I Was Ordained 40 Years Ago Today

I once taught a course entitled “Jeremiah: Reluctant Prophet.”  As I reflect on 40 years of ordained ministry, I have to admit, after all these years, that sometimes I have been a “reluctant pastor.”

One of the main ways we talk about the spiritual journey is in terms of call, which has to do with the ways in which God "calls" us to discern and live out the ways of God in our lives.

At the time of Luther this call referred primarily to the process by which one was ordained for special service in the church. Luther expanded this understanding of call to include all Christians who, through baptism, are called to follow and serve Christ. In the concept of the "priesthood of all believers" he enlarges the understanding of call beyond professional, church ministry. One's calling includes one's work as well as the calling to be a spouse, a parent, a person of love who reaches out to those in need.

Nevertheless, to be ordained one is supposed to have experienced, first, some kind of a specific call from God to professional church ministry, and, secondly, this call must also be confirmed by the church.

Therefore, to be ordained in the Lutheran church you must  demonstrate that you have been “called” in both senses. In fact, as I entered my final year of seminary studies, I had to write a paper in which I described my “call,” and it had to be approved by the seminary professors before I could proceed with the final steps necessary to be approved for ordination.

The first dimension, which we think of most often, is a sense or experience of being called by God to a certain kind of ministry or service. This is the kind of call we see throughout the Scriptures, whether it be God calling Jeremiah to be a prophet, Moses to lead the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt, or Paul to a radical transformation in which he went from persecuting the early Christians to a new ministry calling people to follow Jesus.

The second dimension of call is the confirmation of the church. The church has to be convinced that you have the gifts and skills for ordained ministry. You can be removed from the call process if you don’t have adequate academic ability, psychological integration, pastoral skills, or sound character. 

I first considered being a pastor when I was an eighth or ninth grader at Bible camp. I was very involved in Luther League throughout high school and my first years of college, and I entered college still thinking I wanted to be a pastor. However, majoring in both philosophy and world religions, I began to see the relativity of the doctrine I had been told was absolute truth. I was intrigued by what in philosophy is called the “orthodox fallacy,” which is the presupposition that whatever one believes is the standard by which the rest of the world shall be judged. I thus wondered if my faith was, so to speak, firm and strong enough in the first sense of being called by God.

Secondly, having worked at Bible camps for 5 summers and being very involved in Luther League for several years, I had met and witnessed the work of many pastors. I experienced some of them as being judgmental, rigid, consumed by their work, neglecting their families, and just plain not being a lot of fun to be around. Fortunately, there were other pastors who were great guides and an inspiration to me. However, I wasn't at all sure I wanted to cast my lot with this vocation.

I thus started seminary in Chicago not knowing if I was called to parish ministry. However, I decided to give seminary a year to see where it might lead. During that year I really loved the study of systematic theology and decided to continue on another year. However, I was out of money, and so I had to take off a year from school to work and save.

I then transferred to Luther Seminary in St. Paul, which at that time was necessary if I was going to remain in The American Lutheran Church in which I had been raised. I continued to enjoy theology, but I still wasn’t sure that I was cut out for parish ministry.

Then came clinical training in Massachusetts and a year of internship on the other side of the country in a parish in Washington state. While I wasn’t mesmerized by either, I did learn a lot about myself and in both cases people kept telling me I had gifts for ministry, especially in the areas of youth ministry, teaching, pastoral care, social ministry, and preaching.

Returning to Luther for my final year of seminary, I had to write the paper described above. I had no problem talking about the generalized call of all the baptized uplifted by Luther. However, when it came to an experience or conviction of being called by God into ordained ministry: well, I was honest and admitted I wasn’t sure of that.

All I could really point to was the second sense of call: the confirmation I had continually received over the years from the people I had worked with who felt I had the gifts for ministry. It was almost like I was hoping someone else would make the decision for me that I couldn’t make on my own.

Well, the faculty did eventually approve me for ordination, but I am quite sure it was not unanimous.

I graduated from Luther In May of 1977.  However, one cannot be ordained until you have an actual Letter of Call from a congregation. The months went by and no church was interested in calling me. I began to give thought to what other vocation might be open to me.

Then in October the bishop of Eastern North Dakota called to say a church in West Fargo wanted to interview me for the position of Youth Pastor. Faith Lutheran extended a Call to me and we headed through a blizzard to my home town and congregation, North Viking Lutheran Church in Maddock, ND, for my Service of Ordination on November 11, 1977.

After the Ordination part of the service (led by Pastor Elmo Anderson, my mentor to this day) including the laying on of hands, it was time for me to give my response. Sitting before me were my foster parents, Ansel and Dorothy Haukness, my baptismal sponsors, Doc and Evelyn Neumann and Fireman and Mary Lois Legreid, my brothers Neil and Alan, my wife, Pauline, her parents, members of the four families who had offered to take Alan and me into their homes after our parents died while we were in high school, and this community of witnesses who had helped raise me for 18 years.

I expressed my sadness that my parents, Edrei and Ruth Erickson, were not there. Then I gave thanks for the grace and love showered on me over the years from the people gathered around me, and I turned to Pauline and said, “I never really understood what grace was until you chose to love me.”

Today Edrei, Ruth, Ansel, and Dorothy are buried side by side in North Viking cemetery.  My baptismal sponsors, Pauline’s parents, and my brother, Neil, have died.

Pauline would die 5 years after my Ordination. It was in the depths of my grief that God would find me and I would experience God’s presence as never before. I then experienced resurrection power as God called me into a new life, that now includes my wife of 33 years, Mary, and our two children, Brian, 31, and Jessi, 27.

I have accepted 10 Calls over the years, including teaching through Augsburg College and Luther Theological Seminary. I have had countless mountaintop experiences, and my share of wilderness weariness in which I have wondered what in the world I am doing in parish ministry. And yet, as I look back, in every Call I can see now that I learned something new about myself and my spiritual journey, and  (I hope this is not wishful thinking) I can see that God had some purpose (sometimes painful) in my being in that place at that time. For sure, serving ministries in so many different places, including North Dakota (4 places), Arizona (2 places), Saint Paul, Hemet, California, Mexico, Switzerland, and now Virginia/Washington DC, has opened my eyes and heart (and my family's) to the tremendous diversity and beauty of the people and places of God's creation. We have been invited into the lives of so many wonderful people, both in times of joy and great sorrow. And it is these memories that I continue to treasure.

One of the things I have come to learn is that an avenue in which God’s grace and love are most powerful is the way in which God is able to give us meaning and purpose right in the midst of our confusion and uncertainty about what we are doing and where we are going.  

A year ago this fall I was blessed to be able to marry Brian and a wonderful new member of our family, Sara Melton.
                                     


And now the circle of life continues and I have been given a new calling. Brian and Sara called a week ago to tell Mary and me that they are making us grandparents come Easter.