"Brad - I'm
curious how you ended up in New Mexico - and as a minister! A far cry from
occupational therapist at Mayo in Rochester. Did your kids move with you? You
had sent me a couple photos at one time of your granddaughter - how old is she
now? Do you have more grandchildren? Take care and have a good day."
I received the message above from a friend whom I
reconnected with on Facebook earlier this week. Her basic question is one I have heard a
number of times over the past three years that we’ve been in New Mexico.
Minnesota to New Mexico? Mayo Clinic to ministry? Instead of writing her a personal answer I
thought I would write about it here and share with whomever reads my blog.
The short answer: One thing led to another. The long answer is more detailed. I don’t recall quite when I got to know the
person who asked the question, or when the last time was that we had regular
contact with each other, so I'll go back to the year 2000 and try to bring out the key
parts of the story.
In 2000 I was working at the Mayo Clinic as an occupational
therapist. I had been there 14
years. My wife and I had two children at
home and for several years we had been attending a Methodist church. I had grown up and been confirmed in a
Lutheran church but had spent nearly my entire adult life outside of a
church. I'm not quite sure when our
family began attending church, perhaps 1996.
Our son's Boy Scout troop met there and our daughter had been
participating in some youth activities at the invitation of one our
neighbors. Once we started going it
became a habit. Looking back on those
days I would say that I was a Christian in name only. If someone had asked I would have said I was
a Christian but I wouldn’t have the slightest idea of what to say to further
explain that identity.
In the fall of 2000 our church offered an Alpha course, a
10-week class which intended to outline basic Christian beliefs. I thought this would be good for my wife and
I to attend, and we did. Towards the end
of the Alpha course I had an experience that is hard to describe. Not a vision, or voices, nor a powerful
personal conviction about sin and salvation but an experience where one moment things
were as they always were, and next moment where everything was changed. In that change I knew very clearly that God
was real, and that if God was real then everything in my life was
different. How that change would work
itself out was a process that would take years, and in fact it is still happening today.
Two things that happened as a result of my conversion experience
were that I began to have an active prayer life, meaning I began to spend time
in prayer each day, and that Sunday morning worship began to mean
something. I just didn’t go to church
for 45 minutes but the hymns, the prayers, the preaching, all began to have
meaning that lasted beyond the end of the worship service.
I came to understand I needed to be in a Bible study and in
the fall of 2001 I joined the local Community Bible Study (CBS) group.
I had two acquaintances in the study and
thought it would be a good place for me to be.
It turned out to be awesome. I
spent 3 years in CBS as a regular student.
In those years we studied Revelation, Acts and Deuteronomy and
Psalms. I was in different small groups
each year and really benefited from the work of our small group leaders and the
different people in the groups each year.
I would add that the year we did Deuteronomy/Psalms was the year I
learned to love God's word. I had
decided to read both books over the course of the summer as preparation for the
study. An overly ambitious project, as
it took more than the summer to do. But
in the course of reading the Psalms I began to love the word that God had given
to His people.
In 2004 I was invited to be a small group leader within CBS. I was paired with an experienced small group
leader and we worked together for 4-5 years.
Facilitating a small group was a rich opportunity to grow in my faith
but the real benefit of being a small group leader was that the leaders got
together each week for their own time of prayer and study. Each Saturday we spent 45 minutes in prayer
and 45 minutes going over the next week's lesson. I don’t have the words to describe how
precious that weekly prayer group was.
Without overloading this blog post in minutiae I'll leave
out some of the other ways in which I was growing through my involvement with
CBS, and also the things I was becoming involved in within my local church.
In early 2005, I think, I had casual conversations with three different people, conversations that had
in common the idea of going to seminary.
Thinking that perhaps God was calling me to get some education, and not
having any idea of where that education would lead, I began to explore
attending a seminary. I talked it over
with my pastor, who for a number of reasons didn’t think I should. So I set the idea aside. If it was of God then God would bring it back
up. In late 2005 He did. I talked with my pastor, a different person,
as our pastor had changed in the summer of that year, and he was encouraging of
the idea.
