Secret Life of a Pastor - Chapter One

Riding down the narrow two-lane road my mind is racing and my body won’t stop shaking. Don, the driver, is talking about livestock mating habits, deer hunting, and other inanities. Nothing he says is sticking with me. My anxiety is so high that my five senses feel on fire and shut down all at the same time.

I am the new minister at the tiny Naruna Baptist Church. At 20, I have become the latest in a long line of student pastors who have served this congregation. One of my best friends, Kip, was the pastor before me. When he graduated from our college, he recommended me to the church. It all seemed so simple. I would drive down on Sunday morning to preach, spend the day with one of the families, and then preach again that night. Preaching doesn’t scare me as much as it once did. I have been doing it for five years on an irregular basis. Sure, doing two sermons a week is going to be a stretch, but when your church is made up of a few dozen country folks, I assume the expectations won’t be exceedingly high.

But I hadn’t planned on this possibility. When I arrived at the church this morning, only my third Sunday as pastor, Don met me at the door and pulled me to the side. He is the music director who leads the hymns as his wife plays the piano. Don is about forty, a large man with a thick beard, and his gregarious nature is always on display. Only in this moment, he is strangely subdued.

Don explains that there has been a death in the church. The Barfields’ adult daughter, Susan, was found on the floor of her trailer the night before. Susan’s twin boys were in their cribs unharmed when her body was discovered. Don explains that we will need to visit the Barfields after lunch and plan the funeral.

I’m having a terrible time absorbing this rush of information. Someone with connections to the church has died, but it is not one of the elderly members who dominate the congregation’s demographics. It is a young woman in her early twenties, apparently the unwed mother of twin boys, and no one knows how it happened. Or no one will say it out loud. This will be my first, but hardly the last experience with the awkward silences around an apparent suicide.

As Don and I turn down the dirt road that leads to the Barfields’ home, he asks if I know what I am going to say. The question only serves to increase my stress because it crystalizes the fact that I have no idea what to say. I turn the question back to Don and ask if he has any suggestions. For the first time I realize this situation also feels overwhelming to him. No wonder he was chattering incessantly as we drove along. He hesitates before finally saying, “Reading some scripture is always a good thing to do. Psalm 23 is probably the best.”

The shades are drawn in the Barfields’ den and there is only a single lamp on. The darkness in the room matches the mood of the house, but these are nice people who seem to understand better than I the absurdity of this encounter. What does a twenty-year-old preacher boy know about the death of a child? They carry the conversation and Don sits oddly silent in the corner of the room. I clutch my Bible with sweaty palms wondering when the right moment will come to read. It never does. The longer I sit with the Barfields the more I understand there are no words, scriptural or otherwise, that can make a difference. Their daughter is dead and now, in their late forties, they are going to raise two baby boys.

After deciding on a day and time for the funeral, I offer a prayer that feels utterly useless. When I look up, though, there are tears in Mrs. Barfield’s eyes and she whispers “thank you.” Something I have said or done in these moments has touched her, though in my anxious state I can’t imagine what it could be. It will take years before I understand the simple truth that just showing up in times of tragedy is all we can do and all anyone has a right to expect.

The next day my anxiety returns as it dawns on me I now have to plan and conduct a funeral. I can remember only one funeral that I have attended, a Catholic service for our next-door neighbor when I was 13. Nothing about that experience seems relevant to what I am faced with now. Feeling completely inadequate for the task, I go see my New Testament professor, Dr. Rainey. He is a kind man, sweet in temperament, and he senses my panic immediately. He tells me about his first funeral and how overwhelmed he felt. Then he walks me through each element of a funeral, me taking notes furiously as he talks. This moment still ranks in my top five of nicest things anyone has ever done for me.

I skip class the following day to drive down for the service. I do exactly as Dr. Rainey told me to do. I hear myself saying lines, verbatim, that came out of Dr. Rainey’s mouth. It is almost as though he is leading the funeral and borrowing my body to do it. I don’t care. At this point plagiarism is the least of my concerns.

What I do notice is an odd deference being paid to me by my congregants. Up until this point I have been the new, young preacher who is getting on-the-job training before he heads to seminary in a year. Now, in a tragic circumstance for which none of us has an explanation, they are looking to me for comfort and direction. For the first time I actually feel like their pastor. It feels good. It also feels like an overwhelming burden.

Lunch is served in the fellowship hall after the funeral and Mrs. Vann’s individually-wrapped fried pies are the talk around the table. This is a disorienting transition for me. Moments earlier I was burying a young woman who may have taken her own life, and now I am discussing fried apple pie with my parishioners. Is this wrong? Is it disrespectful of the magnitude of the moment? In time I will learn that in the face of death, conversations about pie, football, and other trivial matters make as much sense as anything else.

My first funeral was for Susan, a young woman I never knew. Her tragic death was my initial experience of trying to be a pastor. I thought it would get easier after that. It never did.

The Secret Life of a Pastor - Introduction

I can see him standing there. He is 15, awkwardly encased in a blue sports coat and paisley tie, and the wooden pulpit hits him at chest level. The congregation is quiet, waiting with anticipation, wondering what to expect from this first-time preacher. Then he begins.

For the next thirteen minutes he explains with false enthusiasm that at least 80 percent of them are headed to hell. Though he thought they would be shocked by this jarring message, they seem to be taking the bad news well. His sophomore English teacher is smiling at him, though she winces when he pronounces the word chasm with a “ch” instead of a “k”. The school nurse, the one who tended to his asthma attacks in grade school, also has an encouraging look on her face. She apparently is satisfied that she is in the minority that will escape the fires of perdition. He quotes Billy Graham, Billy Sunday, and maybe even Billie Holiday, though it’s hard to remember all these years later. When he finishes he is spent and feels as though he has just undressed in front of his family and friends. He is me.

I admire the courage of that young man who stood up on Youth Sunday at the First Baptist Church of Pecos, Texas to give his first sermon. I cannot condone his spiritual hubris, but his audacity in telling his Sunday school teachers, family members, and closest friends that they were in danger of hell fires was a sign of things to come. I was never good at sticking to safe topics when I preached.

Now, thirty years later, having traveled the road from right-wing fundamentalist to flaming liberal, it is over. Eighteen years as a pastor, over a thousand sermons preached, and I have quit. My soul wore out after years of tending to other people’s souls, so I walked away. There was no scandal. I wasn’t fired or run off. I just quit at the age of 44 with no job waiting for me.

And though it is a relief to walk away from the burdens that come with being a pastor, I cannot walk away from the stories that have been stored up over the years. I feel a strange compulsion to share the secret thoughts and experiences from my years in ministry. Maybe I need to undress one more time before the world so that I can finally be done with it.

The pastor’s job is to make faint the invisible. I wish I could say we make visible the invisible, but that claims more than we can deliver. At best, we are taking the hidden and giving it the hint of form. Pastors take submerged truths and lift them to a place where they can be seen, at an angle, through the fog, for just a moment. We interpret a text that for a fleeting second seems real to someone. We sit with a parishioner burdened by past trauma, convinced that she is worthless, and show her from her own testimony a life that is meaningful. The invisible world the pastor tries to reveal is full of glory, and horror, but it is all true.

The stories in this periodic series are the strange, bitter, humorous, and meaningful tales that made up my life in the church. I have changed enough details to protect the confidentiality of people who entrusted their secrets to me, but the stories are real. Six churches were kind enough to invite me to serve as their pastor. I offer these reflections in gratitude for the trust they placed in me and in hope that my experiences will resonate with others who stand with shaking knees behind wooden pulpits.