There's a lot that seminary doesn't teach you. That may seem obvious to you. What may not seem obvious is that seminary doesn't teach you the most important, transformational and challenging elements of being a pastor.
Seminary doesn't teach you, for instance, that many churches expect their pastor to give them the "answers" to life, but then become offended if your answers aren't the same as the ones they've already developed. Or that many churches blame the pastor for any and all decisions they don't like, but then become frustrated if they aren't involved in the decision-making process, not realizing that the decisions they don't like were probably also influenced by lay collaboration. It's a lonely vocation, being a pastor. Good seminary professors may talk about the inherent struggles of pastoral life but no seminary can possibly teach you to handle it. You have to experience a person leaving the church for reasons completely out of your control, or a person leaving because they've misunderstood you, or a person leaving because you did what you're certain God wanted you to do, to learn what it's like. It's one thing I learned on my bike trip across the country that as helped me immensely: you can't train yourself into shape for the tasks God has put before you. You have to ride yourself into shape. You have to do it to be able to do it. You have to trust God knew what He was doing when He called you and spend every moment relying upon God's grace. You can never learn how to be a pastor.
You can't learn what to do when you find yourself working late at night in a haunted church building. True story. My first appointment had an old building re-built on the same spot the previous church building had burned down a hundred years before. At night, you could hear the cries of the previous building: "Don't forget me! Don't forget me!" Either that, or there was a man living in the attic. Actually, there was a man living in the attic. He waited for everyone to leave before he himself could safely leave the building. So maybe all the creepy sounds were of his devising, hoping to force people to leave earlier than planned. You also can't learn what to do when a community member asks you to help her arrange her home, and you agree to help because she clearly has a mental illness and you're worried no one else will help, but then you find that her home is a trailer that hasn't been properly maintained for at least twenty years and instead simply used as storage for that time period. You can't learn what to do when your father-in-law becomes a loved and respected member of the church family and then he suddenly passes away, and you're now expected to personally grieve and also offer care to your congregants. You can't learn what to do when the parsonage the church provides for you is on a major thoroughfare, blessing the house with constant background noise and shaking except for a handful of hours at night. You can't learn what to do when your church doesn't care what it means to be a (fill in the blank with whatever form of Christian disciple you are, Catholic, Methodist, Presbyterian, etc.) because they want to create the church in their own image. You can't learn what to do when the police take over your church building for a stakeout--true story! You can't learn what to do when people just plain don't listen, are ready to take offense at every little thing you say, and can't abide any person or group believing or practicing faith differently and mask their self-centeredness as a concern with other people's "faithfulness," as if faithfulness to God's Word can't take a variety of forms through the Spirit (by the way, the Covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated this. Many churches are finding it impossible to strike a balance between caring for their congregants' physical safety and comfort levels with a theological and emotional need to remain open no matter what).
Look, you can't be taught how to be a pastor in seminary. You can, however, be taught the habits and rituals of a humble pastor, seeking God's grace in all things, in one's personal and pastoral life. Crucially, you can be taught how to form the relationships that will sustain you throughout your fulfilling of your vocation. Here is one fallacy many lay churchgoers need to be freed from: the pastor can be your friend. No matter how close the relationships may be between pastor and congregant, they can never be truly a friendship. Pray for your pastor, offer them support, but most of all encourage them to maintain the solid friendships they already have or should have. A pastor won't survive without friends because the responsibility to grow a church spiritually, but no one's agreeing how that should be done, can be overwhelming.
The good news is that you or your pastor will almost certainly find lasting and meaningful spiritual friendships at seminary. I'd like to share four different versions of friendship I experienced to either give hope to prospective seminarians, assure laity that their pastors are okay, remind current pastors of what's important, and perhaps also offer some thought-provoking reflections on the forms all our friendships take and how to best utilize them in our life moving forward. Pastoral life presents its own particular challenges, but life itself can be a challenge. The trick is benefitting from the people God has placed on our path to appreciate and enjoy the gift of life.
