Dwight Wessington was forty-one years old and happy in his pastorate at the Yakima Evangelical Free Church when he faced his major transition dilemma. At that point his career was well established: his seminary days had led to two years as an associate pastor in Boise, followed by fifteen in the top position at Yakima. During this time the church had grown from two hundred to more than twelve hundred.
A building program was under way; most of the funds had been raised. His stock in denominational circles had been steadily rising as well; he now chaired an important study commission on reorganization. A handsome, high-energy man with an electric smile, he kept his assortment of responsibilities humming with a minimum of strain.
Then came the day during a three-week vacation in the Canadian Rockies when Dwight called his office for a routine check. “There’s a postcard here from Church of the Open Door in Seattle,” said his secretary. “They want to know if you’d be interested in a telephone interview. Shall I just tell them no?”
Dwight had preached at that mammoth church a few years back, when its pastor, Malcolm Sturbridge, was away. The sight of the cavernous sanctuary instantly leaped to his mind—the 120-voice choir, the 30-piece orchestra, the two services with nearly every one of the 2,000 seats filled both times, the sound control studio bristling with electronic gear to record the preaching for radio release over a nine-station network … Church of the Open Door! He had heard of Sturbridge’s retirement announcement a month before, after twenty-two years there, but he’d never dreamed they might contact him. Of course, the list of prospects must be endless.…
“Well, let me see the card,” he finally told his secretary. “Send it along.”
When he told Barbara, his wife, about the inquiry, she was amused and flattered. She’d always known her husband was gifted; it felt good to have others even outside the denomination recognize that. But leave Yakima? How could they? She immediately began thinking of all the roadblocks.
That afternoon during a hike, Dwight bounced the idea off their two sons, fourteen-year-old Michael and eleven-year-old Joshua. The reaction was strong and clear: “Forget it. If you want to go to Seattle, put us in a boarding school or something. We don’t want to go anywhere.”
Barbara, an attractive woman whose skills as a hostess and diplomat have always been complimented, soothed them by saying, “Don’t worry about it. That church is looking at dozens of ministers, and they’ll probably never get down the alphabet to Wessington.”
But they did.
Once the phone interview was over, Dwight and Barbara sat down to make a serious list of obstructions that would have to be cleared. Among them:
• The boys would have to come around.
• The Yakima building program could not be hurt.
• The denominational study commission could not be left in the lurch. Its work would have to be wrapped up.
Seven more entries filled the paper: ten doors in all that would have to open before they could ever make a move. Most of them were beyond the Wessingtons’ ability to influence. The complications seemed invincible.
And besides, Church of the Open Door wanted its new senior pastor in place by December, less than four months away.
When they called and said they wanted me to come to Seattle for a talk, I went to my board to ask permission. They gave it. I also went to five or ten men I respected in the church and asked what they thought: “Am I free to talk to them? What do you think?” Some were brand-new to the church, including a new convert I had led to Christ. In some ways, I was probably looking for ties to stay. But it was also out of integrity, not wanting to betray anything I’d said or even implied.…
They all gave me permission, some after a week of praying about it.
The hardest question came from the wife of a young executive, who said, “Is this your climb up the corporate ladder?”
I didn’t answer her until six months later, when I said, “A little bit … plus thinking it may be God’s will, and a little bit of pure ambition to do what I can best do.” It was a good question. I needed to hear it.
Sharing his opportunity created other problems for Dwight, however, as more people caught wind of what was happening. The congregation turned tentative, cautious. Some of the heavy donors to the building program felt betrayed. That made Dwight worry about whether he’d built this church solely on himself and his personality rather than Christ.
Each Sunday he looked out and thought about how much he loved these people. The vast majority of them had come to the church under his ministry. All those weddings and funerals, all that counseling … could he just walk away?
The months dragged on, and the Seattle committee seemed to go into a stall. Their December target date passed. Dwight was held in limbo. His staff in Yakima became nervous. The boss couldn’t seem to make up his mind; where did that leave them?
I lost credibility in their eyes because I didn’t want to talk about it with them, and they didn’t know that it was both me and the church [in Seattle] that was taking so long.
For the first time in my life I experienced a major confusion. I lost sixteen pounds and really felt the weight of the decision, the guilt of leaving Yakima at this time, the horrors of trying to make a right choice. I read two or three books on the will of God. It was the first time in my life I’d been truly unhappy.
Friends in the denomination questioned Dwight’s motives. Was he ditching his loyalty just to grab a star-studded pulpit?
Dwight knew the move would change his ministry drastically. The sheer size of the Seattle church meant becoming a preacher instead of an all-around pastor. In fact, maybe it would be even more like being a president, with all that staff to manage and all that budget to raise.
