Every
superhero has an origin story. As a kid those were my favorite comics to
collect. As I grew up I kept reading comics but as my reading material expanded
into novels, history and even into things like theology and philosophy, I have
always been intrigued by “the hero’s journey.” Over the years, I’ve also gotten
to know a lot of pastors. A lot. I’ve come to discover that many of their lives
have followed “the hero’s journey” and that these men and women, somewhere in
the midst of their journey, have had to become pastors the same way that Frodo
had to go to bear the ring to Mordor or Joe Banks had to jump into the Volcano.
In
his memoir, The Pastor, Eugene Peterson reveals not only did he have a lack of
interest
in being a pastor, but it was a lack that seminary – if anything –
reinforced: “And pastor as a vocation
for me seemed like being put in charge of one of those old-fashioned elevators,
spending all day with people in their ups and downs but with no view.” Peterson
wanted to learn, to teach and to write. His relationship with Jan, his future
wife, was transformational. “Those years of graduate study could have marked
the beginning of a slow withdrawal from a relational life into a world of
books. She rescued me from that.”
Looking
back on the story of his early relationship with Jan, Peterson observes, “What
I didn’t know was that when we did marry, something had already been going on
in me at some deep level, as yet undetected, that would soon disqualify me from
the life of learning that I anticipated.” Unbeknownst to him, maybe even
against his will, Peterson was becoming a pastor, shaped by his story and by
Jan’s story as their stories converged into one narrative: “In not quite three
years, she was what she had always hoped to be – a pastor’s wife.”
Formation
by story had been happening for a long time before Peterson recognized where
that formation would eventually lead him.
I’m
incredibly interested in the story of every pastor that I meet. I want to collect origin stories from pastors
the way I used to collect Spider-man, Batman and Green Lantern stories.
Have
you ever engaged your sacred imagination to try to picture how your pastor came
to be who, what and where she is right now? Have you ever wondered what events
have shaped her, some knowing, some unknowingly, to choose the life she is
living as a pastor?
No
doubt there are some shady origin stories.
At
a conference for youth pastors that I attended years ago, a psychologist spoke,
the author of a book on “Why Teenagers Act the Way They Do.” But he turned the
tables on us and instead of talking about teens and the way they behave and the
whys behind them, he explored by we became youth pastors. He talked about the
origin story of the youth pastor who had few friends in high school and he
became a youth pastor so teens, the popular ones and otherwise, would have to
be his friend. Later I came to call this the “Michael Scott.” As he went on to
describe other origin stories the auditorium had more and more empty seats. Heroes
don’t always care to share their true identities.
But
the truth is that there are men and women who have become pastors, in the past
and in the present, who were dragged kicking and screaming, or at least
reluctantly, to the pulpit. There are men and women who are as surprised as
anyone else on earth to find themselves, pastors. There are beautiful, amazing,
wise, sacrificial, patient, long-suffering, generous, faithful women and men
called “pastor” who wonder every Sunday morning around 8 a.m., “How did this
happen to me?”
I
want to invest the second half of my life in collecting the origin stories of
these heroes. I want to encourage them and be encouraged by them. I want to
honor those people who have honored God with a life well-lived pastoring
congregations that have been well-loved by listening to and sharing their
stories.
Listen,
if you’re a pastor, know this – there are no ordinary men and women who engage
in this vocation – Paul the apostle was under the impression you have been
given as a gift by God to the church. Being a gift, hand-picked and
hand-crafted by God is something extra-ordinary. Some of you feel like that Christmas sweater
that got stuck in the back of the closet, some of you feel like you’ve been
re-gifted so many times that you don’t know where you’d call home and some of
you feel like every church that’s unwrapped you has thought you were a piñata.
But you are a gift that God has given and that’s never for nothing. You are
changing the world by living your story and sharing who you are and loving the
people God has dropped you into the midst of.
If
you’re a pastor and wouldn’t mind sharing your origin story with me sometime, I’d
love to hear it. I think you’re amazing.
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