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.

 

 

 

Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise; your power is immense, and your wisdom beyond reckoning. And so we men, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you – we also carry our mortality about with us, carry the evidence of our sin and with it the proof that you thwart the proud. You arouse us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.

Grant me to know and understand, Lord, which comes first. To call upon you or to praise you? To know you or to call upon you? Must we know you before we can call upon you? Anyone who invokes what is still unknown may be making a mistake. Or should you be invoked first, so that we may then come to know you? But how can people call upon someone in whom they do not yet believe? And how can they believe without a preacher?

But scripture tells us that those who seek the Lord will praise him, for as they seek they find him, and on finding him they will praise him. Let me seek you then, Lord, even while I am calling upon you, and call upon you even as I believe in you; for to us you have indeed been preached. My faith calls upon you, Lord, this faith which is your gift to me, which you have breathed into me through the humanity of your Son and the ministry of your preacher.

How shall I call upon my God, my God and my Lord, when by the very act of calling upon him I would be calling him into myself? Is there any place within me into which my God might come? How should the God who made heaven and earth come into me? Is there any room in me for you, Lord, my God? Even heaven and earth, which you have made and in which you have made me – can even they contain you? Since nothing that exists would exist without you, does it follow that whatever exists does in some way contain you?

But if this is so, how can I, who am one of these existing things, ask you to come into me, when I would not exist at all unless you were already in me? Not yet am I in hell, after all but even if I were, you would be there too; for if I descend into the underworld, you are there. No, my God, I would not exist, I would not be at all, if you were not in me. Or should I say, rather, that I should not exist if I were not in you, from whom are all things, through whom are all things, in whom are all things? Yes, Lord, that is the truth, that is indeed the truth.

To what place can I invite you, then, since I am in you? Or where could you come from, in order to come into me? To what place outside heaven and earth could I travel, so that my God could come to me there, the God who said, I fill heaven and earth? Who will grant it to me to find peace in you? Who will grant me this grace, that you should come into my heart and inebriate it, enabling me to forget the evils that beset me and embrace you, my only good? What are you to me? Have mercy on me, so that I may tell. What indeed am I to you, that you should command me to love you, and grow angry with me if I do not, and threaten me with enormous woes? Is not the failure to love you woe enough in itself?

Alas for me! Through your own merciful dealings with me, O Lord my God, tell me what you are to me. Say to my soul, I am your salvation. Say it so that I can hear it. My heart is listening, Lord; open the ears of my heart and say to my soul, I am your salvation. Let me run towards this voice and seize hold of you. Do not hide your face from me: let me die so that I may see it, for not to see it would be death to me indeed.