Sensational Seniors – December 2018/January 2019

The First Presbyterian Church of Jacksonville (JPC) hosted a large gathering on October 21 to say thank you and bon voyage to their pastor, Larry Jung and his wife, Sally, for their 33-years of service to their church and the community of Jacksonville. Larry has easily been the longest serving pastor at JPC and leaves a rich legacy. To put this in perspective, it is necessary to recap how Larry and Sally ended up in Jacksonville.

Larry was born on November 17, 1953 in College Station, Texas where Larry’s father was wrapping up a Ph.D in oceanography at Texas A&M after getting his Bachelors and Masters degree at MIT. Larry’s father remembered growing up poor on a dirt farm in Colorado where the family had no electricity and often not enough food to eat. This led to his father enlisting in the Army where he was assured of getting “three meals a day.” It also provided him the opportunity to utilize the G.I. Bill after his service obligation was completed. Larry’s parents met at Fort Detrick, Maryland where his mother, with her biology degree from the University of North Carolina, was working in the biological warfare division of the Army. Larry was the second eldest of his siblings with an older and younger sister and two younger brothers. After leaving College Station and with his doctorate in hand, Larry’s father moved the family to Monterey, California where he started teaching oceanography at the Navy Post- Graduate School located there.

Larry attended public schools in Monterey and Carmel, graduating from Carmel High School in 1971. He was a pivotal member of the Carmel swim team and had early aspirations of being a high school swim coach. With that in mind, he started at Monterey Peninsula College with the intent of majoring in physical education and winning a Division One scholarship in swimming. He enjoyed coaching the Carmel AAU swim team with youngsters from ages 6-18. “I really enjoyed working with the six-year-old kids as they started to develop as young swimmers and thought this is what I wanted to do, but God had a different plan for me.” While teaching a high school Sunday school class at his home church, he started to feel a calling to a different direction. He remembers, “I had become a Christian when I was thirteen but my faith was slow to develop. Still, I started preliminarily thinking about becoming a pastor and casually asked the pastor at my church if I could go to seminary as a physical education major. He was reassuring but suggested I major in one of the humanities instead of physical education… and that really launched my ministerial career.” Subsequent to that discussion Larry transferred from Monterey Peninsula to Westmont College in Santa Barbara, where in 1975 he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy, quite a change from a planned degree in physical education. In addition to graduating, in 1975, Larry married Sally Hunter whom he had met when they were in high school. Sally, who wanted a career in nursing, was first a licensed practical nurse and then eventually became a registered nurse, a profession she still practices today at Asante.

Out of college, needing a job and still not certain about what he wanted to do with his life, Larry’s first post-college job was with his home church, Carmel Presbyterian, as a youth minister. After 15 months on the job, Larry realized two things: he did not want to have a career in youth ministry, but still felt the call to become a pastor. The next piece of his educational journey was at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena where he enrolled in a three-year Masters program in Divinity, resulting in him being ordained in 1979. His first job was at Carmichael Presbyterian Church as an Assistant Pastor, a job that required a demanding 70-80 hour work week. Larry remembers, “I learned a lot at this job I held until January 1985. Mainly, I learned what not to do as a Senior Pastor and that, if I wanted to see my kids, I needed to find a smaller church.” So, he and Sally starting looking for a place to locate where there was a smaller church and a good community to raise their family which now included son, Matt, and daughter, Christy. Another daughter, Courtney, was born in 1988. Larry sent his resume in to several churches that met these qualifications and was seriously looking at the Presbyterian Church in Brookings, Oregon when he was asked to do a sermon from a neutral pulpit—which just happened to be at the Jacksonville Presbyterian Church. He did the sermon and was called to the Brookings job, but he and Sally were concerned that it was just not the right fit for their family. As it happened, after his sermon and a short stay in Jacksonville, he was approached by the JPC church elders with the knowledge that their pastor was getting ready to retire and that, if it didn’t work out at Brookings, Larry should apply for the job in Jacksonville. And the rest is history.

The early years were a struggle for the young pastor. Church attendance was only 60 per Sunday, finances were very tight and there was little support staff. As Larry reminisces, “When I first asked Session Elders to pray out loud, they didn’t know what to do as they had never done this type of prayer. And then at my first Communion service at the church, we ran out of juice and bread and a nervous elder dropped a communion tray while saying, ‘We ran out.’ It was a lot of fun.”

Growth in church membership was slow but steady. They had only one Sunday service until the fall of 1987 when Larry introduced a family worship service that had a special time for kids, was more casual and introduced contemporary Christian music. “Since we had a young family, we were especially drawn to a family-oriented service. We put an ad in the paper, used word of mouth advertising, started with 40-50 in attendance and, by 1991, were having an average attendance of 200… so we had to add a third worship service. The family worship service was really the key to the growth of our church.” This church growth led to church Elders in 1994 exploring ways to build a bigger church on church property, the possibility of purchasing neighboring property and other options. This eventually led to purchasing 10 acres in the Jacksonville Pheasant Meadows subdivision, using money from the sale of the church manse. This purchase resulted in permit issues with the Jacksonville Planning Commission, the City Council and a private citizens’ group protesting the building of a church on the property. This conflict led to an eventual lawsuit and a seven-year struggle to decide whether the church would be built or not. Ironically, during this time, church attendance continued to increase to the point when in 1996, JPC entered into an agreement with Cascade Christian High School, located on the original Jacksonville schools site, to use their gymnasium on Sundays for the contemporary service. Eventually, the new church received permission to start building; the infrastructure was started in 2003, the actual building started in 2004 and in June 2006, the congregation moved to the new church. Larry is adamant that, “We always wanted our church to be a community-based church, so we have never been bitter about the opposition to the building of the church and have welcomed some of those opposed into our membership.” Soon after moving to the new campus, Jacksonville Presbyterian went through another challenging time when the church moved from the Presbyterian Church of USA to the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC). This move resulted in the second big period of growth for the church and in 2012, the church experienced its highest worship attendance since the church’s founding in 1857.

Like many Jacksonville retirees, Larry is approaching his retirement with excitement about what the future might bring. He already is at work with EPC, coordinating the Church Revitalization effort and serving as a consultant for EPC churches. He is actively involved with the Apostles Build program through Habitat for Humanity and is a Master Swimmer, a competitive swim program for older people. At an April swim meet, he won all his breast stroke events. He and Sally enjoy travel and look forward to doing more of it, especially to visit their children and grandchildren who are spread throughout the United States. Larry is excited about the new pastor for Jacksonville Presbyterian who will arrive in January and comes to Jacksonville like Larry did 33-years-ago as a young man with a young family and a mission to bring the Gospel to our community. Larry and Sally love living in Jacksonville and look forward to becoming more involved but in a different way than they have. “We are going to stay in Jacksonville. I’m interested in joining the Jacksonville Boosters Club, but one thing I have learned, you never say no to God. So we will see what the future brings.”