The eight years of my life after leaving Dansville were filled with personal, vocational and family restlessness.
I had left the three years of the serene rural environment with the heavy work responsibilities of pastoral ministry at the two rural Methodist Churches. But the next few years of my life would be a series of two-year sprints until I landed my first serious “long term career” job.
With the clear-eyed 20-20 rear-vision of age I can look back now and analyze that period of my life with some clarity. But re-living that period makes me squirm.
My life-purpose goals developed during the three years of intellectually stimulating time at seminary in Boston had left me an idealistic missionary preacher for the Social Gospel of the Christian Church.
I can remember using a metaphor in my sermons that I had first heard in a seminary class lecture by the Australian evangelist Dr. Alan Walker, who had taken us to “preach in the open” at the Boston Commons. He loved to quote Emil Brunner’s saying “The church exists by mission as a flame exists by burning.”
It was a great quotation, but regrettably, the hasty career decisions I made about my job opportunities in the church did not make for very easy[…]
