What the Church Has Taught Me: Calling
What the Church Has Taught Me: Calling by Rev. L. John Gable
June 25, 2023
The letters which the Apostle Paul wrote to Timothy (two of them) and Titus are called “The Pastoral letters” in the New Testament. The elder apostle Paul was writing to instruct and inform the next generation of church leaders as to how to lead a church, how to be a pastor, what it means to be the shepherd of a flock. These letters were essential then, at the foundings of the Christian movement, and are beneficial still today, for all of us – pastor or not – but admittedly they are particularly meaningful to those who have been called to pastoral ministry.
As I near the end of my career I have found myself reflecting on my life of faith and ministry, and now as I find myself more in the Paul role I am recalling the early days of ministry when I was more like Timothy.
Perhaps as with any profession once you’ve completed your training and education the day comes when you suddenly find yourself actually in the office asking yourself, “Now what do I do?” That is where good mentors and helpful instruction is beneficial.
My first call to ministry was as an assistant, soon to be an associate, pastor, at First Presbyterian Church in Mansfield, OH, a middle sized town in the central part of the state. I was grateful for the call, but it was not at all what I was expecting. Coming out of seminary I assumed I would be the energetic young pastor serving alongside a tottering elderly pastor nearing retirement. That proved not to be the case. Bill Bowers was ten years my senior and had more energy than I have ever had. I suddenly found myself in the role of being the staid, steady one.
Bill had had a conversion experience in college which radically changed his life, while I had been raised and nurtured in the faith. He was a Paul (recall his life-changing road to Damascus experience) and I became his Timothy. He deeply loved Jesus, as did I, we just showed it in different ways.
First Pres, Mansfield, was in need of renewal and revitalization and we became a team committed to doing that. One of the programs Bill brought with him was Youth Club which came to be called the “midweek miracle”. Geared toward elementary and middle school aged children we met every Wednesday after school for games, Bible study, music and dinner. It tapped a need in that community and the program exploded in growth, as did the church because of it.
My primary responsibility as the associate pastor was evangelism and outreach, which meant I visited with every visitor who worshiped with us, most often in their homes. I remember one particular visit in which it took the woman I was visiting about 15 minutes to figure out I was a pastor from First Pres and not a salesman trying to sell her window dressings. It was there I learned the importance of being able to call people by name; one of the most beautiful sounds in the world is someone calling you by name, and I believe every pastor should know the name of every one of their sheep. It is there where I learned to run down the steps to do the morning announcements, where I was introduced to Saturday morning men’s Bible study, where I learned to drop everything when someone called with an emergency, where I met faithful women and men who loved the Lord and loved their church and would do anything for the benefit of both. I will always remember one gentleman, Milt Hess, who was well in to his 80’s. He came to every event we offered, not because he was necessarily interested, but because he knew someone had worked hard to make it happen so wanted to support it. I want to be a Milt Hess when I grow up.
It was there that I also had the opportunity to be trained in the Bethel Series, a course of Biblical study for adults which covered the Old and New Testaments in two years. Every Wednesday night I taught a survey course which helped me to gain a deep appreciation and love of the story of Scripture.
Kris and I were blessed by our years in Mansfield because our children were young and the church family was becoming increasingly younger every year. We made friends there which continue to this day, some of whom continue to worship with us every Sunday on line. First experiences in ministry are formative, so I am grateful for our first call in Mansfield.
We lived and served there for 6 years, then I felt the call to spread my wings and become a senior pastor. I was 32 years old and looked a decade younger than that, when I was called to First Presbyterian Church in Waterloo, a medium sized town in NE Iowa. First Pres was an historic church, about the same age as Tab, with a similar though smaller footprint, on a prominent corner on the city square. Out the front door was the central business district and a beautiful city park; out the back door were abandon buildings and crack houses.
In every sense of the word First Pres was a dying congregation, desperately in need of renewal and revitalization, and they knew it. I think that may have been the reason why they were willing to take a chance on a 32 year old fellow with no senior pastor experience. I mean, what’s the worst I could do, right? The interim associate at the time gave me this advice, “They aren’t dying, they are just dying to be loved.” I didn’t know much, but I knew I could do that.
