Just a small-town prairie pastor

I was ordained as a Minister of the Word and Sacraments over 45 years ago. It happened on a Thursday night because of Halloween, of all things! The elders of the rural Southern Alberta congregation that had called me, a 25-year-old seminary graduate, to be their pastor, had first scheduled the event for Friday night. Then someone realized that Friday was October 31, Halloween. Gangs of older farm boys notoriously roamed the countryside on Halloween, doing mischief. If people gathered at church on Halloween, air might be let out of tires, windows smashed, mirrors ripped off! No ordination could happen on Friday night. So, they moved it to Thursday.

Fearful challenges

A month earlier, I had been examined for ordination at a church in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The name is both musical and tongue-twisting. It was the last hurdle on a journey that began when I was 16. In ways that I still cannot explain, God impressed on my introspective young heart a passion for service and mission. That passion led me stumbling through college, trying to find a major that would get me to seminary. It took me on a roller coaster of faith when I found that seminary was anything but a spiritual retreat. It brought me to an unwanted but transformative internship where a supervising pastor I did not at first respect helped me find Jesus and ministry.

Although seven midwestern churches in the U.S. had called me to be their pastor, I could not shake the divine spark that welded me to the eighth contact – from a Dutch immigrant congregation in Iron Springs, Alberta. I visited and interviewed at the first seven; I had phone chats but no visit with the eighth. Yet sight unseen, this became my anticipated new home.
My examination involved solemn pastors and graying elders pummeling me with nuanced theological questions and fearful challenges about pastoral care in changing times. The distrustful pastors were particularly concerned about my views on “baptismal regeneration,” because that controversy had torn apart their ecclesiastical fellowship in the Netherlands during the worst days of World War II. The skittish elders wanted to know how I would talk with their sons who were fleeing the farms for the cities, and their daughters who were moving in with their boyfriends without marrying. By the grace of God, when the Alberta delegates boarded the rented bus for the overnight trip back home, I had truly become one of them, affirmed for ministry leadership despite not speaking Dutch and remaining suspiciously American.

Affirmation and weeping

Now in Iron Springs, it was the time for the “laying on of hands.” It was a tradition that went back to Jesus’ own Apostles (Acts 6:6, 13:3; 1 Tim. 4:14) who affirmed other young leaders in the expanding Christian movement. More auspiciously, it was a ceremony rooted in even older biblical customs, dating back 13 centuries, when Moses ordained elders to help oversee the Israelite community as it moved toward the Promised Land (Num. 11:16-25). On this dark night of October 30, 1980, people gathered from widely scattered Alberta prairie towns and local farms to an unmarked rustic church building. They sat on uncomfortable hand-built benches and promised to pin their prayers on this young stranger who, by the audacity of hope, they all believed Jesus had called to this ministry at this time. After much lusty singing, a challenging message on 1 Timothy 4, many greetings from other churches, and commissionings all around, I raised my hands for the first time to declare over God’s gathered people the ancient Aaronic blessing: “The Lord bless you and keep you! The Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you! The Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace!” (Num. 6:24-26)

It was only a few months later that I officiated at my first funeral, seeking to comfort the large family of a man who had wrestled with Jesus all 86 years of his life. He died on a thin pallet in the farmhouse basement of a daughter’s home, weeping in agonized shouts for Jesus to love him. I thought it was the most difficult challenge I had ever faced.

But worse was to come. Three years in a row, on bitter early spring days, I stood with a young immigrant couple to bury their first, their second and their third newborn baby boys in windswept Battersea Cemetery. To save them money, I travelled 120 kilometres each time to bring a small casket from the mortician in the back of my car. The first time I wept with them, but encouraged them with scriptural promises and grand hopes. The second time I wept with them, and mused that God, too, felt their pain. The third time, I just wept.

Pastoral care

Initially, as a single man in my mid-twenties, I did a lot of pastoral visitation at farmhouse meal tables, often inviting myself to join families too timid otherwise to have the Domine come over. One feisty matriarch always urged seconds on me, declaring that I could not stand on just one leg and needed to fill the other one as well. At another farmhouse, the five children still at home fought over who would spit on the leftovers as the meal ended, ensuring that they, not others, would be able to eat these particular dishes from the refrigerator.

