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Pastor · Sunday Schedule · FBC
News
January
2005
From the Pastor
LEAVING
There was a time I could never imagine myself doing anything other than what I was doing. I was a pastor.
In the Baptist tradition being pastor is a matter of function. You are set aside, “ordained,” for particular tasks within the church such as leading worship and administering the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. In Baptist polity it is what you do that makes you the pastor, not who you are. In other words there is not a special or different inside of you that makes you the pastor. You are the pastor because you preach. You are the pastor because you counsel people in their faith. You are a pastor because of your work as a shepherd of a congregation.
But, in your being, who you are as a person, you remain who you are; you are a person, a human being, a man or woman, a child of God, nobody special, except as each of us is made special by the Love of God.
The problem with being a pastor, however, is that the line blurs between being and doing, the you who you are and the calling to which you have been called. The man or woman who he or she is becomes engulfed in being what he or she does. There is nothing else left of the person. Some who are called carry this to the grave. They know themselves in no other way. They are the pastor. They see themselves only in what they do and only by what they do.
Yet, I believe that God sees us much differently. God sees us in a fullness that we seldom glimpse of ourselves. While we are busy doing all the things to which we feel we are called, God is ever mindful that we can never be so easily defined. God ever sees the whole of us even when we are too busy to notice these other aspects of ourselves.
As much as I have loved being a pastor, and there is not a morning I do not wake up early, ready and looking forward to doing that to which I have been called, there have been times through the years, and they have increased in frequency, thoughts about those other aspects of myself. I want to know me as God knows me. In truth it is not so much the self I seek but the greater awareness of God’s love.
I know this must sound terribly selfish but it is not meant to be. It is at its base a spiritual desire. It is a longing, in a sense a calling, much as the calling was to ministry.
In my pulpit preaching I have tried to stress the magnificence of God’s Love in loving us and how that love calls forth from us all that we are and are meant to be. To be true to all that I have preached I cannot deny those words to myself, otherwise I would be a coward or an unbeliever.
I have to test the waters myself.
I have basically been a pastor all of my adult life. It could become an excuse for never taking a further risk, never reaching beyond the comfort of what is familiar, and in the end preaching a Gospel that is less dynamic and life transforming than what I know the Gospel to be. “Follow your bliss,” is what I have told people, but what kind of preacher would I be if I said that applies to everybody but me.
I hope this gives a bit more explanation to my letter announcing my decision to resign as pastor of First Baptist Church of Greater Toledo. I regret that the letter was not more personal in tone but the emotional enormity of leaving First Baptist has been more than I have been able to fully confront or put in words. It may be what I consider to be the right decision but that has made it no less difficult to make. The pastorate has for so long been my life. It has defined my relationships with people, what I do, the focus of my study, even at times the nature of my vacations.
Contemplating leaving, I feel like Abraham who first hearing the call of God to leave the place where he was, obeyed, leaving his homeland, not knowing where he was going, only knowing in some sense he was obeying God and was headed in faith to the land God had called him. (Genesis 12). Right now I feel Abraham’s angst. I have no set idea of the future. I have no trip sheet telling me the directions toward my destination. The only thing I have is a sense of trust and faith that God is yet leading in my life, God has His own plans for First Baptist, and always “God’s will is our well
being.”
Dr. David W. Andersen
     
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