CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the
Years of Winter…
The Academy of Parish Clergy starts its annual meeting
today. Yesterday I wrote of Granger Westberg and the founding of APC. I was
supposed to be in Racine, WI today to give the opening remarks, reflecting on
the fifty years of APC’s existence, but it became impossible for me to attend
in person. So, here is what I was going to say. It’s about four times longer
than my usual columns, so you might want to refill your coffee…
MY YEAR WITHOUT
THE PRACTICE
John
Robert McFarland, FAPC
[Not every member of APC is
Christian, and certainly not Methodist, but the only language I have to tell
this story is Christian and Methodist. I do not mean to exclude anyone, just
tell the story as it was and is.]
I.
A PRETTY GOOD BOOK
Almost fifty years ago, James
Glasse spoke at an APC conference. Glasse was a distinguished pastor and
educator of pastors, the dean of Lancaster Theological Seminary, and his father
was a well-known, respected, even revered pastor in their denomination.
Jim’s new book was out, and he
asked his father what he thought of it. But his father had not read it.
“They tell me it’s a pretty good book, if you
like that kind of book, but Son, I don’t like that kind of book.”
The elder Glasse had not read
the book, because he didn’t need to, to know he didn’t like that kind of book.
Its title was, Profession: Minister.
Those of us who are old enough
can sympathize with Glasse’s father. For him, the ministry was not a
profession. You didn’t choose it just for the high status and big bucks and low
hours. The ministry was a vocation, a calling, not a profession. You didn’t
choose it, it chose you. You were called--by God, no less. As my bishop told
me, “Don’t go into the ministry if you can do anything else.”
That was one of the ways you
knew you were called to the ministry--you didn’t want to do it. That was one of
the reasons I thought I was called.
II.
THE STRANGE CALLING
When I was
fourteen my older sister became mysteriously and desperately ill. Her heart and
kidneys and lungs were all failing. The doctors said there was nothing they
could do and that she had only three hours to three days to live. I knew from
Sunday School that if you want to get something from God you had to give
something to God. The only thing I had to give for my sister’s life was my own
life, and the only thing I could imagine God might want from me was my life as
a preacher. So I made the deal. Immediately, at the very time I told God I
would make the trade, my sister got well, as mysteriously and completely as she
had gotten ill. The doctors, of all people, actually used the M word: “It was a
miracle,” they said. And only I knew why. [1]
But was
that a call? It was a deal, a trade, and as an honest as well as promising
young man, I was obligated to keep it. Or was I? You had to be called to be a
minister. Was a deal like that really a call? That was my out. I wasn’t really
called. Unless I really was…
III. BEING A
PROFESSIONAL XN
I had to
start thinking theologically, a fourteen year old hairy legged farm boy. Did
God make my sister sick to get me into the ministry? Would God have let her die
if I had not made the deal? Will God come back and kill her if I don’t keep the
deal? Is a God like that worth serving? I decided to give it 50 years and if I
couldn’t get answers by then I’d try something else.
I received
my first appointment as a Methodist preacher when I was nineteen. Three
points—Solsberry, Koleen, and Mineral, about 200 folks all told. I was ready.
After all, I had been thinking about God since I was fourteen. And ever since.
Then I hit
a birthday that ended with a zero. Not a double zero as some have suggested,
but significant, nonetheless.
All those
years before, from nineteen on, every book I read, every story I heard, every
incident I saw, I put it into my ministry. It went into my preacher brain,
which was a shoe box full of 4x6 cards. My brain got very big through the years
and became several shoe boxes full of 4x6 cards. I never read a word or had a
thought or said a prayer that wasn’t directed at helping my people grow in
faith.
I’m considerably sorry to say
that in addition to helping my people grow in faith, every word I read and
thought I had and prayer I said was also directed to helping me to get ahead. I
especially wanted to impress my colleagues with how good I was at our shared
profession. My life was lived to help others and maximize my status. Nothing
about it was designed to help me personally be a real honest-to-God regular
Christian. I lived with only one question about everything, Will it preach?
There is
always some spillover, of course, if you’re thinking about God and talking
about God and helping others be open to God. You can’t help but get some of it
on yourself.
1V. THE
PROFESSIONAL XN FAST
That,
however, was beside the point. I was 80 and I had never been a real Christian.
I knew I needed to fast. I needed a professional Christian fast—no professional
thinking and acting at all, only Christian thinking and acting. So I did the
Lenten study on Jonah at our church the way I was asked to do, as my last
hurrah. The rest of Lent I would fast from the profession of ministry.
Lent is very long when you’re a
professional Xn but very short when you’re just a regular Christian, and when
it was over, I knew it wasn’t long enough to do me any good. I extended the
fast for a year. I told our pastors that I would do nothing professional for a
year—no pastoral prayers or serving communion, no study group leadership, no
weddings or funerals, no hospital calls. They were willing to honor my fast. In
fact, they seemed unduly happy about it. That year, that professional fast,
ended on a day celebrated both as Easter and April Fool’s Day.
It was a total failure.
After all
my years as a professional Xn, I was a complete bust as a real Christian. Oh, I
did real Christian stuff. Our old colleague, Father Joe Dooley, always said
that the responsibility of lay persons is to “pray, pay, and obey.” I tried. I
prayed. I paid. I obeyed, mostly.
