A friend and colleague noted that the most recent Christmas Eve worship service over which he presided will be the last one for him before he retires.
Even though I left the fray myself six years ago (at age 59), his comment caused me to stop and think. He and I began the journey together at seminary in September of 1977. We were so young.
Scenes of those days flash through my mind: sitting around seminar tables; a snarling theology professor; mentors T.J., Lester, Vinton, and Davie; term paper upon term paper; roommates from Thailand and India; a revolving door of students, many of whom bailed early; conservative classmates questioning the “salvation” of professors; walk-outs from campus chapel services if someone slipped and used male pronouns for God; driving back and forth, back and forth, back and forth every weekend, first to and from my field assignment 90 minutes away, and then to and from Ft. Knox, three hours away, after marrying Mary; an oral exam before three professors dealing with EVERYTHING covered in 90 credit hours of courses; and, telling my faculty advisor, upon completion of every academic requirement that I was ready to go out and “convert the heathen,” only to hear him quickly respond, “or be converted.”
I lacked confidence in myself and faced a major re-orientation of my head at seminary, having been an accounting major in college. Unsure I was in the right place, the path to seminary unfolded in such a way I almost felt I was pushed into going. Growing up in the church in the 1960’s around Washington, DC, I was impressed as a youth that so many of the primary leaders of the Civil Rights Movement were clergy, and that the church, albeit the black church, played a prominent role. Also, many of the vocal opponents of the war (you know which one) came from faith communities. So, I developed a notion of how Christianity was supposed to apply to life in the world.
When I went away to college I dropped out of the church, but soon was pulled back in by unexpected people. Then, the brother-in-law of my home pastor showed up in town as pastor of a church there. He and his wife took me in almost as another member of the family. Ralph was a support, mentor, and inspiration. We spent many, many hours together, and he steered me toward the seminary that he attended.
When the time came for me to go, my home congregation decided, with no provocation from me, to pay my tuition. Another clergyperson in the area, whom I knew practically my whole life, arranged another, smaller, scholarship for me from a congregation in Illinois, of all places. When I arrived in Indianapolis to begin the journey, I quickly found employment as a student assistant minister, which, along with money I saved from my accounting job (I worked for a year after college), paid my other expenses. At the end of my second year, I was awarded the two largest scholarships given by the seminary. This was a complete surprise to me, as I had not applied for either, and had no notion of being a candidate.
So, despite a sense of my own shortcomings, blessings and good fortune abounded, and I had the idea I was supposed to be there.
Now, over 40 years since it all began, I feel a certain emptiness about the whole thing. So much has happened.
For me, the positives are my marriage and family. There have been lean times along the way, but despite all the job and financial stresses we have survived.
There have been several moves: Indianapolis to South Carolina to New York to Washington to Florida to North Carolina. Numerous job changes occurred along the way, including dropping out of pastoral ministry without knowing what was next. The Quakers took me in eleven months later. I spent nine years trying to hold together a crisis-plagued program of theirs, and benefitted greatly by my association with them, despite the toll the job took on me.
There was a short enjoyable respite following my burn-out with the Quakers: an interim ministry with a congregation that shared many of my notions of what the church should be about.
Following that it was back into the fire with a congregation that was dead in the water after jettisoning their previous minister (I had a habit of following those who were shown the door). Almost five years later, I was called to be the number two person at our denomination’s flagship church in Washington, DC. The senior minister was a denominational “superstar,” who, it turned out, was stealing his sermons from a preacher in New York. The fact that the star was African-American added to the nightmare that followed, as race entered into the dynamic. When I refused to cover the star’s behind (stealing sermons wasn’t his only failing as a person and as a minister), his purpose in life, beside protecting his position, was to get rid of me. When that finally happened, his tenure hit the skids. He was gone in four months, only to finally land on his feet in New York.
Meanwhile, we had to move to Florida. Nine years were spent there trying to prop up another congregation that was spiritually bereft following the ouster of their prior pastor. It was a frustrating and very stressful time, leading to health issues for me, and culminating in my being physically carried out of the church on a stretcher and loaded into an ambulance following worship on the Sunday after I submitted my resignation.
Along the way, most of my professors died, as did my best friend from seminary days, as well as my parents, and others in my life; the mainline church suffered dramatic losses in terms of membership, haggling over issues such as homosexuality and biblical inerrancy while broken people surrounded them on all sides; churches died on the vine all across denominations; Facebook, Twitter, and other social media emerged to provide outlets for angry, hateful exchanges between people, known to each other as well as with strangers; rudeness and offense-taking became the first play in many ordinary human interactions; bigotry and related violence became almost acceptable and expected; political divisiveness continues to deepen and fester; guns, guns, and more guns have their inevitable effects. On it goes.
I have left the denomination to which I was loyal for over fifty years, and am not enthusiastic or hopeful about the church today. I do everything I can to avoid letting people know what I did for a living.
Many clergy and clergy-to-be are inspired by the words of the prophet Isaiah, as recorded in chapter 6. As his nation was in turmoil following the death of the king, Isaiah had a vision of God, sitting on a throne attended by “seraphs,” who sang loud praises for the Almighty. There were earthquakes and smoke. Isaiah was overcome by his smallness and inadequacy. One of the seraphs touched Isaiah’s lips with a burning coal, and declared him free from the effects of his failings. Suddenly, God’s voice boomed: “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” Almost without thinking, Isaiah blurted out: “Here am I! Send me!”
Too often the reading of the text ends there. It turns out, though, there is more: “And (God) said, ‘Go and say to this people: “Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.” Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.” Then I said, “How long, O Lord?” And (God) said: “Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate; until the Lord sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land. Even if a tenth part remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak whose stump remains standing when it is felled. The holy seed is its stump.”’”
There are a lot of frustrated and angry clergy who started out with notions of ministry and the church that simply were not true or, in retrospect, possible. William Sloane Coffin was on to something when he asked, “How can you be disillusioned unless you had illusions to begin with?”
I really don’t know all of what my soon-to-retire friend is thinking and feeling these days about the last 40-some years of his life and experience. In some of our conversations I got the sense it wasn’t all lollipops and roses for him, either. My gut feeling is he will be glad to be done with it all.
Sometimes when my thoughts wander into consideration of the vanity of those trying to hang on to the institution of the church, and I think of their attempts to save their buildings, to stubbornly refuse to abandon their organizational structures, to be more interested in their financial reports than in seeking the Spirit, I remember the stump Isaiah described. Can it be that while what we are experiencing is the inevitability of our selfishness, ethnocentrism, and greed, there still is a glimmer of hope? Is there really a “holy seed” that will sprout something new? I guess deep down I truly don't want to give up on that. It’s just difficult to see the way from now to then.
Harking back, however, to those from the Civil Rights Movement who inspired me so long ago, they were motivated by the faith that God “makes a way where there is no way.”
