Planting Roots in the Ground

I’ve been a full-time pastor for 26 years. During that time I have served as the local minister at churches in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and now Arizona. I expect I will finish in Arizona, although I thought the same thing before. I knew the calls in Alabama and Georgia would not be permanent, but our family never expected to leave Mississippi, and now I can’t see anything beyond the church here. Pastoral ministry should, ordinarily, be a long-term commitment, even though that is not the model we see illustrated most often in the New Testament. The pastor should be like a father to the family, even though he usually will not be the oldest member in the congregation. There should be a sense of permanence, commitment, and reliability in their pastor, someone they can count on to be there for the long haul, to baptize, marry, and bury, not someone looking to climb the ladder or improve his prospects by finding a larger church with better benefits.

Of course, there are drawbacks to the long-term model, just as there are in rotating pastors every three years. The three year man has to leave because he runs out of sermons to preach—he wrote three years worth during the first three years of ministry, and he has been recycling them ever since. The long-term preacher is still writing new sermons, but we’ve heard all of his jokes and illustrations before. In fact, we’re fairly sure we could deliver some of them better than he can, and he doesn’t seem to remember that he used them before. “Have you heard this one? Only a dozen times … every year … since you arrived.”

The short-term pastor usually preaches to a fairly stable congregation. The long-term pastor preaches to a new congregation every 3-5 years. “Where did everybody go?” He didn’t leave, but many of them did, and new people have arrived. At least they haven’t heard all of his jokes yet.

I grew up (and first became a pastor) in a world where people rarely left churches. That’s not entirely true. The churches I grew up in grew by division. They were constantly getting into fights and splitting into factions. One part of the congregation left and started another church a few miles down the road. It’s how you have so many churches of Christ in relatively small southern towns. But it was not unusual to have members who had been in the same church for fifty years. They had stories about the preacher who started the church, and about every minister since. Preachers come and go, but this was their church, their family. They had learned the books of the Bible in the Sunday school classrooms, and since then their children and now their grandchildren were learning the same names and songs and memory verses in the same classrooms, although they had been repainted. (The rooms, not the grandchildren.)

Recently I was talking to a friend—my longest friend, we’ve been best friends since first grade—about this feature of the churches we grew up in. It struck me how very different the church culture is out here. It may be a southwestern thing or an Arizona thing, or it may be due to a different ecclesiastical context or theological paradigm. But I don’t know anyone who stays in the same church for very long. Ten, maybe fifteen years, then they’re gone. There are a few exceptions. There are some people at RPC who were members when I was called here 12 years ago. But my small, non-scientific survey of church-goers in the Phoenix area suggests that most have attended multiple churches over a relatively short period of time. The church they grew up in is not the one they attended in college is not the one they attended when they got married is not the one they attended when their children were in school is not the one…. Christians around here move around.

Some of those transitions are for all the right reasons. I thank God for them. Sometimes there are good reasons to move on, and moving on is exactly what those Christians ought to do. But when you move a lot, it is hard to feel like any particular place is home.

Alabama is home for me, but I haven’t lived there since 2002, and I didn’t live there during my entire childhood, and I didn’t live in the same house for most of the time I lived there. I moved 26 times in my first 22 years. The closest thing I have to a family home would be my grandparents’ house, the one my grandfather built by hand, but since both of them are gone, it will be gone too soon.

We’ve known almost from the beginning that Reformation would not be the last stop for many of our members. Some will move away for work or family reasons. Some will decide they would rather attend another church. If you leave for 3-5 years, when you come back, you’re not going to recognize a lot of faces, even if the same pastor is in the pulpit and repeating the same stories. This isn’t a good or bad aspect of our congregation. It’s just the way it is. I don’t understand it, but I do need to recognize it, because it affects the way we minister to people and how we seek to impact their lives. We are equipping them for whatever is next, the same way I have raised my children. God compares them to arrows, and arrows are not supposed to stay in the quiver. They are to be aimed, drawn, and released. The fact that your children move out is a good thing. It’s God’s plan.

That being said, I do hope (and pray and labor) to see a different culture created in our congregation, one that is unlike the typical transitoriness of most other churches in our city. I hope to see families who buy-in long-term, who plant roots that are deeper and more permanent even than my own. “Pastor Joel may leave or die, but this is our church, our family.” I long to see multiple generations discipled in the same classrooms, for your grandchildren to receive the Body and Blood of Christ from the same Table where their grandparents first took communion, for someone to come to this church one day and hear the stories about how Reformation became Reformation… fifty years before.

We live in a disposable world. If God grants me life, I don’t plan for the house I live in to be the last house I live in. Someday I want to own a truck again, or at least a car that I like. My books will still be around when I am dead, and probably some of my sweater vests, that is, unless a house fire changes things, but most of the features of my life probably will change several more times before I finish this race. That’s not a good or bad thing; it’s just a thing. But I hope and pray the Lord will make the church, this church or another local church your family eventually joins, your church, your family, your home, a stable feature in the midst of an ever-changing life and world.