Ready or Not

In observance of the 20th anniversary of my ordination I am dedicating a series of posts to reflect on ordained ministry and the changes I have seen in this call. This is the second post in that series.

As in parenting, one can never be ready for every possible event that will arise in ordained ministry. According to a Fuller Institute / Barna Research / Pastoral Care Inc. report, 90% of pastors feel that they are inadequately prepared for the demands of ministry. That sense of being ill prepared may simply be a part of a job that is constantly changing and evolving, just as parenting roles change as children grow up. I still find it ironic that from among all the people that could, it is the Seminary that actually sent card commemorating my ordination.

For most of my twenty years I have felt inadequately prepared for the task of ordained ministry.

Approval

Is there anything harder in life than realizing your fate is in the hands of someone else? Whether it is an illness that can only be treated by skilled physicians or a jury that can vote you up or down, we all face times when we have done all that we can and then have to trust that someone else will do the right thing.

Every candidate for ordained ministry in my denomination has to be sponsored by one of the local synods of the church. (Synods are geographical groupings of churches in which a Bishop is given oversight to help them work together.) During my four years of seminary I met annually with two members of my Candidacy Committee. The meetings are meant to be encouraging and supportive, and they are in many respects, but it was also stressful. Knowing students who had been denied approval for ordination after four years of seminary and all the other requirements made the process that much more nerve-wracking.

Additionally, two members of the faculty would be brought in to meet with the student and the candidacy committee. Their job was to vouch for the academic success of the student. They asked probing theological questions about the connection between what we were learning in class and how we would apply that in ministry. In my case, the faculty members liked to play good cop, bad cop. One would ask convoluted questions about ministry that I could barely understand and the other (my academic advisor) would rephrase my convoluted answers so I actually sounded pretty good. I don’t know if this was everyone’s experience or if I simply had one good member of the faculty and one bad.

At the end of my time at the seminary I was faced with one last hurdle. I had to appear before the entire candidacy committee and the Bishop. The meeting took place at the Synod office and I was one of about four or five candidates that were being interviewed that day. Because it was a two hour drive to get there, I had arrived at the Synod office early. As I sat in the reception area and waited I thought about the way my entire future and everything I had worked for the past four years was in the hands of a roomful of people who barely knew me.

Forty minutes after she was scheduled to begin her interview, one of my fellow candidates came out of the conference room pale and sweating. She sat down and slumped with exhaustion. When I politely asked how it went she replied, “That’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever been through. Good luck!”

Yikes! That was not what I needed to hear. But it felt like I would be prying if I asked her anything else. So I nervously sat with her as the committee discussed her approval among themselves. In a few minutes she was invited back into the room to hear the verdict. All I could do was wait for my turn.

When the door to the conference room opened the Bishop quietly escorted her to the front doors of the office and spoke quietly to her. She nodded, turned and left the building. The Bishop then faced me and said, “Are you ready Kevin?”  and bounded across the room with his hand extended to welcome me.

Inside the conference room I was shown to a seat directly across from the Bishop on the long side of the table. The rest of the committee members were getting to their seats after bathroom breaks and coffee refills. The Bishop introduced everyone at the table and briefly outlined the procedure.

The first question came from the seminary faculty member on the committee. I kept my answer brief. If he wanted more he could ask a follow-up question but I wasn’t going to hang myself by talking at length. The second question came from a committee member I had never met. Something in my answer prompted the seminary professor to ask for clarification. As I felt myself beginning to sink under the waves of judgment, and before I could respond, the Bishop interrupted.

“Let’s cut to the chase. Kevin, we know we’re going to approve you for ordination. What we want to know is if you can serve in the same synod as your dad. I’d like to have you be a pastor here in this synod.”

“My dad and I get along well,” I said. “I think it would be best if I wasn’t in a neighboring town so I can develop my own style of ministry. But I know I would enjoy seeing him at synod assemblies and conferences.”

“Well then,” the Bishop continued, “I don’t see why we need to take up any more time with this. Why don’t you have a seat in the reception area while we make this official and we’ll call you back in here in a few minutes.”

And with that, I was approved for ordained ministry. I can’t describe the relief and elation that I felt. It had been a long journey from the first day I sensed the call. And it would be several more months before I would actually be ordained. There were a few hoops left to jump through but they were minor.

I can see the importance of having an approval process for ordained ministry. Not everyone who feels the call is right for the job. And I’ve personally heard the call to ministries that, in the end, I haven’t been chosen for.  I always try to see how my involvement in the process can be beneficial to me and also help those who are responsible for choosing the people to lead those ministries.  But nothing ever feels so good as having that sense of self validated, of having someone else say that they see in you what you hope is really there.

