A New Direction
I have been a pastor of a church for over 30 years. I started in my last year in seminary as a "student pastor" at a small local congregation. I was supposed to only preach once per month and have a retired pastor as my supervisor who preached the other three and lead me into pastoral care. Sadly he was diagnosed with cancer in the month before I started and died right after Christmas. That was fall of 1973.

That was the beginning of a long and never dull run in ministry. I served there for four years, moved to my second parish in 1977 for 7 years, then to my third in 1984 where we stayed for 15 years. We moved to our current parish four years ago. Add it up and you have 30 years, 15 of them in team ministry with my wife.

Five years ago I began to discover that the world has changed and the church has become marginalized in the culture we are living in. Then came
  ~~ Darrel Guder's The Missional Church,
  ~~ Tom Bandy's Kicking Habits,
  ~~ hearing both Leith Anderson and Bill Easum a month apart say that many of the current churches will be gone in 20 years,
  ~~ a mentoring relationship with Bill,
  ~~ discovering a passion and calling into some type of post-modern church planting, and
  ~~ becoming part of the God-blogging community.

It was a time of searching and movement, sitting still and digging deeper, and lots and lots and lots of time in prayer. A close friend began calling it my wilderness time. My coach referred to it as a time of waiting. I never lost a sense of call, I just didn't know what God was calling me into.

I'm still not sure, but I have been led to a new place. Beginning at the start of 2004 I will be employed outside the womb of the church for the first time in 30 years. I will become a "bi-vocational" pastor- or in older terms- a tentmaker. I will be working though the county as a "chemical health specialist" in the local middle schools.

I will be continuing in some type of ministry at the church with my wife. I will be doing outreach and the development of a youth center. I also will be working on small-group ministry and the possibility of a church plant. The world we live in has changed so radically in these 30 years that I am truly beginning to believe that the best way to be in connection with the community is to be in the local community. To work in secular employment while being in ministry is what the early church was all about. The world of the 21st Century is a world where that is necessary. It is a new time.

And it is a new time for me. I now will have to keep a "normal" 8:00 - 4:30 job schedule. I am trusting God's direction in all of this. It feels like every other call I have received- exciting and God-inspired. There is a whole new horizon for me and the church where I am serving Jesus. But it is also a new place for me to do ministry. Like I discovered in the Isaiah passage on Saturday, it is in the wilderness- in the world outside the walls of the church- that we need to be preparing the way of the Lord. I believe that is where I am being called to go.

I have a hunch I will have some new thoughts and directions to my blogging as well. Keep me in your prayers. I will need them.