Big Changes

Here is a post that I've been waiting to make for some time. The master resigned today from the church. HE IS NOT QUITING THE MINISTRY. I despise that phrase. If you are a child of God, you're not done with 'ministry' until your dead. He is going to be moving into a new area of bivocational ministry.
This is a decision that was a result of time, prayer, and common sense. This church was not a good fit for us in the first place. They have been the sweetest, most supportive, most loving bunch of folks in the world to us. There is not a contentious soul among them, and after our last church, we needed that time of healing. BUT they are OLD. The music they sing, the way they worship, the structure of the whole church is for OLD people. And they have NO interest whatsoever in changing that. We are not OLD people. We do not want our kids to grow up as the only children in the church. We are not too keen on the Gaither Family Hoe Down every Sunday, either.
Aside from that, we have come to a dividing of the road. We have a lot of mouths to feed, and though we try to be careful managers and good stewards, money is tight. I hope this does not make me sound like a money grubber, but let's talk shop for a moment, shall we? Churches that can afford a pastor the salary that we need don't want a man who does not have his doctorate or at least his masters degree. A degree we have been whittling away on for 6 YEARS, because it takes about a MILLION credit hours to obtain. We could continue to scrape along for three more years for him to finish this degree, but it would be tough. Then, too, he would be trained for one thing and one thing alone: full-time pastorate of a traditional church. Finding and maintaining a position in this ever shrinking career field is what my Daddy always called a crap shoot--excuse my French. So often it is less of an honest and prayerful interview/evaluation process and more of a beauty pageant as you parade yourself before search committees. Frequently, you are judged on criteria that are completely unrelated to Kingdom issues. Who's the snazziest dresser, who has the classiest resume, the catchiest sermons, which translation you study from, the most attractive family (o.k., we definitely have the competition wrapped up on this one), who has the best track record for boosting Sunday School attendance (he's in the toilet here). When you leave your job (which the average tenure for a Baptist pastor is 18 months), you leave your church, town, house, school, friends, etc., to start it all over again somewhere else. We're sick of it. Stop the merry-go-round, we want to get off.
We don't want to be dependent on an income from a church to meet our daily needs. The idea of ministering with no strings attached is very appealing. The problem we have found is that no one wants to hire an ex-pastor. His 7 years of full time experience is a huge black mark on his resume when it comes to the secular field. Employers hold one or both of two misconceptions:
a) Being a pastor is not a 'real' job. Therefore, the applicant
must be lazy, because for seven years, he's been drawing
a salary for nothing.
b) A preacher will try to proselytize my work place.
These are prejudices that in the master's case are grossly in error. The warehouse discovered this through his part time work (where he accomplished more in few hours a day, what some of their full time employees got done in a week and in all that time did not beat anyone over the head with a Bible), and have offered him a salaried position with profit sharing. After a few years, he would be in a position to take over management of his own store.
If the master does not preach, he will shrivel up into a prune and die. Or he will explode. So, he will preach as supply--maybe after a break as interim--and we are scheduled to take part in Walk Thru the Bible orientation in July. We might start a home church. You just never know how God will use him.