One of the questions that I inevitably get asked by people outside the church is "what made you decide to be a pastor?" I always laugh a little at this, and it's not that it's a bad question--it's actually a perfectly reasonable one--but the idea of being a pastor by choice is one that makes me laugh because it was most definitely not my first choice for my life but it's where I ended up. Instead we clergy folks usually ask about call stories, so I'm going to tell you mine.
My parents have been religious through my whole life, but weren't always that way. They grew up in religious households but promptly rebelled at some point during their young adulthood. They had their fun, and by the time they got back to church they needed it. Subsequently, they ended up in some pretty conservative places, which were good places to help nurture what I think of as baby Christians, but weren't well suited to people like my parents as they began to grow and live. It kind of blows my mind to think about it, but they were around the age I am now when this journey began for them! I was born in the infancy of their newly discovered Christianity, and as such, as they grew and questioned, I got to journey along with them. We started out in Kenneth Copeland's church when I was an infant, and attended a Vineyard church (a sort of fundacostal type of church, and yes I just made up that word, fundamentalist + pentacostal). They wanted us in Christian education, so when we began Lutheran school, we moved to the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, which despite all its faults really knows how to teach children to love and serve God. I memorized chapters of the Bible, and most of Luther's Small Catechism by the time I was in 5th grade. We left that church after a while to attend a new school, which was a Berean church (a sort of Anabaptist tradition), though the Lutheran theology had stuck quite well. We attended there for a while, moved to an inner city LMCS church, and then eventually my parents ended up in the Evangelical Lutheran Church when I was in college after a falling out with the LCMS.
Because of our education and active church lives, faith was always extremely important. It wasn't just something we did on Sunday, but something that we lived daily. My mom prayed for our safety every time we got in the car. My dad presided at Communion at dinner some evenings. We talked openly about God and discussed theology at length on long car rides. We lived our faith by being active at church. I watched my parents and learned to live my faith by their example, as they tithed their meager income and despite being poor themselves, served food to homeless people at a local soup kitchen. My faith wasn't something I just learned about, but something that I experienced daily. It was impressed upon us early that faith was identity and a way of life.
When I got to college, I did the normal thing where I quit going to church for a while, but my faith continued to be central in my life. I found myself journaling about theological topics often, having conversations about God with friends and strangers (I had some noteworthy debates with my Catholic friend Debrah, which I loved!), and I became even more involved in service when I joined Alpha Phi Omega. But I was a scientist at heart, and although I started out as a bio-pre-med major, I fell in love with psychology and graduated with honors with a bachelor of science and was accepted to a doctoral program at Kansas State University. Faith and science were never in contention, but I had also never felt particularly called to ordained ministry. I considered deaconess training for a while, but decided that the concept of a "deaconess" pissed me off too much to do it. I started my program at KSU, but within about 16 hours I realized I had made a horrible mistake. I hated the town, I didn't identify strongly with anybody in my largely secular department (though there were a few people who I could be myself with, mostly my office mate and my eventual advisor). I joined the Lutheran Campus Ministry in order to connect with people of faith, and that was a big help. There I met a friend, Adele, who was actually an Orthodox Jew at the time, but loved theological discourse. We started to meet for coffee and theology, and I started to think maybe I should find a different profession. Professorhood was not for me.
In the summer between the two years of my master's degree (which I did stick out to the end), I had the chance to go with my church to Tanzania where we built an eye clinic for the people of Mwanza with International Health Partners. I had been pondering my profession for a while, and had a conversation with one of our leaders, who also happened to work for the bishop's office, and confided in her that I was starting to feel some kind of call to ministry but had no idea what that would look like. I wanted to help people, I wanted to share the love of Jesus with the world, and utilize my skills like being a compassionate listener and good writer. She nodded and smiled knowingly, and wished me luck in my discernment process. I returned to KSU in the fall and one day while having coffee again with Adele, she looked at me seriously and said: "Gwen, you would make a great pastor." I told her not to even joke about that! What a horrible thing to say! Being a pastor is a terrible job where you are underpaid and undervalued, stretched thin emotionally, expected to be on call all the time, and expected to be in a very public role under the scrutiny of an entire congregation (or town!). I laughed it off, but it was like her words had gone into my head and could not stop bouncing around. Begrudgingly, I admitted maybe I was called to SOME kind of ministry work, and applied for the Master of New Testament program at Luther Seminary. But the more I thought about it, the more I felt a sense of dread: I thought maybe God was calling me to be a friggin' pastor! After a lot of thought and prayer and tears, I realized this was true, and had to change my program of study from MA to M.Div. It felt like some sort of bell of doom had tolled.
To be a pastor in the ELCA, you have to go through a process called candidacy, so I initiated that process. It involved interviews, a psych eval, and more interviews, but in April of 2010 I dove in and got the ball rolling even as I was writing my master's thesis. By June I was looking for apartments. I moved up to the Twin Cities on July 1st for summer Greek. I never wanted to be a pastor. I still think it's one of the hardest jobs you can have, and that it's extremely trying, especially for a somewhat odd introvert like myself. But the more I do it, the more I realize that's exactly where God wants me. Ordained ministry will use every single gift God has given me, and will continue to push and stretch me to grow into who I am called to be (and it has already changed me and led me to amazing people and experiences). I didn't "decide" to be a pastor, but regardless of my feelings on the matter, I am. And hard as it is, I can't imagine doing anything else at this point. I get to stand up in front of a congregation and declare to them that they are loved and worthy and called to new life for the sake of their neighbor. I get to spit on sin and death by preaching Christ risen, and I get to walk with people through births and illnesses and divorces and addiction and marriage and growth and even death and declare hope in their deepest despair. This isn't the life I would have chosen; this is even better than what I could have ever imagined on my own, and that is what Jesus is all about: leading us into an incredible new future that we could never have imagined. So I'm glad I'm here. I'm going to keep doing this until God tells me to do something else.
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