On My Decision to Withdraw

On My Decision to Remain As Your Pastor

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson

April 30, 2017

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.

As I think you all know by now, I have withdrawn my resignation as your pastor, and the Admin Board has accepted that withdrawal on behalf of the church. This morning I want to explain to you how I came to that decision and what it means to me. What it means to you is not for me to say, but I suspect, or maybe I just hope, that it means a lot.

You all know that back in February I submitted my resignation as your pastor. That resignation was initially to become effective on March 10; but I offered to extend the termination date to the end of May, and the Admin Board agreed to that modification. The Board (or at least most of the people on it) tried to talk me out of resigning. When I asked what the sense of the congregation was they said they’d find out. So they personally interviewed 30 of you and gave me the results of those interviews at the Admin Board meeting on April 10. I did a great deal of wrestling with whether or not to withdraw my resignation and remain as your pastor after I got those results. They showed that some of you have reservations about me and my work with you, but despite those reservations there was a clear consensus in those results, indeed a nearly if not quite unanimous expression, that you don’t want me to leave. I highly appreciate that consensus, and it has played a major role in the decision I have made to withdraw my resignation. I have however always been aware that the decision whether or not to withdraw the resignation was mine to make, not yours. I, after all, was the one who made the decision to resign in the first place. So why have I decided to stay as your pastor? I think there are several reasons that I want to explain to you.

First of all, why did I submit a resignation in the first place? I did it because I was aware, and am aware, that we are not a perfect match as pastor and parish. I used a cliché to explain my perception when I gave the Admin Board my letter of resignation. I said I was tired of trying to fit my square peg into your round hole. There are some ways in which we just don’t fit, or at least I thought there were. I’ll just mention here a few of the big differences between me and at least some of you for purposes of clarity. I am more liberal/progressive than many of you are both politically and theologically. I think Christianity is more about how we are called to live this life than about what we have to do to assure our salvation in the next. Not all of you see the faith that way. I think that Jesus is much more a revelation of the love of God for all of creation and for each and every person in it than he was a sacrifice to pay the price of human sin. Again, some of you do not see the matter that way. I do not think that God wrote the Bible. I think perfectly fallible men did. That idea is new and troubling to at least some of you. There is a lot more that I could say about our differences, but I’ll let it go at that for now.

Let me instead specify some of the things I think we have in common. We are all people of faith. We all accept the reality of God. We may not all understand God in the same way, but none of us is an atheist or a secular humanist. We all accept that there is a spiritual side to reality that we can, at least to some extent, know and participate in. We all accept that God is the Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of all that is. We are all Christians. We may understand Jesus Christ and his saving work differently, but we all confess Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. We may understand the Bible differently, but we all accept the Bible as at least the foundational book of our faith without which Christianity is simply impossible. I think we all believe that God calls the church and all people to live lives of caring, generosity, and concern for people in need and to live lives committed to justice and to peace. We all believe, I think, that God is a God of love, compassion, and forgiveness. We all believe, I think, that the fullest revelation of the nature and will of God that we have or can have is Jesus. That is a lot that we have in common, and what we have in common is foundational for our faith and our life together. It gives us a foundation to grow on.

So why have I decided to withdraw my resignation? I have decided to withdraw it first of all because I love and like all of you. You are good folk. You are kind, caring, Christian people. You do good work both as a church and in your individual lives. My significant disagreements with some of you around significant theological issues don’t change the reality that you are good people. I like being with you. I like serving you. I like working with you as we discern together where the Holy Spirit is calling us in these days, or at least I do when our theological differences don’t get in the way; and most of the time they don’t.

Yet of course I have always felt that way about you, so what has changed since I submitted my resignation nearly three months ago that has led me to withdraw it now? After all, something significant must have changed if I have changed my decision about resigning, assuming at least that the resignation wasn’t a mistake in the first place. I think what has changed is that both you and I have done a lot of discernment around my call since then. Things that were in the dark have been brought into the light. Differences between us have been put on the table and discussed. The interviews that the Admin Board did with so many of you produced what is by far the best review of my work as a pastor that I have ever had in all of my years of ministry. It produced lists of what you think are my strengths and what are areas in which you have questions or concerns that I find very helpful. Most of all those interviews produced, as I said, a broad consensus that you don’t want me to leave. I understand you better than I did. Whether or not you understand me better I frankly do not know, and that is for you not me to say.

Beyond that, in the time since I submitted my resignation I have sensed that at least some of you are curious about some new ways of understanding the faith and are open to learning about them even if you don’t accept all of them. My primary evidence for that claim is the way a good group of you has responded to the book The Heart of Christianity by Marcus Borg that we have been discussing on Sunday mornings. Borg gives a good introduction to some ways of thinking about the faith that, as he says, are emerging and that have been emerging in American Christianity for a long time but with which a great many Christians remain unfamiliar. I agree with most of what he says is emerging and think what is emerging is a good and necessary thing. I have done my own small part to contribute to what is emerging. I am encouraged that at least some of you are willing to listen to a voice that is new to you, whether it be Borg’s or mine. I have more hope today than I did three months ago that together we can find new ways of being faithful Christians together in this troubled time in which we live.

When, before they talked to all of you, the Admin Board asked me what they should say if they were asked about what my position was, I said you can tell them “I have heard your concerns, I take them seriously, and I will continue to preach the Gospel.” That is still my position, or maybe better it is still my conviction and commitment. I do take the concerns I have heard from you seriously. I will not ignore them, but here is something you must know about me. I am convinced that God does not call people like me to preach only what the people of a particular church want to hear. Jesus certainly didn’t preach only what the people of his time thought they wanted to hear. He preached what he knew to be God’s truth. I know full well that I am no Jesus. Far from it. I am as fallible a human being as anyone else. But I have responded to what I have perceived to be a call from the Holy Spirit to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ as best I can. My discernment of that call has been affirmed through rigorous seminary education and the ordination processes of the United Church of Christ. I am called to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ as best I can understand it, as best I can articulate it. I must and will continue to do that. I can modify my tone, or at least sometimes I can. I can take care in how I express myself. What I cannot and will not do is abandon what I am convinced is the truth of the Gospel. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is spiritual, but it is also social, economic, and political. The Gospel of Jesus Christ consoles and uplifts, but it also challenges. It calls us to new ways of thinking and new ways of living, not to earn salvation but in response to God’s grace. The preacher’s call is to bring all of the Gospel to his or her people, the consoling, uplifting parts to be sure, but the challenging parts too. In nearly everything Jesus said and did he turned the beliefs and expectations of his world, and of ours, on their heads. We are not true to the Gospel or to our Lord and Savior if we do not do the same. That is a core conviction of mine, and I will not abandon it.

So with all of that being said, I have withdrawn my resignation as your pastor. We do not have to agree on everything for me to be your pastor. I can respect the differences between us, and I hope you can too. We have work to do together. We have a vital small church to enliven, inspire, and, if it is the will of the Holy Spirit, to grow. We have the Good News of Jesus Christ to live and to proclaim. I have recommitted myself to doing that with you. Will you recommit to doing it with me? I pray that you will. God willing, we have a future together. May it be so. Amen.