I end every day in despair at what I have not done, that I am physically ill before church council meetings, or that my kids are helplessly easy targets for criticism and abuse, you may again think I’m exaggerating or being deliberately perverse or just silly. But if you’re a pastor, you’re nodding your head.
I’ve sometimes despaired of conveying any real sense of a pastor’s life to anyone outside the calling. I suppose one might argue that I would only have written these reflections if I both hoped and expected to be understood. But, after spending over a quarter century as a pastor, I’m not sure any of us know why we do anything.
One more note: I used as one of my epigraphs a famous remark by Hemingway: All remembrance of things past is fiction. I think he meant to note both an inevitability and a deliberate choice. I certainly mean both. Because of what I did and the person I had to be to do what I did, there are things, some of them the most vivid and charged among all the things I recall, that I have never spoken of and never will. If I touch on them, it will be with less than the whole truth. Much less. I expect all the pastors to be nodding again.
Now let me tell you what it was like to be a small town pastor. Really . . .
Part One
All Hands Stand By to Repel Boarders
The beginning of my service as a pastor was most notable for the mere arrival at the place I was to serve. It had, now that I think of it, something of what missionaries in the nineteenth century must have experienced, setting out from Europe to places that weren’t exactly terra incognita but were certainly remote, home to strange customs and the human strangeness that grows in isolation, places but sparingly connected to the greater world, places easier to settle in than to return from, places they had never been anywhere near. Also, to further the comparison: in the year I began, cell phones and computers were not nearly as common as they now are. We owned neither.
There’s a vivid and indelible memory that comes to me helplessly when I think back to starting out: our little family of four, plus an old beagle who would die in a year, are traveling in two rented trucks, with all our worldly goods, towing our car. It’s December 7, 1982, and the temperature is twenty below zero. All our houseplants will freeze and die on this trip. I am in one truck with our daughter; my wife is with our son and the dog in the other. It’s about 8:30 at night, we’ve been driving north from Minneapolis, Minnesota all day, and we’ve just turned off Interstate 29 in North Dakota, to head east into Minnesota again. We have never seen the town we are heading for, not even in pictures. A Chicago boy, I have never been this far north or west. As I look out the window of the truck, I think I have never seen country so flat, so barren, so sparsely settled. The tiny towns are six miles or more apart. Even the yard lights on the farms are rare, and the farms themselves are mostly dark, because—I will learn— there are few farmers left. I have never seen night so complete or the night sky so clear and filled with stars. We know we will be meeting some Lutherans at journey’s end, but that’s about all we know.
It came about this way:
I had wanted to do something else with my life, but it hadn’t worked out. With a doctorate in philosophy, I had ended up working as a pipefitter. Through college, five years of grad school, and a year of teaching at Purdue University, all I wanted, and worked for, was to be a philosophy teacher. Having to let that go was bitter and, during that time, it was the Lutheran church we belonged to that gave me something to live by.
I found there that egalitarianism that should be the center of Christian life but often is not, that sense that there are no real distinctions but all are equal before God. At that time, this meant a great deal to me, and I’ve never forgotten it. My spouse and I became very involved in the church, its educational programs, its music and worship. Making one of those human recalculations of opportunity and desire, I thought I could be at least some of what I wanted to be by working in the church as a pastor.
My spouse and I attended seminary together, and we were both ordained in the old Lutheran Church in America, one of those ephemeral yet sharply defined stages in the long Lutheran story of uniting and dividing. I’ve told people over the years that she’s the real pastor. They always think I’m kidding, but I’m not. She fits more easily and happily into the role and always saw herself as an active church worker. I wanted to do something else, and being a pastor was really not an all-consuming identity for me. This probably saved me a lot of grief over the years. (A friend of mine, another pastor, remarked to me once that “we are all afraid if we stopped being pastors we’d never go to church.” I couldn’t imagine saying that. The church offered life; being a pastor was just a job.)
But the difficulties of life reappeared, as they will, when we graduated from seminary. We were a clergy couple and, though the LCA had been ordaining women for a decade, no one quite knew what to do with that inevitable consequence: ministers who are not only married, but married to one another.
In those days, you were supposed to enter your service through your home synod, but our bishop claimed to be unable to place a couple with so many advanced degrees and suggested we explore some remote synod that was always looking for personnel: somewhere like the Red River Valley Synod, which ran along the Canadian border in northwest Minnesota and the Dakotas. So we did.
The bishop of that synod, Harold Lohr, had been an infantry officer in World War II, and, after that, a nuclear chemist. Not much on this earth made Harold Lohr feel unable to act. He said he’d place us but it would take time. Be patient.
To make life more interesting, the housing and part-time job we had while going to seminary was terminated, and we became nomads. Having graduated in June, we were still looking for work in November, patience getting a little worn.
Finally, one night, the bishop called us after 11:00.
“Got a Minnesota map?”
We did.
“Get it out. Find the Twin Cities. Now go straight up the map until you hit Canada, then turn left and go until you hit North Dakota. Mind going that far north?”
Nope.
“Good. That’s where you’re going. I’m just sending you, we’re not even going to have an interview. When can you get there?”
Our son had broken his elbow the winter before, and we had an appointment with a pediatric orthopedist in Minneapolis on December 7.
“Mind driving all day?”
Nope.
“I’ll tell them you’ll be there that night—could be late, but you’ll be there. They’ll be waiting with the keys to the parsonage. Sound good?”
It did.
Even at the time, this would have counted as a fairly unusual arrangement. Pastoral candidates today, filling out pages and pages of self-description and self-evaluation, receiving in turn thick packets of congregational self-studies, able to study websites and take virtual tours of churches, meeting for at least one interview, then usually another with an extensive Q&A, must find this process appallingly primitive, almost criminally negligent, stupefyingly simple, dangerously vulnerable to all the disasters all those elaborate studies are supposed to prevent.
But the parish was having unusual troubles. It had been vacant for fourteen months. The former pastor had had a complete breakdown in the wake of a terrible tragedy in his family. In those days, when there was a vacancy, the parish was served by a vice-pastor, usually the nearest LCA pastor, appointed immediately by the bishop. That pastor would preside at one communion service per month, chair the council meetings, make calls on the seriously ill, perform baptisms, weddings, and funerals. The congregation would have to arrange everything else: the education ministry, other visitation, speakers on the other Sundays. The parish we were being sent to was a two-point parish, two congregations in two towns twelve miles apart. The vice-pastor served a church fifteen miles west of them.
Thus, for fourteen months, that pastor had been doing services at