Photograph by Mitchell Leach via Unsplash
Rev. Jerrod H. Hugenot
It had been several years since I stood in that pulpit.
While I consider being in the pulpit on a Sunday morning as a familiar experience after over two decades of serving in local church ministry and regional ministry, it felt familiar and strange to be back in one where I first stood early on as an aspiring learner and later ministry intern at my home church in southeast Kansas.
I was not the service preacher, just stepping up front to say a word of greetings after many years away at the kind invitation of the current pastor. It was a Sunday morning and so much felt familiar, even as I looked around and realized so many supportive saints had gone onward to glory in the time I had been elsewhere in the Northeast.
Remembering your ministerial roots can be a blessing. It allows us to look at where we began, where we were just newbies to life and vocation.
Today, the pulpit has a laptop perched on it, and an LCD screen in the middle of the altar area to support the lyrics for singing and reading Scripture.
I recall the earlier time when I was in college and it was considered newfangled for the pastor to use a lapel mic and move more freely from the stationary microphone that usually worked — with the occasional feedback squeal making the kids cover their ears and dogs passing by the church perk up.
I gave some words of greeting and filled in the blanks for where I’ve been in the past twenty years, in case people lost track. But I wanted most to ensure that I said a word of gratitude.
Over the years, this church supported me with scholarship aid for college and seminary. They sent a note of encouragement and always welcomed me home with the opportunity to preach.
Their longtime pastor, the Rev. Dois Nix, served for thirty years at the pulpit. Toward the end of that tenure, he did worry a little bit that there had not been people who felt called to ministry.
Weaving together a supportive community around those women and men listening and trying their best to respond to God’s call is essential to this sacred yet murky process that aspirants tread hopefully with humility.
Yet the Lord provided. Before he retired in 2001, the church had five people step up and share their sense of call to ministry. It was a beautiful dividend for his laboring in the fields.
Now, as I serve in regional ministry, I see quite clearly that the pastor and the congregation responded to what God was doing in their midst. They gladly heard beginner sermons and watched the awkwardness that comes with homiletical experimentation and exegesis still a little on the half-baked side of things.
Weaving together a supportive community around those women and men listening and trying their best to respond to God’s call is essential to this sacred yet murky process that aspirants tread hopefully with humility.
The day I was licensed to ministry (a learner’s permit, if you will, issued by the church), the pastor stood in the pulpit, and I stood below. As the certificate was about to be handed to me, Pastor Dois paused and said, “Do not take this recognition as a sign you have arrived. You are just beginning.”
Many years later, I thought of that moment, as I went back to the pulpit to bring greetings. It has been a journey. I never expected to serve outside of the Midwest, but here I was back for a few days to see my family before I headed back to my current home in Albany, New York.
When I think of where I have been, it is a surprise most of the time and some befuddlement and doubt at other times.
But the important part is to take a moment to get your bearings. The encouragement and trust by the church that God was doing something good in my early vocational experiments and fumbling around was a blessing and a grace that I still receive years later.
I hope in my work today I help churches see the great need we have in local congregations not to let the work of seeing those for whom God is already at work go untended. We understandably worry about a shortage of pastors that was just starting to be talked about when I first heard the call, and most certainly has come to pass in many denominations well beyond the American Baptist fold. Yet we cannot lose sight of what God already has given us: bodies of believers who teach and live the faith and give of their hearts and resources to raise up a generation already in their midst.
If we could just accept that God is already kindling embers within that person off in the back pew not saying much but listening, or the one who is toiling away at planning Vacation Bible School coming up next month, we might just see our purpose once more to share and spread the Gospel.
After pastoring churches in Kansas and Vermont, Rev. Jerrod H. Hugenot serves as region staff for the American Baptist Churches of New York State.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
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