The small, red brick church sits in a mostly black neighborhood of Evansville Indiana. About 80 percent of the two hundred people attending Grace Lutheran Church are black as well. The only thing black about the Rev. Walter Wangerin is his cassock.
Immediately to the rear of the church sits a matching red brick parish house. The sign above the door reads Office. Two LEADERSHIP editors knock, and Wangerin emerges from a rear office that was obviously once a cozy bedroom. He welcomes us toward the comfortable armchairs across from a desk and a wall full of bookshelves.
After a few moments we ask, “What brought you to this church?”
It’s a natural enough question, one we might ask a pastor in any of a hundred settings. But the question has been at the front of our minds ever since we pulled up and saw that this was hardly a church to grace the front of a Hallmark greeting card.
Walt Wangerin and Grace Lutheran Church appear mismatched. He is better known for his writing than his pastoring. After receiving a Ph.D. in English literature and a divinity degree from Seminex in Saint Louis, he began teaching at the University of Evansville. He’s in demand as a speaker at all kinds of functions in the Evansville area, and he writes a regular column for the local newspaper.
His writing is one of the reasons we came to see him. In 1978 he wrote The Book of the Dun Cow, which won the National Religious Book Award (children’s category) and the American Book Award for best science fiction paperback, among others. He contributes beautifully crafted articles to Christianity Today. Many of his themes are drawn from his pastoral experience. But talk about what he might write for LEADERSHIP is temporarily shelved as we explore his call to ministry.
“I resisted the ministry as a young man,” Wangerin says. “There was no real reason to, I guess. Both my dad and my grandfather were ministers, and I was always interested. But I took up English literature in graduate school and ended up teaching literature and philosophy. That’s when I first got involved with Grace Church.
“It was only then, as I started serving in the fringes of this church, that I began to sense a call to ministry. In a sense, it took the people of this congregation to say, ‘We need you to minister to us.’ Without that personal call, I’d still be teaching literature.
“I wasn’t called to some abstract vocation but to these people. Since then God has made it clear to me that this is where I belong.”
His ordination night-and afterward-are vividly recalled in “The Ordination from Above.”
How does the pastoral call work? It has been on our minds a great deal lately as we’ve selected articles for this issue of LEADERSHIP. Why does someone choose the ministry? Or does someone get chosen for the ministry? If it’s the latter, who does the choosing?
John Calvin recognized two choosers: “The secret call of which every minister is conscious in himself before God, and the external call, which belongs to the public order of the church.”
Both the secret and external calls need to be present in order for a pastorate to work. God chose Jonah and Jeremiah and Paul. But it was the local church that laid hands on Barnabas and Saul and Timothy. The call came from God, but the church blessed the choice. Both God’s voice and the church’s anointing were necessary elements of a life in ministry.
Both elements are required for us to feel right about our vocation. It’s easy to overemphasize one or the other, and something is lost in either case. If God’s voice drowns out the church’s role, we become prophets crying in a wilderness of impersonal preaching. On the other hand, if we let the church alone shape our vision of service, we run the risk of powerless programs and Godless relationships. Only when God and church speak in unison does the full choir of the call sing true.
Obviously, traditional career counseling doesn’t work in the case of the minister. A qualitative difference stands between the ministry and any other job. And that’s what keeps us from feeling trapped and despairing of “making it.”
In Mark 10, when Jesus left Jericho, a blind beggar named Bartimaeus called out, “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me.” Jesus stopped and called for the man. The Bible tells us he threw off his mantle, ran to Jesus, was made well, and followed our Lord.
When you’re “called” to a secular vocation, you’re given a mantle of authority, a guaranteed salary, and the prospect of fame. When we’re called to Christ’s service, the opposite happens. We throw off whatever mantles we have, give up all our prospects, and follow Christ.
Walt Wangerin has earned the mantles of academic achievement and writing reknown-but he follows Christ by pastoring Grace Lutheran Church in Evansville, Indiana.
Terry Muck is editor of LEADERSHIP
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