I worked food repack nights at
the Food Bank. I took the Backpack Buddies food from the church building to the
Community Kitchen. I invited people to come to church. I greeted newcomers and
sent them notes. I bought prizes for Jail Bingo. I criticized the preachers and
the hymns. All the things real Christians are supposed to do. [2]
Mentally, though, I put every
one of those things on a 4x6 card and stuck it in a shoe box in the back of my
brain.
V. THE YEARS OF
APC
1968 was the year that ministry
went from calling to profession. Yes, it was the year Abingdon published James
Glasse’s Profession: Minister. It was
also the year Granger Westberg proposed The APC in the pages of The Christian Century.
Westberg
had been talking about an academy for parish clergy before 1968, however. I
heard him do so when he came to Bloomington, IL to speak at the Lutheran church
where he had pastored years before. He made an academy for professionalizing
the ministry sound so exciting—continuing education requirements, a code of
ethics, a journal for sharing the practice of the profession. I wanted to join,
even though it didn’t exist yet. But I was bereft. I would not be allowed to
join. It was for parish pastors only, and I was a campus minister.
I wasn’t
ever going to get to join APC, because I wasn’t ever going to be a parish
pastor again. I was going to honor my deal with God but not exactly. I would
get a doctorate in communication theory and become a seminary professor of
homiletics. You don’t have to be called to be a preacher to teach others to
preach.
By the
time I finished doctoral work, though, all the homiletics positions were
filled, or at least that’s what they told me, and like so many other would-be
parish escapees before me, I took a congregation because I needed a job.
By that time, APC had moved from
a gleam in Granger Westberg’s eye to a Lilly-funded reality. It had not existed
very long, but it was there, and the first thing I did following the Methodist
annual conference when I was appointed to Orion, IL was to join the APC.
What with campus ministry and
graduate work, I had not been pastor of a congregation for ten years. I knew I
needed the help of experts to make the transition, and who could be more expert
at pastoring a congregation than other pastors, pastors who weren’t just flying
off the seat of their pants, living off an incident of calling from years
before, but real professionals who would share their knowledge, share their
practice, with me?
For twenty-two years of fulltime
ministry and twenty-two more of part-time interims and occasional ministry
forays, every word I read and every thought I had and every prayer I said was
enhanced by sharing that practice with my APC colleagues.
VI. THE OLD MAN ON
THE CURB
When I was twenty, I went to my
first clergy continuing education conference. It was called the School of the
Prophets, for all the Methodist ministers in Indiana, at Depauw University. I
had been preaching at Solsberry and Koleen and Mineral for a year already, with
no education for the job except Speech 101.
This was my first opportunity
for education as a minister. I was enthralled. There was a Cokesbury display,
with all the books and Jesus junk any preacher could ever possibly use, or
misuse. I heard sermons by Bishop Richard Raines and Ralph Sockman of Christ
Church in NYC. I got enough sermon illustrations to last a month, the only
reason preachers go to these things anyway.
Most importantly, I was in a
preaching workshop led by Webb Garrison. His teaching was practical. We were to
put sermon “illustrations” [3] on 4x6 cards, because they fit into a shoe box.
We were to use rubber cement to affix clippings to the cards because it did not
dry out the way Scotch Tape did.
At lunch I went downtown. To buy
4x6 cards and rubber cement. I also bought a pair of shoes I could not afford,
but I really wanted the box. By the time I got done, I was running late for the
afternoon session. I was in a hurry. I didn’t want to miss a single minute of
that conference. In the distance, from the auditorium in Old Main, I heard the
after-lunch singing start. What a sound. 100 tenors. 100 baritones. 100 basses.
One soprano, Clara Mae Ripple, the only woman clergy in Indiana Methodism.
As I rushed along, ahead of me I
saw an old man, bald and with a white beard, standing on the curb. He was
wearing a black suit, shiny at the knees and elbows, with a yellowed white
shirt buttoned up at the collar, but no tie. I was dressed like the cool
university student I was, Kingston Trio style vertical stripe shirt, Ivy League
chinos, argyle sox, tan buck shoes. The old man looked at me, hurrying toward
the sound of the prophets, my shoe box under my arm, and as I got to him he
said, “Are you a preacher?”
That was the question, for sure.
But it was too complicated to explain, so I just said yes.
“I used to be a preacher.” He
looked toward Old Main. “Is that the preachers singing?” he asked. I assured
him it was.
I thought he would come with me,
to the School of the Prophets, but he didn’t. He only stood there, gazing
toward Old Main, his ear cocked toward the singing. He seemed content just to
be close to “the goodly fellowship of the prophets.”
Now I am the old man standing on
the curb. In the distance, I hear the voices raised in song, such much richer
harmony now, with all those sopranos and altos.
In that harmony I hear the
voices of Perry Biddle, Thor Bogren, Earl and Martha Davis, Joe Dooley, Ed
Friedman, Kim Egolf-Fox, John and Dottie Freed, Roger Imhoff, Granger Westberg,
and so many others.
I hear the singing of the
prophets, and I know where I belong: I am called, and I am professional.
John Robert McFarland, FAPC
1] I tell this story more fully in The Strange Calling, published by Smyth&Helwys.
2] I was like one of the football players on a team I
heard their coach describe. He said, “They are good at running around the
field, doing football-like activities, but they don’t really play football.” I
was okay at doing real-Christian-like activities, but I wasn’t a regular
Christian.
3] I resist calling the stories we tell in sermons as
“illustrations” because I think the experiences we tell about are the points.
The things we say about those stories are the illustrations.
