In November of 1985, Immanuel Lutheran Church offered a large parsonage, a winter supply of firewood and an annual salary of $13,000 with benefits. This was about a 65% cut in income for us. The congregation was struggling, having endured a fight over the introduction of the new Lutheran Book of Worship which led to the previous pastor’s departure under less than happy circumstances. And the pastor before him had also resigned under unhappy circumstances! So we knew it was going to be a challenge. The congregation in turn accepted that I would be a Naval Reservist drilling monthly. And Ellen would need to find employment as soon as we could arrange childcare for toddler Will.
It turned out to be the happiest eight years of our lives thus far, with a blessed ministry that saw the congregation rebound. I dived into the Manual on the Liturgy, recalibrated my preaching to focus on the event of Christ-for-us speaking from the assigned Scriptures, and moved the congregation to weekly communion. The most important work during the week was home visitation. These visits were often chatty, tension-reducing sessions as I tried to learn about my people. I often had to absorb the anger or dismay over the preceding conflict about the LBW. And as I gained trust, like many other pastors, I would come home to tell Ellen how I spent the day soaking up human pain. Delaware County was beautiful, but it was poor, and folks struggled to make a living. Geographically Delaware County is also huge, larger than Rhode Island, and our people were scattered throughout it. So visitation was time consuming. Early on we organized a tape ministry recording the services for shut-ins, which we would hand deliver. From this immersion experience in visitation, I remembered as a teenager how another pastor, friend to my father, commented, “In terms of human interest, you can’t beat being a pastor.” I can certainly echo this thought from my own experience of pastoral visitation!
Early on, a parishioner called me with the news that her kin was on his deathbed about 100 miles away and had no pastor to pray with him. As I drove through the Catskill Mountains, I ruminated and finally resolved to defy my training in Rogerian psychology from seminary, above all the malignant counsel that pastors avoid “God talk.” I was going to figure out how to give voice before God to a man I did not know who was facing death. Consequently, I began also, during these years, regularly to talk with my father about pastoral care based on his many years of experience.
Ellen eased into her new role as pastor’s wife with enthusiasm. She asked my mother for her advice. She tells me that Mom gave her three pointers: first, never be an officer in a women’s church group; second, after a church dinner stay out of the kitchen cleanup to avoid the gossip, including rivalry about whose food was best; and third, whenever anybody gives you a gift take it with gratitude, whether you need it or not. Ellen says that counsel served her well. To the delight of the congregation, she became a celebrity in the local newspaper for winning a recipe prize for her sinfully rich No Bake Brownies.
I in turn relished my new life in the country. At the headwaters of the Delaware River, trout fishing was at my fingertips and I learned how to tie flies and cast them. A parishioner had a creek dammed up by beavers, into which someone had thrown a bucket of largemouth bass years before and forgotten about. There I had a honey hole of a fishing spot. Without much success, I tried deer hunting in the abominable cold of an upstate New York winter. After all those years living in the city, a love for rural life was thus kindled in us. I was fascinated by the farm operations of the several parishioners who were still active in that difficult vocation.
The congregation had an interesting history. After the trauma of World War I and the hyperinflation of the 1920s, German families were emigrating. Some made it to Brazil, others to South Texas, and still others to Nebraska and New York City. Through various connections these families were in communication with one another. Someone discovered cheap farmland outside of Delhi, New York – cheap because the soil, as it was said, is “two rocks for every dirt.” Initially they worked dairy, but many discovered that growing cabbage and cauliflower for the New York City market was more profitable. In the 1930s these families began to worship together and search for a pastor. The Missouri Synod pastor in Kingston, New York, Ernest L. Witte, traveled the 90 miles to Delhi on his bimonthly “mission to the Catskills.” So the congregation was established, purchasing a large Victorian house in centrally located Delhi that had most recently been in use as a maternity hospital. When the church was built in the early1960s, the house became the parsonage in which we lived. To honor this history I offered a German language liturgy on occasion, and was gratified when exiting parishioners announced, “Sehr gut gesprochen!” Towards the end of my years in Delhi I gathered up documents and photos, and interviewed the seniors in order to write the history of the congregation, a little book in which I took a great deal of satisfaction.
Of course, it was not all roses with no thorns. I had disappointments as a pastor trying to build up the congregation, investing considerable time and energy into evangelism, with mixed results. Once, a lapsed Catholic divorced woman had been attending for some time, so I asked to visit her. When the conversation got around to it, I asked whether she wanted to join the church. She replied with a tone of false intensity, “Oh, pastor, I like you very much. But it’s just all those hypocrites I can’t stand.” I decided to call her bluff, “Okay, why don’t you just join the church and you and I together will straighten out all those hypocrites?” One must challenge the hypocrisy of those who easily chastise others for hypocrisy!
Another time a weepy wife called me on the phone to say she had just discovered that her husband was cheating on her. This was a couple that I had brought into the church and whose baby I had recently baptized. I went right down to the man’s place of work and said, “You, right now, with me, behind the building!” I wasn’t challenging him to a fistfight but rather seeking a place of privacy to confront him with his adultery.
One faithful leader in the congregation had some years ago befriended a mentally disabled man who now lived in the County Infirmary. Our parishioner picked him up every Sunday and brought him to the church service where he sat in the middle aisle on his wheelchair, disheveled and sometimes drooling. His speech was difficult to understand. When I visited a new couple who had been attending church, the man finally said to me, “Pastor, if you want to grow the church you can’t have that unseemly sight. It turns people off.” I told him that so long as I was pastor the church would never back off from welcoming, indeed celebrating, the broken of this world.
