By Joe Kutter |
The day before yesterday, I attended an ordination council. The candidate for ministry is bright and personable and full of promise and young. Her passionate love for the church and especially for the American Baptist family of churches was a warming thing to hear and stirred some old embers in my own soul. God is still calling some terrific people into the ministry of the church.
It was in May of 1971 when I knelt as hands were placed on my shoulders and head, and the ordination prayer of blessing and dedication was offered in my behalf. My father, ordained as a Northern Baptist pastor in the prior generation, offered the prayer, and I remembered that my mother’s father had served as a pastor and professor in the generation before his. I can still feel the presence of that great cloud of witnesses even as I can still feel the presence of an uncertainty that has never quite gone away.
I remember being there because I had to be there, compelled by some inner force that simply would not let me move in another direction. But something else within me wanted to go someplace else, perhaps anyplace else.
The truth is that I felt like something of a fraud as I began my ministry. I did not know if I had enough faith and whether the faith I had was the right kind of faith. I wasn’t much of a holy man, and I felt a profound absence of any inner spiritual authority to preach or teach. I wondered, “Who am I to tell people about God or what God has to say?” And some of those feelings have never gone away. And I really wondered whether a preacher or pastor could really make any kind of difference in this world or even in the church. Even in 1971 the death of the church was being predicted, and preaching was ridiculed as an archaic mode of communication.
And yet, that other something, that other inner force (I now suspect to be the Holy Spirit) simply wouldn’t let go. So I survived an ordination council of my own in which it took the council members a very long time to authorize the Haddonfield (NJ) Baptist Church to proceed with ordination, and I knelt on that Sunday afternoon to be blessed by the saints who attended.
Now, thirty-one-and-one-half years later, still a pastor, the question has changed. In the beginning the question was, why are you doing this? Now the question is, why are you still doing this?
The Good Lord knows that I’ve seriously thought about other things. Some years ago, I actually took the LSAT, thinking that law school would be another option. I spent a year commuting to Princeton to study Greek thinking that a Ph.D. would be the ticket to a more acceptable vocation. When our fourth child let us know that he was on the way, I talked with people about more lucrative employment out of a genuine anxiety concerning our ability to pay the bills on a pastor’s salary. And I have explored options within the denomination, both regional and national positions. There were times when I wasn’t hired and times when I withdrew from the process knowing that it was not right for me.
So why am I still here, serving as a pastor of the First Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas? It still has to do with that compelling inner force that keeps me connected and fascinated by the tasks of ministry. I have a story that dramatizes, for me, the way this inner force works within me.
She knocked on the door of the house late one afternoon. “Mom is having a really tough time. Can you come over?” “Oh,” she said, “she has asked for a scripture to be read at her funeral, and I don’t know if it is appropriate. It’s that passage about the sheep and the goats where Jesus said, ‘When you have done it to the least of my brothers and sisters, you have done it to me.’ Is that really a good funeral passage?”
“It’s perfect,” I said. “For your mother, nothing else fits so well.”
Let me tell you about Jerry (Mom). When we housed the homeless in our church building during the coldest days of January or February, she was there nearly every night. More than once, she stayed all night. When a neighbor church housed the homeless, she was there too. When an agency that cared for the poor in downtown Detroit needed help, she and her husband spent days helping to paint and repair the building.
Socks are important to homeless people. Wet or damp socks in the wintertime are deadly. So we cleaned and passed out dry and clean socks. One night we ran out of socks, and Jerry disappeared. When she returned, she had a sack full of warm, clean, folded socks. It was late, and the stores were closed. “How did you do that?”
“Paul can buy more tomorrow,” Jerry said, referring to her husband. “They need the socks!”
One cold, windy day Jerry saw one of her “clients” shuddering at a bus stop. She sat with her friend and sheltered him from the wind while Paul went home to get a coat. He could buy another one tomorrow!
And there was the “client” who needed a place to stay. Against our best advice, she and Paul took him into their home for a while to give him a chance. It did not work out well. The addiction was too powerful. But Jerry and Paul were there to try to give him another chance.
I walked over to their house, and the entire family was there. Paul and their two adult daughters had given wonderful care to Jerry, and they met me at the door. “Before you go in, we want you to know that she really looks bad. She has slipped a lot since you were last here.”
We went into the bedroom, and it was true. She was thinner, darker, more drawn and gaunt, for the disease was ravaging her body. They pointed to the lone chair beside her head, and I sat there and talked for just a few moments. The room was dark, with only a small lamp to give the light that created a kind of halo around her face. I asked if we could pray together.
Somebody moved, and I glanced that way to see what was happening. In order to keep her company through the night, the family had placed a mattress on the floor at the foot of the bed so that some family member could keep her company at all times. And there they were, all three of them, the father and his two adult daughters, kneeling like little children with hands folded, ready to say their bedtime prayers.
I am not blessed with great sensitivity to the Holy, but I must say that I was in the midst of something?Someone?profoundly holy that night. The intimacy, the profound love that overcomes even death, the faith that cannot be articulated and trusts God when God seems untrustworthy, it was all in that bedroom, and these incredible people had invited me to share the moment.
A daughter asked, “Joe, do you believe in angels?”
“Why do you ask?”
“As you were praying,” she said, “there was a light up in the corner of the room, and I wonder if it was an angel who had come to take Mother home.”
“Yes, Sue, I believe in angels.”
What keeps me in ministry? It is hard to say, but it has something to do with the fact that I am sometimes invited to share in moments of incredible intimacy, wonderful love, and indescribable holiness. In the midst of all of the nonsense of church work, all of the pettiness that church-folk can sometimes churn, and the grind-it-out work that simply must be done, I stay for the reason that I started. I am compelled by some inner force that just won’t let go.
It keeps me alert, wondering, even expecting, that in some conversation, some hospital visit, some wedding or marriage counseling session, some sermon preparation, or in the midst of some worship experience it will happen again. The Holy will appear even to this one who still knows full well all of the reasons that he ought to do something else.
The phone rang late this morning. (And I am not making this up for the sake of this article.) The phone rang, and the man at the other end said, “Joe, are you free to talk sometime today?” “When? You name the time.”
Some day, I may do something else, but it’s nearly 3:00 PM now. He will be here in just a few minutes, and who knows what will happen. It could be something holy.
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The Rev. Dr. Joe Kutter serves as the Pastor of the First Baptist Church of Topeka, KS. He is currently President of the national Ministers Council.
