Sermonizing

Just wanted to make a quick shout-out.

On Sunday, July 31st I will be preaching my first ever sermon at Saint Paul Lutheran Church in Morgantown, WV.  The gospel text for the day, on which I will be preaching is Matthew’s story of Jesus feeding the 5,000.

The service begins at 10am on Sunday morning.  Saint Paul is located on Patteson Drive, next to Arby’s.

If you haven’t been to church recently, (or even if you have…) why not join us in worshipping God?

So you want to be a Pastor…

I’ve made several references to what I’ve called the ELCA Candidacy process.  There is in fact a process to becoming a Pastor, you can’t just wake up and start preaching.  The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Lutheran church body of which I’m a member has a pretty specific process that you have to go through.  A couple weeks ago, I met with Reverend Sandy Kessinger, one of the Bishop’s Assistants for the Southwestern Pennsylvania Synod (region) of the ELCA.  She’s in charge of candidacy for SWPA, so we sat down and walked through the process, and I’ll try my best to explain it here.

Basically, there are three major “decision points” as far becoming a Lutheran pastor: entrance, endorsement, and approval.  I’ll talk about entrance here, because that’s the stage I’m in; endorsement and approval take place while you’re a seminarian, so I’m not going into detail about them.

For all intents and purposes, it’s important to know that the ELCA puts a decent amount of work into developing and forming its pastors.  Let’s say you want to be a lawyer, you go to law school, and once you graduate and pass the bar, you apply for jobs or start your own firm; you wouldn’t apply for jobs before you even entered law school.

Becoming an ELCA pastor is completely different.

Basically, BEFORE you start seminary, they want to have a decent idea that you might be a good Pastor and that you’re ready to begin theological education/training, and THEN, they check up on you WHILE you’re at seminary (that’s those endorsement and approval steps I mentioned earlier) to ensure that you’re progressing towards readiness to be ordained.

At this point in the game though, really they want to know more about me.  The very first step (other than meeting with someone at the synod office) is writing an autobiographical essay introducing yourself, and submitting an application.  Between now and next spring, I will undergo background checks, a psychological evaluation, do an initial interview with an individual member of the candidacy committee, and then finally next spring meet with the entire candidacy committee who will talk with me, look at the big picture and then give me an entrance decision, either positive, negative, or a deferral.

The interesting thing about this process is that it is entirely unrelated to applying to seminary.  I still have to apply to the individual seminary that I decide to go to, but without the decision of the candidacy committee, I can only get provisionally accepted into seminary.  Basically, they are two parallel process that occasionally meet up every once and a while, for example, most seminaries require a personal statement with your application, a lot of people end up using the same (or very similar) essay they turned into their candidacy committee.

Right now, I’m very early in the game still.  I have the initial application filled out, and have the vast majority of my essay written, but  am working on doing some polishing of it.  When I’m done with it, I’ll probably give it to a few folks to read over and give suggestions, and then, of course, a link will get posted here.  And when it’s completely done, I’ll turn it into the synod and really get the ball rolling.

Jono called the cops?

I had two things happen to me yesterday, well, actually, lots of stuff happened to me yesterday, but it was these two things that were particularly interesting.  If I had to make a list of things I would never expect to happen to me while working at a church for a summer, these wouldn’t be on it, in part because they’re so off the wall, that I wouldn’t even expect to not expect them (if that makes any sense.)

Yesterday, while acting in my official capacity as an all-mighty intern at Saint Paul, I:

1. Had to call 911 and request a police officer to respond to the church.
2. Got called an “F-ing college punk.”

Without going into too much detail, yesterday afternoon I was at the church after regular office hours.  I was sitting in on a meeting between our church treasurer and a few accountants from a local firm in one room, and two local music teachers were giving private lessons in other rooms.

After a bit, a local homeless man whom we had helped on Sunday afternoon came in looking for the Pastor.  Basically, despite being told that he had gotten all we could give for the time being, he wanted more.  This man has a reputation of being belligerent and occasionally aggressive, and has worn out his welcome at several local churches for these reasons.  He had called the church office more than half a dozen times during the day, each time being told that there was nothing more we could do.  Even without knowing his history, the two music teachers were beginning to question  their safety and whether they should cancel the rest of their lessons and go home for the night, so it was clear I needed to do something to defuse the situation.

Consulting with Pastor Brian via phone, I went out and told him that he needed to leave, that there really was nothing more we could do.  He took this opportunity to call me an “f-ing college punk” but eventually picked up his stuff and moved it across the street.  Of course, after moving his stuff, he returned to our side of the street, pacing back and forth around our building glaring anytime he happened to notice someone watching him from a window.

That’s when I knew that, if only to cover my own butt should something more serious happen later, I needed to get the police involved.  A quick call to the Morgantown Police had an officer there about 10 minutes later (I told them it wasn’t an emergency) who persuaded the man that he needed to move along, and told me to call if he caused any more problems.

I’ll be perfectly honest and say that as easy as it is normally for me to report things to the police when I see the need, it was really hard to do so in this case.  I wanted nothing more than for him to listen to what I was saying and leave of his own accord.

As Pastor Brian and I discussed today, there are undoubtedly folks who will read this and immediately say that we are not mission-minded, and that I did a horrible thing by calling the police, and yet others will read it thinking I should’ve called earlier.

Here’s the thing… Regardless of how YOU may feel about what I did.  I’m comfortable with it.  It’s not how I would’ve liked the situation to have been resolved, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it, because I did what was necessary to get the situation under control.

While discussing what had happened in dealing with this man over the past two days, Pastor Brian and I got to discussing sense of  call.  He says that it’s in dealing with stuff like this, that he becomes truly certain that ministry is a calling, because while someone might aspire towards preaching sermons, towards helping others, towards having that shiny white collar, no one ever aspires toward having to do the less pleasant things, but we do them anyway, because that’s what God has called us to do.