Something Completely Different

Some of the hardest things in life to see are the incongruities that we have been taught to overlook. Life is filled with actions, symbols and meanings that contradict the things we claim to believe. Becoming aware of these contradictions and resolving them can be both heart breaking and liberating.

The seminary is an accredited institution of higher learning. Pastors graduate with a Masters of Divinity degree but the seminary can also grant other Masters degrees as well as Doctorates. So in the spring of every year, those who have fulfilled all the necessary requirements get to participate in commencement exercises.

 My graduation from seminary took place at Central Lutheran Church in downtown Minneapolis. Central is a huge, cathedral-like building with gothic architecture, ornate wooden carvings and magnificent acoustics. It’s a church building that was meant to inspire the worshiper and magnify the wonder of God. The seminary used the church for graduation ceremonies because it was one of the few churches in the area that could hold all the graduates, faculty and guests.

Because I played tuba in a brass ensemble that performed at graduation, I had been to the commencement ceremonies in the past. One of the traditions of the ensemble was to let the graduating seniors choose a song from the group’s repertoire that would be played as part of the prelude. As a tuba player I love John Philips Sousa marches and, since there were a couple in the collection of songs that we played, I requested “Liberty Bell March.”

When we got together to rehearse for graduation I was not surprised to be informed that my request had been turned down. I was, however, annoyed by the short, but stern rebuke from the campus pastor who sat next to me in the group and played baritone.

You see, Liberty Bell March is the theme song from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Most people don’t know it by name but when you hear it you immediately think of the irreverent comedy show. Someone on the worship planning team caught it and didn’t see the humor. Not only did my request get rejected but as a punishment I wasn’t allowed to make another request. I remember something being said about the seriousness of the occasion, apparent disrespect to my classmates and the whole seminary community, and disappointment that I would try such a prank.

I thought about playing dumb at that point but I didn’t really care.  It would have been so amazing and more than fitting, in my mind, to hear the strains of the Liberty Bell March echo through that august sanctuary right before my graduating class processed in. The only thing that would have made it even remotely better would have been to shout “And now for something completely different” immediately before we launched into the song.

To me this was more than a prank. It was a statement about everything I had been through in seminary. It was about the hoops and hurdles. It was about the seriousness with which the church and its leaders tend take themselves. It was a statement about the silliness of the whole commencement exercise compared to what we were being asked to do as pastors. It was about the incongruity of graduating in a building that was the showpiece of 19^th century, urban church architecture and the reality of being sent to serve in rural churches with cracked walls, crumbling foundations and mildew issues. It was about the sheer audacity to put on this show of pomp and circumstance highlighting our mastery of a theological education without the slightest hint of irony in claiming that we were going out to be servants.

There are other places where the symbols of master and servant clash in the church . The stoles that pastors wear over their robes represent the yoke of Christ and are a symbol of a servant. Clerical collars that peek out from under the same robes are modernized versions of the collars professors wore in centuries past to symbolize their authority and learning.  We are taught that these are symbols of the “office” of ministry so we overlook the way they contradict each other. But you can’t be both master and servant at the same time.

I am frustrated by the incongruities and the lack of clear vision within religious systems. And yet such uncertainty seems to hint at much greater liberty for individuals and communities than most of us expect. Opening our eyes to the contradictions between our personal (and corporate) actions and beliefs, being able to laugh about them in a forgiving way, and making adjustments to resolve them is the way towards peace.

A No Win Situation

    Sometimes we find ourselves in a situation in
    which there is no possible way to succeed. What
    are we supposed to learn from those experiences?
    To avoid them? To endure them? To make the best
    of them? Or is there another lesson lurking in the
    failure?

One of the hoops that I was required to jump through in seminary was a 10 week stint as a chaplain intern at a hospital. Clinical Pastoral Experience (CPE) was designed to introduce us to working with people who were sick and/or dying. But CPE was also used as a means to expose each intern to the personal issues within us as we ministered to people. In addition to meeting patients and serving their spiritual needs, six of us would meet with a full-time Chaplain to review our work. The goal, it seemed to me, was to have each intern break down and sob in front of the group so they could be lifted up and supported. Definitely not my learning style.

 I didn’t like being a chaplain. I didn’t like going into a room and asking if someone needed some kind of spiritual tending. I am extremely thankful for the men and women who do this kind of ministry every day in the military, at hospitals and at care centers. But for me it seems too impersonal. It’s spiritual care based on the model of medical care in our culture. Each component of a patient’s health (mental, physical and emotional/spiritual) is handled by different teams of experts that are each trying to fix what’s wrong with the patient. Maybe I didn’t understand what was really expected of me but it seemed like I was being asked to join in a team effort to treat what was wrong with each patient.

