The Offer

Then life takes a twist. A month and a half ago my phone rang. The caller had a 719 area code. It was a former boss from a temp position in Colorado Springs. After catching up, he offered me a job. After considering it for a few days, we turned him down.

Two weeks ago, he called back and upped the offer. Here we are. For a year and a half, I have been through every stage of the interview process with multiple churches and zero offers. On the other hand, I managed to skip the interview process and jump right to the details.

For me, the hardest part of considering a job outside of pastoral ministry is letting go of value I find in having a title. I remember a conversation with my spiritual director where he pushed back on my justification with the question: “Do you think being a pastor requires a title?”

We accepted the offer. Now I am a young pastor who works as a manager.

We have our share our share of challenges ahead of us, but with them comes a salary, health insurance, and our own apartment. And the best part is that I do not have to drive our stuff to Colorado. Of all the times my life has been in jeopardy, most of them involve a moving truck.

Visiting Pastor

Preaching is a gift. It may be a bit like that itchy sweater you get from grandma that you have to wear in the Christmas picture then gets accidentally lost or shrunk or dropped into a fire. Nevertheless it is still a gift.

It was given to me this past weekend at St. Peters Lutheran church in Denver, Iowa. St. Peters is the church Kimbra attended as a child. We search for her confirmation picture on the wall every time we visit. I enjoy tracing the hairstyles back through the decades.

In our visits, I have been blessed by the liturgy of the Lutheran church. For some it becomes rote or mechanical. But much like systematic theology, it frames the experience of faith. It reminds me that we continue the journey of many who walked this path before us. They, like us, may have taken wrong turns but they still moved us forward.

The best part of preaching is that it awakens the pastor in me. The worst part is that it stops short. I am again reminded that preaching alone will not bring growth. It takes a faith community. It takes a church.

I enjoyed preaching more than I thought. I enjoyed a medium-sized church more than I thought. I have always placed myself in a large church as one of many pastors. But the thought leading a small or medium community would not be a waste of these next years.

One thing is clear. I am a young pastor. I have come a long way from my first sermon (which you will not find on my website) and I still have a long way to go.

What is your ideal job description?

This question often pops up early interviews.  I've had enough experiences to refine my answer, so here are the top five components I am looking for in a job. 

A. Spiritual Formation

The non-negotiable for me is discipleship. If I am not promoting the spiritual formation of others than I am not being true to my calling or my training. I prefer group discipleship (augmented with individual attention), because it maximizes time and allows for multiple voices. This area also includes building discipleship into the fabric of the church, managing related structures and guiding curriculum. There is lots of coffee involved here.

B. Leadership Development
The starting point for spiritual formation is the leadership. My heart here is for me to pass on my training and experience to those who will never have the chance to go to seminary or work full-time in pastoral ministry. It involves recruiting new leaders and training people in faith, ministry skills and gifts. Plus, I have a lot more free time when I have a church full of people who can do my job.

C. Teaching
I hope to be involved with both preaching and teaching. I would love to be the third member of a rotating preaching team. I also want hands on time in adult education, which allows opportunity to further explore a topic or a passage. My teaching has a strong formational element; I would rather leave people with a discipline than an application. Teaching satisfies my inner nerd.

D. Groups
For community relationships to be healthy, small and medium-sized groups must be in place. Given the right nurture and encouragements, these groups become the platform for growth and transformation. I like to be involved in organizational structuring, leadership training, and content options.

E. Community Life
A big part of pastoral ministry is walking with people through the important spiritual events in life. These include baptisms, weddings, baby dedications, confirmations, funerals, divorce, going through counseling, retreats, graduations, rededications, and so on. An essential part of who I am is being with people in these moments.

How's the Job Search Going? or Hawkeye Football

I am being forced to relive season after season of the Bachelor. Gather 100 candidates for a church job and slowly eliminate them week by week until someone proposes. Currently, I am still single, but I have quite the rose collection.

Kimbra and I spent most of September back in the Midwest, interviewing for multiple positions. (We also spent time with family, abused our free babysitting privileges, and vowed to diet when we returned to Colorado.) The result: I've made it to the final episode a number of times now, but she keeps going for the other guy. I even had a run in with Season 11 where neither of the two finalists were chosen. For those of you who no idea the Bachelor made it to 11 seasons and beyond, good for you.

The feedback I have received has been unfortunately positive. It would be nice if I had some blatant area to improve. Instead, the trend has been to go with candidates who have experience with the specific area of the job. In a normal economy, employers who want education and specific experience will have to settle. In this flooded market, they can have their way. Though I'm getting really good at describing myself in five adjectives and identifying one or two weaknesses that are actually strengths in disguise.

Overall, the search has been pretty discouraging. I'm itching to jump into a staff team and get to work, but I'm stuck on the bench. And as grateful as we are to be huddled in my grandmother's basement rent-free, we would like some forward motion as a family. We spend a lot of our prayer time exploring these feelings and searching for God's voice in all of this. Perhaps with time, we will better understand God's direction for this season.