My grizzly bear roommate, Joel, was a year ahead of me in seminary and so, by being his roommate, I had a built-in set of friends. One of them, Jo, later traveled to South Africa with me--or I with her would be more grammatically correct, as she was definitely more mature than I. It was a blessing to have these friends in particular because they fit with my own personality quite well: funny, loved sports (some of them), and most importantly were committed to holy fun and intellectual and spiritual growth.
At one lunch time, when chicken nuggets were being served, one of those friends declared that a chicken nugget lunch meant an eating contest. I gleefully joined, to the mock delight of many, given my skinny frame. I then handily won. A year later, another friend, even skinnier than I, challenged others to a Chipotle burrito eating contest. We made it into a "thing," walking down to Chipotle, walking back, and then gathering in the community room for the main event. Probably H wouldn't want me to tell this story because she recently got married (congratulations!) and might still be in that, "Should I tell him all my life stories?" phase, but it so went that H, the skinniest one, ate both burritos first. Unfortunately for her, I won the contest, because I was the only other one to have eaten two burritos in one sitting and she, shortly after finishing number two, mysteriously left the room and never returned. You can guess what happened.
Yes, there were shenanigans, but we also joined together night after night during Advent to read from The Christmas Chronicles and mark the holy season together. And we challenged one another on a range of theological and vocational questions. J and J were particularly insightful regarding economic justice issues, H on the nature of spiritual growth, and Joel on the reality of living life. When I decided I would not become a pastor, none of them blindly accepted my decision but instead, while still supporting me, asked me why and wanted to ensure that I'd still use my spiritual gifts somehow and some way. These conversations were not the purpose of our time together but did flesh out the meaningfulness of our friendship. Together, we could clearly see that God has created us to share in life with Him, which means joyful and peaceful attention on God's self. Our friendship helped us master the joyful and peaceful part, while always remaining attentive to God. You need to laugh in life, especially if you are serving in a vocation filled with responsibility.
On what we might call the opposite end of the spectrum, I also participated in a band meeting during seminary. Originally the Methodist movement, in addition to a theological focus on grace and spiritual perfection through the Holy Spirit, emphasized what were called class meetings and band meetings. Class meetings met to ask one another how one's discipleship journey was going; band meetings met to confess sins to one another and then forgive them. While our school required that each student attend a class meeting during an introductory class, mine didn't last, probably because it was merely a class requirement. Whatever the reason, with the dissolution of my forced class meeting and my growing disillusionment with the qualifications and spirituality of my prospective clergy colleagues, I sought something more meaningful. A lot of my disillusionment could probably be traced to the fact that I was a theological conservative surrounded by progressives. All my friends at that time either leaned or were outright progressive, as were all the professors. Plus, I seemed to daily fall off the pedestal of holiness and purity. I needed some group of people I could unload my entire self to without fear of being judged. The band meeting was just what I needed.
What made my band meeting meaningful was that it was only men--all band meetings should consist of one sex--and that we all felt out of place at that school. Now, I shouldn't call it "my" band meeting because I was invited to an already ongoing band, but it became mine. Publicly confessing one's sins to others is not great fun but even so I looked forward to that hour or two every week. It was like a secret enclave where God spoke to us directly from Mt. Sinai, offering grace and mercy in increased measure. My group of friends were open and accepting, of course, but there are times in life when we need more than friendly support, advice, and prayer. We need an outward and tangible sign of God's grace. An outward and tangible sign of God's saying to us, "I know the deepest, darkest parts of your being, and yet I gave my Son to die on the cross for you."
