Ten years ago I told myself I would never be a pastor again. And I meant it.
It was 2016, and after a year of false accusations, the congregation I served voted to dissolve our relationship. I was eventually exonerated, but by then something in me had already closed up. I didn’t trust churches anymore, and honestly, I didn’t trust myself to survive that kind of vulnerability a second time.
A couple of years later I was sitting in a presbytery meeting, watching a new pastor being received into the presbytery. He was standing up front, hopeful and ready for whatever was coming next, and my heart just sank for him. He has no idea what he’s walking into, I thought. It felt like watching somebody climb down into a snake pit.
I still meant what I’d said.
The Safe Version of Ministry
For two years I worked with a nonprofit called Flourish San Diego, and I did a lot of guest preaching on the side. I loved guest preaching, because guest preaching doesn’t ask anything of you. You show up, you preach, and you go home.
Somewhere in those years I also stopped thinking of myself as the pastor of a church and started thinking of myself as someone who helps churches. Plural. I started a podcast, I did some coaching and consulting, and I built online courses. And all of it fit my fear beautifully, because none of it required me to actually belong anywhere.
Then Westmorland Community Presbyterian Church asked me to be their interim pastor, and I said yes because the boundaries were so clear I couldn’t possibly miss them. It was part-time. It was two hours away. There were literally mountains between where I lived and where I served!
And for three and a half years those good people loved me and blessed me, and I began to wonder something I hadn’t let myself wonder in a long time. Could a church actually be a safe place?
Mount Soledad Presbyterian Church, in 2022, felt riskier, mostly because it was local. This time I’d have to maintain my own boundaries, since no mountain range was going to do it for me. So I held onto the parts that still felt safe, which is to say it was part-time and it was interim, and there was always an easy door out if I needed one.
And then the same thing happened all over again. People loved me and cared about me, and since most of the folks at Mount Soledad today became part of this church during my years here, they started to feel like my people. Which is, of course, exactly the sort of thing that makes a person vulnerable.
What I Was Looking For
After I’d been at Mount Soledad about a year, we started talking about making me Stated Supply, which is one of those in-between arrangements, not quite interim and not quite permanent. It would have let all of us skip the harder question. But the presbytery didn’t go for it. Instead they suggested the church go through the full search process, and said I was welcome to apply.
Honestly, I was grateful. It gave both the church and me the time to discern whether I really was being called to be the pastor of Mount Soledad, and it kept us from drifting sideways into something neither of us had actually chosen.
So I went looking for red flags. Criticism. Conflict handled badly. Anxiety driving decisions. A hunger for control.
I didn’t find them. What I found instead were elders who could disagree with real conviction and still land somewhere good together, and a congregation that walked with me through a flood, a serious deficit, and a sanctuary with hardly anybody in it, and came out the other side trusting each other more than when we started.
Maybe I’m Just a Pastor
A couple of years ago I was on a retreat with some of the guys I’d walked the Camino de Santiago with, and I was tired in a way I couldn’t quite explain to myself. All that helping churches (plural) had been pulling more energy out of me than I was able to put back in.
And then I said something out loud that surprised me. “Maybe I’m just a pastor.”
It wasn’t triumphant. If anything it was a kind of surrender, an admission that all my strategies for serving churches without belonging to one had finally worn me thin, and that maybe I was only ever called to shepherd one flock at a time.
That was the moment I stopped protecting myself from my own calling.
Three Times on a Beach
I keep coming back to Peter in John 21. Jesus doesn’t just forgive Peter for denying he ever knew him. He asks him three times, “Do you love me?” and three times he tells him, “Feed my sheep” (John 21:15-17).
Think about what Jesus is doing there. He takes the very thing that frightened Peter into denial, and he hands it right back to him. Here. Do it again. Take care of my people.
I got asked three times too, and each time asked a little more trust than the time before. Guest preaching. Westmorland. Mount Soledad.
And now, ten years after I promised myself I’d never do this again, I’m becoming the installed pastor of a church I love.
If Ministry Has Wounded You
If ministry has hurt you, I’m not going to pretend otherwise, and I’m not going to promise it can’t happen again, because it can. This work is hard, and sometimes it cuts deeper than anyone prepared you for, and every pastor I know has tasted that in some measure.
What I can tell you is that God never left me. Not in the worst of that year, not in the years I wanted nothing to do with the church, and not in all the years I kept one foot out the door just in case.
