Friends,
Last weekend the folks who ordinarily would organize our annual week-long church retreat we called “MPC@Tahoe” put together “MPC@MPC”, a somewhat pared down version of MPC@Tahoe that observed some of our regular traditions in a way that was COVID safe and local. It was a great event.
For me, a highlight of MPC@MPC was the keynote speaker, Nancy Davis Kho, who talked about the benefits of gratitude and recommended a practice of writing “gratitude letters” to people, places and institutions that have had a profound impact on our lives.
I’m still trying to figure out how a practice of writing gratitude letters might work for me, but even without designing such a discipline for myself, I know that I would want to write a letter of gratitude to the MPC family. And I know that Contact is a good place to publish such a missive.
So, dear MPC family, thank you for calling me to be your pastor.
By the time Carrie McKiernan, on behalf of the Pastor Nominating Committee, phoned me to offer me the job, I wasn’t sure I’d serve another church. I had been the pastor of Foothill Presbyterian Church in San Jose for sixteen years, and many of those were really good years. But about ten years into my work in San Jose, I started to change spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally. The church didn’t change with me, which is normal–nothing wrong with the congregation I was serving — but as I applied for new jobs, no one hired me. On several occasions I was among the candidates who heard I didn’t get the job when it was offered to someone else. After six years of futile job searching, I was starting to suspect that the Spirit was calling me out of pastoral ministry, the only work I’d seriously considered doing since before my voice changed.
It turns out the Holy One wasn’t calling me out of pastoral ministry, rather the call was to wait until the right congregation called. Happily, that congregation was the MPC family.
The life of Montclair Presbyterian Church is marked by a blend of social activism and intellectual curiosity that I find to be a good match for my interests and skills. The open-minded progressive theology has given me more freedom to preach and teach and write than I’d ever felt in my two previous churches. You have welcomed my family and given us a place to call home in Montclair, where we can enjoy both the small-town vibe of our neighborhood and all the benefits of life in a big city. I cannot imagine a better place to raise kids for that portion of their lives when they move from being pre-teen children to being adults. We are profoundly happy here.
So, thank you, MPC. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to preserve my work as a pastor and thank you for giving my family a place that we will almost certainly think of as home, even in the still unknown future when the same Spirit who called us here calls us somewhere else.
God’s Peace,
Ben