After a long period of gestation, the actual birthing of my pastoral vocation took place over a three-year period from 1959 to 1962 in and around New York City. The birthing center was at the intersection of two jobs, one as assistant professor at the New York City seminary from which I had graduated two years earlier, the second as associate pastor at a Presbyterian congregation in White Plains, just north of the city.
The seminary that trained me had a single focus, defined as a total immersion in the English Bible, the biblical revelation in our mother tongue. This immersion was not just individual but corporate, incarnated in students and professors who lived and prayed, studied and conversed in a twelve-story building on East Forty-ninth Street. It was a small school of seventy or so students that I realize now in retrospect formed a unique minority ethos. Daily life at the seminary comprised common prayer in the chapel, common meals in the refectory, common play in the requisite volleyball game on the roof after lunch each day. Classroom lectures and library reading were held together in this intricate relational network of common life. All of this took place on a quiet side street bordering the maelstrom of noisy, jostling, harried, secular, cutthroat, competitive New York City.
I had only the vaguest of ideas of why I was there and certainly nothing that I would recognize as a pastoral vocation. I didn’t know it at the time, but what I absorbed in my subconscious, which eventually surfaced years later, was a developing conviction that the most effective strategy for change, for revolution—at least on the large scale that the kingdom of God involves—comes from a minority working from the margins. I could not have articulated it then, but my seminary experience later germinated into the embrace of a vocational identity as necessarily minority, that a minority people working from the margins has the best chance of being a community capable of penetrating the noncommunity, the mob, the depersonalized, function-defined crowd that is the sociological norm of America.
I had no idea then of how my years of study and community at the seminary would be worked out vocationally. The only real surprise academically was that in the process of a thorough saturation in the English Bible, I discovered a taste for Greek and Hebrew. When I graduated—the year was 1957—I was as vocationally vague as when I had arrived three years earlier. One of my professors took care of that by sending me off to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to do graduate study in Semitic languages with his old professor, William Albright, with the suggestion that I might return and teach with him in the field of Old Testament.
I did return, bringing Jan with me. We met and were married during the years in Baltimore. And I did teach. My assigned courses were Greek and Hebrew. The seminary was paying me what they could get by with, but it wasn’t enough for us to get by with. So I added another job, this one as the associate pastor in the Presbyterian Church in White Plains, fully expecting it to be temporary. I thought of it as something of an off-the-cuff job. I did it for the money and only for the money, for I had no intention at the time of being a pastor. I assumed, in a rather desultory way, that I would be a professor. The church, a thirty-minute commute by train from the seminary, provided us with housing. Two days a week, Tuesday and Thursday, I was in the seminary classroom at 235 East Forty-ninth Street, teaching students Greek declensions and Hebrew syntax. Four days a week I worked out of an eighteenth-century stone church building at 39 North Broadway in White Plains. Monday was set apart as Sabbath. There I spent my time in prayer, conversation, and companionship with saints and sinners as they followed Jesus, many of them by fits and starts, as together we picked our way through the wasteland of American culture.
But the most significant thing at the time was that Jan and I were learning how to be married. We had been married the previous year while still in Baltimore, but the conditions there had been such that we hardly had time to be married. We lived in a dark basement apartment with sewage problems. Jan was plunged into her first year of teaching a crowded classroom of thirty-nine first graders from a rapidly changing inner-city neighborhood of mostly single-parent families. I walked with her to the streetcar at seven o’clock each morning. She returned in the late afternoon exhausted. Supper conversation was laced with a detailed narrative of her eight hours of tyranny at the hands of Brucie, Henry, Melissa and the other gang members. About three months into the school year I had occasion to drive to her school and pick her up. We were going Christmas shopping. I was waiting for Jan outside the classroom door when the bell rang. The door opened and the children poured out. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. I was expecting hulking Huns with switchblades and Amazonian warrior women, but here were all these little kids running and laughing, free from their classroom cage. These tykes? Terrorizing my wife? It turned out to be a long year.
Meanwhile I was doing doctoral work in Semitic languages—the most exhilarating intellectual world I had ever lived in but also the most demanding. At the same time I had taken a job at a large church to administer its educational programs. What I didn’t know was that the man who would be supervising me was a tyrant. Not quite like the gang that tyrannized Jan every day but every bit as abusive.
A year of that life in Baltimore was all either one of us could take. We loved being married but didn’t have much of either time or energy to explore this new way of life. We completed our commitments to the school and church as well as we were able and made our way to New York and the seminary. I taught my languages in a classroom; I worked as a pastor in a congregation where we were provided with generous housing on the ground floor of a spacious Victorian house with a wraparound porch and a large fireplace. Other members of the church staff occupied the second and third floors.
