As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’ve had a couple of funerals this week.
And in the funeral I led yesterday — you can read the obituary here — the man we celebrated had been an accountant. And a pastor.
Now: vocationally, he was an accountant. That’s how he’ll be remembered. But for three years in the late 1960s, he was bi-vocational … meaning that in addition to his full time job as an accountant, he served as a local pastor of a small United Methodist Church in Union County.
And because I knew this man, I knew he didn’t do ministry for glory or for ego or for money or even to become a celebrity pastor. He was in ministry because it was the natural the outflow of who he was deep inside.
Which of course made me ponder my motives as well as those of my clergy colleagues.
Is ministry a performance? Or is it the product of a life lived with Jesus?
Is it a role? Or is it the result of abiding deeply with the Savior?
Is it something you do? Or is it someone you are?
I know what I want the answers to those questions to be. I’m just not sure what they are yet.