It's Nothing Personal

In 2021, I tried being a pastor one last time, but others didn't see me as I saw myself.

I gave it one more try.

In the summer of 2021, a friend called me, a pastor. We’d worked together at a church many years ago.

My co-pastor is leaving, she said. Come and work with me.

I agreed.

It was an interim position, preaching on Sundays and teaching classes on Wednesdays and going to staff meetings and sitting with sweet old ladies at church suppers to listen to stories about their grandchildren. 

My final sermon as a pastor.

I took to it immediately, as I thought I might. I preached the best sermons of my life, which I chalk up to seasoning and maturity and life experience. The truth is, I’d never been a regular preacher. In my long career, I’d only been a pastor for seven years, from 1997-2003 — and that was as an associate pastor, so I only preached occasionally.

Definitions will clarify. I’ve been a minister since I was ordained on September 7, 1997 — that doesn’t go away with or without a job. But a pastor is, by definition, “a minister in charge of a congregation.” The word derives from the Latin term for shepherd. If you don’t have any sheep, you’re not a shepherd; if you don’t have a congregation, you’re not a pastor. So, technically speaking, in 30 years of ministry, I’ve only been a pastor for seven. But technicalities aside, I considered myself a pastor.

A funny thing happened when I joined my friend’s church staff and started technically pastoring again: my faith rekindled, it grew in my chest. I could feel it. I prayed without crossing my fingers behind my back. I taught classes on the Bible and drove home feeling electrified by the experience. I knew it was exactly what I was meant to do.

I even pulled my old clerical robe, given to me at my ordination, out of the back of the closet. It’d been back there for years, unused. I shipped it to Bentley & Simon, where they sewed the doctoral chevrons on the sleeves that I’d earned a decade earlier.

Having preached and pastored for a couple months, I was encouraged to apply for the full-time position. People greeted me in the narthex after my sermons: you’ve got to be our next pastor. Please apply.

But the chairman of the search committee caught wind this and asked to meet with me.