Barbara was very supportive, very much the friend I needed to talk about it. We had always supported each other, but for the first time, she really held me together. That was different; I’d always been chairman of everything I’d been in.
She just did a lot of listening, asking me questions, praying, showing me things she’d read now and then … but mostly just supporting me in love.
As spring moved on toward summer and the Seattle deliberations ground on, Dwight kept slipping into more and more confusion. He would soon have to declare himself on whether or not he was indeed willing to stand as a formal candidate. Barbara recalls:
He would lie in bed in what I called his “coffin pose”—hands folded across his chest, just staring at the ceiling, anytime he had free time! He didn’t sleep, and he didn’t eat.
I had never seen him when he wasn’t motivated. He’d always been so excited about life and what he was doing. Now it was a chore for him to move through a day. It scared me to see him just lie there looking at the light fixture.
Dwight Wessington, the man who had always prided himself on being a preacher of grace and liberty, was now paralyzed over the thought of missing God’s will. He was also bedeviled by the possibility of hurting the church he had labored so hard to build. The son of divorced parents, he had vowed as a boy always to try to keep people happy, be the peacemaker, maintain a good atmosphere at all costs. The idea of causing pain to this dear congregation plunged him into agony.
Over the winter, his sons had mellowed a bit. Whether they had gotten intrigued with the idea of moving or whether they were just giving in was hard to tell. Barbara occasionally talked about how nice Yakima was, a medium-sized place where you didn’t have to lock your doors. But she was not opposed to leaving if Dwight believed they should.
The bankers at first had said the church construction loan deals were off if a change of senior pastor should occur. But now they changed their minds. The study commission finished its report and presented its findings at the summer annual meeting.
Still, the risks were great. One of Dwight’s ministerial friends looked at the long tenure of Malcolm Sturbridge and said, “Good luck—you’ll be taking on a suicide mission for God. You are about to be the sacrificial lamb.”
Finally, on August 17, with misgivings still rumbling inside his chest, Dwight stood on a Sunday morning in Yakima and said, “As many of you already know, my name has been in consideration by the pulpit committee of Church of the Open Door in Seattle. They have asked me to come as a candidate. Barbara and I will be spending the last eight days of September there, speaking two consecutive Sundays and meeting with a number of groups in the church the week in between. I ask your prayers.”
He sensed the smell of a burning bridge behind him as he spoke, but he didn’t know what else to do.
Some parishioners were listening with only one ear and came around to say good-bye. “No, I didn’t say I was leaving,” Dwight explained. “I just said I was going to candidate.”
The fateful week arrived. He preached the first Sunday. Throughout the week, he must have spoken another ten times to various groups and fielded five hundred questions, it seemed. Over lunch one day with four committee members, he let slip an unfortunate remark. They had been talking about the balloting, which would occur on Sunday at the close of each morning service, and Dwight said, “Oh, I think I’ll require a 98 percent vote, just to be sure.” Everyone laughed.
Late Saturday afternoon, the phone rang at the hotel overlooking Puget Sound where the Wessingtons were staying. It was the vice-chairman of the trustee board. “The rumor is out that you’re requiring a 98 percent vote before you’ll accept. Is that true?”
“No, it’s not true,” Dwight replied. “Ninety-four percent.”
Barbara looked up with a start. What was this?! Just that afternoon they had been marveling together at how each of the ten doors they had listed more than a year ago had opened. Even the boys were willing to move.
That really made me angry. He wasn’t being honest. It seemed like a test of God after everything else [had opened up].
You don’t know what it was like living with people [back in Yakima] who were angry at you because you’d even consider leaving—and having your husband so indecisive.… I’d had to absorb a lot of things during this time. I knew by now we probably couldn’t turn around and say, “OK, you guys, we’re staying.”
If he’d brought up a 94 percent requirement before, or even 96, that would have been fine. But after I had prepared myself emotionally to leave … for him to add one more thing was just too much. I thought God would strike us dead right there!
They went to bed that night with the matter unresolved. The next morning, Dwight preached twice, and the ballots were collected. In the narthex afterward, the chairman told Dwight he’d stop by with the results around two-thirty.
Over a dinner of salmon in the hotel restaurant, Barbara again told her husband he was playing games with God. He had added an eleventh door at the last minute, and it wasn’t fair. Dwight said nothing.
At two-thirty there was a knock at the door. The vote in favor of calling Dwight Wessington as senior pastor was 95.6 percent.
We drove back to Yakima that afternoon, and after a staff member preached in the evening service, I stood up to read my resignation.
It was a horrible, wonderful four weeks after that. I realized once again how close we had become to these people. The farewell Sunday came, and after an hour and a half of standing in line and crying and hugging, we drove to Seattle.
