Happy Father's Day, Dad

My father is a pastor. He is retired now, but to be a pastor is a calling from God—one that I don't believe ever ends "so long as life shall last."

My father is an outstanding pastor. When you ask folks who have sat under my father's ministry, they will overwhelmingly say that my father was the best pastor ever. My father's assessment of his own ministry would not be nearly so favorable. But perhaps that's one of the reasons that he has been such a fantastic pastor.

This aspect of my father's character and ministry are what drew my attention to Don Carson's Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: The Life and Reflections of Tom Carson. I read some reviews and heard a few folks talking about this book and realized that I needed to read it for myself. This book is Don Carson's tribute to his father's ministry as a pastor who was not one of the "big name" pastors like Rick Warren, John McArthur, Joel Osteen, or John Piper. He was a man who followed God's call to pastor the flock of Jesus Christ faithfully. This is a good description of my father.

From the preface of this book:

Some pastors, mightily endowed by God, are remarkable gifts to the church. They love their people, they handle Scripture well, they see many conversions, their ministries span generations, they understand their culture yet refuse to be domesticated by it, they are theologically robust and personally disciplined. I do not need to provide you with a list of names: you know some of these people, and you have been encouraged and challenged by them, as I have. Some of them, of course, carry enormous burdens that watching Christians do not readily see. Nevertheless, when we ourselves are not being tempted by the green-eyed monster, we thank God for such Christian leaders from the past and pray for the current ones.

Most of us, however, serve in more modest patches. Most pastors will not regularly preach to thousands, let alone tens of thousands. They will not write influential books, they will not supervise large staffs, and they will never see more than modest growth. They will plug away at their care for the aged, at their visitation, at their counseling, at their Bible studies and preaching. Some will work with so little support that they will prepare their own bulletins. They cannot possibly discern whether the constraints of their own sphere of service owe more to the specific challenges of the local situation or to their own shortcomings. Once in a while they will cast a wistful eye on "successful" ministries. Many of them will attend the conferences sponsored by the revered masters and come away with a slightly discordant combination of, on the one hand, gratitude and encouragement and, on the other, jealousy, feelings of inadequacy, and guilt.

Most of us—let us be frank—are ordinary pastors.

My father, Dick Gelina

I have considered for two and a half decades why it is that my father still stands head and shoulders above all the pastors whose ministries I have sat under since I got married and left my father's church. I have been a burr under the saddle to men who could not live up to what I thought was the standard for all pastors. I have wondered if the pastorate has slipped and our seminaries are to blame for putting out an inferior product. I have rejected all these possibilities but not been able to determine what the reasons are for my father's seemingly superior pastorate.

This continuing portion of the preface to Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor I think points to the answer to this long-considered question:

At the risk of saying too much prematurely, I end this Preface with two observations. The first is that Dad's "glass half-empty" awareness of his failures and inadequacies rarely aligns with the view of him taken by his contemporaries. I've given this discrepancy a lot of thought and will reflect on it from time to time in this book. The discrepancy may say something important to other ordinary pastors who are feeling discouraged. Second, few assessments of Dad's journals are likely to prove more penetrating than that of Michael Thate, my administrative assistant. Michael cheerfully transcribed the English parts of the journals. When he sent me the last digital files, he accompanied them with an e-mail that said in part, "I used to aspire to be the next Henry Martyn [heroic British Bible translator and missionary to the Muslim peoples of India and Persia]. However, after reading your dad's diaries, the Lord has given my heart a far loftier goal: simply to be faithful. I know we men are but dust, but what dust the man I read about in these diaries was!" And after proofing the manuscript he sent me a note telling me he was reminded of Tolkien's lines about Strider:

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

All true. And yet Tom was a most ordinary pastor.

May your Father's Day be the best yet, Dad. I could never have had a better example to model than you. Thank you for being my father.

Visit my father's blog: Navigators