Prima Verba – Part 3

In rocketry, the boost phase is all about propulsion, as the rocket’s fuel is converted to energy to achieve a desired orbit or trajectory. Someone in aeroscience could, no doubt, tidy up my summary of the boost phase. But I think this is close enough for our purposes here. My dad would have said, “It’s good enough for who it’s for.” And who it’s for is me. And you, I guess, though I mean no disrespect by applying my dad’s expression to you, the reader.

Anyway, why in the world am I talking about a rocket’s boost phase?

Here’s why… If my time as a pastor were to be compared to a rocket’s flight, my first ten and a half years were my boost phase, and the remaining four and a half were my burnout. In that first phase, I was full of energy, full of passion, and full of zeal—even though I was getting started ten or twelve years later than the average first-time pastor.

I was initially hired in November of 2009 to serve for one year as an interim pastor while the church searched for and selected its next ordained minister. At the time, I didn’t have an MDiv degree. MDiv is short for Master of Divinity, which is the standard degree that aspiring pastors earn at seminaries.

Without an MDiv, I was essentially un-callable as an ordained minister in this Dutch Reformed denomination, and it never crossed my mind that I would be there longer than my one-year term.

At this point, the reader may be wondering how it was that I was even hired in the first place if I had no formal training. That’s a fair question. The answer is that I had a fair amount of informal training. And I had shown theological aptitude for many years. Every one of my pastors between 1992 and 2009 (seven or eight pastors in all, I’d guess) had affirmed pastoral gifts in me and encouraged me to pursue vocational ministry.

So, what prevented me from pursuing it earlier? Life decisions and circumstances.

Cami and I knew before we were married that we wanted to be open to children from the get-go, and she became pregnant three months after we were married. We also knew that we wanted to homeschool our children. As our family grew and our oldest children started school, moving away so I could be a full-time seminary student became increasingly impossible. Cami wasn’t going to work outside the home, so I would have to be a full-time student and a full-time employee and still find time to be a husband and a father. We counted the cost, and I gradually gave up on the idea of going to seminary.

But we ended up in a church and denomination that had a non-seminary route available for ordained ministry. Eventually, I became something of a hybrid pastoral intern/associate pastor in our church. I was doing guided seminary-level study under my pastor directly and under a group of other pastors remotely. I was also assisting with leading worship services and giving occasional sermons. The only problem was that the church was in a different city, about thirty miles away, and we were feeling disconnected from both our community and our church.

But one day, I received a phone call and was asked if I would be interested in a one-year term as an interim pastor at this Dutch Reformed church in my hometown. We talked it over together and prayed about it. We talked about it with the leaders of our church. And with their blessing, I accepted the position. That’s how I came to be hired in the first place as an interim pastor at the church I served for fifteen years.

How did the interim position lead to a more permanent, ordained pastoral position?

Three months into my year as an interim pastor, the Search Committee approached the leaders and told them that if I was willing, and there was a way to make it work, they thought I was a good fit to be the church’s next pastor. I was interested, and a conversation started with denominational powers-that-be. By March of 2010, I was that church’s pastor, under the agreement that I would earn my MDiv while serving as their pastor and then be officially ordained in the denomination.

It was a lot of work. A lot of work. But I was in my boost phase, and I had plenty of energy. Plenty of drive. I also had plenty of support—financial and emotional—from my church and my classis (a regional body of churches). I put my nose to the grindstone (whatever that means) and over a period of nine years, completed 106 seminary credits as a full-time pastor, earning my MDiv. I was officially ordained in September of 2019.

Functionally, nothing at all changed in my role as pastor. But I had completed the work and received valuable training. It was satisfying. Completing seminary felt like a milestone for the entire church, and it was a time of celebration. Things had never been better there. Not in my time, anyway.

Boy, if I had only known what was coming six months later…

But I didn’t know. And I was riding high. It felt like the church was firing on all cylinders, and that continued to be our sense for the next half a year.

And I think it’s here that I need to press pause on the narrative arc and share a few stories from my boost phase. I have no agenda in choosing these particular stories. They’re just among my most vivid memories from that time.