The cloud over my heart lifted during that drive. The next day I went into the office, and it was a new beginning. I’ve had pain since then, and hard decisions, and there’s a great challenge here—but I’ve not had any remorse.
The pressure here is about seven times greater! And it’s lonelier, since we haven’t grown up with this church. But we know this is where we belong, and I’m grateful that God apparently didn’t mind my tacking on one extra thing at the last. He must have known I needed it.
Reflections
by Louis McBurneyThe Wessingtons’ move from Yakima to Seattle came at age forty-one, which again is one of those transition periods in life. This too was a call to a larger place—a much larger place.
If I could discover what all goes into “finding God’s will,” I’d write a book about it and make a million bucks! Fred Smith said to me one time, “You know, maybe God’s will is for you just to do what you enjoy doing.”
When we came to start Marble Retreat, Melissa and I prayed, put out our “fleece,” and so forth—and wound up with a very specific sense of call. But I think we might have come here just as comfortably if I’d said, “What would I like to do as a psychiatrist? Well, I’m interested in ministers. I’m interested in the church world. I’ve discovered ministers have problems. I think I’ll just try to help them.” We would probably have been just as blessed by God.
Maybe Christians ought to move toward a freer idea of call. Maybe our call is simply to become Christlike, and we can do that almost anywhere—here in the mountains, in a city, in a foreign country, wherever. I know people sometimes say, “I want to live up to my potential, and this bigger church will give me the opportunity to do that.” Maybe it would be more honest just to say, “I’d really like that. I’d enjoy going there.”
I’ve been reading in Acts recently, and it seems Paul went most places primarily because somebody was chasing him! He occasionally got visions and specific calls, but not often. Usually he was just running for his hide.
I realize I may be accused of heresy for questioning this, but I really do think we get into a lot of problems when we put the responsibility on God the way we do. If a move works out fine, then “it was God’s will.” If it doesn’t work out fine, then it’s not that we did anything wrong; we “must not have heard God’s will right.”
In this narrative, as the Seattle committee went into its stall, Dwight Wessington found himself experiencing a loss of power or control. He couldn’t do anything to speed up the proceedings. This often happens in the church, as we all know. It would be nice if you could always be in control, know what was going to happen, even control what was going to happen—but often that’s not the case. You get stuck in situations where you are impotent.
This is one of the stresses ministers face: the feeling of powerlessness in church situations. When that happens, it is good to identify what is so important to you about wielding power. To many people, it’s a need to feel a sense of worth; others want to be able to determine what’s going to happen to their destiny. All this touches one of our basic developmental stages: dependency versus autonomy. We first struggled with that as two-year-olds, trying to be independent and in control of ourselves while also having to admit dependency. Well, at forty-two, we still have realistic dependence. No wonder we feel tension when in a limbo state.
The more we can realize we are never in total control and begin to place our faith more squarely on God, knowing he is there and hasn’t abandoned us even if things don’t work out as we want, the better we can cope.
Another aspect for men particularly is that a lot of our male identity has to do with power and the ability to effect change. When we lose power and control, it threatens our maleness. But in fact, we are not less valuable in God’s eyes. I am not less of a man for being vulnerable.
Resigning a pastorate was tougher for Dwight Wessington, as the story explains, because of his need to please everyone. He had grown up in a home where there had been divorce, and so one of his early marks of value as a person was to be a peacemaker and please everyone. Now, as he looked at his options, he knew some people would be displeased if he went to Seattle.
If you hold such a factor to be important in your personality, church stress will be magnified a hundredfold. You run into situations daily where you’re not going to please everybody. You can work yourself to death if you don’t deal with that.
The actual separation in this story, once Dwight made up his mind, was handled beautifully—a refreshing contrast to the Ruch story. Dwight talked about what was going to happen at every stage along the way. They had a farewell dinner where people were able to cry, hug, and find closure. Too often this doesn’t happen for churches and pastors.
At the very end he mentions the pressure and loneliness he faces in Seattle. This is often the case after a pastor moves; he feels dislodged and not belonging. It takes awhile to build up close relationships—probably three years or more under good circumstances.
And yet, many ministers move again before they ever have a chance to do that. I’ve heard some ministry couples say they never felt this was their church. It belonged to the people. Some parishioners would even comment, “You’re going to be leaving eventually; we’ve got to stay. This is our church. You’re only here for a little while.” The pastor and spouse felt like transients, migrant workers. This created stress, and it occurred because the ministers didn’t take the time—or get the time—to settle in and belong.
The Wessingtons, of course, had been in Yakima fifteen years; this was most certainly “their church.” That is part of what made leaving so hard. But I feel confident they will build solid relationships in Seattle, assuming they stay long enough to nurture them.
Copyright © 1985 by Christianity Today
