CREEDE HINSHAW: As it was, so will it continue to be

I sat in the graceful sanctuary of First United Methodist Church in Tifton this week to rejoice with United Methodists across south Georgia at a worship service to ordain and commission candidates for ministry. Two of my good friends were to kneel during the service in the final step of a lengthy process. One would be commissioned for ministry, which in United Methodism is the next-to-the-last step before ordination. The other would be ordained. In each circumstance, Bishop David Graves would lay hands on the head of the kneeling candidate and call upon the Holy Spirit to empower the one being set aside.

Suddenly it dawned on me that I had been ordained in that very sanctuary 45 years earlier on a hot June evening. I am not sure I had been back in the Tifton sanctuary in the years since I was ordained there.

On that June in 1979, the sanctuary packed to overflowing, this young adult knelt before Bishop William R. Cannon, who firmly laid hands on my head and said, “Take authority as an elder to preach the Word of God, to administer the Holy Sacraments, and to order the life of the Church, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

I knelt as a layperson; I stood up as an ordained pastor. How little did I know. How much did I have to learn. The task before me in those next 36 years was enormous; the highs and lows only dimly perceived, the successes and failures unanticipated.

A deep feeling of joy washed over me this week as I marveled over how quickly the past decades had sped by. I listened to the words of the ordination liturgy with fresh ears and a renewed heart. The ordination sermon that evening seemed as if it were preached for me, and it might as well have been, because I could remember nothing of the sermon on that 1979 evening.

Pastors are entrusted with incredible responsibility. We often fall short of the glory and the duty to which God calls us. A few pastors are enormously successful, even becoming household names. A few pastors have taken the most sordid liberties with parishioners, have absconded with church funds, and have led people astray, defaming their high calling and making it harder for the rest of God’s servants.

But most pastors are decent, sincere, Holy Spirit-led men and women of God, serving the best they know how and living out their call to be servants, shepherds, proclaimers and even prophets. Most pastors know their failings all too well; they labor on despite the task that often feels quite impossible.

The worship service was over too soon. I searched out my newly ordained friends to hug them and welcome them as I had been welcomed so many decades ago. The world and the church will be a better place because of these new servants of Christ.