The relationship I developed with my band members was special. To this day those three have heard things about my life that no one else knows, not even my wife. Yet you might not need a band meeting to develop those types of relationships. It is hard, though, to maintain friendships that are completely and entirely open to everyone's failings and struggles all the time, which is why I often recommend therapy and counseling to anyone, regardless of one's mental health. Some friendships are able to strike the balance, though. Either way, as I continue in pastoral ministry, the need for these deeply spiritual relationships has become clearly a necessity to me. The pressures of life, of sin, and of competing interests within the church that then blame issues on the pastor or church for not being God-focused, can all become too much. This is true for non-clergy, as well, who might have an equally demanding vocation. You will feel like a failure. You will feel lonely. You will feel out of place. You will feel that you should give up, that God is not with you, that you can't redeem yourself from past mistakes. Having friends that support you and make you laugh will often not be enough. Again, even with our best friends, we often still hide part of our being to protect ourselves from complete exposure. Yet we need at least one relationship in which we can bear ourselves and become entirely vulnerable so as to know God's mercy in times of trial and tribulation, whether they be spiritual or practical. These relationships will nurture contentment. Different from joy and peace and intellectual growth, we sometimes just need to be content in God.
Dating in seminary can be fun, as I've shared before in other pieces. What I haven't said is that I believe every romantic relationship should serve a purpose. We don't necessarily need to know what that purpose is in the midst of the relationship but we should internally inquire every so often to discern. Why? Because we also need relationships that contribute to emotional and reflective growth. Sometimes, even in a church, people will seek to intentionally hurt you, either because they are simply mad or they think that doing so will return you to a more "right" path. And as a clergy friend of mine says, "church hurt is the worst hurt." Or people around you are not self-aware or considerate enough to acknowledge when they are unintentionally hurting you. All I know is that you will be hurt, whether in the church or not, by the people you least expect to hurt you. In those situations we need not only a closeness to God, not only relationships of joy and peace and spiritual growth and contentment, we need to be able to reflect on our own selves well. We need to know when there's a good reason we've been hurt, when we've been caught in a crossfire, and when our hurt has everything to do with someone else's unresolved issues. Romantic relationships aren't the only way we do that but they are often the best, as they encourage us to constantly question what we've done and why.
I've mentioned my friend Alex before and how I was attracted to her before becoming friends. I remember going late to some special, evening chapel event. Because I was late, I had to sit up in the foyer--foyer? That's not the right word, I don't think. Whatever the upper rows of seats/pews in the back of a sanctuary are called. Up there. Standing a few feet from me, managing the lighting and sound, was this gorgeous older woman, looking a little sad, who needed me to cheer her up. Little did I know how much reason she had to be sad. A few days later, a friend of mine told me that he knew this mystery woman, so I asked if he could investigate her romantic history, as if we were in middle school. He commented on the fact that we weren't in middle school but I didn't care. I wanted to know, I wanted to tread carefully.
From that point forward, I realized that I'd need to grow up if I wanted to nab a mature woman. I couldn't win her over with middle school tactics and an early twenties' physique. Who knew? Alex expertly redirected my interests towards friendship, for some unknown reason, but I didn't give up until I graduated and moved away. In the meantime, I re-evaluated everything about myself that might have turned Alex off. Wearing visors upside down and backwards was the first casualty. Saying, "Whale's balls," as a substitute for cursing, was also a casualty. Funnily enough, Alex and I actually had a conversation about the size of testicles I could reference that wouldn't be overly obnoxious to her. If I were going to use male parts instead of curse words, in an attempt to be a funny and flashy young thing, I had to stick to only, "balls," once or twice a day. She was clear on that. I also learned from her that babies grow in a woman's ovary, not in their stomach. Apparently the ovary expands inside the woman's body. Who knew? Perhaps the greatest maturation consisted of examining my desires. Did I want to win over Alex because we'd live happily ever after, or because I wanted victory in a challenging conquest?
Over time, whether she knew she was doing this or not, Alex guided me to understand myself and what's important in my life. Not life generally, but my life. We are each, of course, unique individuals, and what might be good for someone else might not be for us. If we want to be happy, content, whatever, we need to intensely self-examine. No one else can do it for us. However, we can often see ourselves reflected most clearly in the quest for gratification. If the quest only remains a quest, then we've failed ourselves. If, on the other hand, we question why we are who we are, why we're seeking what we do, then we might grow up a little bit. We might develop the emotional and reflective health and maturity that we need to survive years of life, full of crises.
