belief.

"Pastor always says, 'God not only loves to the uttermost, He loves to the guttermost,'" says Shirline Arnold Franz, who married the preacher in 2002. She came to his church as a young mom and credits Franz and his first wife with saving her life. The second Mrs. Franz, now 46, helped care for her predecessor in the last years of her life, and married the preacher two years after his first wife died of complications from diabetes and heart problems.

Having served churches in Elk Grove Village, Des Plaines and Crystal Lake, the pastor had his epiphany in 1976, when he left a church to start his Church of the Comforter.

"I wanted one of my one," Franz says.

He rented space in a YMCA in Schaumburg for years, drawing as many as 125 people on a Sunday.

"We had an understanding among the people that so much would be given to me," Franz says of his salary. "Some weeks it would be nothing."

While he was permitted to take a $28,000 annual salary from the church fund, it usually was much less, says Franz, who lived in his mother's home before he bought the house in Schaumburg. Still, he managed to pay into Social Security, worked an extra job for a time with a metal company and bought his own health insurance, which he needed for a triple heart-bypass in 1982. After his wife suffered from heart problems and diabetes, Franz was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Many in the congregation left, and the church moved into Franz' modest three-bedroom, split-level home.

"We stacked them in here," Franz says, explaining how people spilled into other rooms and even sat on the stairs. "At one time we had 41."

Now, his congregation is his wife, an organist and the organist's mother. Sometimes, they'll get one or two more. The church bank account that once boasted $41,000 now holds $41. But Franz, who moves from behind the makeshift pulpit to a chair if he gets tired, still gives a fiery sermon each Sunday.

"You can take the pastor out of the church, but you can't take the church out of the pastor," Shirline Franz says. "He's got it in him."

Left with $42,000 in medical bills after his wife died, Franz says he refinanced his house and put debt on credit cards that he and his new wife are trying to pay off. He has his own health woes and bills.

His sad tale isn't unique.

"We hear them quite often, especially with people we refer to as our pioneer ministers," says Ken Tripp, administrator of the division of the treasury for Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal ministry with 12,000 churches. "Currently we have over 300 ministers in our fellowship who are receiving support" through the church's Aged Ministers Assistance Fund.

Lots of small churches can't afford to pay a preacher a living wage, let alone set up a pension or retirement plan. While some modern preachers do their own financial planning, many of the older ones never gave it a thought.

"There's always going to be a number that says, 'I'm going to live sacrificially. I'm not going to reserve anything for my retirement because I know God will take care of me,'" Tripp says. "Especially individuals in his age group."

Through donations, not as part of a pension plan, the Assemblies of God can supplement qualifying pastors 65 and older who make less than $918 a month. That benefit is the same whether the pastor lives with relatives in rural Missouri, rents a condo in San Francisco or pays a mortgage in Schaumburg.

"I get Social Security," says Franz, who doesn't receive a supplement. "That's our mortgage payment."

Even the nation's largest religious institution, the Roman Catholic Church, can have problems in this economy.

"The priests' pension fund was adversely effected by the economic downturn," reads an announcement on the Web site of the Archdiocese of Chicago's Priests' Retirement and Mutual Aid Association in Hillside. "Millions of dollars will be needed in the coming years to bring it to appropriate funding levels."

The Franzes have a reputation for helping others in need. She still gives people rides in their 1998 Buick LeSabre to the doctor's office or the grocery.

"They are very kindhearted people. They spent their whole life giving to others," says Hanover Park Village President Rod Craig, who has known the Franzes for years. "They lived the kind of life that's giving, and maybe they didn't take care of themselves."

Craig has tried to link them with the proper social services.

"I'll stop by and they'll end up praying for me," Craig says. "They're a fine couple. They've always given back to the community."

Pastors Ron Heitman and his wife Tamra of Evangel Church in Hanover Park heard about the old preacher and stepped forward even though the Franzes obviously aren't part of their congregation.

"I've just sat with them and prayed with them and taken food to them and set them up with our food pantry," Heitman says. "We would do this for a family that wasn't a pastor's. That's just what we do."

The Franzes are looking for help from veterans groups, charities, other churches, people who visit their churchofthecomforter.com Web site, God.

"He's my heavenly father and He knows what we need," Franz says, adding, "I love the ministry. I love it."

Even though his flock has dwindled, Franz will always be a preacher.

"Hey," he says, slowly working his way to the front door to say goodbye. "If you have a cat that needs baptizing, I'm available."