Feeling ill-equipped for this role I spent my days  doing the bare minimum to pass my CPE course. I would see the people who requested visits and chart anything I thought was significant to help the doctors. I would meet the new patients on my assigned floors. Then I would hide out in the medical library or a visitor’s lounge and write verbatims (word for word transcriptions of visits I did with patients) for my group of peers to pore over and critique.  

 I feel bad about hiding when so many people needed help but I was certain that a 10 minute chat with a seminary student wasn’t going to do much more than calm them down for the rest of the afternoon. Maybe that was enough for that moment but I could see they needed more. Most patients on my floors were dealing with life-threatening ailments like cancer, brain tumors, diabetes or emphysema. Whenever I entered a room I frequently sensed two competing expectations: One was the expectation that I was there to heal them. The second was that I would do it as quickly and efficiently as possible. What they wanted was a  quick fix. What they needed was a healing presence that lasted more than 10 minutes. Very often, what they needed was for someone to walk with them slowly through their suffering.

The trouble was that I wasn’t able to do either of these things.

I have seen the power of grace at work to calm and relieve an anxious heart instantly so I know that spiritual healing can come quickly. But all too often a carefully chosen quotation from the Bible can come across as trite and meaningless, especially to someone struggling with their faith. We tend to use Bible verses and theology like spiritual Band-Aids when the patient is hemorrhaging.  We want them to work like magic because we are just as uncomfortable in the presence of suffering as the person to whom we seek to give aid. While I was comfortable reading scripture to those who requested it, I didn’t have a go-to verse that miraculously set everything right.

Neither did I have the time to sit and chat about seemingly trivial matters and let the bonds of companionship grow. I know I can’t be all things to all people. But I met a lot of people who had no one in their lives who truly knew them. Sometimes it was because the person who did know them passed away. Sometimes it was because they were guarded and didn’t ever let anyone get to know them. Sometimes it was because they had been abandoned by family and friends for various reasons.  All I know is that I couldn’t give them the time and attention they needed to feel loved.

In CPE I was put in a situation where I was set up to fail. It was not possible for me to give people what they wanted the most and what, at some level, they needed the most.

I thought that parish ministry was the answer to that dilemma. In parish ministry I would be able to take the time to get to know people. But I am finding that the conditions that existed in CPE now exist in the congregation. The demands of my job restrict the time to truly connect with the 1300 people in my congregation or even a significant fraction of them. And while applying scriptural Band-Aids is all that many people seem to want; something to patch up their spiritual dis-ease, I don’t feel comfortable leaving it at that. I don’t believe faith is meant to work like that.

So is there some lesson that I’m missing in all of this? 

Hoops & Hurdles

One of the frustrating things on the road to achieving our goals is that there always seems to be some sort of requirement that needs to be fulfilled to satisfy someone else. While these requirements are often put in place with the best of intentions they can easily become bureaucratic hoops that take more time and energy to jump through than they are worth.

The report from the chair of the Evangelism Committee took less than a minute of the council’s time. “Most of the people in the neighborhood are either black or Indian, and they have their own churches they like to go to, so there isn’t much for the Evangelism Committee to do.”

I sat up in my seat, ready to take the chair of the Evangelism Committee to task for missing the whole point of evangelism. Besides, there was a less-than-subtle hint of racism buried in his observations. The pastor of the congregation, who was sitting next to me at the table, pressed his hand against my leg to get my attention. He silently mouthed the words, “Not now,” and shook his head ever so slightly. Reluctantly, I held my tongue.

For my Contextual Education class I had been assigned to an urban church on the north side of Minneapolis. It had thrived in the city expansion of the post-war 1950’s. But in the 1960’s and 70’s an exodus of people to the suburbs started a steady congregational decline. The people who moved into the neighborhood didn’t look or live like the affluent suburbanites that returned to their home church every Sunday morning. By the time I was assigned to the church in 1989, the beautiful sanctuary that was capable of seating over 400 people, regularly hosted about 60 every week. Most of the Sunday school rooms had been repurposed for special groups since only four of them were used for their intended purpose. The gymnasium echoed with emptiness every time I passed by in the hallway.

The point of contextual education is similar to teaching practicums for people who are studying to become teachers. Even though everyone has been in a classroom as a student, being the teacher is quite a different experience. Sitting in a pew every week and teaching a Sunday school class is different than being a pastor. Since the seminary is responsible for training qualified pastors, making sure that people know exactly what they are getting into is important. Contextual Education is the way to do that.