One of the challenges every newly minted pastor has is figuring out what to stand up and say every Sunday morning. All of us have one or two sermons in our hip pocket, but then what? This is one of the issues Paul addresses in his first letter to Timothy – what to preach on and teach. He writes, “I instruct (you) not to teach any different doctrine and not to occupy (yourself) with myths and endless genealogies that promote speculations rather than the divine training that is known by faith. Some people have deviated from these and turned to meaningless talk, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make assertions.” This is a good reminder to any pastor, new or experienced, to remain close to the teaching of Scripture and the historic faith of the church, not just their own flights of interest or fantasy. To this end, he clearly states that the aim of all preaching and teaching is “love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience and a sincere faith”, as perhaps you’ve heard me say, “When in doubt, do the loving thing in the loving way.”
I brought to Waterloo the only two ideas I knew that worked: Bethel, the in-depth adult Bible study program, and Youth Club. The only problem was there were no children. Our first Sunday morning I called the kids to come down for the children’s message and only two came: our kids Timm and Jenny. Call me naïve, but we started a Youth Club program and the kids started to come. We had octogenarians sitting as table leaders with first and second graders. We had business leaders teaching classes on how to tie ribbons and bows and do science experiments. It was in Waterloo that Kris taught 3rd grade Bible study on the Old Testament characters. She thought, “Rather than tell them about them, let’s become them”, so she became an Old Testament hero every week and discovered that the adults in the room were enjoying the stories as much as the children were. That idea planted the seed of my doing first person sermons, becoming Biblical characters and letting them tell their own stories.
I will be forever grateful for our experience at First Pres, Waterloo, because they gave us the freedom to try new things, some of which actually worked, like Youth Club and Bethel. It was there I learned the discipline of preaching every week and of leading weekly Bible studies on the passages I’d be preaching on. It was there I learned how to lead a staff, to understand the workings of the finance committee and the furnace, of the importance of an endowment fund. It was there I pulled out my guitar, and twisted a few arms, to start a contemporary worship service. It was there I learned how to represent the church among those in the community. It was there that I was exposed to the needs of those out our front doors (the haves) and those out our back doors (the have-nots). It was there that our church adopted a failing neighborhood school and I became involved in the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program.
Given its history and location, First Pres was a diverse congregation, much like Tab. I would look out on any given Sunday morning and see the president of the bank and those who frequented the food bank, sitting in the same pew. Two women in particular come to mind. One was perhaps the wealthiest person in our church, the other lived on food stamps; and they called each other “friend.” One day the conversation turned to where people lived. Kris remembers thinking this conversation may not go well, until the lesser resourced woman said, “I live in the most beautiful home in town.” The others knew she did not, so wondered what she meant, until she said, “Look around you at the beautiful stained glass windows, finely decorated rooms and carved wood.” She was talking about our church as her home, and we as her family.
Kris and I have often said, “We wish every young pastor and pastor’s family could have an experience like we had in Waterloo. We were loved and supported in every way.” We quickly learned the truth of what we had been told about them: they weren’t dying, they were just dying to be loved…and we did them and they did us. I also learned the truth of the saying, “People don’t really care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
As I look back on those early years in ministry, I give thanks for the experiences and the people who were part of them. To this day, I find myself practicing ministry in ways I know Bill Bowers taught me in Mansfield 40 years ago. I give thanks for those who guided and mentored a young pastor in Waterloo with kindness and gentleness. One day I wanted to put my really catchy sermon title on the front sign, “This church is going to hell”. The sermon was going to be about how the church is called to go to the deepest, darkest places to reach people with the love of Jesus Christ. One of my mentors, the program director for the local NBC affiliate, wisely instructed me not to, saying “Don’t put anything out there that is more distractive than it is instructive.” He too was one of my many mentors along the way.
John Cairns once wrote to his teacher Sir William Hamilton: “I do not know what life, or lives, may be before me; but I do know this, that, to the end of the last of them, I shall bear your mark upon me.” I can say the same about those who have influenced me in countless ways, whose mark continues to be upon me still.
This is just some of what the church has taught me…and I pray that we will be the kind of church who so teaches others, those among us and those still to come.
Rev. L. John Gable
Tabernacle Presbyterian Church
Indianapolis, IN