On August 14, 2012, after thirteen years with the same company, I quit my job, with no plan about what would come next. In retrospect it was more than that; I walked away from a career, away from a six-figure salary, and toward something entirely different. Here’s why. (Part 7 of 7). Missed the start? Rewind to Part 1.
Answers
Once I decided to pursue the pastoral gig things just began to fall in place. There are only nine seminaries in my Lutheran denomination, and the closest one is in South Carolina, a long hike from South Florida. Initially I thought taking this path would require moving to seminary. When your wife has a good paying job, you’re a father, homeowner, and plugged into to a supportive local faith community…well, that’s a lot to consider. Then my wife learned Luther Seminary in St. Paul MN, had a distance learning option that enables students to take many classes online. Excellent! Scratch having to move off of the barrier list.
Next came jumping through the various hoops of getting the green light to enter seminary from the local Synod. In Lutheran terms a Synod is a regional group that helps coordinate various things for local congregations. They also walk with people that have the inkling to journey toward becoming a pastor, giving guidance and support along the way. Working through these various hoops involves lots of little steps, things like a 1-1 interview with a pastor, getting background checks, being evaluated by a psychologist and taking three hours of psychological inventories. That part was fairly interesting. Beyond wanting to see if potential clergy have any red flags – fortunately nothing big popped up there – some of the testing is designed to measure what careers or vocations would be a good fit. The career inventory came back with “very high” for “social domains including religion, spirituality and counseling.” Excellent, so far so good.
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Something I struggled with was writing a 10 page paper about my faith journey, one of the many requirements from the Synod. Likely the goal of this paper is for the Synod to gauge your writing skills. The other goal is to get a better sense of who you are as a person of faith and to understand how you got there. Sitting down and putting pen to paper my mind froze. What the heck was I supposed to write? Fortunately my brother invited us back home to visit for the holidays which turned out to be a great way to remove this roadblock. After going to two church services on Christmas Eve, including to the church of my youth I was able to compare and contrast where I had started this faith journey as a child and where it had led. At that point the words for this paper flowed out of me.
After that it seemed like the more open I was to the possibilities, the more life just unfolded. Over the past year I have been accepted to and have begun seminary, started working part-time at our local congregation as their Director of Ministry, had the joy of welcoming our second child to this world, and purchased a new home to fit all this new life. It’s been thrilling.
What does this call to be a pastor look like? For me it is to offer this new life I’ve found, the life after coming out of the darkness of depression, to others. In progressive, action-oriented, Christian terms it is to encourage people to heal the sick. To feed the hungry. To stand with the oppressed, the poor, the immigrants, and those treated by society as less than. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll even be able to recycle some of those market research skills, of understanding differences between people and use those skills for a Higher purpose. Screw helping banks sell financial products. Now I’ve got something much more interesting to market: Jesus.