We had a three-year honeymoon. Jan had the space and time to create a place of welcoming hospitality. Our first child arrived: Jan became a mother and I became a father. We became a family. A friend pointed out to me that when God called Abraham and Sarah to be our ancestors in the faith, the definitive act was to make them parents. We entered into the practice of what we had promised and been promised—all the intricacies of love and forgiveness, of grace and humility. We didn’t know how much we didn’t know. We had a lot to learn. Me especially. Being married was far more demanding than mastering the Semitic languages of Akkadian, Syriac, and Ugaritic. We didn’t know it was going to be this difficult—and this good.
In this new country of marriage I worked the two jobs, side by side, for most of three years: two days a week an assistant professor in a classroom, four days a week an associate pastor in a congregation. And all week, every week, marriage—realizing, detail by detail, the many dimensions involved in becoming “one flesh.”
During those three years, our vocations, pastor and pastor’s wife, gradually clarified and became integrated. When they finally came into focus, I realized that I was not, in my bones, a professor at all. I was a pastor. This came as a total surprise to me for I had never seriously entertained the life of pastor as a vocation. It was no less a surprise to Jan. Many years before we met, she had prayed for a vocation as a pastor’s wife but had set it aside in order to marry me. For my part I now set aside my plans to be a professor-to-be in order to be married to her as a pastor.
When we left Baltimore, I had completed all my doctoral academic work but had not yet written my dissertation. And my professor, Dr. Albright, retired. He arranged for me to write the dissertation under the supervision of his friend Dr. Brevard Childs at Yale. I visited Professor Childs in New Haven, an easy drive from White Plains. We got on well together and arrangements were made, complete with a generous stipend. I was set. Except that by this time I was not at all sure about the professor business and I was becoming more certain of the pastor route, but that was not yet set in stone. Saying no to the Ph.D. would effectively shut the door to being a professor. Jan and I knew it was a big decision. All my friends advised against it. We talked it over from every angle. Certainty eluded us. And then our prayers for discernment cleared the air. I wrote a letter to Professor Childs and dropped it in the corner mailbox. Indecision evaporated in that act. I have never since, even for a moment, regretted that decision.
It was the conjunction of classroom, congregation, and marriage that did it, set off a chain reaction that produced pastor and pastor’s wife. The world of the classroom, the world of congregation, and the world of marriage interacted at a level below consciousness. Interaction is too tame a word. The conjunction was catalytic. They were no longer three distinct worlds. A fourth world came into being. One and one and one did not equal three. It was more like they equaled five—a teaching assignment plus a church job plus marriage added up to a pastoral vocation. Not all at once. The gestation took most of three years. But at some point along the way the waters broke and there we were—pastor and pastor’s wife. Pastor’s wife became as vocational for Jan as pastor did for me.
Here is a rough sketch of how it happened. In addition to teaching the biblical languages at the seminary, I was also pressed into service as a kind of faculty utility infielder, each semester picking up a course vacated by a professor on sabbatical. One of those courses was the book of Revelation. As I taught, I began to recognize early embryonic outlines of my pastoral vocation that had been taking form a few years earlier when I was a student taking this same course. A few weeks into teaching the course, I began imagining myself in the apocalyptic world of the Revelation and identifying myself with John of Patmos as a pastor. John, doing his work on the prison island of Patmos, was exiled from the seven congregations that he served as a pastor. Remarkably, he was undeterred by the exile conditions, doing his Lord’s Day work with them all the same, worshipping his and their Lord Jesus.
Until that time the term pastor had never set up any resonance in me—it was a flat word without depth. But now I was attempting to teach what John saw and wrote to his people and doing it in the exact pagan New York City conditions that mirrored the Roman culture in which John saw and wrote. John’s pastoral identity worked itself into my imagination. I realized that John’s vocation as pastor was not confined to those seven sermons addressed to his miniscule congregations, but got expressed in the urgency and sovereignty and beauty and drama that pervaded the entire book. The sermons, yes, but also the dragon and the throne, the horsemen and the trumpets, the whore and the bride, the lake of fire and the foursquare gem-emblazoned city—the entire work of salvation taking place on that very Lord’s Day. And embedded, of all places, in the massive, arrogant, bullying Roman Empire. Meanwhile, on alternate days in the White Plains congregation I was getting a firsthand feel for what it meant to be a pastor on the ground.
