Why Don't You Just Go Somewhere Else?
When is a job just a job and when is it a vocation, a calling?
“Ultimately, it is just a job,” she said. My therapist was walking me through how to move on from an earth-shattering (at least for me) loss. The Board of Ordained Ministry had just informed me that upon my most recent interview and examination, it was believed that I have neither the gifts nor the grace needed to be a United Methodist pastor. In all honesty, I saw it coming. I had struggled mightily with the interview process. The interviews being on Zoom for the last couple of years had made it incredibly difficult to feel like I was connecting with individual board members. I have a very acute anxiety disorder that comes out in public more in that setting than anywhere else. But most importantly, the work I am called to do often looks suspect to most mainstream religious leaders.
For some strange reason, I have always been called to the one who has been bullied, the one who has no other place to be, the one with a bad father or mother, the one who struggles to find faith, the one on their way out of the church for good. When I was a youth pastor, if a student showed up who had it together, if they had a great mom and dad and got good grades and had a lot of friends, that kid would stick around for about three weeks. I would keep calling them and meeting up with their parents, but I was not a natural fit to be their pastor. If a kid was queer, had one struggling parent, and had been rejected by every human institution in the known world, that kid would be in my orbit for the rest of my ministry. It’s just the way this has worked.
This kind of ministry has required my holding things loosely. Am I teaching about How Firm a Foundation? Not really. The foundation that these folks experience is pretty shaky. They’ve been hurt and rejected and hope that someone will love them. Before they are ready to receive that love from Christ Jesus, one of his followers would have to prove that love by being Jesus for them. It is not a natural fit for them to come back to the Church. Often the Church no longer looks like love; it looks like oppression.
But somehow, the kind of love that has no agenda has come easy for me in that setting. I’ve never needed a kid who has dealt with more pain than I can imagine to somehow recite a creed or list of beliefs before they can be welcomed. That said, it is hard for me to love the mainstream church. When I was growing up, as a kid with a big personality and a lot of questions, I felt a lot of hurt and rejection on a daily basis in church and in my youth group. It nearly broke me. I thought God hated me because of the hateful things my church taught me about myself. I remember praying in my bedroom as a teenager, screaming at God through hot tears, “If you hate me, then I hate you.” For a long time, that marked the moment I gave up on God.
I wish I hadn’t had that experience, but I believe it has become a gift that has helped me translate the message of the gospel for the ones for whom it was written. I believe the gospel is uniquely for the poor and the marginalized. As I come across churches full of people who are privileged and shrinking, I wonder when the king will start inviting the ones in the street (Mt. 22).
Though I may not be a natural fit for the United Methodist Church and it may never work out between us, I have tried to give it a go because it has been the only place that has ever been willing to give me a try. I still remember 2007 when I was having one of the hardest seasons of my life. I was finishing grad school and applying for Ph.D. programs, teaching high school, and trying to have a child with my wife. Then it all came crashing down. Every school to which I applied rejected me with a few short paragraphs on letterhead. In my job as a charter high school teacher, the administration decided to go another way and let a lot of us go, most of actually. And then, as a jobless and prospectless young man, my wife became pregnant and wanted to stay home with our daughter.
I was frantic, much more so than I am right now as a realize that ministry as I know it likely has an expiration date. I applied for every job I could as a person with two degrees in theology. Teaching job? Applied. Jewish high school administrator? Applied. Youth Pastor at a Methodist Church? Applied. Custodian? Applied. In this one-sentence history lesson, I will remind you that this was the beginning of the financial meltdown; jobs were evaporating as companies would stop the hiring process even without the position being filled. As month after month went on, I began to panic and wonder what God was doing in my life. I thought I had been called to teach, but it was all falling apart.
Eventually, that one youth pastor job at a small United Methodist Church called me to offer an interview. It had been months and I’d forgotten that I applied. But after some confusion on both our parts, I went in for an interview and I stepped onto the property and immediately felt like I’d come home.
So, sorry to my therapist, but it’s not just a job. This too shall pass and I will survive, but I am again really struggling to see what God is going to do with this little life of mine. I hope that, much like the season I mentioned before, I look back at this time in my life with no small sense of “O, ye of little faith, why did you doubt?” (Mt. 8). I don’t believe that God is done with me, but I believe God is going to take me out of my comfort zone and farther into the far country. Though it shakes my foundation, I’m still finding a sense of home.