Ordination Council Paper (My Story)

Scope and Purpose

In what follows I have attempted two things. First, I have tried to tell my story as accurately and as truthfully as I, or anyone else, can bear. Secondly, I have tried to reflect theologically upon various stages in that story in order to better understand and articulate who it is that I am today and who it is that I want to be. In that respect my story, like all good stories, is arched by force toward some end. We might call this force, as the Hebrews did, “wind” or “spirit”. And we might call this end Christ. It is my belief that I have read the winds rightly and they point me toward an end which is hoped for, yet unseen. It is my hope that you, this Ordaining Council, will read the winds with me, confirm my interpretation, and point in The Way.

First Foundations

Baptism is the sign through which we freely confess Jesus the Christ as Lord and covenant ourselves to live as faithful and obedient disciples in life, in death and into the resurrection.

As any good Baptist would, I have begun with baptism. My own baptism took place in a backyard pool in Lubbock, TX in the presence of the people of Live Oak Community Church. The blue water glistened, cool and refreshing, beneath the hot West Texas sun. The skies were not rent asunder; there was no booming voice from heaven. But I have to think the Lord was nevertheless well pleased. I was baptized by the Reverend Scott Travis, a friend and mentor from whom I first (with ears to hear) heard the gospel of Jesus Christ and responded. I was 20 years old.

Growing up, church was not a significant part of my family’s life. My parents were (and still are) salt of the earth kinds of people. They worked hard and did their best to instill the values of right and wrong in us kids. Faith was important to them; church was also an important - but not quite necessary. Jesus Christ died for their sins and that was what mattered most. God would judge us by what was in our hearts.

I came to Christ through the evangelical high school mission Young Life. Scott was the Young Life area director for Lubbock and I gravitated toward him and his message. He presented a Jesus far more exciting and attractive than anything I had ever heard. All the other Jesuses had been about religion. The Jesus Scott preached was about relationship. I fell in love with the new Jesus and wanted to follow him.

I was on fire and that fire was all consuming. I became significantly involved in my church and in Young Life where I served as both a volunteer leader and later as intern during college. Jesus Christ had changed my heart and I was eager to tell others of the peace he had given me.

That peace was a curious one however. While on the one hand I was profoundly moved by a sense of tranquility and rest, I also harbored a deep anger and hostility toward those who could or would not share with me in this new life. My relationship with those closest to me suffered most. I failed to make the same kinds of connections with my family that I could make with those I mentored and ministered to. It was difficult for me to understand how my sister and parents could not feel what I felt and know what I knew about Jesus Christ. It was impossible for me to imagine how people could be so lukewarm about something I found so exciting and so right. I can see now how pious and condemning I often was. I had become a zealot, not out of malicious intent or hatred, but out of a distorted image of what it means to do and be good in this world.

Jesus told us faith in Him would put a wedge between father and son and bring a sword rather than peace to the world (Matt. 10:34). Somehow I had missed his point. The sword was supposed to be in the hands of those who hated Christ, not those who loved him. It was a lesson I learned early in life and one which will shape my own worldview for the rest of my life. It is less important to be right than it is to be loving. Our God is a god of mercy, not of sacrifice.

I graduated from college and took a year’s sabbatical – determined (only half-jokingly now) to “find myself” and listen for God’s gentle whisper. As I searched scripture I could not shake the sense that I was called to seminary. I lived with the Apostle Paul’s charge that our love for Christ should overflow with knowledge and depth of insight (Phil 1:9). The foundation of my faith was laid solid, it was time to build upon it. Charles Johnson, a Baptist preacher I respected a great deal from my hometown, put me onto Duke Divinity School. It didn’t take much arm-twisting. I wanted a place that would grow me both spiritually and intellectually. In researching schools I read that the Dean of the Divinity School, Greg Jones, boasted that Duke’s goal was to cultivate in its students what Jean LeClerc called “a love of learning and a desire for God.” I was sold.


Beyond Foundations

“What is crucial is not that Christians know the truth,
but that they be the truth.”
Stanley Hauerwas

When I arrived at seminary I was startled to discover that the foundation I thought my faith so solidly rested on began to sink quickly. Confronted with challenges like the historical-critical method, the problem of history’s violence (especially Christian history’s violence), the high burden of “proving” anything (especially the burden of proving the existence of an all-powerful and all-loving God) and the fact that the fire that had once burned so fiercely could no longer be seen or felt, I began to doubt the reality of my faith. At times I even doubted the reality of reality. All this, mixed together and thrown into the pressurized cooker of a rigorous academic curriculum and cranked up to 500 degrees was enough to make me crack. At the beginning of my second year of school I suffered a crisis of faith.

