by Linda Macqueen

It all started with that first wobbly ride on a friend’s new motorbike. He managed twice around the block without coming to grief — and he was hooked. Two weeks later, while on holidays in Adelaide, on impulse 21-year-old Ben Mogg bought a Suzuki GSX 250 and arranged for it to be sent home to Mt Gambier on the train.

‘The first my parents knew about the bike was when I received the phone call from the train station to come and pick it up’, Ben recalls. ‘Then I had to ask Mum to drive me in. I can’t remember what she said. I was too excited to care.’

Ben’s had a love affair with bikes ever since. And with the gospel, too. About a year after he bought that bike he enrolled at Luther Seminary (now Australian Lutheran College) to study to be a pastor. He was ordained in 1994 and has since served the parishes of Chinchilla in Queensland and Hobart in Tasmania. Very soon he’ll be heading off to his third parish, Port Lincoln in South Australia.

In all sorts of ways Ben is your typical Lutheran pastor doing typical pastor things: administering the sacraments, preaching, doing kids’ talks, visiting people in hospitals and prisons, chatting with people over scones and coffee, marrying people, burying people, caring for people, praying with people. Typical pastor things. But in all sorts of other ways Ben is anything but a typical pastor.

For instance, how many pastors have conducted a marriage ceremony for an outlaw biker couple in front of a six-foot image of the devil’s head?

‘That wasn’t a problem for me’, Ben says. ‘God is and always will be more powerful than Satan. His word can and will cover everything, even the devil’s head. The important thing is that his word is clearly heard.’

As a pastor of the Lutheran Church of Australia, Ben is allowed to marry people only according to the rites of our church. This is federal law.

‘So an integral part of that service was the reading from Scripture, the prayers and all the rest that makes up the traditional Christian wedding ceremony’, Ben explains. ‘The wedding was six or seven years ago now, but I still get favourable comments about it from the members of that club.’

And how many Lutheran pastors have baptised a child in front of an entire outlaw biker club, decked out in their leathers and colours? ‘They were crowded into a small corner at the back of the church ... but still, they were there’, Ben recalls. Later he’d learned that the club’s president had made this event a compulsory ride. All members had to be there to support the club member whose daughter’s child was being baptised.

Read the rest of the story in the May 2011 edition, available from LCA Subscriptions