Meet The Pastor
Alex Chartier
Holy Trinity Lutheran Church welcomes new pastor
Pastor Alex Chartier is the new pastor at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in North Augusta and brings with him experience in prison ministry and an understanding of God’s grace in people’s lives.
Chartier is originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and attended seminary in California. He started attending Holy Trinity after retiring from working as a prison chaplain in Edgefield. When he realized the church needed a pastor, he asked that his name be put in the hat and has been working as interim pastor since February.
Chartier began working in prisons in California and said he took a class about working in the prison system as a chaplain and recieved good grade, but hated it.
“I thought it was the single most oppressive, nasty, hard place to do ministry,” he said.
But he said it’s funny how God lays things in a row. He got an internship working at the Contra Costa County Jail, serving as a student chaplain as he worked his way through school.
He said after a while, with an understanding of how the justice system works, he realized that the people there needed to hear the same message as everyone else.
“You think, ‘These guys know they’re sinners, they have a judge and they have a jury and they have a file that says they’re a sinner,’ you know, so the message of grace to them sometimes is overwhelming because they can’t really realize how they can still be forgiven,” he said.
He said in the parish sometimes it works the other way, people see how great their life is and sometimes don’t see themselves as sinners.
Chartier said after nine months of working in the jail, he loved it. He realized he wanted to be a parish pastor and received a call to work as one in Beckley, West Virginia. He said around the same time, there was going to be a federal prison built there and he thought he could do some volunteer work, but ended up applying and going through the background check process.
“I got the job,” he said, “and they moved me from West Virginia – I was living in the town of Beckley now, they could have not even had to spend a dime – but they sent me to Estill, South Carolina and hired somebody from South Carolina and moved them to Beckley, so that was kind of funny.”
Chartier helped activate the federal prison in Edgefield and worked there for 19 years. He said he realized the power of God’s love with his first daughter.
“You wonder how God can love something that’s broken, and love it so much that he would die on the cross for it,” he said.
Chartier’s first daughter had a stroke when she was 5 days old, he said, and was disabled for 14 years until the time that she died.
“I realized in how deeply I loved her and as broken as she was with her disability, that I would have gone to a cross for her. All of a sudden it made sense, and I think sometimes we don’t examine our lives and see how God’s at work in them, but that was one of those times in my life that was very very profound,” he said.
He said if someone’s looking for a congregation that is comfortable and loving and where they can hear a message of hope, come to Holy Trinity.
“One of the things I thought about putting on the sign is something like ‘Grumpy, cranky, happy, joyful, conservative, liberal – are all welcome here.’ It doesn’t matter where you came from, it matters where you’re going, and I want people to know that,” Chartier said.
“As long as we make Christ our focus as a Christian Church, I think the sky’s the limit as to how we can reach out to one another and love one another and support one another, even if they’re going through something difficult.”