In my work at Mayo a number of my colleagues were pursuing
advanced degrees through distance learning programs. I did not feel as if God was calling me to
leave my job at the moment for the sake of going to school for what was at that
time a vague purpose and so I began to explore seminary distance learning
programs. In the fall of 2006 I began
the distance learning program at Western Theological Seminary (WTS) in Holland,
MI. I did lots of coursework on line, attended classes on campus twice a year
for two weeks, and also had assignemnts through my local church. If I stayed on schedule I would complete a
Master's in Divinity in 5 years of "part-time" study, compared to 3
years for a full-time student.
Of the 17 students who started my cohort together, 6 of us
graduated on-time in June, 2011. Taking
18 graduate credits a year, while working full-time, makes for a very busy five
years! As many of you may know, there
were a number of major life changes in that period as well. In early 2007 my wife and I divorced. We had two children together, both of whom
left home in 2005. In the late summer of
2007 Robin and I met, marrying that fall.
Robin also had two adult children, virtually the same ages as mine, and
also living on their own. In February
2009 we were asked to adopt one of our grandchildren. Kat, who was 2 at the time, moved in with us a
month later and her adoption was finalized later in the year.
I began at WTS in 2006 and sometime in my second year I
began to sense a calling towards pastoral ministry. In early 2011, shortly before graduation and according
to the guidelines of our denomination for seminary students, I began to seek a
church to serve.
It was a process that turned out to be much
different from what we had expected. We
began looking at vacancies in MN, IA and WI, because that we there the majority
of our families were. Perhaps 125 or so
churches in those states. Pastors
move. They retire. An opportunity is sure to arise. So we thought
as we began.
I sent my information to churches, without much in the way
of positive response. We gradually
expanded our search to other states in the Midwest, and then as far as New
York. Over the course of the 2 years I
was looking for a church to serve I would average a phone interview about once
every three months. Once I had a second
interview. I came to figure out that as
someone in their mid-50's and without a background in ministry, say as a youth
pastor, I wasn't a highly desirable pastoral prospect. Good thing I went to school part-time and
still had a full-time job!
In November 2012 I had a phone call from a friend of mine
from seminary. He had graduated before
me and a church where he had almost gone to in late 2011 was still looking for
a pastor. It was on a Native American reservation
in New Mexico. He had received updated
information about the church and their search and if I was interested he would
send it to me. Throughout the search
process Robin and I were praying that we would be able to discern God's leading
and then faithfully follow that lead.
And so we asked my friend to forward the information. He did so.
We looked it over and responded by sending the search committee the
denomination's standard information on pastoral candidates.
In February 2013, while on vacation in North Carolina, I had
a phone interview with the search committee of the Jicarilla Apache Reformed
Church in Dulce, NM. Then in April
Robin, Kat and I went to Dulce for a long weekend. We toured the community, met with the search
committee and I led worship on Sunday morning.
In June they called me to serve as their pastor. But there was a hiccup in the process and in
early July I had to make a trip to Denver to meet with some people for the
denomination who had final approval of the call.
On a Monday I met with the group in Denver for several hours
and while I was waiting in the security line at the airport they informed me
that they were approving the call to Dulce. I had had two days off from work at
Mayo and when I went back on Wednesday I gave my supervisor a letter informing
her of my intent to retire at the end of the month. So I left Mayo Clinic after 27 years as an occupational
therapist on July 31st, was ordained as Minister of Word and Sacrament on
August 6th, we left Rochester for Dulce on August 22nd, arriving on the 26th,
and my first Sunday in the pulpit was September 1st. Tomorrow, Sunday Septembers 4th, will be the
first Sunday of our fourth year. How
time flies!
And that, more or less, is how I and my family got from
healthcare to here.
My friend had a few other questions about our family, and so
here goes. Hope it makes sense! Robin and I have four adult children, two
each from our previous marriages, M, J, N and B.
Together we have Kat, who began as a granddaughter
and is adopted as our daughter. Through our adult children we have these grandchildren:
J, I, A, S, R, M, Ta and De. R died last
year in an accident at home. Many of our
grandchildren have half-siblings. These
children are Ka, L, C, I, Dc, Tr, Te, Ja, H, M, Ar, Al, Je, Ko, N and there is one
more on the way. They range from ages 10
½ to 6 months. We pray for all of them
in the same manner, no matter what their biological and/or relational connection
happens to be. All credit goes to Robin
for keeping us connected with these other children.
CBS is non-denominational and it is an awesome program
for Bible study. I highly commend it.
All people who follow Jesus are his disciples, which is a
word that basically means "learners." He is our teacher and we are
His students, learning from Him. 