The title of this essay is "Grace," as you can read. I assume you can read, anyway, otherwise I should stop writing. Sometimes I wonder if God's grace is best explained by putting the right people in our paths to develop the relationships we need to grow well into mature, holy people. I did not choose my roommate, and because I did not choose my roommate, I didn't exactly choose my friends. Yet they were right for me. I also didn't sit around asking myself, "How can I find an older, attractive woman to fall in love with that will then help me mature emotionally?" That happened by accident, or by grace, by providence. At times, though, we do willfully choose the relationships we want. That can end badly. Once, in college, I thought to myself, "Man, I should find a good, intelligent, Christian woman, and base my love for her entirely on respect. I don't need to be attracted to her at all." Before I realized how miserable I'd be in that marriage, I had already bought a $3000 engagement ring. When we have planted and watered the relationships that we need to grow, though, we can then know the persons and character we're looking for to establish a single relationship that might encompass all the other means of edification from the other forms. Hence, why I became friends with Rob and Maggie.
During one of those awkward icebreaking conversations at the beginning of New Testament class, Rob admitted that he was an aspiring writer. Hey, so was I! I caught him after class and said we should start a writers' accountability group. Just the two of us. He agreed. That lasted a month, maybe, before Rob's life caught up to him--a husband and father of two and still working part-time as a youth pastor--and I realized I'd never amount to much.
So when we dissolved our meetings, he invited me to his apartment for family shabbat. I accepted the invitation because I was learning how to chase after what I believed God told me was good for me. Years later I learned that Rob did not expect me to accept the invitation, wasn't even sure he had wanted to make the invitation, and so didn't tell his wife that I may or may not be coming. My arrival was a surprise to everyone but me. Looking back on it, the whole experience was awkward, but at the time I assumed it was because I was unfamiliar with the family traditions. Rob had not learned from his first mistake and, at the end of the evening, extended hospitality again and said I could feel free to join them any Friday in the future. So the next week I showed up again and we reran the whole charade. Except that night, Rob and Maggie and the kids decided they did, indeed, enjoy my company.
Friday after Friday for two and a half years, I was part of a family. The Ulmers weren't friends. They were brother and sister. Christians use family language a lot but not often, I think, do the words, "brother" and "sister" actually apply. Usually we say, "Hey, brother," aspiring that it will be true, but with the Ulmers it was true. Every week, I stayed later and later. To that point in my life I had only stayed up beyond midnight, on purpose, a few times. But for the last year of seminary, I knew that I shouldn't plan to do anything Saturday morning. We talked, laughed, taught the kids, prayed, worshiped, argued, explored new ideas, held one another accountable, and fast forwarded our maturing process. Maggie once said to me that I was the first male friend she was entirely comfortable being alone with for an extended period of time. My response was, "huh, yeah, you're right." I hadn't thought about it but never did we have to question the status of our relationship: we were family.
We were family, so I had learn how to deal with a pregnant woman. Pregnancy and infancy were periods of life I had astutely avoided until then. Once, in worship class, the professor asked us all to practice how we'd baptize an infant so that the water wouldn't drop down into the baby's eyes. For me, there was a step prior to that I had to practice: holding a baby. Everyone glanced at one another as if to ask themselves whether I was joking. But with little Ulmer, I was thrown into the deep end, and I didn't seem to care. I learned all sorts of things about infant care, including sleep regressions, when the child wakes up after half an hour and looks around to see if there's anyone to annoy. Hiding became an essential skill I learned in my final year of seminary. I also learned how to change a diaper, which side is the front and which is the back; which direction to swipe the poop. Half an hour after changing my first poopy diaper, we could still smell it. Rob asked me if I "dug in there" or not. Little did I know that one must "dig in there" to counteract after-taste. All these things I had to learn because we were family. Somehow or another I even became "uncle" to the Ulmer kids, and they wrote out kind little notes in their graduation gift to me, The Giving Tree.
