a tunnel where all I could see were the details of the things to be done next day. (This became such a habit that I still get nervous leaving the house on Saturday night.) The more commitments I had on Sunday the more isolated I wanted to be the night before.
Then, the more things I had done on Sunday the more catatonic I was on Monday morning. I would sit over my coffee, trying to remember what it felt like to be interested in anything.
But it’s the regular, gentle drifting along with the lives of others that I want to celebrate here and that I think is so important in parish life.
I was standing, one day, with a pair of young funeral directors, John and Joe. They were the last two in a series of fine funeral directors I was thankful to work with. The three of us would often be, except for a couple of ladies in the kitchen, the first to arrive at a funeral. I needed to check everything not only well before the service but well before any mourners arrived. I had nothing but contempt for leaders who weren’t prepared and it was a pleasure to work with people who thought the same.
John and Joe always treated the presiding ministers to lunch after we were set up. Then we would stroll back to the church to deal with anything that came up; but, mostly, if things were going smoothly, we would talk to the mourners and hang out together.
I was standing there with them, enjoying the comfortable way we worked together, feeling good about all the people that had turned out for the service, seeing such a big part of the community flowing together for this moment, and that was when I had this reflection: if someone asked me what you needed, if you were going to thrive as a pastor, I think I would say that, after you reach a certain level of competence with the standard qualifications, there’s one quality you have to have. You have to be able, sometimes, to do nothing much but hang out.
Saint Ken
Once we were settled into our first parish, Pastor Walt, the pastor who had served so many months as vice-pastor when the parish was vacant, dropped in to see how we were doing and to give us whatever information he thought we needed immediately. Before he left, he talked a little about the pastors in the conference. Since the area was so isolated, they tended to make a point of getting together regularly. He urged us to show up at the meetings. He said we’d find them a good group, and we did. Then he said, “You’ll be meeting Ken soon.”
Ken was the pastor of the largest LCA church in the county, north of Walt and west of us. Walt smiled and continued, “He won’t be able to stand knowing you’re here without checking you out for himself. He has to know what’s going on in everybody’s life. That’s how he works in his parish.” Walt shook his head and said decisively, “I don’t need to know that much until there’s something I can do about a problem.”
Well, I thought, guess we’ll see.
It was a busy time. We were already in Advent, the kids were starting in a new school, we were trying to learn the life of the parish and get enough unpacked so we could function. (When we moved, almost 16 years later, there were still boxes we hadn’t opened.)
They eventually built us an office attached to the church, but at the start our office was in the parsonage. I was home alone one morning, unpacking, and I heard a knock. I went to the back door, which was the door most people used, and there was no one there. I couldn’t see a car, so I assumed the visitor had parked in the church lot and come to the front door. I hurried around the corner of the house and saw a tall man, about my age, already walking away. I called out, and he turned. He had an amused smile, and he was smoking a pipe. “Hi,” he said, coming back, “I’m Pastor Ken Losch.”
And that was my first sight of my mentor and guide, the one who would light my path, school my thoughts, and offer my spirit a refuge whenever I needed one.
From time to time, the church tries to formalize relationships like this, assigning new pastors a more experienced nearby pastor as a mentor. This isn’t a bad thing; if nothing else, it’s good to know the people around you, for many reasons. But it’s a bureaucracy’s solution to a spiritual problem. You don’t need just any guide on a journey like this: you need your guide. I was lucky to find mine knocking on my door.
We were both from Chicago, and we probably both liked to pretend to the rural folk that we were tougher and more streetwise than we really were. Someone told me once we were the two most cynical people he had ever met. I would give myself the edge on cynicism, but I would say Ken was clear-eyed. He was never blinded by how he wanted things to be or thought people should be. For some of our colleagues, that would come across as cynicism.
Ken taught me to see what was right in front of me. I was in his office once, worrying over something that had someone angry and agitated. He listened, nodding, then said, “Yeah. There’s a problem there.” Then he leaned toward me. “But it’s not your problem. Don’t start assuming everybody’s anger is your fault.” On another occasion, he told me: “Look: wake up. It’s not that you can’t please this guy. It’s that he’s unpleasable.” (That single phrase was a gift that, fairly or not, often guided and consoled me.)
He liked to point out, in his down-to-earth, deflating way, that pastors have a bad habit of thinking themselves the center of the universe, for good or ill, taking both the blame and the credit for things that usually had nothing to do with them.
He was better at getting things done without friction than anyone I know. He had patience and took a lot of time to lay the groundwork for things he wanted to happen. He had an effortless connection with people, and he really did know a lot about his community. We were talking once about the habit church councils have of reporting complaints while refusing to reveal who made them. He said he once had a meeting in which almost every council member reported the same complaint; it seemed the entire congregation was enraged.
No one would mention a name, so here’s what Ken did: he told them he’d write two names on a piece of paper and hand it around the room; he wanted to know how many other people, besides the ones on the paper, had complained—no names, just a number. He handed the paper around. It circled the table and returned to him in an increasingly embarrassed silence. No one had heard it from anyone else. What seemed like a congregational crisis was an issue limited to two individuals, notorious malcontents.
To do something like that, you have to be secure and calm enough not to get defensive and start arguing the issue before you know how big the problem is; you have to have a good enough relationship with the council for them to trust your instincts and your judgments; finally—and this is the hard one—you have to be able to come up with those two names.
I’m trying to illustrate how canny he was about the dynamics of a church community, but the real gift to me wasn’t his example or his inspiration, but his presence, the ready welcome when I was feeling bruised, the ready wisdom when I called looking for specific advice for a specific situation.
Ken was a great defender of ordinary pastors and the ordinary life of the church. He hated hearing the synod staff talk about churches being in “survival” mode; he thought if a rural church was surviving it was doing well. He hated seeing articles in church magazines that praised attention- getting innovations, like baptismal services done in hot tubs; he loved declaring that a ministry devoted to faithful preaching, teaching, presiding at the sacraments, and visiting would never get you a write-up: it would only enrich your congregation.
In general, he thought most of the agitation for change and novelty that marked the time of our church service was silly and beside the point, leaving the real tasks of ministry at best untouched, at worst ignored.
We
