Fifteen years in the same church bring many facets and many rewards.
The average pastorate in North America is five years long. One minister who has stayed three times the average is George Regas, rector of All Saints Episcopal Church, Pasadena, California. He recently talked about the meaning of his stay in a sermon to his congregation.
Two people went up in a balloon one morning. All of a sudden they were enveloped by clouds and lost track of where they were. They drifted for what seemed like hours.
Finally, the cloud cover parted, and far down on the ground they saw a man.
“Where are we?” one yelled down.
The man looked around, looked up at the balloon, looked around some more, and then yelled back, “You’re in a balloon.”
The two balloonists looked at one another, and one yelled down again. “Are you an economist?”
“Yes.”
His friend said, “How in the world did you know he was an economist?”
He answered, “No one else could give an answer so quickly that’s so logical and tells so little about where you are or where you want to go.”
I will leave it with you to make the parallels with preachers. But I do know where I am-in the greatest parish in the world. In May, 1967, I began my ministry as the rector of All Saints Church. Sometimes it seems as though I arrived only yesterday. At other times it feels like an eternity.
Twenty-five years ago, Bishop John Vander Horst laid his hands on my head in Knoxville, Tennessee, and commissioned me a priest in the church of God. That twenty-five-year passage has been soul-searing. A new world has been born, and in it a new woman and a new man. We have all been radically changed by this last quarter of a century. And change has cut the church to its marrow. In the midst of all this, I’ve tried to have a priesthood. Upon reflection, I can see four expressions of my ministry, when I’ve lived it at the highest levels.
I have a ministry to myself.
Being rector of this fast-moving, challenging parish is a hard job, and I love it intensely. But I do better when I take care of my own spiritual life. I didn’t learn that in seminary, but it became clear to me at a very early time in the priesthood. Some graffiti I saw recently speaks to this: “Don’t just do something- stand there.” Precisely! What a gigantic struggle it has been in my overactivated, hyperthyroid ministry to hold sacred and inviolable those hours in my study, away from people, staff, and telephones.
I have a ministry to myself to provide time and space where I can listen to the deepest things in life and to the Spirit of God at work within me; where I can ponder and brood and pray; where I can study with the passion of a lover for his beloved; where in all of this I am fed, so that I have something to offer to my precious people. I do not let people take that time from me, and if they do, I feel it is the work of the Devil.
My congregation has been responsive to my work, supportive of my aspirations, candid but gentle in criticism. I have always felt the privilege to fail and get up to start again. That was no small gift to a young man of thirty-six, when I took on this job as rector. I never felt God gave me the privilege of being mediocre, but I still made some terrible mistakes, and then I would be haunted by those words of Pogo: “We have faults which we have hardly used yet.”
But everyone has not been so generous with me over the years. At first I took all those harsh criticisms personally, whether I was at fault or not. Only in my old age have I come to know something of the wisdom of John Dewey’s words, “Men do not shoot at targets because they are there. They want to shoot, and set up targets to have something to shoot at.”
I remember how vicious some of the opposition has been. Many opposed me honorably, and they are still among my best friends; others were dishonorable in their opposition. After a harsh, acrimonious evening with a group of people who attacked my ministry, questioned my integrity, and wanted my exit as rector, I remember going home deeply shaken and depressed. I stayed up most of the night thinking and pondering and praying. Over and over I kept repeating Psalm 27: “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; yes, wait for the Lord!” I thought of that powerful verse from 2 Chronicles 20: “We do not know what to do, but our eyes are upon thee.”
I doubt if I would be in this pulpit today if somewhere, somehow I had not got hold of the idea that I had a ministry to myself.
I have a ministry to individuals.
A seminary classmate is quick to say he would like the ministry if he didn’t hate people so much.
I sense people are in a state of nervous exhaustion from the succession of crises through which we have lived over the last decade. The mass of suffering in a congregation, hidden away behind the quiet faces in the pews, is almost unbelievable.
Although many would characterize my ministry as socially activist, my primary obligation has always been to be with people who need me; to share the depth of despair in death or the ecstasy of joy in the birth of a child.
An old rabbi asked a faithful student, “Do you love me?”
The student answered, “Yes, you know I do.”
“Then do you know what causes me pain?”
“No.”
“If you are not close enough to know what causes me pain,” said the rabbi, “then you are not close enough to love me.”
