Go out into the world...

A very wise friend of mine said to me about a year before my retirement, “You need to decide what your platform will be once you are retired.” To introduce yourself as a retired presbyterian pastor is to state a condition, not an identity. Since you no longer introduce yourself as “pastor of such and such a church,” what are you going to say?

I think that is actually a good exercise at various stages of our lives. I remember once going on a cruise and dreading the inevitable question among my dinner companions. “So, what do you do?” I actually avoided the question for several meals and noticed a distinct change in the conversation when I finally acknowldeged that I was a pastor. Not only did the jokes change at the table, but I was approached individually by several members at the table about personal issues they were dealing with. I knew what a doctor felt like.

I was not embarrassed by my profession but did resist carrying all of the sterotypes that were part of people’s image of pastors. But it also made me think about what it was that I wanted to be my image to those who first met me. When my friend asked that question of me as I neared retirement, it raised the question from a different perspective. What was my identity apart from my attachment to a church.

My answer that I put on my calling card was, “author and theologian,” because those were the two aspects of my work that I thought identified my interests. What would yours be? Even if you are not retired, what couple of words would you like to present as reflecting your identity?

It is common to say that I retired from a job but that I don’t retire from God’s call in my life. The question is how you would like to describe your understanding of that calling now.

Recently I was at a retirement banquet for one of my best friends. Sitting next to me was another retired pastor who had a brilliant academic career but who is now severely retricted because of health and hearing problems. Maybe because I am also retired, I began thinking about how the church relates to retired pastors.

If they still have a lot of energy and health, they may be asked by the larger church to take on a lot of committee tasks. If many are like me, not being on committees is one of the joys of retirement. Once your health goes, the busy church usually moves on. I wonder what God’s changing call is for retired pastors.

In some cases, I think the church loses a lot of wisdom because we don’t gather pastors together to draw upon their experience. I also know, however, that sometimes it isn’t wisdom but simply nostalgic memories. Is there a way to stimulate fresh theological thinking among the retired pastors of our community?

Perhaps more importantly, should we be gathering pastors soon after they retire and assist them in discerning God’s call in this new phase of their life? My friend who has just retired wants to take a year for intense prayer and spiritual discernment. Might some encouragement and support in that direction be good to offer many newly retired pastors.

And what about those in poor health. Is there some means of offering them spiritual support in what has to be a very challenging phase of their life. What is God’s call for someone who has lost their hearing or had to give up driving a car? Do we really think that God says, “Well, I’m done with that person. I will now focus on someone else.”

For those who have committed their life to responding in faith as one of God’s priests, is there not an important spiritual value to these concluding years of their life?

Here is another exercise by which you can take the pulse of your ministry. It is not something that you do continuously but occasionally it may have value.

Take some time to sit quietly and calm yourself. When you have quieted yourself, take a pad of paper and begin to list some of the positive things that have happened in your ministry from the beginning until now. Now, make the faith assumption that God has been part of that ministry. Look for patterns in what you can affirm as positive incidents in your career history. Write some of those possibilities down so that you can see them and reflect on them.

Now note some of the more difficult moments in your ministry. If God “works for good with those who love him and are called according to his purpose,” look for redemptive results that have occurred because God was with you during those difficult times. None of this is to say that God caused such negative experiences for a purpose. It is simply to say that God can work redemptively even in the difficult moments. What have you learned, how have you grown, what are redeemable possibilities as a result of such experiences.

Write some of those down and combine them with that which you have gleaned from the positive moments. What does this suggest about your future directions. Write out some possibilities. Put them aside and then return to them at least a week later and see how that speaks to your future. Share them with a friend and get their reaction as well. Allow God to speak to you through the Bible, prayer, community, and time.

Sometimes I think we fail to take seriously that the Infinite mystery of this universe has chosen to provide us the gift of Scripture as a means by which God can speak to us. All the arguments about inerrancy and higher biblical criticism do not have to be resolved to accept that the Scriptures are God’s gift to us by which the infinite can speak to the finite.

Think what this means for your sense of call. While God can and often does speak to us through many mediums and experiences, the Scriptures are God’s gift by which God has frequently chosen to speak.

So here is one means by which we can open ourselves to that possibility. Take time to pause from your work. Sit quietly in a place where you are unlikely to be disturbed. Then having calmed yourself, allow the biblical stories to flow through your minds until one seems particularly to stand out for you. Find that story and reread it so that you have the basic content in mind.

Now assume that that story does contain a message from God to you about the current context of your call. Play with the story or passage with that assumption in mind. Take a piece of paper and write for at least 15 minutes about that story and your ministry. This is not magic or fantasy but it does allow for the possibility that God has been working on our unconscious and this may be a way of helping us surface those thoughts and bringing new insight into what is taking place in our lives. Don’t worry if no great insights occur the first time or so, but allow the interraction between biblical stories and your life to speak to you.

If you would do this occasionally, I think it would allow you to take the pulse of where you are in ministry and how God seeks to speak to you.

Every once in awhile, I think it is good to pause long enough to check your pulse in ministry. We knew that the calling was not going to be easy from the beginning. I think what grinds us down is not the over-load but two other factors.

One, do we feel that what we are doing is significant. Sometimes it is hard to equate God’s transformation of the world with wrestling with decisions about whether to allow the Boy Scouts to have a yard sale on church property. Not to mention deciding how to respond to a grandmother who wants her child baptized in a private ceremony in her home during a whirlwind visit by her daughter who would refuse to enter a church but is willing to agree to her mother’s wishes if it can be done in private.

The second factor is a simple need to feel that someone recognizes and appreciates the efforts that we are making on their behalf. If most of what we hear are complaints about what we are not doing, it is hard to feel good about what is happening. And sometimes we don’t even give ourselves credit for the significance of what we are doing. I have a friend who is a pastor to a small church with mostly elderly people who are not energized for major mission efforts. Yet she has accomplished some amazing things among that group of congregants. She has gathered some of their grandchildren and neighboring youth in a youth group and even got financial support for sending them to a church youth camp. She has them involved in a small way with financial support in a mission in Mexico. Her church has created a grief group that supports many elderly who lose loved ones. These are life changing ministries that would not take place except for this small church under her guidance. It would help if both she and others would occasionally recognize how God is working through her efforts at that church.

In the next couple of days I want to reflect on how we take our pulse in the ministry, particularly with respect to these two areas. When God paused after six days of labor to rest and reflect on God’s creation, his response was, “It was very good.” May you also recognize that when you take time to step back and reflect on your ministry.