On my first Sunday morning I was taken aback by a ghastly sight in the sacristy. A dying man was sprawled on a chaise lounge in the center of the room. He was white as snow and as cold to the touch. His total hairlessness, I was soon to learn, was the result of an experimental drug therapy. He was dressed in a cassock, surplice, and stole. A hymnal lay open across his lap.
Erich Martin was the former pastor of the church. He was so weakened by cancer that he couldn’t sit in a pew. He worshiped in the sacristy with the door to the chancel wide open. From his lounge chair he could also keep an eye on me, and from anywhere in the chancel I had him in view. Since no one could see him but me, he constituted my private audience of one, a second congregation. Whenever I stood in the pulpit during those first months, Erich was a barely living blur to my right. If I was tempted, as preachers occasionally are, to replace the proclamation of the gospel with affable chatter, the presence of a liturgically vested, dying man in a chaise lounge never failed to dissuade.
Long after he was gone, I could not step into the pulpit without instinctively checking the sacristy door.
Although Erich never played the mentor toward me, his presence, at first intimidating, grew to be a source of reassurance. If we are “surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,” as the Book of Hebrews promises, here at least was one I could keep my eye on.
The old academy system of education had forged Erich with a discipline that was foreign to me. I never met a person so utterly controlled by the patterns and duties of the ministry as he. Even among farmers, who are not famous for their introspective nature, I never met anyone less absorbed in himself or driven by a personal agenda than Erich. Unlike the therapeutically trained cleric, Erich did not compulsively insist on being a friend or a pal to his parishioners. He was not, as one of my friends says about Protestant ministers in general, “a quivering mass of availability.” He did not personalize his every act of ministry. Unlike ministers who make a career of getting along with people, Erich’s approach was to do his duty, and to let the duties symbolize something larger and more important than his own personality.
Erich had been seasoned by many years of ministry in India, where he and his wife had lost a son to malaria. New Cana was just another mission field to him. No one who has buried a child in Jabalpur can be beaten by a little loneliness or a few stubborn farmers in Illinois.
No doubt owing to his background as a missionary, Erich’s practice had been to refuse his paycheck until the monthly mission allotment had been paid. He never made an issue of it, but in a small town word gets around.
It was solely due to his example that in good years and in bad an ingrown rural congregation gave away one half of its income. Everyone respected him, but if someone were to ask, “Did you like Pastor Martin?” they would say, “Like?” then look quizzically at one another.
Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership.