But Contextual Ed assumes that a person has never been on the business side of the church. For many people this is true. But some people came to seminary with years of experience in congregations. They were aware of the behind-the-scenes squabbles, the infighting and the politics of local congregations. They had years of teaching and leading experience. Yet they too were required to work with a church.

I was probably somewhere in between. I had experience with the inner workings of a congregations having spent so much time in churches. What I needed was experience leading the leaders. Leaving someone unchallenged when they were so clearly in the wrong about the church and about the people who lived in the neighborhood was not the kind of training I needed. This was a teaching moment for everyone at the table. It demonstrated the kind of thinking to which so many churches adhere. Unfortunately, the chance to inspect the speck in our own eye, so to speak, silently slipped by.

With any experience in life there is an opportunity to learn. I met some wonderful people in that congregation who were genuinely loving and worked in unofficial ways to reach out to the surrounding community. But there were some in my class who didn’t need Contextual Ed experience because they had it before they came to the seminary.

I will admit that some requirements for certification or graduation that felt like hoops at the time ended up being valuable learning experiences. I don’t always know what’s best for me at the time. But creating one-size-fits-all models of education can waste a lot of valuable time and energy as people find themselves jumping through hoops and fulfilling requirements that don’t teach what they are meant to teach. It’s simply a way of making it fair to everyone. Creating individual learning programs for students is more work for the educators but it is not impossible.

Maybe it’s time to stop putting hoops and hurdles in front of people and calling it faith development. Maybe we, as a church, need to find ways to let life teach its own lessons if we are willing to learn.

The Harrisville Incident

Have you ever made a mistake so grievous that you were certain you messed up your life forever? These kinds of mistakes can gauge our resolve in continuing along the path we feel called to follow.

It was one of those mornings. We had moved to St. Paul, Minnesota so that I could begin my seminary studies. The first course was a summer-long class to learn ancient Greek. I had made it through two-thirds of the course but was struggling with this last part. On this particular day I overslept and awoke with just enough time to throw on some sweats and a baseball cap and hurriedly walk to campus to get to class on time.

When I got to class the professor returned the quizzes we had taken the previous day. I looked at my score and thought to myself, “This is why I took the class pass/fail.” I had no trouble learning vocabulary but the syntax and grammar of the language stymied me. I was frustrated at my inability to do better no matter how hard I studied.

At the conclusion of class I debated over whether I should go home or attend the daily chapel service. I could return to my apartment, shower, dress and be back in time for my next class (a second helping of Greek) but the idea of going to chapel appealed to me too. Maybe I would find some peace there. Maybe God would speak to me through the music or the sermon so I wouldn’t feel like I was messing up my chance to be a pastor. The lure of holiness triumphed over cleanliness and I followed my classmates towards the chapel.

Sitting in the softly lit chapel I close my eyes and listen as the organist dances his fingers and toes across pedals and keys, piping out a new arrangement of a old hymn. I feel the stress of Greek class begin wash off of me and I’m glad that I came. It was the right choice.

A harsh voice from somewhere near me interrupts my meditation. I open my eyes to see an old, unfamiliar man one row ahead of me staring at me as if I had just insulted his wife. Two women in their mid-twenties stand  next to him.

“Excuse me?” I ask, not sure that I heard what I thought I heard..

“I said, ‘Take off that hat.’ Don’t you know where you are?”

I’m suddenly aware of the baseball hat that I threw on before leaving the apartment. I completely forgot that I was wearing it. Personally, I never understood why it was okay for women to wear hats in church but it was disrespectful for men to do so. The practice has more to do with cultural expectations than with spiritual guidelines. But I don’t want to cause anyone to be upset.

“Oh, thanks,” I say. “I’ll be sure to take it off before the service starts.”

He leans over the pew in front of me putting his hands on the back of the polished wood seat. “Take it off now or I’ll take it off for you.” His eyes began to bulge behind his wire rim glasses. His face was getting redder by the second.

“Who is this old man is and what he’s doing in chapel?” I wonder to myself.  I imagine he lives in the neighborhood and doesn’t have anything else to do on a summer day in August except come to the seminary and grouch at the state of pastors-in-training.

“Jeez. Don’t get you underwear in a bunch,” I tell him. I look him in the eye as slowly reach up to take off my hat and then place it carefully next to me on the pew. “I’ll take it off just for you. Have a seat and relax.”

I can honestly say that I’ve never seen anyone so apoplectic in all my life. He can barely contain himself. I look at the women standing next to him. I watch as their expressions change from fearful disbelief to insulted dignity. Who are these people and why are they bothering me? They sit down in front of me and I can tell they are fuming. I spend the duration of chapel looking at the backs of their heads, annoyed that they ruined whatever chance I had at finding some peace.

