ELM CREEK —Three different people handed the Rev. Tom Swartley the same Bible verse this week. He pulls a scrap of paper out of his pants pocket after church and reads the words from the Book of Matthew aloud.

“And ye shall be brought before governors and kings for my sake, for a testimony against them and the Gentiles,” it begins.

“But when they deliver you up, take no thought how or what ye shall speak… For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you.” 

Some people think that’s what Swartley did Tuesday during his opening prayer to the Nebraska Legislature, a prayer in which he called abortion murder and said anarchy sprouted from the teaching of evolution in schools.

The 32-year-old former insurance agent spoke for God, these people think, or rather God spoke through him, and the Gentiles, they did not like that.

“Open our eyes to see that we’ve killed 47 million young American taxpayers and indeed Social Security is in crisis,” Swartley prayed Tuesday, linking abortion with Social Security revenues. “Open our eyes to the other aspects of this 33-year-old bloody nightmare.”

Other people think Swartley’s prayer trampled on the U.S. Constitution and showed disrespect to the Nebraska Legislature to advance a political view offered every day on A.M. radio.

This wasn’t biblical, they say, it was political. This wasn’t right. It was wrong.

“We’ve put our children into the same category as other mammals, and we wonder sometimes why they act like animals,” Swartley said Tuesday, now praying against evolution.

“Forgive us for sowing the seeds of anarchy in the hearts of children. Open our eyes, God.”

So, the Elm Creek minister is either a saint or a right-wing parrot.

 He’s “wise beyond his years” according to a parishioner, or “a dolt” according to Sen. Ernie Chambers.

Either way, the controversy Swartley kicked up had mostly settled by Sunday, when he took the pulpit at First Christian Church.

His words had spiced dinner conversations, filled a news cycle or two and then disappeared into the ether. 

But follow Swartley home to Elm Creek, learn a little about him. Sit in the back pew and watch 63 people give him a standing ovation before church begins.

And listen to him during his sermon and after it, listen for something alien to these black-and-white debates about science and religion, pro-life and pro-choice.

You hear doubt.

“God gets credit for this,” he says after the applause dies. “I think he has had his way with me, but sometimes I wish he’d picked somebody else.”

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The first thing the parishoners of the First Christian Church want you to know is that a three-minute prayer does not define Tom Swartley.

Yes, it did define his views on abortion and evolution, and — truth be told — that prayer reflected most of the congregation’s views as well.

But no sound byte has yet captured his nickname around Elm Creek — he’s the Breadman, because he’s fond of baking it from scratch and driving it over to the homes of friends as well as random strangers.

No one in Lincoln knew that Swartley has fed the hungry, clothed the homeless, comforted the sick and dying and played with children. In the year since he moved to Elm Creek, Swartley has done so more faithfully than any other pastor these people can remember.

“He’s an excellent pastor,” says Dale Wright, who’s attended First Christian for six decades. “When our son-in-law had heart surgery, Tom was right there.”

Church attendance has doubled since Swartley took over. The congregation is younger. The children’s group is thriving.

Swartley helped Julia McGovern with her transition from Pittsburgh to Elm Creek. He consoled her when she lost a child. He helped her adopt another. 

“If it wasn’t for this pastor and his family, I don’t know where we’d be,” she says. 

Swartley himself didn’t know he’d be here even two years ago. He  served in the Navy. He managed a convenience store in Columbus. He sold insurance. He  quit to become a full-time student at Nebraska Christian College in Norfolk.

Then Elm Creek called. They needed a pastor. He needed a job.

That was his story until Tuesday.

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It may have been God’s will, but it was a form letter sent by Sen. Jim Cudaback of nearby Riverdale that invited Swartley to pray at the Legislature.

He says he prayed about whether to accept. Then he dialed the number on the letter and the voice on the other end asked him, “Is the 24th good?”

Swartley soon received a packet detailing the morning prayer’s guidelines. He read it, including the part about how political issues should not be discussed during the prayer.

He wrote the 32-sentence prayer. His wife read it.

“Isn’t this political?” she asked.

“No, it’s moral,” he said. 

On Tuesday, he says, he calmly stood in front of the senators and delivered the prayer.