Family should be unconditionally loving and supportive but not all are. I mean, not all biological families are. Many families have their limits. Many friendships have their limits. Friendships that transition into chosen family, however, are likely to offer all the elements of God's grace I'm suggesting are necessary for life's challenges, and they're able to do so because chosen families are indeed unconditionally loving and supportive, like God Himself. This isn't to say that biological families that don't live up to the ideal or friendships that fall short are somehow bad. My friends in seminary who fit the various molds were and are great. But this last friendship, my chosen family, was the ultimate. I acknowledge how lucky I was and am because not all of us are fortunate enough to ever find a chosen family. Not all of us are fortunate enough to find people who will remain loving and supportive friends to us no matter what we say or do. That's what the Ulmers were to me. If ever I angered them, they would not stew but instead share their feelings and hold me accountable by asking why I did or said what I did with the intention of reconciliation and also my own spiritual and mental growth. We did not need to walk on egg shells because every moment was an opportunity for some sort of life or spiritual improvement.
I was never embarrassed around them, either. One time, Rob and I were arguing, and I said, "Well, surely, if you believe x, you must also believe y," and Rob responded with the conclusion, "and don't call me Shirley." I didn't get it, having never seen the movie Airplane. I was in a "surely" mood so I said the word again and again, and Rob responded the same way each time, and I could see a growing smirk on him as he tried to keep a straight face but he wasn't sure whether I was pushing his buttons on purpose as a comedic routine or if I actually wasn't cultured in comedy film. Later that evening I returned home and researched, "Don't call me Shirley," to see if Rob was referencing anything--obviously--and felt stupid for only a moment. With anyone else, that feeling would have lasted. Indeed, with anyone else, I probably would have followed up after a few days, "Hey, you know that time I seemed not to know the movie Airplane? I was so much better than you at delivering dry humor."
The point is this: if you plan on surviving life, seek out the relationships that can support you in God's grace via intellectual growth, joyful refreshment and peaceful relaxation, forgiveness and mercy, and emotional and spiritual growth. And if you're lucky, you'll find a relationship, or a chosen family, managing to encapsulate all of God's grace. Hold on to it.
It is true, too, that a chosen family can serve for you as a means of all of God's grace. The religious acts that we call sacraments are such because we believe that somehow, mysteriously but surely (don't call me Shirley), Christ is present in that action regardless of our state of mind or heart. A chosen family can be that for you all of the time. Just as it is only through Christ we come to know our true worth, so in human terms it is only through these special relationships that we can be truly assured that we are indeed of worth and value.
Still, at the end of the day, perhaps the most important lesson isn't about the types of relationships you need to survive the challenges of life, but that you need relationships. Unless you make a covenant, as in marriage, relationships will come and go and that's okay. No matter how introverted you are, though, please don't ever forget the importance of your relationships, especially if you're going to be a pastor or want to support your pastor. Pastoral ministry is, again, lonely.
So do whatever you need to do to nurture and maintain the relationships you need. Even if that means taking a train trip across the country to revisit with old friends and chosen family. And even if one of those stops is in Newport News, Virginia, one of the least safe places to be late at night in Virginia, and your best friend has no idea where the train station is and he's driving an old rickety van on its last legs. Even then, take the trip, because eventually it will be a pretty hilarious story you can all laugh about after the van breaks down and you need to sit around waiting for the wife to put all the kids to sleep so she can pick y'all up.
These relationships are going to help you be the person God intended you to be. If you're a pastor, that means being a non-anxious presence at your first funeral in a new appointment hearing and then seeing that an elderly member of the family fainted and is possibly having a heart attack mere minutes before the start of the funeral. It means having half your church judge you for something you did not say but they think you did say because of mishearing or miscommunication but calmly loving them all anyway. It means looking someone in the face as they ask, "Why do we need to talk about racism? We don't have any coloreds in our church," and patiently listening to God's guidance. Being a pastor means all sorts of things they don't teach you in seminary, but you can survive and thrive through it all because you have God's grace in the form of tangible, living people behind you, supporting you, watering your growth.
And if you're not a pastor or a concerned congregant reading this, I believe most of what I've said here applies to you, too. If you are a concerned congregant, though, some advice: don't try to be the friend your pastor needs. 99% of the time your pastor can't stop being your pastor around you. Just check in to ensure they have the network they need... and then do your best not to make them need it.