Following chapel I pick up a cup of coffee in the cafeteria and find a table where some of my classmates have gathered. I sit down and tell them about the crazy old man and this threats. I tell them what I said. When I see that he is sitting at a table across the cafeteria with the two women, I point him out.

“That’s Professor Harrisville,” someone at the table whispers. Now everyone at the table has that look of fearful disbelief that the women had in the chapel. “You said that to Harrisville?”

Professor Harrisville had a reputation of being one of the toughest professors at the seminary. It was then, and only then, that my Greek-fried brain connected the dots between an “old, white guy at a Lutheran seminary” and “Professor.” How could I have missed it? Now I understood the looks on the women’s faces. I was an idiot who had just shortened his career at the seminary by four years. It was over before it even began.

I wish I could finish this story by telling you that I faced my mistake and went to ask forgiveness. But I didn’t do that. I was certain that this incident would be the topic of discussion in the faculty lounge and that every professor would have their eyes on me. A phone call to my dad convinced me to stick it out for a year and see how things went. I spent that year, and the next, fastidiously avoiding Professor Harrisville. My third year I was away from campus on internship. By the time I returned for my senior year he had either forgotten the incident or didn’t realize that I was the impudent student who suggested that his crankiness was caused by wedged undergarments.

My unedited remarks to a stranger on a bad day made following the call to ordained ministry more difficult. Even though it felt like a monumental mistake at the time, it turned out to be mostly just an inconvenience. Finding the means to go forward, even in a cowardly fashion, was better than giving up.

Dubuque

I really can’t talk about my call into ordained ministry without talking about my dad’s call into ordained ministry. For the first 14 years of my life my dad worked at Oldsmobile as an electrical engineer. The summer before my 8^th grade year I learned that this was going to change.

Normally during the summer our family would spend a week or two vacationing in a pop-up camper at a state park somewhere in Michigan with a nice lake and a sandy beach.  We also spent the 4th of July week in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for a family reunion on my mom’s side of the family. The announcement early that summer that we were going west on vacation to see the Mississippi River made me excited to see something that I had only seen in books and on TV. But it also raised some suspicions. Why now? And why were we going to Dubuque, Iowa to see the river there?

To be honest, Dubuque in the late 1970’s was not a vacation destination for anyone.  I’m sure we must have done some touristy things but I don’t remember much about the vacation. The one “highlight” was visiting Wartburg Seminary. The limestone block buildings, the classrooms, the library and the chapel were like nothing I’d ever seen before. The statue of Martin Luther holding a Bible in front of the small campus and the well-kept grounds reminded me of the university buildings I had seen during cutaways from Saturday afternoon football games on TV. We walked through married campus housing which consisted of a trailer court and a couple of old Victorian houses that had been converted into apartments.

I didn’t quite understand why we were visiting the school you attended if you wanted to be a pastor in the church, nor why it was the highlight of our vacation. Staying in a hotel room with five other people was a new experience but I missed the beaches and campfires. I fell asleep to the loud drone of the hotel air conditioning instead of the muffled sounds of other campers settling in for the night.  This didn’t really alarm me or upset me, though. It was just one more of those weird things that my parents did which my middle-school self didn’t understand.

A month or so after we returned from that vacation mom and dad gathered me and my brothers together and told us that we were going to be moving to Dubuque the following summer. They told us that dad was going to leave his job at Oldsmobile and go to school to become a pastor. They told us to keep it a secret and not tell any of our friends. I’m not usually good at keeping secrets but for some reason I didn’t want to talk about this.

Throughout the coming year we would talk about moving in quiet little snippets. My grandparents were concerned that we would be living so far away and that my dad was quitting his well-paying job. My brothers and I were concerned about being the new kids in school and about leaving friends behind. I wondered what High School would be like and how I would get along in a class of 450 instead of 30. I hate not knowing that to expect and there was no way I could know what was coming with this move.

The thing I couldn’t talk about was the way I thought my dad was taking my call away from me. I suppose there is a time in every kid’s life when the last thing they want to be is like their parents. Because I look so much like my dad I was accustomed to hearing how I was exactly like him and I was tired of it. Now my dad was laying everything on the line to become a pastor, the thing I secretly thought was my calling. Never mind that I hadn’t mentioned that dream to anyone or that I didn’t completely understand it myself. It just felt that if I became a pastor it would be one more way that I was like my dad. So I stopped thinking about being a pastor. It would be another five or six years before I admitted to myself that I was indeed sensing a call into ordained ministry.