Calling

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August 21, 2009

TiM Reflection on a First Year, Post-Residency

Eleven months into my pastorate at Calvary Baptist, I find myself “at home” in my pastoral calling even as I am “transitioning” to a new model of ministry, a new geography and climate, a new Baptist denomination, a new local culture and a new church family.

My two-year TiM Residency at Wilshire Baptist in Dallas did more than teach me skills and hone my gifts. Wilshire solidified my identity and calling as a pastor in such a way that, through everything that has transpired during this first year of my pastorate at Calvary, I have never doubted my gifts, my call, my training or my voice. This sense of affirmation and consistency in my pastoral identity has been especially important as other parts of my working environment have shifted.

Having been involved with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) for so many years, I came to one of the “flagship” churches of the American Baptist Churches (ABC) Rocky Mountain Region. There has been an adjustment with regard to collegial relationships and polity structure, on all levels (local, national and regional). Known and comfortable in my CBF skin (I was mentored by CBF pastor George Mason at Wilshire, a prominent CBF church), I came to a church of equal standing and stature in the ABC world. (Calvary was the congregation of Rev. Mary Hulst, currently President of the ABC USA). The sensation is loosely akin to that of being a confident 8th grader at middle school only to “promote” to being a disoriented 9th grader at high school. While the transition has been for the better part smooth, I am still in the process of shifting to a new language of acronyms, meeting new colleagues from different alma maters, learning new policies and procedures, and moving from a “non-southern” church culture to a “Rocky Mountain/outdoor/Denver” geography and culture.

I feel blessed to have ties now to both the CBF and the ABC—and I feel even more grateful that no matter what church name is on my business card or what denominational gathering I am attending—I embody the title and call of “pastor” without any hesitation and with full blessing from both my mentoring congregation and my current church family. I attribute this to the attention the Wilshire TiM Residency program gave to teaching us not how to do ministry the “Wilshire way,” but rather how to take what ministry we were doing at Wilshire and find ways to creatively adapt and transfer a grounded philosophy of ministry and a confident pastoral identity to any and every church context.

One gift of my transition to Calvary, which could have just as easily been a burden in another circumstance, is sharing the pastoral ministry with my senior colleague, Brian Henderson. Hired at the same time and installed together at Calvary, we have navigated through rough waters together and celebrated moments of God's grace and glory as we both stepped in to lead this 128 year old congregation last fall. My residency at Wilshire afforded me the opportunity to work on a large church staff with a relatively traditional structure. At Calvary, Brian and I, both young new pastors, have stepped into a much smaller staff that has completely turned over almost 100% in less than two years. Through staff changes and restructuring, we have begun to live into a model of ministry that is characterized by a workable equality that has made our ministry team stronger as a whole, and has strengthened our unique gifts as individuals.

It is a joy to serve on staff at Calvary and I love my colleagues, trust them and I admire them. It is a blessing to be part of such a young, energetic staff that has a sound balance of wisdom and longevity behind it as well. Further, I can't imagine being with a more loving church family, one that has NOT been resistant to change and one that has encouraged Brian and me from the beginning with grace, forgiveness and trust.

Perhaps the hardest part of any transition from one to church to another is leaving one family and entering into another. Pastoral trust and congregational vulnerability takes years to develop, and for good reason. For better or worse this year at Calvary, we have had an unusual number of deaths, three of which have been extremely taxing on our congregation in terms of the levels of grief and the subsequent processing involved. A beloved former Calvary pastor (who resigned a few months before Brian and I were hired) committed suicide in the fall; a beloved youth member in our church family committed suicide in late Spring; and a young man, who had been diagnosed with a brain tumor 20 years ago at this church at age four (when his father came to be the Director of Music), finally breathed his last after living 24 years with bravery, love, and courage.

The levels of emotion surrounding these deaths have drawn us closer to this congregation, more swiftly than we otherwise would have been. As individuals and as a pastoral team, grief opened our hearts and raised questions of faith in ways inviting further vulnerability to God and to the mystery that enfolds us. It has been a gift, though a very difficult and tragic one, to walk through the past 11 months with this congregation and through these losses as well as through three other resignations of significant staff members.

The reality is, the typically anticipated transitions—to regular preaching and teaching, to making financial decisions and running meetings, to constant pastoral care, to staff management, and to re-visioning corporate worship—have not been the hard ones for me. I attribute this to what a confident identity Wilshire helped me gain as a pastor, while giving me the skills, the courage and grace to embody that identity with authenticity in any church environment.

What I perhaps didn't anticipate in this year of my first pastorate are the things I could never have thought to prepare for: sharing a pastoral ministry instead of being a “senior pastor” myself (how this happened was the work of the Spirit through the “senior pastor” search); entering a new corporate church life (who knew I would be called to an ABC church and not a CBF church?); and dealing with such monumental and concentrated congregational grief and valleys of faith. It is precisely these unexpected moments throughout this year that have afforded glimpses of God's grace and blessing and love, as otherwise any one of these three things could have resulted in collegial strain, denominational isolation/struggle/red tape, or ministerial burnout. But quite the contrary is true. I feel more energized and ready to continue into my second year at Calvary with great confidence of a long ministry here into the future.

The TiM program at Wilshire continues to form me as I revisit old conversations, receive emails and notes of encouragement from that congregation's members, and as I talk to my residency mentor and seek advice and share struggles. But most of all the residency continues to form me because the seed that was nurtured and began to blossom at Wilshire is in full bloom because of roots that are secure and deep from that first ministry experience. Those roots run deep and wide, stretching from Dallas to Denver, continually feeding me and supporting me in intangible and inexplicable and unconscious ways. It is the Spirit of the Living God, the connection to the living Body of Christ, and the grace and blessing of one church family raising up a pastor in their midst and then letting her go to spread her wings and soar. Thanks be to God: for Wilshire and the TiM program and for Calvary Baptist and their vision to call a young woman like myself to love them and lead them as we walk together in faith.