notably —presiding at funerals in three communities. This county, at that time, had the highest death rate in the state of Minnesota. During those fourteen months, besides the normal cycle of parish deaths, four council members at one of the churches died.
They had interviewed some candidates, but very few people wanted to serve in such an isolated area. They offered the call to a single woman they interviewed, but she turned them down. I think this shocked them a little because they felt they were doing her a favor by calling her. (One council member told me, a few years later, that some of the questions at her interview were pretty abusive. One of them was: “Are we going to see you walking around the lake in a bikini holding a can of beer?” If you probe the assumptions behind that question, you’ll understand a lot about rural life at that time.)
The vice-pastor told the bishop he was on the point of having a breakdown himself. So the bishop presented his offer to the parish: he had a clergy couple he wanted to place; he would send them without interview or discussion; they would serve together and be paid as one pastor; after six months, the couple or the parish could terminate the relationship, no questions asked; on the other hand, if both the couple and the parish were willing, the parish would issue a formal call.
They agreed and we were on our way.
Those remote highways in Minnesota can be lonely roads. I remember the relief I felt when we finally reached the town our smaller church was in. We turned north, heading for the smaller town that held—in a nice touch of symmetry—the larger church and the parsonage. I got a jolt when we made the turn and saw a mileage sign: Canada, 30 miles. The sign also listed: Eidsvold, 6 miles. When we went through Eidsvold, I thought I had never seen a town that small that rated a mention on a sign. My next thought was: we’re going to a town that didn’t make the sign.
It came upon us quickly. Crossing a small river, we were in it, with a lovely new church building on our right. I drove right by it because I knew we were going to an older church and assumed that couldn’t be it. But it was: the old building had burned down ten years before: this was its very attractive successor.
We circled the block, parked in the church lot, and there they all were, coming out the door: the complete councils of both churches, some of them up well past their bedtimes, waiting to welcome us and get us settled for the night. We had never seen each other before. More strikingly, we had never been in contact during that long day. We came with the faith they would be there. They waited with the faith we would make it. It probably wasn’t a bad way to meet.
We were glad to be starting. Having been unemployed, without housing, we were glad to have a job and a home. The parish called us formally after only a couple months. We served there almost sixteen years.
But we left behind everything and everyone we knew. All four of our parents, still alive when we went, died while we served up there and we missed every death. I barely made it to my mother’s funeral: I took the first flight out of the Grand Forks airport after it had been closed for an ice storm; the eighty-mile drive to get there was over solid ice. We might see our families once every other year.
And then, after those sixteen years, we left all those things and all those people we knew there, and started up again in another unknown place. By that time, we had grandchildren, but they lived so far away we were lucky to see them once a year.
I think of waking up that first morning, after the long drive across that frozen landscape. We were in sleeping bags, on the floor of the parsonage, and the furnace was roaring. Congregation members would be arriving to unload our trucks.
We got dressed and wandered here and there, exploring the house.
The only people we knew within hundreds of miles were each other. I remember, then, getting one of those lurches of the spirit, when you suddenly want to draw back from something you can really no longer avoid, like freaking out on the high board in a swimming pool. I heard car doors slamming, voices.
From the living room window, I could see people approaching the front door, others walking up the driveway to the side door. More cars were pulling up to the curb. My wife was in the kitchen, I think. The kids were upstairs.
I turned away from the window, cupped my hands around my mouth, and shouted, “All hands stand by to repel boarders!”
I heard my son laugh.
I had always hoped I would find some occasion in life to use that line, and I guess I found it that morning.
I think there was some part of me that meant it, that wanted to go back to something familiar somewhere, that wanted us to repel those friendly, helpful boarders, get back in our rented trucks and get away.
But we were up against that decisive fact in the lives of earthly creatures: we had nowhere else to go.
So we opened the doors, and let them in, and began weaving together the words and deeds that would be our life together, the only life we had.
Caveat Lector
That we would serve as co-pastors in the same parish was not something my wife and I planned or asked for. In fact, the first interviews we had in the Red River Valley Synod were in neighboring parishes. One interview fell through, so Bishop Lohr told us to turn down the other and he would keep trying to place us. Once we had served together for so many years, however, we were unwilling to give up the advantages this gave us; so, when we looked for a new call, we looked together for one. Thus, all the years we served as pastors we served together.
That shared service will not make many explicit appearances in these memories, tales, and reflections. The reader should assume it as background, but I will not be discussing it much. This will, no doubt, make these fragments even more distorted than faulty memory and deliberate alteration have already made them.
Caveat Lector.
However, I thought it might be useful to set down the advantages we found in this arrangement and some of the principles we tried to live and work by. This might also throw some light on my reticence.
The great advantage is time: you get the time to work on your sermon because someone else is doing the visiting that week; you get time to make those visits next week because someone else will be doing that week’s sermon. Time, and more than time—it’s a rare gift for a serving pastor to hear someone else preach regularly.
Also, if there’s a funeral on Friday and a wedding on Saturday with Sunday still to come—and sometimes more—at least you won’t be burdened with all of them. (What it’s like to find the words for a young person’s burial in the morning, then the words for a happy couple’s wedding a few hours later, is simply beyond telling.)
We set our week and our tasks by who would prepare Sunday’s sermon: that person was in the office that week, studying, preparing the service, dealing with whatever came through the door. The other person did the visiting, the hospital trips, anything that required being on the road. (When the major hospitals are fifty to a hundred miles away, this means a lot.)
Essential things we did together: all worship services (including funerals and weddings, which we understood as congregational milestones), council meetings, major educational events. We alternated Vacation Bible School by the year, confirmation by the half-year, and we split up committees.
But there’s one absolute about a team ministry, whether your partner is spouse, friend, stranger, or enemy: if you have to be the center of attention, if you have to shine more brightly than anyone else, if you need to control anything you see as important, if you need the credit, the name above the title, then don’t do it. Don’t serve in a team ministry, or on a staff. In fact, do me a favor and don’t be a pastor. Be a politician or talk show host instead.
Paul’s hymn to love, which most of us know from its use at weddings, was meant much more broadly, as a call to life in community: it remains just as vital