Another time, after reading one of my columns in the newspaper, a woman asked to talk with me and complained about the arid preaching in her church with its constant partisan political commentary. I urged her to go back to her pastor with her unhappiness. And I told her she was more interested in politics than religion. I thought that would be the end of it. But she and her husband, having dealt honestly with their church and its pastor, came to Immanuel and became leading members. When they asked to join the congregation, they told me that they were indeed more interested in religion than partisan politics.
I learned a valuable lesson: it’s comparatively easy to bring someone into the church, but not so easy to incorporate new folks. Unless you have a caring and welcoming community of people, i.e., a community that embodies the Christ proclaimed, newcomers will rarely connect. Immanuel became that community, but all the same, I felt betrayed when people in whom I had invested left the church for entirely petty reasons (as it seemed to me). I experienced the sheep stealing of a new Pentecostal pastor in town. I had several people turn on me when, with the growth and success of the congregation, my compensation grew up to the Synod standard. I learned that all a pastor really has is his or her reputation, a very soft target in times of discord. Despite such slings and arrows, the genuine affection and support of the congregation never wavered and we weathered these little storms. I was particularly proud of the response to a challenge I made to reinforce the choir for the singing of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus on Easter Sundays. We were never perfect but we filled the church with joyful praise befitting the Day of the Resurrection.
I am no fan of what you might call the dominant trend among pastors in my lifetime: the “professionalization” of the ministry as “rostered leaders.” Pastoral ministry is a vocation, not a job. It is a sacrificial vocation whose reward, quite literally, “is in heaven.” You are never off the clock and are on call 24/7. All you’ve got is the Gospel in Word and Sacraments by which you shepherd the flock. Without this conviction and commitment, it is no wonder to me that contemporary pastors, with their theology-light seminary education, burn out -- and burn their congregations to the ground in the process of burning out. Rather than strategic plans, programming, mission statements and all the other jerry-rigged devices borrowed from business school thinking that surround the ministry today, we simply insisted on quality Sunday worship in the gathering of our Eucharistic community that sends folks into the world refreshed and equipped for their baptismal vocations.
Accordingly, we emphasized lay leadership. I trained our Sunday school teachers, meeting with them monthly to prepare for the coming Sundays with the children. We chucked the canned Sunday school lessons from the publishing houses and taught the children the lectionary’s Scripture lessons of the Sunday. In place of cheesy “children’s sermons” we brought the children forward for brief recitation of a portion of the catechism and a prayer and then send them downstairs for Sunday school, but back in time for the Eucharist. We elected laypeople to be home visitors, whom I trained. Later, we folded this into diaconal training, which involved specific ecclesiastical ministries, including liturgical leadership.
This diaconal training emerged out of cooperation between rural and town congregations in our part of upstate New York after the Synod’s bishop warned small churches that they would not be getting pastors anymore. Hartwick College in Oneonta had originated two centuries ago as a Lutheran seminary and was willing to host a week-long training of laypeople in the summer, which we called the Hartwick Institute of Theology. It is still going strong after all these years -- and it is a model that has been imitated by many other jurisdictions.
As a result of this cultivated churchly leadership, many initiatives for various kinds of charitable outreach were initiated. An especially enthusiastic project was Christmas time food baskets for the needy, which we took great joy in gathering and distributing. I remember thinking to myself when I started at Immanuel in Delhi that my ministry would be a test whether my “evangelical catholic” convictions could actually prosper congregational ministry. The proof was in the pudding. When I left after eight years, the congregation was in better shape than we found it, and was able to call a new pastor quickly. It was also our happy family time of the childhood of William and the teen years of Sarah. No doubt the loving Christian family at Immanuel sowed the seeds in Sarah of her own pastoral vocation.
As mentioned, during these years I went on monthly drills (two full Saturdays rather than a weekend), and during the summer for a two week activation. My first assignment was at a Naval Reserve Center in Binghamton, New York, about 80 miles away. All I did for a year was sit in my office and read training manuals – the CO didn’t know what to do with me. The only time he employed me was to work as “good cop” to his “bad cop” at Captain’s Mast, which is a disciplinary hearing. I was expected to give character testimony incriminating some poor sailor for some petty offense. As you can imagine, I hated this. I was able to transfer to a Chaplain’s Unit on the other side of the state near the Hudson River. This was a much better experience, with a group of clergy. We could train together and I could learn from more experienced officers.
My last and most enjoyable gig was an assignment to a Marine Corps unit headquartered under the Throgs Neck Bridge in New York City. It was grueling to travel there and to exercises, even further away, in New Jersey. I spent four weeks in the hot summer at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina in this connection. But as my congregation had grown and was demanding more of my time and energy, I gradually began to deactivate and finished out my eight year commitment (just as the Kuwait war erupted and we worried that I would get activated for it). I was never very comfortable with the expectation that I stifle my Christian voice before the military public. Those who have a genuine chaplaincy ministry have a skill for negotiation that I evidently lack.
When we first drove into Delhi to unload our rental truck at the parsonage, we were welcomed by what seemed to us a large group of folks eager for our arrival. We found the pantry chock-full of goods waiting for us, including a gallon of maple syrup from the sugar house of one of the members. I remember telling the people at that moment how I expected the bond of love to grow between pastor and people. Eight years later, when I announced that I was taking the call to teach theology at the newly liberated theological faculty in Bratislava, Slovakia, the chorus of sorrow touched me deeply. I embraced one and all as they departed that service. They sent us off with a rollicking party, and to this day, thirty years later, I remain in touch with many of them. At Immanuel in Delhi I learned to be a pastor. Soli Deo Gloria!