'Colonial House' actor and pastor shares new book

By Rachel Pritchett

GIG HARBOR
His face is still recognizable from the 2004 PBS series "Colonial House."
The Rev. Dr. Donald Heinz was the pastor in the series that recreated life in 1628 in the colonies.
The real-life ELCA pastor and retired religion professor today is living in Gig Harbor, writing instead of acting.
His newest, "Christmas: Festival of Incarnation," looks at the secularization of Christmas and urges readers to take a step beyond.
"There is still much more to Christmas that can be discovered, and if you're going to discover it, you're going to have to go to church," said Heinz, who taught and was a dean at California State University, Chico.
Heinz's book takes the form of a three-act play in which the church is a theater, the pastor a director and the congregation a troupe.
Heinz said he himself is not at all above the commercialization of Christmas, admitting "I love all that stuff," but if readers settle just for that interpretation, they're missing the message.
"Christmas: Festival of Incarnation," with study guides, is available through Fortress Press. It is the second book for Heinz. In 1999, he write "The Last Passage: Recovering a Death of Our Own," based on a rediscovery of ritualizaiton surrounding death mostly in the gay community through AIDS deaths (Oxford University Press). The ritualization of death also has been lost in the secularization of the culture, he said.
Heinz and wife Carolyn have been living in the Northwest for several years now, getting used to the gray climate and attending Agnus Dei Lutheran Church of Gig Harbor.
Even now, nine years after it was filmed, he still gets stopped on the street by people curious about what it was like to recreate life in 1628, and if the popular series where hardships and strife among close neighbors was for real.
"We didn't cheat at all," he said. The crew lived life as close as America's first settlers did then, though they were chagrined when PBS producers sometimes twisted the stick for some reality TV. Once, they encouraged one of the actors to go skinny dipping instead of coming to worship.
"It began to dawn on us," Heinz said, "that the worshipful attitude we had toward PBS started to feel like reality TV."
The series still is shown occasionally on PBS and is avaiilable through Netflix and at local libraries.
Heinz grew up in Dubuque, Iowa, went to a Missouri Synod seminary and switched over to the ELCA a quarter of a century ago, because of "irreconcilable differences."
Having coffee outside a Gig Harbor Starbucks one cold November day, Heinz said he is sad about the division in the ELCA caused by the 2009 churchwide vote on sexuality.
"In about 15 to 20 more years, no one is going to even be debating this question," he said. "It really grieves you, I think, that the church will split over an issue that is going to resolve itself."
Heinz is working on a third book now, this making the case that the progressive Christian voice needs to be much more assertive in this country, where the far Christian right seems to be the chief public voice for Christianity, he said.