Together In the Spirit

This is the sermon I gave at my wife/co-pastor's installation service on June 22, 2013.

Together in the Spirit

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Co-Pastor

June 22, 2013

Scripture:  Romans 12:1-13; 1 Corinthians 12:1, 4-11

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

So here I am preaching at the installation service for my co-pastor Jane.  It’s weird enough preaching at the installation of your co-pastor.  I suspect it is more common in these cases, or maybe I’d just be more comfortable, to have someone else preach a word to both of the new co-pastors. Yes, preaching at the installation of your co-pastor is a bit weird, but when that co-pastor is also your wife it gets really bizarre.  I am indeed Jane’s co-pastor here in Monroe, but much more importantly she’s my wife; and preaching specifically to your wife is just wrong, maybe especially when she’s a preacher too.  It got even worse the other day, however.  Jane suggested that I preach on 1 Corinthians 7:16a.  That half verse reads “Wife, for all you know, you might save your husband.”  Let’s just say I wasn’t much taken with that suggestion.  I suggested in response that I preach on the non-Pauline insertion into that same letter at 1 Corinthians 14:33b-34a:  “As in all the churches of the saints, women should be silent in the churches.”  Needless to say Jane didn’t like that suggestion any more than I liked hers.  Probably less.  It’s her installation, so I really had no choice.  I’m not preaching on that verse.  But then neither am I preaching on hers.

So what can I do here this afternoon?  I don’t feel right preaching specifically to my wife, even if she is my co-pastor.  Rev. Steve Hanning, my former pastor and recently the interim pastor at our church in Everett, told me once that he has known four clergy couples who did co-ministry together.  In two of those cases it worked really well.  In the other two—the couple got divorced.  I don’t want to say anything here that might increase the chances of Jane and me ending up in that latter category of divorced former co-pastors, so I won’t presume to preach specifically to Jane.  Instead I want to say a word to our people here in the Monroe church.  The rest of you, our honored guests here this afternoon, are of course welcome to listen too.

Today we formalize and celebrate your decision to call Jane as co-pastor, together with me, of your church.  Last August we changed our pastoral staffing by adding Jane as co-pastor, but back then adding Jane was only an experiment.  We all wanted to see how having Jane as co-pastor with me would work.  We needed to see, among other things, if you were able and willing to pay the added expense of adding another pastor to the staff, even at a very modest compensation level.  That experiment was set to end at the end of May, but on Pentecost you voted to make the co-pastor arrangement with Jane and me permanent—as permanent, that is, as a church’s pastoral arrangements ever are. 

I’ve got to be frank with you.  That decision, as much as I appreciate it—and I really do—makes absolutely no sense.  That’s what the so-called experts would say.  They’d say we’re not really big enough for even one full time pastor.  We’re nowhere near big enough for a staff of more than one full time pastor.  Any consultant we might have hired to evaluate the co-pastor proposal for us would have said you’re nuts to do it—in much more professional language of course.  We wouldn’t be very happy paying for just “you’re nuts.”  Yet somehow, by the grace of God and your good will, we’ve had a full-time pastor since 2003; and since last August we’ve had more than that.  You have supported the new pastoral arrangement with your prayers, your work, and your money; and Jane and I thank you for that support with all our hearts.  You have shown what a small church that once was stagnant if not quite near closing can do with the dedication, hard work, and contributions of committed members.

And now we come to a celebration of a new phase in our life together.  You have called Jane to join me as pastor because you know her, you love her, you see her manifold gifts for ministry.  You see what she can bring to our church, and that is a very good thing.  Today we get to celebrate your decision, and we also need to recognize what that decision means for the future of our church.  The new co-pastor arrangement that you have created presents us with both great opportunities and great challenges.  With Jane as co-pastor we have the opportunity to expand the ministry of our church beyond what I have been able to do as sole pastor.  We have pastoral support for parts of the church’s ministry that, frankly, I didn’t spend as much time on before as I might have—outreach and Christian education of children and young people being good examples.  We have an expanded availability of pastoral care.  Some of you relate to Jane better than you do to me.  Others of you relate better to me than you do to Jane.  That is natural and expected, and now you all have a better chance of having a pastor you are comfortable talking to.  Jane brings new ideas to the church.  She brings new energy.  Her pastoral experience is very different from mine; so she sees things differently than I do, and her insights have been and will be of great value to us.  Jane’s presence with us opens great new opportunities before us.

