Every three to four weeks, my associate pastor does something significant. She doesn’t do much the rest of the time. No one in my congregation would even identify her as a staff member. But about once a month, they welcome her ministry.
I’m the sole pastor of a small-town church. I’m also the secretary and sometimes business manager. There’s no way this congregation can afford an associate pastor, so the one we have works for free.
Every week in the classroom, pulpit, and living room, I try to speak and live the gospel. I work hard at teaching and preaching, visiting and spiritual direction. In all I do as a pastor, I want to help draw people further into a grace-filled life, a life marked by prayer and worship, witness and joy.
But I know I can’t do it all.
Larger churches, faced with this dilemma, hire an associate pastor, someone who can specialize in outreach or education or youth ministry. I don’t have that luxury, but I do have that unpaid associate pastor: the church newsletter.
Every three or four weeks I spend a “staff day,” working on the newsletter. It’s a simple, one-page, both-sides affair that lets me talk about the gospel in ways I can’t in pulpit or living room. I take seriously its associate pastor role. For those hours of thinking and writing, I give myself to another task: I stop being pastor and become an associate with a one-line job description: telling gospel truth in a new way.
Our newsletter has two parts. The first page lets me take something in our common life and expand on it, showing how God is working in the mundane things of life in West Yellowstone, Montana. The back page shows the working out of the gospel in the events of the congregation: weddings and funerals, potluck suppers and classes, decisions of the elders and announcements of events.
Page one is slow work, thoughtful work. It demands that I stay alert to what’s going on around me. I have to notice the way God shapes and works with life. I look for a way to connect God’s grace with the lives of my people, a chance to interpret the faith in a new way. I don’t want the newsletter, with great potential for pastoral care and spiritual direction, to become merely another piece of information in an information-saturated culture.
I often use parables on page one. Parables were used by Jesus to portray the gospel in terms his listeners could understand. While his listeners didn’t always get the point of the parable, they walked away unsettled and wondering. They mulled things over. They asked questions.
That’s the type of response I long to evoke with the newsletter: taking the commonplace and ordinary and making it extraordinary, showing the possibilities of grace in the humdrum.
In 1988 Yellowstone Park was burning. All summer long we lived with smoke, firefighters, arguments, evacuation alerts, and the sadness of charred earth and blackened trees. Those controversial fires gave cause for thought and discussion. A late summer snowfall in the midst of the fires became the focus of that month’s newsletter:
Long forgotten, Sunday’s snowflakes surprised us. inured to summer’s dry heat, the slowly cooling days and nights should have warned us: we missed their message. Ever forgetful, we thought low humidity and constant sun were our only weather.
Then, gracefully, Lord’s Day snowfall sent spirits soaring: fire’s enemy, those gentle white flakes sizzled against ember and flame, sheer numbers overwhelming stubborn coals until forest, once green and now black, became white.
By Monday it was gone. Like some peculiar manna, this heaven-sent September snow disappeared quickly, invisible by the second day, unable to be stored or preserved, leaving us gazing upward in hope of more and suddenly alert to another climate, aware that heat and sun aren’t the only forecast for our lives.
We tend to think that the future will be like the present-only more so. What we know now is what we will know: today’s hot sun determines tomorrow’s weather too.
But Sunday’s snowfall says otherwise.
Gracefully, snowflakes fell. Climatic conditions changed, and we realized that the future isn’t some poor extension of today.
Undeserving though we are, the snow fell on us. Unplanned and uncaused, those tiny white flakes helped accomplish what aircraft, sprinklers, fire lines, and tractors couldn’t: for a while the fires were slowed, and some were stilled.
Undeserved grace falls every day. Intensified each Sunday as we attend to the words, “Let us worship God,” grace flakes down, drenching us each Lord’s Day. God gives himself to us, as unstintingly as those hurried snowflakes, until we find ourselves covered, white, clean: sin’s fires quenched, embers of anger and sloth dead.
