By Catherine Slabaugh
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July 22, 2025
Written by Gregory Favre Doctor or Pastor? What will it be? A young Scot Sorensen tangled with that decision for several years. His father Vern served on church councils and call committees and his mother Patsy headed the altar guild for 20 years. The family, including Scot and his older brother Marc, was in church every Sunday (read more about Scot's family here) . And the Lutheran pastor was a close family friend. But so was the family’s doctor. One way to decide was to have a small, but effective, experience of both professions. Scot as a high school junior joined an occupational program where after school you could work in a hospital. His assignment was in the emergency room where he could see up close and personal the relationships between doctors and nurses, and patients in need of immediate care. Then he spent the summer in a Lutheran camp in Idaho and spent time with pastors. Doctor or Pastor? What would it be? Help heal the body or help heal the soul? He had completed his personal homework, and he felt “my skillset was a right fit to be a pastor.” And then later on, “I felt the call.” After graduating high school, he enrolled in California Lutheran University, majoring in history, graduating cum laude. He also played varsity volleyball and served as student body vice president. He kept his desire to be a pastor to himself during his four years there because he didn’t want people “to put me in a box, as they often tend to do.” But those years at Cal Lutheran helped spark his passion about wanting to help congregations move from an inward focus to an outward one where members would live God’s love in actions outside of the sanctuary. That was the beginning of a journey starting 45 years ago that took him to the Lutheran Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota and then on to an internship at a church in Davenport, Washington. “It was farm community,” he recalls. “There was one flashing red light in the county and five or six churches, each a different denomination. Just about everyone in town attended one or the other. I really liked the Northwest. I learned many things during that internship, which lasted an extra two months, 14 in all. “One thing I learned was to carry work clothes at all times. Often, you would have to go out with the farmer to help him, such as feeding the cows in the winter.” He was ready for his first call, and it came from a church in a location as different from the farmlands of Washington as possible, to Mount Carmel Church in San Luis Obispo, California. He was brought on as an associate pastor assigned to the youth of the church and to the campus ministry at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. “It was a great first call that lasted from 1984 to 1989,” he recalls with a smile. “I learned a ton, especially from all of the mistakes I made.” But there was also another reason why that call was so memorable. In 1988, Scot went to the Lutheran Youth Gathering in San Antonio. There, he met a woman named Kathy Hassell. “Scot and I were both working the 1988 Gathering in San Antonio as staff. He was a hotel pastor at the Travelodge on the River and I was a Youth Coordinator at the Hyatt,” Kathy recalls. “At the training for the hotel staff, we sat across from each other and I thought he was pretty cute. My hotel pastor knew him, and when I asked about Scot, he said, ‘Scot Sorensen is a flaming heterosexual.’ It took me a moment, then I realized, hey that totally works for me! We had our first date at a restaurant on the river as well as our first kiss.” Scot and Kathy became engaged and Scot moved to Dallas without a call. “I don’t advise that,” he says now. But it worked out just fine. He and Kathy were married in Dallas in 1990 and Scot was called to be a pastor on the staff of King of Glory Church as Director of Family Ministries. “It was a message from God,” he labels it now. Three years later, he joined the staff of Zion Lutheran Church of Helotes in San Antonio, and Kathy continued her work toward a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.