Deep thoughts…on Friday

It feels like I’ve been in ministry all my life. It’s almost 58 years since I assumed my first ministerial responsibility at Sutherland Mission in north end Winnipeg in 1955. I was an Arts student, and I knew nothing about ministry.  I had felt a strong call to ministry just a year or two earlier, and by the time I’d worked my way through the system, it was 1955, and here I was, a student minister.

‘Not knowing what I was doing’ seemed to be the hallmark of my progress through the tasks of ministry. I had to learn by doing, with some supervisory help. Hal Parker, later a professor at Queens University, was my first supervisor. A kind, gentle, supportive and insightful man, he was perfect for a new and scared student.  Later, when I was working out in “Mennonite country” in southeastern Manitoba, George Taylor was my supervisor. Just as supportive, but not always so available as Hal had been. I had to suck it up and go at the task on instinct. I conducted my first funeral in Steinbach that first summer. I couldn’t find George to ask for help, and I had never even attended a funeral. I went by the book. The family, sensing my greenness, was incredible supportive, and helped me do a decent job.

Later came ordination and placement in Lynn Lake, Manitoba, an isolated mining community. There, I conducted a wedding in a basement suite where the bride was in labour and wanted to be “married” before the baby was born. From there, it was to Drayton Valley, Alberta, in the Pembina oilfield – another outlying place, parts of it very urban, parts of it quite back woodsy. There I engaged in heated discussions about theology with an intellectual physician who was a strong rationalist conservative Christian, and the organist in my DV congregation. There, I encountered ‘yellow mud’ – full of oil!

Five years at Augustine Church in Winnipeg put me in touch with the alcoholic community, within which I did a lot of counseling over the years. A year studying in a Kansas Mental Hospital was my preparation for the rest of my ministry years. One of the key books I read said it best: “People in psychiatric hospitals are just like us…only more so.” That has remained as my guiding motto over all the almost 50 more years that I have ministered.

I spent 32 years in hospital ministry, where I was a teacher and supervisor of ministry students in pastoral care. I loved this work, and believe that here, I discovered my gifts as a teacher. When I talk to my son, who is himself a consummate teacher, I can only smile inwardly and know that some of his ‘gift’ he got from me.

Since ‘retirement’, I have been a pastoral minister in Banff, Alix/Delburne Alberta, Bashaw, Alberta, Gaetz Memorial in Red Deer, and St Andrews in Lacombe, Alberta. In none of these places have I ever been really sure that I knew what I was doing. As a teacher/supervisor, as a counselor/therapist, I had some clues. But as a congregational pastor, I was always partly in the dark.

Congregational administration never really interested me. Trying to figure out ways to get the church to be “the Church” seemed… pointless. If people got the gospel, then they could get on with it. If not, then keep trying to give them gospel in ways they could grasp it. I have no idea if that is correct, or even if it works!

In the hospital, and with people in life crisis, I did have a clue. In those situations, trivia was irrelevant, organization was not helpful. Could somebody “hear” me? Would somebody respond to me? In this sort of situation, I could pour my energy into the work. It was personally important; it mattered. People’s lives were at stake.

I still remember, with agonizing clarity, the ICU nurse who came to me for counseling. She was introverted, seriously depressed, in a barren alcoholic marriage. I worked with her for months, and made some progress. Then we agreed that she should continue with a female therapist. I referred her, and she worked with someone else. And then, one fateful, horrible day, she sat on her marital bed, doused herself with gasoline, and lit a match…I was in pain over that death for months. Could I have done anything? Had I contributed to her pain, made her life worse? Who knew? Not me.

Some of the other painful moments for me have occurred in the last ten years, in supportive and appointed ministry in rural places, who had no other minister. There I encountered my first sociopath, who wounded me while climbing over me in ministry. There I have entered my first serious congregational division, one that can’t, so far, be acknowledged and dealt with. Once again, I don’t know what I am doing, and at 78, I wonder if I should even be trying to ‘know’ or ‘do’! I wonder if God’s call upon me to minister is done, if it’s time to sit back and do nothing. I can’t decide, but the pain pushes me to keep looking at it.

I wonder if anyone else out there agonized so deeply about their life path, wondering what God – or whatever he or she calls “It” wants of them? More another day.