On the 27th of May, 2018, I was installed as a pastor of this little church that we love so much in Nitra, Slovakia.  (Yes, installed.  There were a lot of hardware / software jokes that day.)

I never set out to be a pastor.  Yes, for the last ten years I’ve been moving towards giving more and more of my time to serve the church, but I never set out to be a pastor.

A while back I realized that I was becoming one, and with that realization I slowly began to feel grateful, humbled, and terrified.

Recently I sent a letter to our sending church Soma, Tacoma, in which I said:

I’m realizing how idealistic I can be about church-everything; dreaming about building an all star leadership team, empowering women who’ve been on the sidelines, championing a vision for bettering our city, helping our people grow in dependence on the Spirit, for churches planting churches planting churches…the list is long…and it’s a long list of good things, that I should continue to pursue, for sure…

But honestly…

most days I’m just sitting in front of somebody and I’m simply pleading,
“Jesus, please help me not screw up this person’s perception of you.”

I’m realizing that most of my job description is simply that – helping people understand – and not misunderstand – the character of God.

Hence – why I said grateful, humbled, terrified.

Another thing I didn’t see coming, was that my Dad would become a pastor of a church in Bratislava, just one hour away, this very same day.  He preached his first sermon that morning, and then he and my mom rushed to our city, to join our church for a lunch celebration.

There are days when dates and persons and geographies converge in a way that deeply encourage our hearts.  This was one of those days.

That morning, I cracked open a memoir by Eugene Peterson and read this:

“In our present culture, the sharp distinction between a job and a vocation is considerably blurred.

How do I, as a pastor, prevent myself from thinking of my work as a job that I get paid for, a job that is assigned to me by my denomination, a job that I am expected to do to the satisfaction of my congregation?

How do I stay attentive to and listening to the call that got me started in this way of life – not a call to make the church attractive and useful, not a call to help people feel good about themselves and have a good life, not a call to use my considerable gifts and fulfill myself, but a call like Abraham’s ‘to set out for a place…not knowing where he was going’, a call to deny myself and take up my cross and follow Jesus, a call like Jonah’s to go at once to Nineveh, ‘a city he detested’, a call like Paul’s to ‘get up and enter the city and you will be told what to do’?

How do I keep the immediacy and authority of God’s call in my ears when in entire culture, both secular and ecclesial, is giving me a job description? How do I keep the calling, the vocation, of pastor from being drowned out by job descriptions, gussied up in glossy challenges and visions and strategies, clamoring incessantly for my attention?”

How?  Grace.

Pray for me, and my dad, and many pastors and elders and missional community leaders that are pastoring the church in Slovakia.

Pray that we would follow Jesus, the senior pastor of the church in Slovakia, as he leads all of his underpastors in the calling he has given them.