Retirement Speeches

In my retirement speech, I quoted Jesus, in John 10:10, “I’m here. Let’s party.” [The New Reversed Standard Vision] That summed up my career, at least for me.

[23 young people entered the ministry because, they said, I made it look like fun. They all hate me.]

That sort of career summing up is important. I was given only 2 minutes for my speech before the annual conference of the Central Illinois Conference, in which I had pastored for 40 years, but it was important to have those minutes.

[My computer doesn’t understand pastoring at all, and consistently changes pastoring to pasturing. I try to change them, but if one slips through…]

Wes Wilkey and other members of that conference [It’s now part of the IL Great Rivers Conf] have been discussing retirement speeches on FB. In recent years, apparently to save time for arguments on the conference floor about gay marriage and parsonage standards, retirement speeches have been shunted off to the retirees’ luncheon or even just recorded and put on line.

Summing up is part of the work of integrity v. despair that is required of the years of winter. Everyone needs to be able to give a retirement speech, live, to the whole hoi polloi.

Of course, one of the chief reasons for retirement speeches is so we can make fun of our colleagues. One story I like is of the retirement speech at conference in which the minister said, “Those of you who have heard me preach over the years know that I had only two themes.” One of the other ministers turned to the friend beside him and said, “You mean there was a second one?”

When I was a grad student at U of IA, David Belgum told of the retirement of the president of the Lutheran seminary where he taught before coming to Iowa City. Ministry was his second career. He had started in his family’s lumber business. But he went to seminary, then graduate school, went on the seminary faculty, eventually became president. At his retirement banquet, when it came his turn to give his retirement speech, he said, “If I had known then what I know now, I would have stayed in the lumber business,” and he walked out. Talk about despair!

Contrast that with another seminary president, John Bennett of Union. He did not get to give a speech. At the time of his banquet, he was in jail. Earlier that day he had been arrested outside the UN, protesting the treatment of Hatian refugees. What a great retirement speech!