Father Kevin Schroeder’s Lazarus Small Engine Repair ministry brings new life to dead equipment

Inside the Incarnate Word rectory garage, Father Kevin Schroeder examined a signature green-and-yellow John Deere riding lawn mower. Smoke billowed when he turned on the engine.

“The carburetor was all clogged up,” Father Schroeder said. “It’s been sitting for a couple of years, so it got a lot of oil in the cylinder, so it just needs to run for a little bit and burn all that off.”

The 34-year-old lawn mower was just one of many pieces of equipment that Father Schroeder has brought back to life through his Lazarus Small Engine Repair ministry. The idea is simple: People drop off broken lawn mowers, snow blowers, leaf mulchers, chain saws and more. Father Schroeder fixes them. They stay out of the trash.

The name comes from the story of Jesus raising His friend Lazarus from the dead, found in the Gospel of John. “Lazarus is brought back to life and set back to work in a community, and so that’s kind of what I want this stuff to do is get a new life and get back to work cutting grass and taking care of people’s yards,” Father Schroeder said.

He traces his passion for repairing broken things to his childhood, growing up in Hazelwood as the oldest of 14 children who were “free-range kids,” he said. They were homeschooled and lived in a small house that backed up to the woods. Part of the way he and his siblings kept themselves occupied was finding broken things, like lawn mowers, that had been put out for trash pickup and figuring out how to get them running again.

“It was like, if something’s broken, including Dad’s car or whatever we found in the trash — as long as you don’t hurt yourself, try to figure it out,” he said. As the oldest, he was the “project manager, lead architect of bad ideas.”

They built a treehouse so magnificent it was featured in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; trial-and-errored their way through fixing a car muffler pipe; turned a broken-down riding lawn mower into “a little hot rod” that they rode through the neighborhood and the adjoining woods.

Father Schroeder set aside his fix-it ways while moving through the seminary and early priesthood, aside from doing his own car work and the occasional oil change for a classmate. But soon after he was assigned to Incarnate Word in 2017, the school was looking for middle school elective courses, and he offered to teach a class on the trades.

For material, he asked parishioners to bring in lawn mowers or other small engines that he could teach students to repair. He taught the class for about four years, and in that time, “people had been used to, ‘hey, can you take a look at this?’ Or, ‘you got my motor running last year, would you mind doing it again?’ So I just kept doing it,” Father Schroeder said. The ministry was born.

While Father Schroeder’s clientele is mostly Incarnate Word parishioners, the ministry has spread through word of mouth to parishioners’ neighbors, coworkers and friends. On a recent Thursday, there were five pieces of equipment waiting for his attention, all of which had come in within the previous week. He typically sets aside one day a week to work on repairs; in total, he estimates he’s fixed about 400 engines since the ministry began.

“For me, the fun part is so many people have views of the Church or a priest that are kind of like, (a priest) holed up in the rectory, just sitting there with the Bible, you don’t do much,” he said. “So it’s gratifying for me to show a human side of the priesthood, that we have interests that can help other people and we enjoy doing that.”

Lazarus Small Engine Repair is a one-man operation, but Father Schroeder enjoys the chance to share the craft with others whenever possible. Sometimes a dad will stick around to watch and learn while he works on a piece of equipment. He’s worked with Boy Scouts on Eagle Scout projects. One summer, he hosted a camp for kids on how to use lawn mowers and lawn equipment safely.

“The thing I’ve learned, personally, is when to stop so that your hands can be clean enough for Mass the next day,” he said. “I don’t want, you know, oily hands to distract people from the Eucharist.”

The ministry is a chance to encounter people in a different capacity, “people that maybe you wouldn’t meet over in church,” Father Schroeder said. Once, an Amazon delivery driver dropped off a package, saw what he was working on, and asked if he could bring over his lawn mower.

It’s also a chance to care for people who need help in a very specific way. Several widows in the parish, for instance, have come to him when their husbands died, looking for help with a lawn mower or other equipment they’ve never had to touch before.

“So you can do a lot of little thoughtful things that no one else sees or thinks about that can make people feel a little bit less alone,” Father Schroeder said.

If someone doesn’t want their equipment back after it’s fixed, Father Schroeder turns to Facebook Marketplace to sell it to a new owner. He has to suss out the scammers and bluffers, of course, but the face-to-face interaction when a buyer comes to his garage is another chance to have a positive encounter with the Church, he said.

“I talk to them a little bit, and you’ll find out their story: ‘I used to go to a Catholic Church, I went to a Catholic school, I went to the fish fry here,’” he said. “…It’s really casual, as much or as little as they want to talk. Some people will want to talk about their past or about the spiritual questions they have. And if they just want to have you help them load up and be on their way, then I hope they feel like the Church took care of us and was honest and made it a good experience.”

The rectory garage also includes an expansive wood and metal workshop, equipped to take wood “from a log down to finished furniture,” Father Schroeder said. He’s made several pieces of furniture for the parish adoration chapel and church, including benches, flower stands and kneelers, and the workshop is another chance for connecting with people who want to learn how to use a specific tool or need another set of hands on a project.

Once, Father Schroeder was regularly visiting a man on hospice who had been an airplane mechanic and had a 1960s Lawn Boy that he loved.

“It sounds kind of wild, but he wasn’t a man of many words, so we just started by talking about his mower,” Father Schroeder said. “Sometimes that’s what surprises me, is something very ordinary that you talk to someone about can kind of open them up to feel comfortable with you talking about other things.”