What's Next

Imagine yourself serving as an EMT (emergency medical technician) in a small rural community without easy access to physicians, much less specialists. Getting started, you find many ways in which your limited training in medicine, primarily related to first aid, can help the people in the community you serve.
Soon enough, though, you recognize that there are chronic health problems that need to be treated so that folks don’t keep ending up in the back of your ambulance. You realize that you don’t have the education you need to serve the people in the community in deeper ways. So you decide to go back to school.
Fortunately, there is a med school that allows you to stay on the job full-time and pick up your classes on the side. By going on short stints and studying on your own, either when you’re off work or between crises, you are bit-by-bit able to get through the schooling necessary to become a doctor. What then?
Part of the answer depends on why you were serving in this rural setting in the first place. Was it desperation, insufficient schooling to serve in a more urban setting, or an interest in serving precisely in the rural setting that led you there? If there was an aversion to the country scene and you were just paying the bills until you could get the sheepskin that would help you get out, you would probably work through the degree requirements as quickly as possible, making all other priorities take a back seat to the priority of getting the degree so that you could get a “better” job and move to where you really want to be. If you enjoyed serving in medicine there, though, your priority may have been more on trying to make sure you responded to every emergency, even if that delayed your graduation several years. After all, if you weren’t in a hurry to go somewhere else once the degree was in hand, what would it matter how long it took to get it?
Sand Springs is not a rural community. However, people who have a thorough education in theology, biblical studies, pastoral care, church history, polity and other subjects taught at seminary are probably significantly more scarce in our town than are EMT’s.
The place the image fits for me is in this: Nadia and I came to Sand Springs not as a stepping-stone or a move of desperation, but as a sense of God’s call into a different form of ministry after I had served about five years as an associate pastor in missions and Christian education. I took the maximum amount of time allowed to complete the degree, in large part, because I let ministry (and family) concerns take precedence at many points along the line. I did not rush through to complete the degree because I was not and am not in a rush to leave Sand Springs. Finally, I began the degree program out of a sense that I needed to know more to serve this congregation better.
Now at the end of the program and with the degree soon to be in hand, I’m like the EMT-become-physician in the rural setting that realizes that there’s still so much I don’t know that I wish I did in order to care for my community better. And learning becomes a life-long quest. Thankfully now, though, I can learn the way I graze at a buffet line—picking and choosing what strikes my fancy or meets an immediate need rather than being under the discipline of a program (which also has its place) that requires certain courses and deadlines.
Unlike in some other forms of church government, Presbyterian pastors aren’t moved around by bishops or other church officials. The term of service in a congregation is open-ended, with the congregation and pastor both having the power to end the relationship between them when it is no longer fulfilling the church’s needs or when there is a strong sense that God has something else in store. It is also generally believed that longer pastorates are good for the church when the relationship between pastor and church is healthy and invigorated.
There are many things that still excite me about ministry in Sand Springs. We have just restarted our Long Range Planning committee and have many ideas percolating about how we can strengthen the ministries of our church and improve the transitions that come as officers change each year. Our Christian Education committee has been doing great ministry for years, but is now on the brink of being able to step up the ministry we do to new levels. For the first time in many moons we are entering the summer with two great staff members who both have a year of experience in our church under their belts. We also have many members supporting the ministries we have to children and youth and many kids participating in those ministries.
Additionally, there is growing enthusiasm behind strengthening and broadening our missions ministries, reaching out in evangelism, and striving to shape our services on Sunday morning to provide the full breadth of our membership with an environment through which we can whole-heartedly worship God.
I’m also enjoying ministry in Sand Springs with my involvement in Sand Springs Community Services, the Sand Springs Ministerial Alliance, and Sand Springs Public Schools.
In short, I’m looking forward to going out to Atlanta and enjoying graduation exercises and then coming back and rolling up my sleeves and getting back to work. Does a doctorate make me a more attractive candidate to larger churches? Certainly. Would we like to move closer to my parents? Yes. But there have already been a couple invitations over the last few years to pursue a call to a larger church, and I have felt no peace to pursue those opportunities. In fact, they have only served to deepen my commitment to ministry here.
At this point, perhaps the most important thing each of us can do is to deepen in our commitment to serve Christ together. There’s much that we can’t know about the future, but that future always turns out better when we meet it fully committed and fully engaged in serving as Christ leads us.
I’ll miss seeing you this Sunday, but when I come back, my sleeves will be rolled up! I hope yours will be, too!