It was in 1962 – the year that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I remember because I was 10 years old at the time. Mom and Dad decided to make a complete shift in our family’s direction. Dad had just been offered a lucrative offer to become a Vice President of an Top Forty Insurance Company but chose to leave his career to begin patoring three small churches in a rural county about 45 minutes from our home in Illinois. None of the churches could afford to pay a full time salary for a pastor. So Dad became what was then known as a Circuit Rider Pastor – speaking at two of the three churches each week – with one church being the sort of hub church where he spoke at each week and the other two, every other Sunday.
They began their ministry on a “trial basis” at $65 a month salary, but that soon was raised to $100 a month in compensation. That amount actually continued throughout a surprising number of their years there. They drove 45 miles one way to handle all of the services at these churches, two times a week because, in those days a lot of churches still had a Wednesday night “Prayer Meeting” service. So, Dad would do a service at one of the two smaller churches every Sunday Morning, then drive like the wind to make it over to the largest church of the three to do a second service there. By doing this, the larger church always had a Sunday Morning service and he would alternate between each of smaller churches – doing a Sunday morning service every other week with them.
As a family, we would always stay in the area until night every Sunday for a second service in the evening at the larger church before driving back home (making it Dad’s third of the day!). Mom would get up every Sunday morning to fix us a “picnic lunch” which we would eat in our car or in the church fellowship hall almost every Sunday at noon – unless one of the parishioners invited us to have lunch with them. It was an “odd” kind of life for us as a family – but my brother and I were just pre-teen kids at the time, so we thought it was kind of an adventure. Except, it was a tiring schedule to manage with coordinating everything and balancing it with our school schedules, as well. I remember getting up very early on Sundays – which I hated!
For me, the greatest day of the year next to Christmas was the day when Daylight Savings Time would end, I would tell myself that I got to sleep an extra hour but never balanced that with the fact that I had to go to bed an hour early. And that was actually important because our schedule meant we were always getting back home fairly late every Sunday. If I had homework to still do, it was a “Kid’s Nightmare” – or so I thought. And then you have to understand that we would also go out to do the Wednesday night service as well. So… another late night for us kids every Wednesday.
The larger church actually owned a “Church Parsonage” (minister’s home) but it was in virtual ruins when we first started going out there every week. The home had holes through the walls and was in terrible shape indoors from years of neglect. Several years into my parents’ ministry there, they actually were able to get the churches to raise enough money to remodel that house to become our home. But, at the onset, the only option was to commute back and forth.
However, there was no reimbursement for any travel or car expenses. That amounted to 180 miles of driving alone every week, besides the hours of preparation of sermons and the services themselves.
Wednesday evening services were still common then, so drive out and back again. However, that is not nearly the entire work of a small town pastor. There were also the weddings, the hospital visitations, the funerals (Dad ministered at more than four hundred funerals and more than two hundred weddings.) And, you have to understand that each wedding, funeral, hospital visit, birthday party, etc. also meant extra preparation time and additional travel time and expense to handle anything that a minister may have been expected to do.
There is no such thing as a single gathering time for any wedding or funeral. Each one would likely mean some sort of visitation or counseling time early on to meet with the respective members of the families. Then there would be some sort of rehearsal time or visitation time for families and friends, and so on. For every wedding or funeral you could pretty much count on at least three or four extra times that a minister needed to invest. I once asked Dad, “How much did people give you to help with your expenses for all of those extra duties such as funerals or weddings?” He looked at me a bit comically and said, “… Sometimes people would give me twenty dollars.”
Please consider this a sort of “untold” story about ministry life. Every time Dad had to be involved, it also meant that Mom was as well. She kept everything working through an ever changing schedule for all of these events. And, for most of these events it would mean that she would also spend at least as much time making changes in the family’s schedule, getting the kids ready, packing lunches and/or work arounds to have dinner ready for Dad when he would finally get home after my brother and I needed to eat earlier.
Most of you will not believe me when I share this, but Mom also CLEANED THE CHURCH at the larger church building every week for quite some time… because “that’s what ministers’s wives had always done in the past.”