The first one has to do with all the children. Gracious, there were a lot of them! At the peak of the church’s membership in my time there, I’d say we had close to 150 people, from the oldest to the youngest. And for a while, it seemed like half of our members ranged from five to fifteen years old.

You see, without really trying, we became a quasi-homeschooling church. Not that everyone homeschooled their children. But a lot of us did. And most of us had big families. So, there were a lot of kids running around the church on any given Sunday, and they were all pretty close friends.

I remember that it was around this time that the Dude Perfect guys were beginning to make it big. Naturally, all the boys of the church wanted to imitate them. So, in the after-hours, they would gather at church and construct elaborate trick shots in and around the building, recording hundreds of unsuccessful attempts before finally achieving success. I don’t know how they had the patience for this. I guess the joy of one another’s company overshadowed the disappointment of their countless fails. I think there’s still a video somewhere, edited to show only their successes. I’ll have to try to find that someday.

My second vivid memory occurred when I’d been there exactly one year. At that time, we had two services every Sunday. Not two identical services; two different services. One was in the morning, and the other was in the evening. This denomination has a long history of holding both a morning service and an evening service on Sunday, and it’s only recently that this practice has begun to fall out of favor.

It was the evening service of the first Sunday in November 2010. I had just started the sermon when a bat began flying and swooping around the room. Two guys noticed it right away and went up to the balcony to see if they could ambush it. It didn’t take long for the rest of the congregation to notice and forget completely about me and my message.

Within three minutes, every woman was covering her hair, and every man was trying to figure out how he could get in on the bat-catching action. I didn’t know if it would be viewed as an act of sacrilege if I ended the service at that point, so I just kept on preaching. I don’t think anyone heard a single word I said. When we all left for the night, the bat had eluded the two guys in the balcony as ably as my sermon had eluded the congregation.

The last memory I’ll share is about the church fire. Yes, a fire. And not the Holy Spirit kind. It was February 2019, the same year I was to graduate and be ordained. I got a call from one of my sons on a Saturday morning saying that he had just gone to the church to practice piano, and the building was full of smoke. I told him to call 911, and I rushed to the church.

How did the fire start? That remains an unanswered question to this day. But one of the inspectors and I ended up agreeing on what was the most likely cause. It’s a long story, but the punchline is that it was a freak accident involving a candle and a tiny ember that waited a couple of days before getting serious about igniting.

Here’s the thing, though… There was almost no fire damage. The church is made of brick, and the inside walls are plastered. The fire started on a windowsill, and the only real fuel it had was the hardwood of the sill. The fire damage consisted of the windowsill and an eight-by-twelve-foot section of plastered wall. That’s it.

But the smoke damage… That was next level. Literally, everything that could be removed from the building was removed for smoke mitigation. Every wall had to be scrubbed, painted, and sealed. Every square inch of carpet had to be replaced. Every ceiling tile had to be replaced. Every ounce of insulation had to be removed and reinstalled. Every light fixture. Every pew cushion. Every piece of furniture. Every hymnal. All my books. My drums! Everything.

We ended up renting office space and worshiping in a Christian school gymnasium for six months.

Now, you might think that this ordeal would have resulted in a decrease in both our morale and our membership. It had the opposite effect. We thrived in those six months. I think this was largely because we were all rowing in the same direction through the turbulent waters. Despite all the challenges, we grew as a body, and we grew closer as a body. It was a long six months, but it was a good six months. Together, we experienced the Lord’s kindness and favor. It’s probably safe to say that those six months were collectively the best six months of my time as a pastor.

We returned in high spirits to our church building about three weeks before my ordination in September 2019. I was installed as the now-ordained pastor on the first Sunday in October. As a church, we were energized, and we were very thankful to be back in the building for the holidays. The future looked bright from where we were standing.

Boy, if we had only known what was coming six months later…

*******

In Part 4, I’m going to transition from the boost phase to the burnout. I won’t be a bit surprised if it takes me two or three installments to tell that story. I’ll have to see how it goes. Maybe I’ll surprise myself and make friends with brevity. Don’t hold your breath. I can assure you I won’t be holding mine.

I want to thank you for coming along with me on this journey. The interest and support I’ve received is a bit overwhelming. Please know that you are appreciated, and that I am praying for you.

Gloria in excelsis Deo

Aaron