Yesterday I spoke of the temptation to acedia that can accompany your final years of active ministry. I mentioned that I had worked on re-framing my perspective as a way of warding off any sense of apathy or despair.
The first, and most obvious act was to expand my perspective on ministry. I say most obvious because more than one person said to me that I could retire from being a pastor of a church but not from ministry. They were right but what does that mean for me? The first thing it meant for me was revisiting my understanding of my sense of call. In Acts 16:6-15, we hear how the Holy Spirit blocked Paul’s intended path of ministry and directed him into a new understanding of his call. While we are called by God, the nature of that call can change. Retirement doesn’t end our call by God but it can alter its nature.
Because we devote so much of our life to being a pastor of a church, it is easy to confuse our identity with our work with a church. Or another version of that confusion is to confuse our identity with being needed by others. Some pastors, upon retirement, immediately respond to any invitation to join a board or fill in for churches and reconfirm their identity through such work. That may work for some but one needs to be careful.
I would encourage anyone in the last five years or so before retirement to do some disciplined listening to what God may be calling them to do now. What is the new direction of God’s call in their lives? Building on the advice of another very wise pastor friend, even when we have the skills to offer, if someone asks us to do something and our first emotional response is to feel weary at the thought of it, then it is probably not something that we should agree to. I was asked to become chair of a city council on the homeless, something I care deeply about, and yet the very thought of engaging in those endless discussions made me weary.
Part of our re-framing is to ask ourselves what type of calling we might consider that the very thought of it gets us excited. What might we now be set free to do that awakens energy in us just thinking about it.
More on Friday.
