This is a piece I just wrote about my dad:

Called to Preach

In some religious traditions ministers are expected to live celibate lives. Not so in Protestant Christian churches. Indeed, marriage is the norm. My mother, who married a minister, has startled people she met in Catholic Mexico by saying that she’s a minister’s wife. For some the idea of a minister who has a family just like anybody else must be pretty startling. To me it has just always been the normal order of things.

When Dad was a teenager he felt a call to preach. I’ve asked him what that was like. He could not really articulate it for me. All he could say was that he developed a conviction that the ministry was what he needed to do with his life. He talked about it with his own father—a minister himself—and with other experienced ministers. They prayed over it and decided that Dad was right. So he began preparing for the ministry.

The decision meant a profound change of direction in Dad’s life. He was very good at math and had wanted to become an architect. Instead when he went to college he studied biblical languages, Bible interpretation, and homiletics. The Bible college he attended was where he met and married Mom. I owe my very existence to that place.

Mom had all the qualifications to make a good minister’s wife. She was smart, sweet-natured, and ready to try her hand at any aspect of a church’s ministry that needed work. She also happens to be a fine piano player. Small rural churches sometimes have trouble finding a good piano player. No church Dad has pastored has ever had that problem.

Dad went right into the ministry when he left school. He pastored several churches over the next few years. One of them was located well over a hundred miles from where he and Mom lived. They had to drive there every Sunday morning, spend the day at church and eat lunch with church members, and drive back that evening, Dad driving, Mom (who was still in college) studying her lessons.

Dad could not sleep in on Monday because he had to work full-time to make a living. Baptist denominations have no central hierarchy that can subsidize smaller churches. In return for the freedom from central control that each congregation enjoys, it must accept the responsibility of paying its own way. Small rural churches often can’t possibly afford to pay a minister a living wage. Dad has worked for as little as $10 a month—and that was before the church ran into financial trouble! He has spent his life as a “bi-vocational” minister—one who works a secular job and preaches in addition to that.

In early years Dad worked brief spells at factories making boat paddles and school busses. He has driven a school bus for a time. Mostly, though, he laid bricks for a living, as his father and grandfather had done before him. Before I was born he worked on well-paying union jobs. This involved commuting quite a way from the little towns where they lived to places that had bigger projects. While Mom was carrying me he did lucrative out-of-town jobs to save up as much as possible before my arrival. That meant being gone from home for most of each week. After the births of me and my brother, he left the union work for small residential and commercial jobs that did not involve travel.

Some of my earliest memories are of going to church. We lived in a parsonage next door to the church house. I remember walking across a wide expanse of ground to and from church. Actually it was just a little grassy lot. To a four-year-old it seemed a lot bigger. Inside we usually sat on a church pew near the front. Mom left me and my brother in the care of some trustworthy lady and played the piano during the music service. Then came the preaching. I spent a lot of time looking up at Dad as he stood in the pulpit and spoke.

At age four we moved to the town where we would stay from that time on. Dad pastored one church there for about four years. Then we moved to a larger one where Dad managed an experimental “children’s church” that ran during the main adult service. For a time he served as interim pastor and handled “big church.” Then we moved to another church in a nearby town that, like most places, had no special separate children’s service. Indeed, it had hardly any children at all.

What does a pastor do? Well, first of all he preaches a sermon on Sunday morning and another Sunday evening. On Wednesday evenings he gives a devotional. He usually teaches a Sunday school class. He organizes visitations and revival services and mission trips and church camps. And when church members are sick, he visits them at home or in the hospital. This ends up being quite a job in itself, in addition to a normal five-day-a-week trade. Dad has often had to spend evenings and Saturdays studying or visiting.

Sometimes seeing a sick member means driving to one of the hospitals in Little Rock, a three-hour round trip. In much of Arkansas “going to Little Rock” means going to the hospital, since that’s where the state’s biggest concentration of specialized medical care is located. One of the worst pieces of news one can get is to hear that a friend or family member had to be “carried to Little Rock” because of some emergency. I recall a number of evenings where Dad came home from work, cleaned up, and drove to Little Rock for a visit.

