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After leaving Stateline Youth for Christ, I had been out of work for
six months when I received a pastoral call from a Congregational
church in Thomson, Illinois. I was ecstatic at the thought of
having my own church and arrived in Thomson in February l985 with all
kinds of energy and enthusiasm.
Thomson is a tiny farm town of 550 people and
sits on the east bank of the Mississippi River, about 50 miles
directly west of Rockford, Illinois. When I first read the name
“Thomson” in print, I thought there had been a typographical error.
I assumed, wrongly, that I was moving to Thompson, spelled with a “p.”
But there is no town of Thompson in Illinois, and as far as I know
there never has been. In fact, the standing joke in town is that
the only “p” in Thomson is during the watermelon season. That’s my
kind of humor!
Thomson Community Church was one of three
churches in town and had a congregation of around 40 members.
The people expected a well-developed sermon on Sunday mornings; a
monthly visit to each of their homes; weekly nursing home visits; and
someone to officiate at weddings, funerals, and baptisms. That
was it, and for my first six months in town I loved pastoring the
church.
In a town as small as Thomson, there wasn’t much
for a single man to do with his spare time. There were only so
many times in one week that I could visit people without wearing out
my welcome, and after fulfilling my duties as a pastor, I still had
time left over. That’s when I went out to the Durwood’s.
Cliff Durwood and his three sons operated a dairy
farm a few miles outside of Thomson, and all four of them welcomed me
with open arms. They knew a good deal when they saw it, and on
my first visit they put a shovel in my hand and told me to go to work
cleaning out the barn. They milked close to fifty head of cattle
twice a day—once in the morning and then again at night. That
many animals in one building can produce an unbelievable amount of
manure, and it all had to be shoveled out every day.
The thing that I appreciated most about the
Durwoods was that they didn’t care whether or not I was the pastor of
a local church, someone from out of town, or a guest from another
country. To them I was just Steve Chance, a man willing to help
out in any way he could. Cliff and his sons treated me the same
way that they treated everyone else who came out to the farm. If
they felt like cussing, they cussed. If they felt like lighting
up a cigar, they lit up a cigar. And if they felt like having a
beer, they did that too. They did anything they felt like doing,
and they weren’t about to let some up-and-coming preacher keep them
from having their fun.
Now, you might think that all of the Durwoods’
crude language and barnyard behavior might have turned me off, but it
had just the opposite effect. Being a minister can sometimes
become pretty suffocating, and everywhere I went people were always on
their best behavior, afraid to let me see them for who they really
were. I found it immensely refreshing to be around people who
felt free enough to be themselves and not have to hide behind a facade
of Christianized jargon every time I came around.
I spent a lot of time at the Durwood farm, and I
usually came home feeling exhausted from working too hard, yet
exhilarated from pushing myself to the limit. Some days I helped
with the feeding, and on other days I cleaned out the barns. In
the spring and summer I helped with the haying, and in the fall I
helped with the corn harvest. And when I became really desperate
for something to do, I drove the five miles to the Durwood’s other
farm and spent the day chasing pigs onto an old horse trailer used to
transport animals to market. That was not a fun job.
Cleaning out a dairy barn is one thing, but there’s nothing like the
smell of hogs on a really warm day. It’s awful. In fact,
it’s bad enough to turn a diehard meat-and-potatoes man into a
vegetarian on the spot. But somebody had to do the job, and I
wasn’t about to wimp out just because of an odor that was a little too
pungent.
You wouldn’t believe how much manure can
accumulate when fifteen or twenty litters of pigs are all crammed
under one roof. When it came time to clean, every bit of straw,
manure, and urine had to be removed and the floor swept. To make the
job easier, someone had turned a 55-gallon drum into a dump-cart that
ran along a track mounted to the ceiling. Instead of having to
go back and forth all the time with a wheelbarrow, we filled the cart
up at the far end of the building and pushed the manure down the track
and out the door.
It’s amazing what a little old-fashioned
ingenuity can do, and the dump-cart idea saved us a lot of time and
effort. Of course, there was that one time when someone forgot
to replace the piece of track that went underneath the door frame.
Without it, the cart couldn’t be pushed outside. It was a
disaster just waiting to happen, and Cliff was the unfortunate one
pushing the dump-cart when it jumped off the track. Before he
could react, he was standing knee deep in a ton of pig doo-doo.
Cliff was mad, and he let everyone know it
“Who’s the boneheaded idiot that left that track
gate undone?” he shouted, adding a few expletives out of anger.
I may not have been the one who forgot to fasten
the track gate, but I knew enough to keep my mouth shut until Cliff
cooled off. I guess I wouldn’t have been very happy either if 80
pounds of manure had just fallen on top of me. There have been
times in my life that I have felt like I’ve been in the basement of an
outhouse, looking up with my mouth opened, but only because I’ve had
a bad day. In this case, it really happened, though, and Cliff
made sure that we knew to never let it happen again.
I know that some people reading this are
scratching their heads and wondering why in the world anyone would
willingly volunteer to clean out a hog barn. That’s a good
question, and looking back, I sometimes wonder about it myself.
Why did I ever hook up with a bunch of guys who spent their days
making hay, milking cows, and shoveling manure? After all, most
people don’t spend their leisure time this way. The truth is
that although I enjoyed physically exerting myself, I was mostly
looking for a place to plug into in a community where I otherwise felt
isolated.
The Durwoods gave me a place to belong.
They invited me not only out to their farm but into their lives as
well. One night they even took me to the dog races over in Iowa
for an experience I’ll never forget. Three of us drove an hour
and a half one way, just to watch greyhounds chase after a stuffed
rabbit.