He touched on evolution and abortion, he says, because he believes they are the two largest issues facing us today.

Why just those two? What about hunger? Poverty? War?

“We haven’t lost 47 million to hunger and war,” he says.

Chambers heard Swartley praying and rushed down to blast the prayer’s content on the legislative floor. Other state senators, including Cudaback, clucked their disapproval as well.

Reporters questioned. The public buzzed.

“It was after the other shoe dropped that I thought, ‘Whoa, what’s the big deal about this?’”

What Swartley thinks is a big deal is that creationism cannot be taught in schools.

He says there are plenty of problems with evolution. The Grand Canyon couldn’t have been created under the theory of evolution, he says, because the Colorado River would’ve needed to run uphill.

The earth can’t be millions of years old, he says, because it would’ve spun so fast and been so close to the moon that nothing could’ve lived.

Instead, the Grand Canyon was formed by a giant flood, the flood that Noah rode out in his boat.

And the earth is only thousands of years old, not millions.

“Did all the dogs in the world come from two dogs in Noah’s ark? Yeah, I’d buy that,” he says.

This conclusion is part science, part faith, he says.

“When we call into question Genesis, then when Jesus quotes Genesis we have to question his accuracy.

“If you question a part of the Bible, you throw a shadow over the whole thing.”

So there it is, the white in the black-and-white, or the black, depending on your particular point of view.

But here comes that strange gray tone again, seeping back into the conversation after the churchgoers have filed out in time for Sunday dinner. 

It appears when Swartley seems to be revving up for the ol’ “If I had to do it all over again” statement, the ultimate in tough-guy rhetoric.

Instead, he says this:

“If I’d known what was going to happen, I never would’ve done it,” he says.

“I’d have chickened out in a minute.”

Reach Matthew Hansen at 473-7245 or mhansen@journalstar.com.

Prayer is common in legislatures across U.S.

By NATE JENKINS | Lincoln Journal Star

Invoking higher powers to help lawmakers travel a righteous legislative path is commonplace on state lawmaking floors across the country.

Christian entreaties are the most prevalent, but they aren’t the only ones. At least not in Vermont.

“Senators in Vermont occasionally hear Buddhists play drums,” says a recent Stateline.org story on the issue of prayers and state legislatures. “Christian preachers play guitars during the chamber’s relatively rule-free ‘devotional exercises’,” it continues.

That probably wouldn’t fly on the floor of the Nebraska Unicameral, where state senators are accustomed to sober prayers that are the religious equivalent of dry toast – good for you, some might say, but not too exciting.

The routine was broken last week when an Elm Creek pastor, Tom Swartley, unleashed some moralistic exuberance that left state senators angry instead of inspired. In the prayer, he asked that state senators be given the courage to “do what is right” by condemning abortion and stopping the teaching of evolution in the state’s schools.

Some state senators believe Swartley broke rules regarding what can and can’t be said by guest chaplains who offer prayers at the beginning of each legislative day. One of the rules prohibits the guest chaplains from mentioning topics that could be considered political. Swartley believes that while the issues he spoke of have political aspects, they are first and foremost moral issues.

Some states, such as Ohio, have safeguards in place to ensure that prayers stay tame. Those who pray before the House in Ohio, according to the same Stateline.org story, must submit remarks three days in advance to ensure they aren’t “denominational, sectarian or proselytizing.”

A U.S. District Court in Indiana recently endorsed similar guidelines when it issued an injunction against the speaker of the House of that state from permitting sectarian prayer. In other words, a ban against using Jesus’ name.

That case relied on precedence established by a two-decade-old case carrying a name that may ring a bell — Ernie Chambers, the senator from Omaha. Chambers argued that Nebraska’s practice at the time of paying a chaplain using state funds was unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court determined in 1983 that it was not.

Chaplaincy, wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger for the court at the time, is “part of the fabric of our society. “It is simply a tolerable acknowledgement of beliefs widely held among the people of this country.”

Twenty years later, in 2002, at least 47 states had every legislative day open with prayer in one or both chambers of their two-house systems, according to a survey by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Reach Nate Jenkins at 473-7223 or njenkins@journalstar.com.