'Everything ends': Highland Park UMC pastor steps down amid Parkinson's fight

Even in the throes of a bitter winter storm, Rev. Paul Rasmussen couldn’t help but compare ministry to a day at the beach.

In his final sermon as senior minister of Highland Park United Methodist Church (HPUMC) in Dallas, Rasmussen summed up the moment by sharing a story of a family vacation in Florida, where he watched as two boys spent their entire day at the beach on an “extraordinarily detailed” sandcastle, one with “the whole moat and the bridge.”

He added, “Man, I was blown away.”

The next morning, he said, the tide washed the castle away, leaving one boy in tears while the other started rebuilding. “There is no more sandcastle,” he said. “One of the boys just started wailing. I mean, crying, the other kid ... reached down on the ground, picked up a bucket and a shovel, and he just started going at it again. By the end of the day ... he had created another sandcastle."

Rasmussen, who has Parkinson's disease and announced his planned transition to an emeritus role last year, said that life’s waves, not unlike that sandcastle, can destroy the efforts of a work or ministry over many years, forcing one to choose between despair and action. 

“Buckle up, because in your life, you're going to have a lot of things that are going to get walloped by some kind of wave,” he said. “You can either cut and start crying and run, or you can simply reach down and pick the shovel up and get to work with whatever remains. But that really is your choice."

Rasmussen’s message, delivered as the last in HPUMC’s “Final Four” series, reflected on his more than 25 years at the church, where he started working in 2000 before his preaching role in 2001 at Cornerstone, the contemporary worship service at HPUMC.

A native of Shreveport, Louisiana, Rasmussen is a fourth-generation United Methodist minister. Under his leadership at Cornerstone, the ministry expanded its services and reached a weekly attendance of 2,000. Rasmussen also led a church effort to revitalize the Munger Place Church UMC satellite campus and to raise capital to expand contemporary worship and build a new family activity center at HPUMC.

A former assistant basketball coach and sports marketing expert, Rasmussen has a degree in history from Centenary College in Louisiana, a Master of Arts from the University of Richmond in Virginia, and a Master of Divinity from Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology.

Since his promotion to senior pastor in 2013, Rasmussen also served on the Methodist Health System Foundation Board of Trustees and the St. Philips School and Community Center Executive Board.

One takeaway from ministry, he told the congregation, was realizing that, apart from God Himself, change is the only constant.

“If I've learned anything in ministry, it is that every single thing save for God is transitory,” he said. “Everything changes. There's always an ending. Everything ends."

For Rasmussen, it’s a lesson that transcends the theological: he pointed to one season when, after assembling what he felt was a solid pastoral team at HPUMC, the church was hit by a wave of resignations. That was when, he said, a mentor reminded him of a sobering truth.

"I got about five two-week notices in 30 minutes,” he said. “I called a pastor friend. ... He started laughing. He says, 'Let me tell you, they all leave.' ... 'Yeah, all of them, including you.' In any organization, everybody leaves."

And that universal truth, it turns out, also goes for Rasmussen, who announced his decision last November to step down. After he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2020, Rasmussen said he saw “a noticeable change in my energy level” at some point in 2024. 

As his successor, Rev. Matt Tuggle, is set to take on senior pastor duties, Rasmussen transitions to an emeritus role — a moment he described to the congregation as an opportunity, not merely an ending.

"Life is full of endings. But the beauty of life is that every ending is also at the same time a new beginning,” said Rasmussen. “They come together. They're on the same platform. ... Every ending is a new beginning. It just depends on how you look at it."