It is never easy to admit you are wrong.

          In November I resigned from the Urbana Yoke Parish as pastor because of the fact that my wife of 43 years had left me. The reason? Well, I am still not sure except that she said the ministry had finally just become too much for her. Unless you have been in ministry for all of your married life, you cannot understand that thinking. The ministry looks like a pretty cushy job. But there have been many vacations canceled or cut short because of the ministry, many get togethers with family or friends disrupted, many dinners that have gone uneaten, many times the pastor has come home not wanting to talk or visit. Imagine being married to someone who has an interest more compelling than you. You can be involved, as well, but not to the level your spouse is involved. It can wear on you until it gets to be to much. It is not all that unusual to see an older couple in ministry, but usually they came into it a little later in life. Marsha married a man committed to the ministry. Less than two months after we were married, I was called to my first ministry endeavor, Youth Pastor at a church in Tennessee. Our whole married life has been in the ministry. It is unusual to see a couple in fulltime ministry for over 40 years.

          We often learn things when we are younger that we hold onto later in life, even though if we were to study it out, we would find that what we had learned was wrong. When I first accepted Christ, 45 years ago, I got involved in a very legalistic church which led to going to a very legalistic college. The educational portion was fine, but the belief system was very strict and, in many cases, created by man. As the years have gone by, I have worked to unlearn a lot of what I learned in college as pertains to the harshly strict thinking we were exposed to. That ‘unlearning’ process was mostly spurred by circumstances that demanded more study. I had never encountered my wife leaving me, though.

          When this happened, I fell back on what I had learned when I was an impressionable young man. Specifically, in this case, 1 Timothy 3:1-7. Keep in mind, I learned this at a school that said moustaches were a sin. The school had people called campus checkers (always male) who went around writing down names of people violating the rules. They could make a female kneel before them on the sidewalk to see if their skirt or dress touched the ground. Anyway, 1 Timothy 3:1-7 says;

1 The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer (in this case the overseer is the pastor, as is clear in the passage), he desires a noble task.

2 Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3 not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. 4 He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, 5 for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church? 6 He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. 7 Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil.
          To me, given the teaching I had received at that college (not my seminary training, that was not legalistic) I had no choice but to resign. Once my wife left me, I was no longer the husband of one wife, nor was my household in order. I was no longer qualified to pastor. Now, I had two agonies to deal with, both of which were simply breaking my heart. My wife had left and I could no longer pastor.

At no time, however, did I have peace about resigning. People tried to convince me otherwise, mostly using the example of Hosea in the Old Testament who was told repeatedly by the Lord to continue on even though his marriage was forfeit. As I explained to my son, though, a prophet and a pastor are two different callings and they were required to live under two different set of rules. Similar, but different. Still, I was struggling with this decision. I just felt it was wrong. The Lord was working on me and I soon began to fully explore the passage.

First, I examined it in the original language, that being Greek. Their sentence structure is different from ours, but the above is a faithful translation. In their sentence structure they often have really long sentences because they put an entire thought into one sentence, where we tend to break that thought down a little into two or three sentences and create a paragraph. Verses 2 and 3 make one sentence. We would easily make it 2 or even 3 sentences. Because it is one sentence it is one thought. It has to do with how one presents oneself to the world as concerning their self control and actions. I have always taken out the portion that says "husband of one wife" and applied it solely to marital status. Marsha leaving me essentially removes my wife and thus disqualifies me as a pastor. However, this segment is part of a larger thought. Since the whole thought is concerned with how one controls oneself, that segment is as well. I then looked it up in various commentaries. I seldom use commentaries and when I do, they are the old commentaries, such as Matthew Henry. These were written by real men of God. Not to say the newer writers are not people of God, I just trust the older writers. Every writer I read said that it was legal then for a man to have multiple wives. The Greek wording is actually "a one woman man." This was so the pastor, or overseer, in this passage, would just have one wife at a time. One writer pointed out that if you take this passage in our way of thinking then an unmarried man, or a man whose wife had died, would be ineligible to pastor.

          The next thought is in verses 4 and 5. This is pointed at keeping your kids in line, because if you cannot do that you cannot manage a church body. The word 'household' is used, but laid into that thought is the idea of children, so it is about the children. One writer addressed the issue of a marriage breaking up. He said that it totally depends on the circumstances of the break up. If the man is at fault, as in the sense of adultery or abuse or some negative, then he is unqualified. If, however, it is because of the actions of the wife, the husband may still continue as a pastor.

I believe, Biblically speaking, that I may continue as Pastor of the Urbana Yoke Parish. My decision to resign was poorly thought out and due, at least in part, to a broken heart.

I presented this to the church yesterday at a specially called business meeting following the service. I asked the church to consider allowing me to rescind my resignation. In a seriously overwhelming majority, the church voted to retain me as pastor.

It is still a struggle. I believe I can effectively pastor. If I see that I cannot, I will not be a burden to the church. But, whether or not I can effectively pastor, the fact remains that at the end of the day, I am alone without my best buddy. That is hard. However, Philippians 4:13 says, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I have claimed this verse many times in my life and I have never been let down. This time looks to be much harder on me than ever before, but He is my Lord, so it is good.