Virginia, for instance. She was a shy worshipper easily overlooked. She showed up in my study one day visibly terrified. Shaking, she told me that her husband, Nick, was being threatened by the shylocks—if he didn’t come up with five thousand dollars before the week was out, they would shatter his knees. Nick was a compulsive gambler, betting mostly on the horses. The shylocks who financed gambling addictions were merciless. She didn’t know where to turn. After listening to her stories, the tangled web of criminal intimidation and deception, the shylocks and their victims, I knew I was in over my head. I was able to put her in touch with a retired Brooklyn cop who wasn’t intimidated. I don’t know if I was much help to her. But she was a help to me. She was in church each Sunday, but no longer overlooked. Her presence in the sanctuary was proof against any superficial assessment of people in the congregation as complacent shoppers for a comfortable pew. I was pastor to people who were in the lion’s den, to men and women facing wild beasts in the Colosseum.
I began to think of John of Patmos as the patron saint of pastors. I began to imagine myself into that intersecting work and world of Patmos and White Plains and New York.
During that time I became aware of something else: the contrast between being a professor in a classroom and a pastor in a congregation. Professors and pastors have always held important leadership positions in the Christian world, but for me professors unquestionably topped the hierarchy. Pastors were shadowy, undefined figures in the background. And now I was a professor, a bona fide player in the minor leagues of academia but on my way, I assumed, to the big leagues. I loved the teaching; I loved the dynamics of the classroom; I loved getting it right, the truth of the scriptures—Isaiah and the Psalms, Matthew and Paul—the sense of being given responsibility for bringing the learning of the great teachers in our tradition—Origin and Augustine, Luther and Calvin—into the lives of these students. And I loved the mental and spiritual energy that was almost palpable as men and women participated and understood what it meant to be part of this great community of scripture-taught, scripture-formed Christians.
As I spent these weeks in the company of John of Patmos, with alternate days in the congregation, I was beginning to feel that the classroom was too easy. The room was too small and orderly to do justice to the largeness of the subject matter—the extravagance of the beauty, the exuberance of the language. Too much was excluded from the classroom—too much life, too much of the world, too much of the students, the complexities of relationships, the intricacy of emotions. The classroom was too tidy. I missed the texture of the weather, the smell of cooking, the jostle of shoulders and elbows on a crowded sidewalk.
In the congregation, by contrast, everything was going on at once, random, unscheduled, accompanied too much of the time by undisciplined and trivializing small talk. Babies born squalling, people dying neglected, and in between the parenthesis of birth and death, lifetimes of ambiguity: adolescents making an unholy mess of growing up and their parents muddling through as guilty bystanders. Also, of course, heroic holiness, stunningly beautiful prayers, sacrificial love surfacing from the tangled emotions in a difficult family, a song in the night, glimpses of glory, the sullen betrayal of a bored spouse quietly redeemed from years of self-imprisoned self-worship by forgiveness and grace: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And all of this mixed together. In this world, sin was not a word defined in a lexicon. Salvation was not a reference traced down in a concordance. Every act of sin and every event of salvation involved a personal name in a grammar of imperatives and promises in a messy community of friends and neighbors, parents and grandparents, none of whom fit a stereotype.
The only hour of the week that had any predictable, uninterrupted order to it was Sunday morning, when the story of creation and covenant was told and the prayers of confession and praise were said and sung. I was learning that for a pastor, the rest of the week was spent getting that story and those prayers heard and prayed in the personal and unique particulars of these people. I had just spent an hour of worship with them but now was mixing it up with them in a world of dragons and whores, blood flowing as high as a horse’s bridle, and the news headlines trumpeting catastrophic disasters.
It took me by surprise to find myself preferring those four days spent in the congregation under the aegis of Pastor John of Patmos to the two days I was teaching about him in the classroom. There is something wonderfully satisfying about the clean definitions and precise explanations in a lecture hall. Chalkboards and PowerPoint presentations are not tolerant of ambiguities. I was finding myself vocationally at home in the mysteries of worship and baptism and Eucharist in my Ephesus-Smyrna-Pergamum-Thyatira-Sardis-Philadelphia-Laodicea congregation. I was finding congenial company rubbing shoulders with the four horsemen, the trumpeting angels, Michael and the beast with ten horns and seven heads, the 144,000, the supper of the Lamb, and the river of life bright as crystal.
It took a while to reorder our imaginations along the lines of John of Patmos, but in three years it was done: we were pastor and pastor’s wife. Pastor’s wife, not pastor’s helper. Pastor’s wife was as vocational for Jan as pastor was for me, a holy calling, holy orders. We didn’t yet know the details of what we would be doing and how. But we knew who we were. Our vocational identities were different, but not competing. Jan’s identity was not as defined by role and tasks as mine and did not carry with it social recognition, but month after month the conviction deepened—“this is who I am.”
We were ready. We received a call to organize a new congregation near Baltimore. We spent the next twenty-nine years in that place, living into our emerging (and merging) identities (“every step an arrival”) in an American suburb that was as marginal to the culture and politics of America as the congregations of John of Patmos were marginal to the culture and politics of Rome.