On the plus side, I am not the only University of Iowa graduate to be smelling roses.

Tim vs. the Wildlife

Day number 71 of my expedition begins the typical way. At 5:35 a.m., the sun creeps over the horizon and most bird species begin their melodic tweeting. One species takes a different route. BamBamBamBamBamBamBam!

The Northern Flicker, or colaptes auratus, is a medium-sized woodpecker that marks its territory by repeated hammering or "drumming". Though the natural drumming material is wood, urbanized Flickers have taken a fancy to metal, such as the metal fireplace cover on my grandmothers house. After reverberating down the chimney, its tiny beak sounds more like a SIG SG-550.

Speaking of rifles, the Northern Flicker is protected by the Federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which requires a federal permit for lethal methods of control. Instead, I brought my Super Soaker XP 150 back from Iowa. If I'm having a particularly rough morning, I throw a handful of ice cubes for good measure.


Our other brushes with the local fauna have been less irritating, other than the finches that ate Kimbra's strawberries. Deer have been quite popular. They seem to care very little about whose bushes they devour and even less about giving cars the right-of-way. This morning, we saw a baby bound across the lawn while its mother munched on a nearby tree.

Our last spotting has been the neighborhood fox, who prefers to avoid media attention. He enjoys riling up the local dogs and uses the drainage ditches as his own personal roadways. Clara refers to him as 'neaky fox, thanks to Dora the Explorer.

Book Review: The Iliad

Here is a quick summary. Thisguy the son of Fatherguy threw his spear at Thatguy and it struck him in this very specific body part, causing this other specific body part to spill onto the ground, and he died. While Thisguy was stripping the armor off of Thatguy's body, Thisotherguy threw his spear at Thisguy and it pierced some specific body part so that he never returned home to Fatherguy in Theirhomeland.

I now understand why my ninth grade English teacher made us read The Odyssey instead. To those of you who were stuck with The Iliad: I'm sorry. And to those of you who find yourselves facing The Iliad in the future, remember this: read the first chapter and the last eight chapters and use the above summary for anything in between. As riveting as the lists of Achaean generals can be, I suggest you cut directly to the lengthy dialogue and abrupt ending.

The only thing that most of us know about The Iliad is that the city of Troy gets sacked by the Achaeans because of some girl named Helen. Dig a little deeper and we might mention something about a wooden horse that has since become a household description of a type of computer viruses. But the horse fails to make an appearance in The Iliad. Instead, it appears in the fifth chapter of The Odyssey in a brief story tucked into one of those dialogues I mentioned. The Iliad ends with the death and funeral of Hector the son of Priam who was killed by Achilles for killing his friend Patroclus. Sound familiar?

Redeeming value: If you can suffer through it, The Iliad offers a window into the ancient Greek mind. In this world view, there are two levels of reality. On the surface, humans love, fight and travel as they will. But behind the scenes, a hierarchy of gods controls the human world through direct or indirect intervention. Some gods control simple natural forces while others have more developed realms. This worldview answers the failure to the gods to answer prayers by positing god against god in competing schemes. Even the strongest god falls prey to the tricks of others. In addition, there is an overarching sense of fate that controls humanity, to which even the gods must submit. This is just the basics of the Greek worldview that dominated the ancient near east.

Bottom line: Someone needs to hire me so that I have better things to do with my free time.

Home

As I walked through my grandmother's basement, I felt a strange sense of familiarity. I saw the bar where I sit when job searching and make lattes during the breaks. I saw the desk where Kimbra does data entry while watching Hell's Kitchen online. I saw the couch where we sit with Clara and watch Dora the Explorer. I entered our room, sat on our bed, looked through our closet, moved to Clara's room, scanned her bookshelf, and picked up some Duplos.

A few days ago, we returned to Colorado Springs after visiting family and attending a smorgasbord of graduations, open houses, birthday parties and baby showers. We have been living in Colorado since the last week of February but we have spent just as much time back in Iowa. We have been nomadic for some time now, with most of our belongings boxed up last August. Each home we have found since then has taken some adjusting. Finally, Colorado feels like home.

I have though a lot about that feeling on Tuesday night. At first I wondered if it had something to do with ownership, being able to call a place ours, even if it is borrowed. But even though ownership is a powerful feeling, it does not require this kind of time to develop. The familiarity I felt was one bred from time. This feeling was affection, or fondness. It is the love of something familiar that develops over time. Affection is part of what makes a location become home.

One other surprise awaited our return. In the mail I received an unexpected check from Home Depot, for all my unused vacation and sick hours. It was as much as I would make in a month. We could not help the gratitude rising in us. This gift reminded me yet again that God will carry us until he calls us to a job.