CLOSING REMARKS [Sat, 4-18-20]

Christ In Winter-Reflections on Faith & Life for the Times of Winter

CLOSING REMARKS             [Sat, 4-18-20]

 Old clergy friend John Shaffer and I have been exchanging lists, like ten famous people I knew, but one is false—guess which? Those sorts of quarantine games. John is a good list sharer, for we spent the same years in ministry, so we know, or fail to know, the same people, books, bands, etc.

We have not shared this list yet, and I’m not sure I want to, for it’s a bit sad—the churches I pastored that no longer exist. Half of them, and I pastored a lot of different churches. Eighteen.

I pastored so many, and so many are closed now, because in the early days I had two and three church circuits. Usually one or two of those was in an area where the population was already declining, and the church was struggling to stay above water. [In the case of Koleen, that was a literal struggle. The first Sunday, they told me, “If the water is over the road, turn around and go home.”]

But I never actually closed one. In fact, I never served a church that did not have more members when I left than when I came. But in those rural communities, that was often a difference of four or five.

I feel bad not only that so many of my churches are closed, but that I never got to close one myself. I have several friends who closed churches, and they say it was a spiritually satisfying experience. They got to pull together all the threads of witness and ministry that that particular church had woven into its community and the world through many years, pull them together into a seamless garment, a garment that allowed the church and the world to see what had always been there, but was impossible to grasp in a moment, because it was always on the move. When it stopped moving, it could be appreciated for its beauty and usefulness.

But someday I’m going to get to close part of the Body of Christ, my own body, my own life, and closing a life is much like closing a church. It is finally whole. All the loose ends are pulled together.

I don’t mean this in a macabre way, or for immediate use, but I’m looking forward to that.

I don’t want anyone to eulogize me. We do that in a service to close a church, and in a funeral service for a person, but that’s not what I mean for myself. I just want people, when they hear that I have transferred from the church militant to the church triumphant, to realize that all those loose threads are in their proper place in my particular plaid now, and thus to say, “Hot damn, he finally got it all together.”

John Robert McFarland