This was a dark period in my life; yet I now consider it a necessary part of my journey, just as the desert wandering was for Israel. My former foundations having given way, I looked to new rock for manna. In contrast to what one might expect from theologians trained in communicating Christian truth, the professors at Duke Divinity School did not begin afresh with what could be proven about the Christian faith. They began with what could be practiced.

Up until that time I had understood Jesus was the one through whom all my needs would be met. The emptiness I now suffered called that into question. I began to find solace, however, in reflecting upon the book of Job. In the story Job, a righteous man, suffers affliction beyond comprehension and is left to wrestle with the terrorizing thought of a god who allows pain and evil to persist in the world. As readers we are privy to something Job is not. Though the problem of evil is never resolved for us, we learn, from God’s own conversation with Satan, that Job’s suffering (and by inference all human suffering) is bound up with the human freedom to love or reject God. The capacity to love and follow God is contingent upon an analogous capacity to “curse God and die.” The question put before God by Satan, “Does Job fear God for nothing?” (Job 1:9), remarkably resembled the question being asked of me in my trial of faith, “Can you love and obey God selflessly?” To love and obey God selflessly is to love a god who sometimes remains quiet amidst heartache and tragedy. To love the Lord is to risk loving a god who will not always give us what we want.

I think this is the lesson of John 6. After Jesus fed the five thousand, the people were so overcome that they were willing to resort to violence in order to make him king. Jesus instead withdrew to a mountaintop. The people had fallen in love with the miracle and had missed what that miracle was pointing toward – a new economy of abundance being established on earth. To love God selflessly is to worship a king who will not always work miracles.

At the same time I was reflecting upon Job I began a class on Baptist polity and history. The central question put to us throughout the course was “What does it mean to confess Christ as Lord?” It was this question that fundamentally changed the entire course of my seminary education and perhaps my life.

For early Christians, the confession “Christ is Lord” did not rest upon a set of doctrinal statements about the truth and divinity of Jesus which could be isolated from the story of God’s ongoing work in the people Israel. Instead, as Baptist theologian Jim McClendon notes, in Jesus we have two stories – God’s story and the story of his people – weaved together. The good news for the early Christian witnesses was the proclamation of a new world being ushered in upon them in the faithful life, death and resurrection of Christ. The earliest meaning of “Christ is Lord” was that Jesus, a man, obediently chose to live the self-giving life God chose for him and was raised from death that all might follow his path and be reconciled in “the way, the truth, and the life.” The flame which would set the world afire was the good news that the kingdom of God had drawn near. The stranglehold of suffering and death had ended. Humanity had been born anew in Jesus Christ.

What was so liberating about this discovery? On the one hand it was terribly frightening - I might not ever regain the certainty I at one time thought I possessed. But at the same time, this new discovery was freeing. God called me to live as a disciple, to follow the pattern Jesus set in giving his life away, and to submit (literally “to put under”) my own humanity to the call of the cross – to live as humans were made to live by renouncing power and glory and affirming service to our neighbor as the way to loving and obeying God selflessly. The lesson of Job – to love God and serve him without regard to self-interest - was fulfilled in the life of Christ.

God had given me the freedom to either accept or reject that life. In reflection I realized my baptism – the baptism I had undergone so many years before – was a promise I had already made to follow in the life of Christ. Believer’s baptism was a pledge to accept my place in the cosmos - an affirmation that Christ’s way is indeed the Way to new life and Christ himself is indeed Lord. The ball was now in my court. It was up to me to either break or keep that pledge.


The Church…The Body of Christ
Looking back now I can see that the first two years of seminary had been a terribly selfish period in my life. I am ashamed of this. I rejected most forms of legitimate Christian community, choosing instead to turn inward and wrestle with my demons in isolation. Though I joined a local church I disengaged from its communal life - perhaps fearful that my faithlessness would be exposed. Darkness always fears the light. Up until divinity school I located the truth of my faith in my own private, experience of Jesus Christ. In layman’s terms, “I knew Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior.” What I had failed to consider, however, was the ways in which my fellow community of believers had helped me sustain and make sense of my faith throughout the journey. What I thought was a strictly private matter had in fact been a community affair!

Sadly, modern assumptions about the self and the primacy of the individual have done much to diminish our understanding of what the church is. The church has become something like a club where like-minded peoples gather and worship and then freely disassociate themselves from the fellowship when times and circumstances warrant. It was this kind of misconception on my part which allowed me to break from the church when doubt began to cast its long shadow over my life.

But the church is something more than a coming together of peoples. The church is the community of fellowship wherein the very constitution of peoplehood is remade into the likeness and body of Christ. This body is a living body – an organic expression and embodiment of God’s kingdom being made on earth. When we separate ourselves from the body of Christ we lose more than casserole dinners. We forfeit our very selves – who and what we were made to be. When I disconnected myself from the church I lost touch with the fact that I was designed to live in community with others. This loss was the loss of what McClendon calls the “baptist vision” for church. With the “baptist vision” we come to see the waves of human destiny already breaking upon us. With the “baptist vision” we come to realize that the kingdom of God dwells – already - in the resurrected and Spirit-filled lives of Christ’s disciples.