When I first moved to Thomson, I fully intended
to make it my home for quite a few years. I even purchased a
house a few months after moving there, which turned out to be one of
the biggest mistakes of my life. It was too much house. I
really didn’t need a three-bedroom, two-story home to take care of,
and I don’t know what possessed me to buy such a huge house in the
first place. It took an incredible amount of time to care for,
not to mention the financial drain on my savings account.
The money wasn’t the worst part. Owning a
home locked me into the community. That was okay as long as I
wanted to stay in Thomson, but the moment I decided that the time had
come to move on, the house became a ball and chain tying me to the
area. It didn’t take long for that to happen, and as soon as six
months later I talked to someone about putting the house back on the
market.
“The only people who move into Thomson are
pastors and schoolteachers,” the realtor told me in the beginning of
December. “The earliest I expect anyone to look at your house
will be sometime in early spring.”
That wasn’t exactly what I had wanted to hear.
“We can’t lose anything by trying,” I said, hoping for what seemed to
be the impossible.
I decided to put the house on the market, despite
the realtor’s pessimism, and I’m glad I did. Before a month had
gone by, someone expressed an interest in looking at it. I had
six-hours’ notice before showing the house and spent the entire
afternoon cleaning. I was more than ready to get out of Thomson,
but in order to do that, I needed to sell the house. I did
everything I could think of in order to make the house as attractive
as possible to the potential buyer. From scrubbing floors to
washing windows, I cleaned every room. The effort paid off, and
before the week was out I had accepted an offer to buy the house.
So what was it like for me, a man with cerebral
palsy, to be the spiritual leader of a church? It was horrible!
I made a lousy pastor, and I’m afraid the reasons that I made a lousy
pastor had little to do with my disability. Thomson was a
wonderful town to live in, and the people in the congregation were
very kind and gracious to me during my employment at the church.
Yet despite all the warmth and hospitality shown me, when it came
right down to it, I just wasn’t cut out to be a pastor. In fact,
of all the things that I have done in ministry, pastoring the Thomson
Community Church is probably the one thing at which I considered
myself a failure.
Although it’s true that I felt lonely and
isolated, the real reason behind my leaving the church is that I felt
that I had failed as a pastor. I failed the people who had hired
me by not providing the spiritual guidance and direction they
deserved; I failed myself by not doing the kind of job that I knew I
could have done. And, ultimately, I felt I had failed God by not
being the type of minister that I thought he had called me to be.
Cognitively, I am very much aware of how my
ministry in Thomson impacted some of the parishioners of the church.
However, there’s a part of me that knows I did not measure up to my
fullest potential as a minister. Sure, I preached every Sunday.
I baptized people. I even officiated at weddings and funerals.
I was very good at being with people and performing all the
ceremonial functions that went along with being a pastor. But
when it came to nurturing people’s faith, I was ill prepared to
minister full-time in a church. I was only in my mid-twenties
and knew nothing about ministering with adults. All of my
training had been in youth work; I lacked direction, for myself and
for the church, and I was too ashamed to ask anyone for help. So
I did the only thing I knew to do. I left.
I knew what I didn’t want for my life—I
didn’t want to stay in Thomson, and I didn’t want to be a pastor.
Yet I had no idea what I did want. So as soon as escrow
closed on the house, I headed down to Taylor University. I
still had a lot of friends there and wanted their input about what I
should do next. I talked to anybody and everybody, including
Lowell Haines, the dean of students at Taylor. Lowell had been
the hall director at Sammy Morris Hall for two of the three years that
I had lived there, and I believed that if anyone could give me advice
on what to do, he could.
“Houghton College has a cooperative program in
student development with Buffalo State College,” Lowell offered.
“Maybe if you write the dean of students, there still might be time to
get into the program.”
I took Lowell’s advice. When I heard back
from Houghton a short time later, I had only one week to respond
before the final deadline for applying for the fall enrollment.
I worked my butt off that week! I spent the time filling out
applications (both for Houghton and for Buffalo), gathering
recommendations, and writing essays about myself and why I desired to
pursue a career in student development. I wrote, rewrote, and
then rewrote each essay again until I had it worded just the way I
wanted it. I wanted the applications to be as perfect as
possible before I dropped them into the mail. I was really
looking forward to getting out of Thomson, and I didn’t want to do
anything to jeopardize my chances of finding other employment.
A week hadn’t yet gone by when I received a phone
call from Houghton, offering to pay half of my expenses if I agreed to
fly out for an interview. And, before a second week had passed,
I was boarding a plane and heading for New York.
I felt good about the trip and kept close to the
phone for the next two weeks, afraid that I might miss hearing from
Houghton. I was ecstatic when the call came inviting me to work
part-time in the Houghton College Career Development Center while
completing a master’s program at Buffalo. That’s not a bad
deal, especially considering how much I wanted to leave Thomson.
I was asked to show up for work beginning the third week in
August—three months later—and couldn’t wait for the summer to end.
Some may say that I took the easy way out by
leaving Thomson and moving to Houghton. I prefer to think of it
as moving on to a more suitable profession. I’m not one to walk
away from something just because it’s a little harder than I expected
it to be. I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere in life if I had
bailed out every time the going got tough. On the other hand, I
don’t believe in forcing something that isn’t working. There’s a
time to stay in a job, stick it out, and hope things will improve.
There’s also a time to leave and to explore others options in life.
The hard part is knowing when to stay and when to leave. For me,
it was simply time to pack my bags and move on.
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