Obviously, in a parish as large as this, I cannot share all the pain that breaks your heart. But wherever I can, I want to be with you when the lights go out, when all seems lost and absurd, when life is drained of its joy. I want to be there, if I can, so that together we can find our way to that divine love and light that is stronger than calamity and death. I want to be with you as you struggle to keep a marriage from breaking apart; to stand with you as you try to marshal enough courage to pick up the pieces after failure and disgrace. I want to hear a man say, “I’ve got cancer and I’m afraid to die,” and I want to walk with him through the valley. I want to listen as a woman enumerates her many blessings and then screams, “I’m so damn miserable; what’s it all for?” and then to help her find a mission in life that will bring a joy the world can never give.
How many times in the secrecy of my office a person has found the courage to blurt out, “I’ve never said this to anyone in my life, but it’s about to destroy me”-and in that sharing he or she has found liberation. I am grateful for that trust. What deep things we’ve shared together. They are locked in my heart for eternity.
I have tried to make All Saints Church, although very large, be a people-centered parish. I have tried to proclaim a living Christ who strikes out against the bigotry and war and self-indulgence that gnaw
away at the soul of mankind; but also a living Christ who would comfort people, bind up the brokenhearted, and hold a candle so that his people would not stumble in the dark. That is the ministry.
I have a ministry to the parish.
We’ve laughed a lot about Episcopalians being “God’s frozen people.” But we won’t tolerate that here if we can help it. There’s not much integrity in our ministry of reconciliation to a broken world unless warmth, good will, and love of all people pervade this place. I want to be the rector of a happy congregation where there is color and laughter and gaiety in our soul.
It’s not very chic today to say you still believe in the institutional church, but I do. I’ve given my life to the structures, wheels, machinery, buildings, and committees that make All Saints Church function. My job is not to preside over its demise but to give it life and love.
This parish wouldn’t be what it is today if, over these many years, we had not had a hard-working, highly talented staff. It has been a rare privilege to share a ministry with them. They have helped shape community where diversity is affirmed and honored.
Sometimes the magnitude of our diversity stuns me. We have experienced fierce conflicts, deep disagreements, hard controversies over these fifteen years, yet still we have been able to love each other. The reservoir of good will is remarkable. We don’t have to agree in order to hold hands and join hearts.
In Christopher Fry’s play, The Lady’s Not for Burning, there is a poignant scene when the Major pronounces judgment on the little girl, Jennet, and upon Thomas, who dared to defend her. He speaks this memorable line, “We have only place for the standard soul; you two are clutter.” It is the standard soul-the search for sameness-that is the death of vitality in a church. The power of this parish is that all of us are at different places on our journeys and no one wants to mold anyone into the standard soul. My ministry is to love and sustain that diversity, that ability to be compassionate in our deepest differences, and to call out the creative depths in all of you to create a beautiful community.
I have a ministry to the world.
When Peter met Jesus by the Sea of Galilee after the Resurrection, Jesus asked him if he really loved Jesus. This Peter, who had denied him at the cross on that day of infamy, said yes he loved the Lord. “Then demonstrate your love by caring for my people,” Jesus replied.
Albert Schweitzer wrote from the jungles of Africa, “From the community of suffering I have never tried to withdraw myself. It has seemed to me as a matter of course that we should all take our share of the burden of pain which lies upon the world.” I hope as the years go on I can more fully share in that kind of spirit.
I remember reading somewhere of a half-mad artist, swinging from a high-hung scaffold, who tried to paint a picture of creation on the walls of a building condemned for destruction. That’s what it means to be a priest-to keep life’s incredible possibilities before an individual, a church, a city, and a nation; to keep saying to a world apparently condemned to destruction: You can live.
I love my congregation because it has the audacity to think a new and better world is possible. Such boldness makes Satan tremble. It is said that what Satan missed the most when he fell from heaven were the trumpets in the morning. I am thankful I’ve been around All Saints Church these fifteen years to hear those trumpets and claim life’s incredibly high possibilities.
* * *
Finally, I don’t know what will happen to me, but I’m reminded of the church schoolteacher who asked the class if a leopard could change his spots. They all shook their heads, except one little girl who nodded. The teacher asked again if a leopard could change his spots, and again they all shook their heads except for the one little girl, who again nodded. The teacher asked what she meant by that, and the child said, “I don’t know why a leopard who doesn’t like his spot can’t go to another one.”
Well, I love my spot, even though after twenty-five years I’m still not sure exactly what priesthood means. Those words of management genius Peter Drucker ring in my ears, “Here I am fifty-eight years old, and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.” There is more of that spirit in me than I know what to do with-yet I am thrilled to be a priest, and I know of nothing in this world I would rather do than work in this great congregation. In these fifteen years as rector of All Saints Church, I have given only a part of my fifty-one years, but I have given the whole of my heart.
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