When I returned to the church I found myself once again. Yet here is the mystery…I found myself in letting go. By acknowledging the fact that in baptism I had buried the old body and all its claims to self-determinism I, by process of logic, could not deny the fact that my life was no longer my own. It had been born again; and this not merely in the age that is to come, but born to God here and now, as a member in Christ’s living body.

As I began to engage in the practices of gathering, worshipping, storytelling and fellowshipping, I began to once again find my self and my God. I began also to recover the summons to share in the self-emptying of Christ’s cross. I was beginning to discover my gift and my call to serve Christ’s body as a minister of the gospel.

The Priesthood of Believers and the Call to Ministry

There is no provision for ordination in the New Testament. Baptists rightly reject the hierarchal priesthood in favor of what Martin Luther called the “priesthood of all believers.” This does not, however, mean that every person is a priest unto him or herself. Instead it is the fullness of the communal body (Eph 1) in its abundance which points us toward the consummation of all things in and under Christ. It was not merely one person, but the people of Lowe’s Grove Baptist Church that ministered to me in my need. The people had become one person, Christ, who drew me near.

Given this fact it may seem somewhat anomalous to seek ordination into the gospel ministry. For are we not all then commissioned to proclaim the gospel in baptism? I take this point quite seriously and answer with two points of my own. First, some members of the body are called to be pastors, and some teachers, and some apostles, and some are called to bake casseroles (not because their place is in the kitchen but so that all might share in equally in the fellowship of Christ). No one calling is greater or more exalted than another. In point of fact, we know from our Lord himself that those who will lead must in turn become low and give themselves as servants. The call of ordination is then not a call to glory but is instead the call to set oneself apart for extraordinary (more than might be ordinarily expected of or possible for a faithful disciple) sacrifice and service to his or her (yes, “her”) brothers and sisters.

My second argument is somewhat more pragmatic, but no less important. We live in a world of diverse opinions and perspectives. Not all Christians share the same ecclesiological views as us baptists. Nor are all non-baptists familiar with the nuances of what priesthood means. Therefore I believe it is incumbent upon us as we seek reconciliation with other Christian communities to single out particular members who can speak on our behalf with some degree of credibility. In the eyes of other Christian communions, faith traditions and the State ordination serves this purpose and is beneficial in doing so. In any case, the call to lead is exactly that - a call. It is our call to hear the call of the Lord and respond in sacrifice and in service. I can truly say I have heard the call and want faithfully to respond.

I have not shared the following with many people, but believe it is pertinent for the exercise at hand. I had delusions of being a lawyer after Divinity School. I call them delusions because I think they were part of a last-ditch effort at what the world sees as beautiful. A final attempt to be like God. Yet the nagging feeling I had through all of it – the feeling that certain people like Forest Gale, Hardy Clemons, my fiancée Irie and my Mom wouldn’t allow me to put to rest – told me that I was born to be a minister. To do otherwise would be to deny my own humanity – the humanity we are called to submit to in service of God and neighbor. I had a terrible fear that somehow my world would one day come to an end and I would realize that at a very definitive moment in my life I had counted the cost of eternal life and, like the rich young ruler, turned and walked away in sadness. The cost of eternal life is the cost of giving everything away when called to do so. It is the cost of putting away all our ambitions and plans and securities and upon the altar. The cost of living into one’s baptism is the cost of setting aside who we want to be in life and submitting ourselves to what God desires and calls us to be. Now is the critical time in my life. I stand at the crossroads.

Frederick Buechner says that vocation is the point at which our greatest joy intersects with the world’s greatest need. If he is right - and I think he is as right as anyone - then I feel confident about my calling to the ministry. I can think of no greater joy than standing with the people of God, in the midst of the world’s pain and suffering and brokenness, as we witness in word and in deed to the kingdom which is now at hand. For what is so remarkable about Buechner’s statement is the fact that our greatest joy IS in fact the world’s greatest need. It is Christ who stands in this intersection and we, as baptized members of his body, are called to stand with him.

After Words: The Journey Begins

Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.
John 21

Oh Lord, you have made us for yourself, our hearts
know no rest until they rest in you.
Saint Augustine



I confess I have been, in the immortal words of Bob Dylan, a “slow train comin’.” I sometimes kicked and sometimes screamed, but there was nothing I could do to alter the course of life’s motion. Now I can say it is time to stop swimming upstream, and give myself to the current. Give myself to the living water, which not only sustains us but will also deliver us, when the times will have reached their fulfillment, unto the safe harbor of God himself.
I cannot say I know where the path will take me; I can only say I am committed to the voyage and I am committed to the ship. And I am willing to fish.