From the pastor

Sunday Morning Memories

September 28, 2003

I am anticipating autumn’s most dazzling sight: the color changes in the "grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind." As I move about town, my eye catches a treetop here and there already splashed with orange. And within days now we will witness the total transformation of the vegetation that covers our part of the earth. And we will suspect that God in our midst is creative, playful, and outrageous.

I am currently in the middle of a ten day period that includes some continuing education and some spiritual retreat time. I was in Chicago Thursday and Friday for a seminar with Eugene Peterson. Peterson has translated the entire Bible into common English, a version called, The Message. As a young man, he was working on a Ph.D. in Semitic languages, but felt pulled instead into being a pastor. He started a congregation in Bel Air, Maryland, and served there for 29 years. Near the end of that time, he wrote several books aimed at pastors. He declared that he could take an average high school graduate, put him or her in six months of intensive training, and create a successful pastor for the average American congregation. The primary work of a pastor consists of preaching, administration, and pastoral care. Peterson claims that competency in those three areas is not too hard to fake. I agree. It doesn’t take much to please or pacify the average congregation.

According to Peterson, the real difference between a good pastor and an average pastor is in what is NOT seen by the congregation--directly. Peterson suggests three elements. First, a good pastor is involved in personal, persistent searching of the scriptures for the daily message of a living God. Second, a good pastor is involved in prayer, continually seeking to transform the realities of his or her parishioners with God’s grace. And third, the good pastor engages in spiritual direction, listening carefully to what is really happening in people’s lives—and then helping them see the signs and gifts God has placed along the way to bless them.

This week is my 31^st anniversary in the ministry. Those 31 years have included a significant number of sermons, meetings, and one on one conversations. And I admit—plenty of faking: sermons that only appeared to have depth, meetings that weren’t really necessary, and one on one conversations in which my mind drifted far from the person at hand. Sometimes you all caught me. And sometimes I got away with it. And it still happens. But what I most want you to know is this: I don’t stay in the ministry in order to be successful. I stay in it because I truly want to be an agent of God’s grace and love in this congregation and community at this point in time. I hope to help bring the Bible alive in people’s lives. I hope to help people find companions for this leg of life’s journey. I hope bear witness to how God transforms the difficult realities of our lives. And I hope you pray for me to move on toward this ideal. This next week I will be on retreat in a monastery in Wisconsin. I can be reached through the church office, or messages can be left on my cell phone. --Mike