Sundays were the big days. I stood outside the small entrance to this windswept building, welcoming people and trying to remember names, birthdays and anniversaries. I prepared one modestly decent sermon each week for the morning worship gathering, and then beat a hasty retreat home afterward to try to pull together another new sermon for the afternoon service. Most of the year, worship services were at 10:30 am and 2:30 pm, sandwiched between early milking, noon irrigation pipe moves and afternoon milking. For a few months in the summer, the afternoon service was moved to 7:30 pm, after the final milking and irrigation pipe moves of the day.

As many of us worshiped in English upstairs, the sounds of Dutch psalms and hymns and the reading of a Dutch sermon by an elder wafted up from the basement gathering of a dozen or so seniors. They had left everything, including language and culture, to establish their children in a new land; the church vowed that these honoured saints would always be able to sing, pray and hear God’s voice in their native Dutch tongue.

Baptisms were overflow celebrations, with extended family pouring in from everywhere. One Sunday, we baptized an entire family of refugees we had sponsored, who at the time we called “boat people.” It was Dutch immigrants taking care of Cambodian immigrants.

Love and travel

I met Brenda two months after my ordination. The congregation spied on us through our long courtship, and then celebrated extravagantly at our Easter wedding and reception. Shortly before the event, one of our farmers shouted down at me from his high tractor seat perch, words heavy with Frisian brogue: “Now you are counting down to the wedding. Then you will count up to nine and the baby!” I scoffed, but it was true. Kristyn came along nine months later, and our second daughter, Kimberly, 18 months after that.

Our third daughter, Kaitlyn, was born in Nigeria 18 months later, when I was serving there as a missionary. Over 45 years, we have lived on four continents, called a dozen villages and cities home, and taken up quarters in fourteen different houses. I have preached in church buildings of all shapes and sizes, including jungle preaching stations, Scottish cathedrals, upper-room secret meeting halls, outdoor evangelistic revivals, country frame clapboard buildings and modern megachurch auditoriums. While these gatherings were invariably friendly and inspiring, and I counted everyone present as sisters and brothers, the only person I can truly remember always being there was Jesus.

Failure and hope

Many of those to whom I first served Communion have since joined the eternal feast of saints. Now and again, a baby I baptized shows up as a student in one of my college or seminary classes. Recently, a “youngster” I knew only as a bobbing head between his parents reached out through Facebook to tell me what my sermons had meant to him and his family. One couple (then unconnected to any church) who asked me decades ago to officiate at their wedding continues to send newsy Christmas cards documenting their growing family and deepening Christian faith, which they attribute to my first kind interactions with them. But many other marriages have ended in divorce, despite my best pastoral counselling and prayers.

Funerals were the best and worst. I have cried many tears of reflective joy when listening to the family tributes paid to true saints, and hearing stories sifted through healing memories of those who became the touch of God to others. But too often, there was bitterness, such as the funeral for the brother of a new congregant. The brother had been shot at a house party, allegedly by the brother of another member of our church.

On Sunday, the new congregant asked for prayers, seeking justice for his cruelly terminated brother, while the sister of the man who pulled the trigger sat stewing directly behind him. At the cemetery, as the casket was being lowered into the earth, my new friend jumped down onto it, spread-eagled, pounding his fist on the metal casing and wailing, “NO! NO! NO! You can’t be gone! I’ll get justice for you!”

This scene and others like it haunt me. I remember the passion of my early love for Jesus, and the ordination that confirmed my leadership role in ministry. Jesus and I were going to change the world. Now, as I look towards retirement, I sometimes wonder what these decades have meant. I look with kindness and hope at my students, apologizing to them for the world we know, with its horrible racialization, constant wars and inequities hinged on privilege, famine and skepticism. “I tried,” I tell them. We tried. Those who have been intertwined with my life for the past 45 years have tried.

But we have failed. I gesture giving-hands to my students, and say, with love and genuine expectation, “I’m sorry. I tried. I did what I could. We’ve left it a mess, but here it is. Make it better.”

In a sense, it is another “laying on of hands.” Jesus has not failed, and I am thankful for the energizing Holy Spirit that came to me through my ordination. But now I pass it along to others.
And I live in hope.