I remember my first…

pastorate, Tabernacle Baptist Church in West Allis, Wisconsin. I still think about them, pray for them sometimes, and hope I didn’t do too much damage along the way because I really did love them.

Yet I was fresh out of seminary, loaded with ideas, could speak a bit, and was ready to be, as I look back at it, a one man revival. Tabernacle was a big church waiting to happen, a theory or two away from filling the pews. All it needed was for me to come riding in with the cavalry, the signature barely dry on my diploma.

I meant well. I really did. You’re doomed if you don’t pursue ministry with at least some idealism. I loved my new calling. I loved being a pastor. Sunday mornings were highlights of my week, still are, and things started out well.  The church began to grow.

Somewhere along the line, though, idealism started drifting into obsession. Every word of conversation, almost every waking thought, and my whole identity were being absorbed. My long suffering wife asked me not to speak about the parish from at least Friday night to Saturday evening so we could have some kind of day off. I usually didn’t make it. I burned bright but short, around two years and there was no more left to give and off we moved to another parish in Kansas where for the most part everything repeated but this time for only a little more than a year.

It was humbling to drive home from Kansas, spirits down, tail between my legs and no place to live outside my parent’s basement. I’d like to think that it was about persecution, about suffering for the Gospel, and in part I suppose that was true. Yet it would be more than fair to say that I did myself in with my obsession masked as spirituality, my sermons at and not for, and a failure to understand the most important thing.

It’s not your church.

I know people call it that when they ask you “How’s your church?” Yet it never was and never will be “yours”.  You don’t own it. The people are not yours. It’s past and its future are not yours. All you really have is your books, your vestments, and hopefully an understanding of all of this simple fact to help you along the way.  Unfortunately there are some of us who have to learn this through pain and hopefully we didn’t get burned out of serving the church altogether in our struggles.

Wherever I go and whatever I do, however the future unfolds it’s not my Church. It’s not the Bishop’s or the people’s or the non profit corporations, none of us own it in any sense that matters. We are all just temporary managers of eternal things, things that are so much larger and more important than any one person or moment that thinking otherwise is like banging your head on a wall, it only feels good when you stop.