It’s not easy being green. Or yellow. Or blue. Or red. Or pastor. It’s probably true that it is not easy being anything.
Some think that pastoring a small church like the one I pastored in Illinois was not hard because there were not as many people. After all, that meant fewer house and hospital calls, fewer counseling sessions, fewer phone calls, fewer everything. But it is not true that pastoring a small church is “easier” than pastoring a larger one. Larger churches usually give their pastor a support staff to assist them. A secretary. An assistant pastor. Or two.
I had none of that. I did have a secretary for a short time, part-time, just a couple of days a week. But then she and her family moved to Florida. I was the only member of the staff once again.
If we had a bulletin on Sunday, it was because I typed it and ran it, folded it and put it out on the table at the entrance to the church. If someone answered the church phone when it rang, it was me, if I were there and not somewhere else. If someone was in the hospital, and, somehow, someone usually was, if they had a visitor from the church it was me. Well, others visited sometimes, too, but the “official” visitor was always me.
This is not a complaint. I know it probably sounds like a complaint, but I do not mean it to be. It was what I was called to do. I am simply making the case that pastoring any church is hard work. It takes a lot of time, energy and commitment.
Our church grew. When Linda and I first arrived in Oglesby, we thought we had a good Sunday if fifty people were in the Sunday morning service. We did not always have fifty. Often it was less than that. But in the 1980s our church had grown to the point where we often had 100 or more people in church. That was a blessing. It was also a curse.
The curse involved our parking situation. The church was located on the corner of West Porter and Woodland. The building had been erected in 1910 when people did not usually use cars to get to church. We had no parking lot, and no place to put a parking lot. All of our parking was on street.
Most of the neighborhood was residential. We lived on West Porter next door to the church, and we had neighbors’ homes all around us, except on the west side of the house. That is where the church stood.
Also, a large Catholic church stood on the corner just to the west of our church. About two-thirds of the population of the small town were members of this church. Although the church had a small parking lot, the Catholics preferred parking on the street.
You can imagine what a mess we had on Sunday mornings when both churches were holding services and everyone wanted to park in the same few spots on the street.
Also, our building was old. We had done some work on it, but what we really needed to do was build a new church building. Good idea. Wonderful idea. I had been praying about that for years, since we first arrived and viewed the antiquated building.
There was a problem, of course. There always is. And you probably have figured out what the problem was. It was money. We didn’t have enough of it.
The priest from the Catholic church thought we had a lot of money. I met him in the bank one day and he commented on the total amount of our offerings as related to the total number of our attenders. Someone had given him a copy of one of our bulletins where I often reported such things in an attempt to encourage better giving on the part of our people. But Father Jack (not his real name) did the math and was impressed.
“How do you do it?” he asked.
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"Do what?” I said. I wanted to hear him say it again.
“Get such good offerings out of the number of people you have. When I divide our offerings by our attendance, I come out with way less than you get per person.”
“Well,” I said, glad for the opportunity to show how faithful my small number of attenders were, “most of my families tithe.”
“Oh,” he said, a frown coming over his face. “It’s nearly impossible to get Catholics to tithe.”
Hey, he said it, folks. I’m just repeating what he said.
But tithing from the small number of families we had began to be less and less effective in paying the bills that kept on increasing. The 1980s were a time of change in the United States. Costs kept rising faster and faster, but incomes seemed to lag behind. In our small town, more and more families, especially the younger ones, were moving away where jobs seemed to be better.
The family of my short-lived secretary (she wasn’t short-lived; her time as my secretary was), wound up in Florida because of work. He was employed at a factory in one of the nearby LaSalle. He had a good paying engineering job there. But there were growing threats of layoffs and let goes because of the economy. I remember my secretary’s husband telling me that the axe was getting closer and closer to him.
Then they went to an amusement park in Florida for a vacation, perhaps one of the last ones they thought they would be able to afford if he got laid off. While there riding on the monorail train, there was a malfunction. They were stranded in the car high over the park, and a wheel was burning and filling the car with smoke. The only way out was on the roof, which involved climbing on a door and swinging up onto the roof while rescue squads assembled below to extend ladders to them. It was a scary time for them. It was more than scary for my secretary. She was afraid of heights.
When they were safe the amusement park people talked to them. You know, they didn’t want any lawsuits. They discovered my friend had an engineering degree and many good years of experience. They offered him a job. Now that is a good way to avoid a lawsuit!
Not only did they offer my friend a job, but they offered one to his son who was an engineering student at an Illinois university at the time. They told him to come see them when he graduated.
Great news for this family. They still live in Florida today. My friend went home to be with the Lord several years ago, but his son is still working for the same company. My former secretary, who did such a great job helping me keep everything together for a few weeks, got a job as a secretary at a big church there.
The Lord did a good thing for this family. He does good things for all His people. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Oglesby, IL, it was not easy being pastor when you didn’t have enough green to pay the bills, even if the local priest thought you did.