It also, however, presents us with challenges.  Jane and I are still working out just how we share the pastoral responsibilities around here, and how we do that will continue to evolve in the times ahead of us.  So far our being co-pastors has in no way threatened our marriage, and Jane and I will make sure that it never does.  One of your challenges is to understand that for Jane and me our marriage comes first.  If our pastoring together ever even remotely threatens our marriage, we’ll choose our marriage over co-pastoring.  Some of the time Jane and I have together sounds a lot like a pastoral staff meeting.  So far that’s OK.  We will make sure that it continues to be OK.

Yet the greater challenge that we face is understanding just where this church is heading.  Where is the Holy Spirit calling us?  We believe that the Holy Spirit has called Jane to ordained pastoral ministry here at Monroe Congregational UCC at this time.  We must presume that the Spirit has some purpose in calling Jane as one of your pastors today.  What is that purpose?  Is it to work Jane into the life of this congregation as essentially my successor as your pastor?  Perhaps.  She is thirteen years younger than I am, and I have been your pastor for over eleven years.  I’m 66 years old, and I won’t keep working forever.  Jane as my successor isn’t set in stone, but it’s something to keep in mind.  Is it because Jane will have new ideas for new types of ministry we can do in this community?  Perhaps.  I hope so.  We’ve come a long way in the last eleven years.  Is the Spirit calling Jane to lead us in building on the work we’ve done together in that time, to take us to new places reaching new people?  Perhaps.  I hope so. 

Discerning the Holy Spirit’s purpose in calling Jane as your co-pastor is an important challenge, but in our Scripture readings this afternoon St. Paul reminds us of another important truth about our church.  In both of those passages Paul speaks of how Christians have many gifts, all given by the one Spirit.  He doesn’t talk much there about the gifts of a community’s leaders.  He talks about the gifts of the people.  It is the gifts of the people, not just the gifts of the leaders, that make a church a faithful community of Christ’s disciples.  We don’t all have the same gifts, he says.  Just as a body needs different appendages and organs to function as a body, so a church needs the many different gifts to function well as a church.  You have two pastors.  That’s an extra pastor for a church this size.  One of your most important challenges is to remember that having an extra pastor doesn’t free you from the call to bring your gifts to the life of the church.  You don’t get to sit back and say Tom and Jane can do it.  We can’t.  We can help, and we will; but we can’t do much of anything without you.  You are the church.  Jane and I are part of the church too, but only a part of it.  Jane has many gifts for ministry.  I like to think that I have some too, but you are the church.  Your gifts are the ones that matter most.  Together we can do many good things.  Alone Jane and I can really do nothing.

So today, as we celebrate the installation of Jane as co-pastor, I ask you to consider not what Jane and I can do for you but what you can do for yourselves and each other as this little church of Jesus Christ.  Do you love children?  Volunteer in the nursery or the Sunday school rooms.  Do you care about the poor and the homeless?  Volunteer with Brown Bag Brigade, or Take the Next Step, or the food banks in Monroe and Sultan.  Can you sing, or do you like to sing but aren’t sure how good you are at it?  Come to choir practice on Wednesdays at 6:30.  Do you have a strong speaking voice?  Volunteer to serve as lay leader for our Sunday worship.  Are you a teacher?  Offer a class at church on something you have a passion for, either for children, or for adults, or for both.  Are there things you’d like to see us doing?  Do you have a vision for what our church could be but you don’t know how to make it happen?  Share your ideas and your vision.  Share them with Jane, with me, and with all the people of the church.  Maybe together we can make them real. 

The examples of gifts and how to use them could go on and on.  The Spirit has indeed given us many gifts.  Today we celebrate Jane, and it is right and good that we do.  We face many challenges together, not the least of them financial.  But we have overcome harder challenges in the past.  Those challenges became opportunities for faithful ministry.  The challenges we face today can be opportunities too.  If together we pray hard and rely on God’s grace, we can do great things.  With Jane’s new leadership, and with my old leadership, let’s get on with it.  Amen.