(Twenty-seventh in a series.)
Just ordained and installed in my first call at the tender age of thirty, I found Scripture true:
Wisdom is with aged men, length of days is understanding. (Job 12:12)
Right at the beginning of my work, several older pastors gave good advice.
The first was Pastor Larry Odegard, a professor of social work at University of Dubuque who spent weekends serving different churches as their interim pastor. A fellow member of John Knox Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Larry had served my two yoked churches as interim pastor for some time following the departure of my predecessor. As I took over from him, he and I had opportunities to talk, and Larry gave me two pieces of wise counsel.
First, Larry said he’d learned a lot being an interim pastor. Typically interim pastors are peacemakers brought in to stabilize a church during a time of transition. Even if the transition is simply the result of one pastor resigning his call and a pulpit committee being assembled to search for a new one, finding and issuing a call to a new pastor takes more than a year and that time presents that interim with minefields. The former pastor has known how to wend his way carefully through the historic family and personal squabbles. He’s had years to learn the ropes and manage to keep at least a superficial peace.
It’s the rare pastor who has not spent years (especially the final few) avoiding conflicts he doesn’t want to touch. Years back, I remember an older pastor telling me he’d arrived at the time in his longterm tenure when, as he put it, “I can do anything I want, now.” Later in the conversation talking about his impending retirement, though, he interjected the comment, “The next man is going to have to be a fighter.”
The next pastor taking up the call immediately hits messes bequeathed him by the former pastor.
Interim pastors filling in the time between two pastors are notorious for avoiding conflict. Interims known for exposing and working to clean up messes left by the former pastor are unlikely to be recommended for another interim. Exposing and seeking to heal longterm conflict in a congregation makes a bad interim.
Unless, that is, one looks at it from the perspective of the next pastor about to take up that call. Then that interim who helped start the cleanup that will define the next pastor’s first few years is loved by the new pastor. He is very grateful the interim before him put his shoulder to the plow and didn’t leave the mess completely unaddressed.
Since he’d spent his life serving as an interim pastor, I wondered if Larry was a normal interim, or a good one? Asking him how he handled longterm conflicts he discovered in churches he was asked to serve as interim pastor, Larry said it was his habit to expose the church’s conflict right out of the gate.
“How,” I asked?
“The first thing I do is change the order of worship. That brings the power players out into the open.”
Couldn’t believe he said or did that. The core curriculum of every legacy seminary is “If there’s ever conflict in your church, you’ve failed,” and yet here was an older experienced pastor telling me he worked to expose and resolve conflict, starting the work immediately. As an interim pastor, no less! I laughed nervously and asked him to tell me more.
One other bit of wisdom from Pastor Odegard. Talking to him about premarital counseling and weddings, he told me he always informed the couple during the first premarital counseling session that his fee for a wedding was ten percent of the total spent on the wedding. “If you spend $10,000, my fee is $1,000. If you spend $100, I’m perfectly content with $10.”
Again, I laughed nervously. But yes, he was serious in both matters. He wasn’t blowing smoke and I learned not to apologize for exercising leadership in pastoral ministry.
The second pastor who gave me wise counsel was Rev. Alma Huppert. Yes, she was a woman.
Pastor Huppert had served the Methodist congregation in our town for many years, but by the time I arrived she was older and lived in the county nursing home. A godly soul in my churches had encouraged me to go visit her, saying she was godly, so I did and she was.
At her door into her single room, I knocked and asked if I could come in?
She welcomed me and, after explaining who I was and why I was there, I asked about her life?
Miss Huppert recounted how she had grown up at the Methodist church. Her father had been the pastor there for ages, and when she finished her education, she had gone overseas to serve as a missionary in China.
Years later, her father—who was still serving the local Methodist church—died, and the congregation had trouble finding a good man, so they contacted Miss Huppert over in China and asked if she would come home and be their pastor?
Our conversation continued for a while, but maybe fifteen minutes later it was clear to me what a godly wise woman I was privileged to be speaking to. The more she talked, the more I couldn’t imagine her agreeing to be the pastor of men.
We got along so well that it was evident I could ask Miss Huppert the question burning in my mind:
“Miss Huppert, what do you think of woman pastors?”
“I’m against them!” she snapped. “The first time they asked me to come home and be their pastor, I said ‘No!’ But they kept on asking so that, finally, I said, “Look, I don’t think it’s right, but I’ll do it on one condition. I will not administer the sacraments, so if you’re willing to hire a man to administer the sacraments, I’ll do it.”
Thus for many years did God protect that congregation from the false doctrine that prevailed in the Methodist church at the time—and since. Pastor Huppert, like Deborah, was a mother in Israel to that whole community, and by the time I arrived, she had become a mother in Israel to the residents of the Columbia County Nursing Home in Wyocena, Wisconsin.
Just a few months after meeting her, I was visiting one day and asked her a favor. “Alma, I wonder if you might be willing to do something for me?”
“What is it,” she asked?
“Would you be willing to have me bring down my sermon tape each week and listen to it and critique my preaching?”
“Well, I suppose I could do that,” she responded.
“Thank you!”
The visit finished, I went home. But the next morning Mary Lee returned from our post office mailbox with a postcard addressed to me. Handwritten, it said:
Dear Pastor Bayly,
I’m very sorry I agreed to critique your sermons. I should never have done so! No, I will not do that. You should not be concerned with what I think of your sermons. You should only be concerned with what God thinks of them!
Alma Huppert (signed)
That wise rebuke has lived in my brain for forty-three years, now. The pastor’s audience is not man, but God.
Visiting Alma one day, (we’d gone to first names), I told her of a young eight or nine year old girl who had started coming to church. She came by herself. No adult brought her, so I looked on her fondly as volunteer corn in a soybean field; a root out of dry ground.
The previous week she had asked me if I would baptize her. Knowing the importance of the sacraments being guarded from our natural superstitions and penchant for ceremonialism, I told Alma I had declined to baptize her yet, but suggested she take some time to consider baptism and its meaning for a while, and then we could talk again.
Alma almost shouted at me: “You did what?”
Knowing I was about to catch it, I answered, “I suggested she wait for a time.”
Alma’s response was excoriating: “A little lamb wanted to come to Christ. She wanted to be baptized and become a member of Christ’s Church, but you told her no? You should be ashamed of yourself!”
I was. Fully. And I never forgot that rebuke, either.
My last memory of Alma was visiting her just before lunchtime. Not wanting to be rude and cut our visit short, Alma was late to the dining room. She asked me to push her wheelchair and out the room, down the hall, and into the dining room we went. Through the doorway, her assigned table was on the opposite side of the room and all the other places were filled with residents who were already eating.
Halfway across the room, suddenly Alma bellowed, “Alright, we’re going to pray” and immediately (as I was still pushing her, “Almighty God, our loving Heavenly Father, we give you thanks for this food you have provided us from Your Own great bounty, and we ask you to bless it to our bodies…”
The average age of the members of the town church was probably eighty when I arrived, and I learned a great deal about the wisdom of old age. Quickly I realized that I was a youth living in a culture that worshipped youth and despised age.
One quote I found at the time stuck with me. No, not Oscar Wild’s ditty, but one that went something like this:
It’s the curse of youth that they have no wisdom and won’t listen to the aged, and it is the curse of the aged that, by the time they have enough years to have gained wisdom, the youth won’t listen to them.
(Twenty-seventh in a series.)
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