Dad spends a lot of time on sermon preparation. He draws illustrations and examples from all sorts of sources. When I was little he mentioned a swinging bridge in a sermon that he had crossed when he was a kid. A few years later on a family trip we crossed that bridge together. Several years ago I visited home and showed Dad a book on Japanese gardens. Mom told me later that the book found its way into a sermon the next Sunday. Evidently part of being a preacher means always keeping your heart and mind open for inspiration from the unlikeliest of places. One advantage of being a bi-vocational minister is that Dad has spent his life doing the same sorts of work that most of his church members have. He has had the same experiences and speaks the same language that they do.

What’s it like having a dad who pastors a church? Well, for one thing it means having to live with a somewhat unfortunate reputation that “preachers’ kids” have for wild behavior. My brother and I never lived up to that reputation, but I have known a few who did. It means usually sitting down front, rather than drifting toward the back row of the sanctuary like so many people do. It means ALWAYS going to church, whenever the doors are open. And it means hearing your dad called “brother” a lot, since brother is a term of respect within a church congregation.

It also means always being surrounded by what amounts to a big extended family. There are always plenty of adults taking an interest in you—an awkward and painful situation for some, from what I’ve heard, but a great advantage to me growing up. You get invited out after church a lot, to go to a restaurant or eat dinner with a family, or just have some popcorn in the evening. There’s lots of visiting and kidding and joking. While the adults are visiting after church, the kids run around outside in the parking lot, or explore unused classrooms or dare each other to go upstairs to the darkened second floor of the building at night. And when you’re little, your parents usually have no trouble finding babysitters.

On rare occasions Dad had to babysit me and my brother while carrying out his duties. Once he drove to Texarkana to pick up some items from the church book stores there. Mom was in summer school, if I recall correctly. We had hardly started down the road in the station wagon that he drove at the time when Dad spotted a tortoise in the road. He picked it up and put it in the back for us to play with. A few moments further in toward town he spotted a second one and picked it up as well. We spent the day trying to get them to peek out of their shells and look around. When we reached the stores we went inside and left the turtles in the car. The stores fascinated me—I had never been in a bookstore before that time. So many books everywhere! I browsed as much as I could before we had to leave. When we got home we turned our temporary pets loose in the woods.

I also spent an afternoon once in Dad’s office. At that particular church his office was a little shed out beside the church house. It had a window air conditioner unit. While Dad studied I sat in a corner listening to the drone of the AC and poking through a stack of books. I was only about seven or eight and had a time finding anything with as many pictures as I liked. I read some in a book about the life of the apostle Paul. The account of his shipwreck on the way to Rome was one of my favorite adventure stories.

When I joined the church at age eight Dad baptized me. That meant wearing less dressy clothes than usual to church on a Sunday evening. We went up a little metal stairway in the church’s men’s restroom into the baptistery in the front of the sanctuary. Dad went through what passes as a liturgy in our churches, invoking “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost” and then put his hand, in which he had his handkerchief, over my face. I closed my eyes and took a breath, and he dunked me so fast it felt like I had jumped into a swimming pool backwards. Then we went and changed into dry clothes, and stood up front so that the whole church could come around and welcome me into the congregation.

Dad baptized my brother too, when his time came. He spoke at my grandmother’s funeral, and at many others. And when I got married, he honored us by performing the ceremony. It helped to put a nervous groom and a really nervous bride at ease.

Dad’s tangible rewards for preaching have been very small. Usually he has made a few hundred dollars a month in salary. Once, when I was about seven or eight, the church had an old-fashioned “pounding”—so called because each member was to bring a pound of dry goods for the preacher’s family. In our case we got lots of canned and boxed groceries and a little “money tree” with a couple hundred dollars on it.

Otherwise Dad’s reward—and Mom’s—has mostly been hearing people say “thank you,” and having a sense that they are spending their lives doing what they were called to do. Any other rewards will have to wait awhile yet, for another life. I think they’re quite okay with that.