That fact also meant that often we would get to church some Sunday mornings only to find that someone’s child had had a birthday party during the week but FAILED TO CLEAN UP AFTERWARDS! I can remember so many times on a Sunday Morning running around in my little suit trying to help Mom get the place presentable before the services would begin.
What I am hoping you will understand is the fact that the churches did not only get my father’s time for the salary they were paying him… but they also got Mom’s time, as well. She did that for years. The people simply saw a system that seemed to “work” without too many hitches. But, as a child, my brother and I saw the behind the scenes reality of it. These were different times. There was a sentiment within some churches concerning salaries for ministers. It still can be found in many churches today. As a child, I personally heard church board members who would mention this to my father in front of me on several occasions. It goes something like this, “Well, it doesn’t hurt a minister to work!”
I agree. And, my parents did.
But, I sometimes wonder if that statement is a truthful one or not? Maybe it does hurt them to have others question the amount of work that they should do without ever knowing the work that they were already doing. Because, I can remember a surprisingly scant few evening dinner meals around our home table back when my parents were in ministry when the phone didn’t ring for Dad to have to jump up and leave to help some couple about to break up, or to go visit someone who ha been put in the hospital, or to run to be with a family who had just lost a loved one.
I wonder now if they would mind if I asked them this question? “How many dinners did your parents miss as the result of those types of calls?” They were at least weekly events in my home, and often many more. In fact.we used to joke among ourselves at the start of any dinner, “I wonder how far we will get through this before the phone rings. (They didn’t have phones you could silence in those days.) I guess that many people simply depended upon that time of day being one when they could always count on being able to get ahold of the minister.
You may think from my story above that our family secretly resented those times in ministry.
WE DID NOT!
We also enjoyed some of the most precious times serving all of those people. At Christmas they would fill a whole church pew with gifts of love and thanks. We would always know that we would be eating well for at least a while after all of those presents. We also learned that God was faithful to meet our needs. There were times when we simply didn’t know how things came together for us to make it. But, it somehow always did.
I once asked Dad how much he thought he “made” while pastoring and he gave me that same comical smile of his while he answered… “Well, I don’t think it actually cost me as much as you might think.”
When I spoke with Mom last month about all of those years, she told me, “Steven, I would buy a one pound package of wieners and a couple of cans of beans. That would mean I could serve each of us one wiener a piece along with some beans. And that meant I would get two meals out of one package of wieners.” (I wish you could have seen her face when she told me that. She was anything but angry – she was delighted that they figured out how to make the best of things to be able to serve.) Those people were and still continue to be some of our family’s closest friends and some of the best examples of Christian people I have ever known after fifty years of ministry myself and after traveling in ministry to more and two dozen countries abroad.
The simple truth was that they didn’t have much to give, at that time. It was, and still is an impoverished area. Most of them made incomes that were far less than the national average and many of them still do. So, what do you do if that happens to be the place that opens up for you to serve? Tell God that you are looking for a better offer??? Dad had that type of offer! He would almost certainly have been made President of that Top Forty Insurance company I mentioned earlier that had made him that lucrative offer right before he accepted this particular “Road Less Traveled” one instead. Thinking back, I might have wound up as some drug addict after going to the Big City school which would have accommodated that other offer.
Dad and Mom served there for almost fifty years. I could be wrong about this… but, after all those years, I think Dad was receiving $165 a month for his continued service while he was in his early eighties. In fairness, the number of services had decreased by then to once a week and the number of churches had changed to one. But, I think most of those people would still say that Dad didn’t treat them any less diligently.
But you need to know that, when I asked Dad before he died when he felt he was the most effective in his life and ministry, he quickly responded (without a single hesitation), “No question about it… it was during my last ten years!”
Now you know what kind of people my parents have been throughout their lives. Dad is gone to heaven now and my brother is in a nursing facility due to his disabilities suffered in the Viet Nam war. All I have is my ability to write and tell stories. And, Mom is in a retirement apartment caring for herself most of the time at 95 years old. They’ve left quite a legacy, both in the work that they did throughout all those years and in the people that they served. Their efforts will live on in all of them.