At times we can be surprised by grace, that slow, certain gift of God that remakes us. We are inured to ourselves, so grace is often missed or avoided. But as surely as that surprising snowfall last Lord’s Day, God comes to us, the undeserving, changing the weather of our heart. Alert now to God’s climate, today and tomorrow become shaped, not by us, but by the deep love and acceptance of God, illustrated quietly last Sunday in minute flakes of snow.
My associate pastor was doing something I couldn’t do in the pulpit. (Perhaps others can; I can’t!) I don’t talk that way over coffee in someone’s living room. But my unpaid associate gets away with it.
In the mountains of Montana, snow is a part of the vernacular almost six months of the year. Snow removal-shoveling, plowing, clearing rooftops- is something everyone in my congregation knows.
In an article titled, “Space for God,” written during Lent, I tried to make our common experience of snow removal become a way of understanding the faith and Lent:
Ladders lean precariously against eaves and rooftops. More daring souls eschew ropes or handholds and stand on the pitched surface, snow shovel in hand, saws and hand plows at the ready. The less intrepid among us rig lines, wondering if they’ll hold if feet should slip.
With four to five feet of snow overhead, residents work to lessen the load. Cutting, then sliding, blocks off the roof, we bend and shovel, bend and shovel, stopping occasionally to gaze west to Lion’s Head or east to the cut in the horizon where the Madison River flows-until roofs all over West Yellowstone reappear. In days they’re covered again.
Such snow provides good insulation. It looks beautiful as wind sculpts and shapes. Cornices hang ever further.
But left alone, the deepening snow is benign and beautiful. Visitors must scurry
no longer inside and out: no lingering under roofline. Roof beams strain under the load, and warmer, wet snows increase weight. Leaks begin.
The only solution is cutting, sliding, scraping, and shoveling-sweat and a tired back. The occasional view of mountains and a rooftop view of West Yellowstone are rewards.
Other rewards are equally important, if less visible: the leaks that didn’t occur, the visitor not buried, the roof beams left unstrained, the chimney pipe not bent or moved by shifting snow.
Roof shoveling is a normal winter activity here. It is Lenten work, clearing away a beautiful and terrible insulation in order to remove strain and protect guest; clearing space so roof and house maintain their integrity; making room for snow yet to come, so collapse will not occur.
Lent is the heart’s snow removal season. Lent tells us to cut and shovel, slide and push until anything and everything that crowds us, compresses us, and thus reduces us, is gone.
Lent concentrates time as we prepare for Holy Week and Resurrection. Lent stimulates us to remove the impediments, clear the clutter, shove aside the snow piles or anything else that is crowding our space for God. Lent sees only the essential and demands commitment to one task: clearing space for God.
With part two, the associate pastor shows another aspect of grace. Announcing weddings and Easter breakfasts, thanking faithful workers and alerting people of new events, the back page speaks the language of grace through the work of the church. This isn’t obvious parable work Gospel often seems far from “Our Annual Spring Cleaning and Barbecue will be held . . .” But spring cleaning and teacher recognition is the necessary back page to metaphor and parable on the front. God’s grace is always worked out in the ordinary and the commonplace.
We attend to the ordinary (“The Church Treasurer reports that our giving is falling behind our spending . . .”) as one expression of the extraordinary (“God gives himself to us, as unstintingly as those hurried snowflakes, until we find ourselves covered, white, clean . . .”).
Page one’s gospel parables work one way, coming in the back door-surprising, questioning, probing. Page two’s gospel works another way, using the front door-activities are announced and projects planned, showing hands and feet given to grace, expressing love for God in ministry and service.
Nearly every church has an unpaid associate. She requires discipline and motivation to get her going. But getting the Associate Pastor of Gospel Parables working is part of my job as head of staff. Increasingly it’s a duty I enjoy.
-Steve Trotter Community Protestant Church
West Yellowstone, Montana
Copyright © 1992 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
