Chronicles of a Pastor, Part 4: “Let’s Just Pray That He Would Open That Door of Opportunity”

The past few weeks, I've been sharing the story of how my conference employers informed me in late 2022 that I would no longer have a job with them in six months. That left Emmalee and me facing a terrible choice: we could uproot our family and move to another conference so that I could continue my career as a pastor; or we could stay and face the great unknown of a life outside of full-time ministry.

Although the conference's threat of early termination if we discussed their plans publicly was still hanging over our heads, we did begin to share our dilemma with trusted friends. We couldn't make a decision this significant in total isolation. We sought the advice and support of people we knew would have our best interests at heart.

There are parts of this story that I still cannot share publicly out of respect for those who supported us during this incredibly difficult time. Some of them are denominational employees, and unfortunately their careers could be jeopardized if I were to share too openly about the conversations we had. Suffice it to say that we took counsel from people who knew how the denominational system operated, and that helped us as we weighed our options.

Emmalee and I also spent a considerable amount of time talking through the situation. We've always made decisions as a team, and this time was no different. I knew this was more than just a career move for me. My entire family would be deeply affected by whatever we decided to do. I needed to know that Emmalee and I were on the same page, whatever direction we ended up going.

To say that this period of time was stressful would be an understatement. Both our mental and physical health suffered. That winter, our whole family got sick. I was knocked down for weeks. When I finally made it back to church, I did my best to put on a brave face. But people started to notice that something was up.

At one point, one couple at our church called the senior pastor out of concern for me. He texted me to ask if I'd told them what was going on. I told him I hadn't given any specifics. But they had sensed that something was wrong and asked me how I was doing (and wouldn't accept "fine" as an answer). I just told them that I was dealing with a lot of work-related stress and left it at that.

This was one of the cruelest aspects of the whole ordeal. For six months, I had to continue pastoring my church, even though I was supposedly so ineffective that I was getting fired. But I couldn’t tell anyone what was really going on. I had to pretend as if everything was fine. I helped ministry leaders plan for future programs knowing I would not be there to participate in them. I gave baptismal studies to people knowing I would eventually have to tell them I was leaving before we could finish the studies. It was a terrible weight to bear.

On top of all this, I was still trying to get specific details from the conference about the end of my employment. I’ll say more about this in a future blog, but I spent the majority of those six months without any official written notice from the conference about my termination. We needed information to make our plans, but we weren’t going to get it.

Eventually, through the agony of those months, we did make a decision. I would not pursue employment in another conference. We would stay where we were.

Over the past year, a number of people have asked us why we didn't move. “Doesn't Matthew still want to be a pastor?” The answer to that is complicated. Yes, there is a part of me that does still want to be a pastor. But sometimes what we want to do, what we need to do, and what we can do are not the same thing.

So how did we reach this decision? Here were the four biggest factors for us.

1. We believed that staying was in the best interest of our family.

Moving is always disruptive for a family. You have to acclimate to a new town, learn where all the stores are, find new doctors, adjust to new schools. Even in the best of times it is stressful, and it was not the best of times for us.

Of course, if we had a good reason to move, we’d be willing to pay that price. But for us, there were a number of family considerations that convinced us to stay.

Chief among those was the wellbeing of our two boys. They were in their second year at our church’s school, and they were thriving there. When they first started school, we had some apprehension about how it would go, particularly for our oldest. Emmalee had actually homeschooled him for the first couple years of elementary school because we didn’t feel he was ready to be in a classroom environment. When our youngest started kindergarten, we started him at the same time, in 2^nd grade.

That first year he was in school, he was diagnosed with autism. We had suspected it for some time, but we hadn’t gotten him tested until then. There were a few stressful moments during that first year. But thankfully he did well, thanks in large part to the teachers and staff at the school. They were eager to work out a plan with us to give him the best shot at success.

Of course, I had the added advantage of knowing all of the school staff, since I had been pastoring on the campus for four years already. I knew the principal well and had full confidence in her system.

Three years later, our youngest son would be diagnosed with ADHD. Once again, we were able to work with his teachers to formulate a plan for his success.

Having our boys in a school where their educational needs are being met, they are making friends, and they have kind, supportive Christian teachers is important to us. Leaving all that behind was not something we could do lightly.

Plus we knew that a move would be tremendously disruptive for our son. Transitions are hard for autistic people, and he had just adapted to the routine at his current school. If we moved, it might set him back. And there were no guarantees we would end up in a place with a school that would meet his needs. This was a strong motivation for us to stay.

2. We didn’t feel God was calling us to move.

I became a pastor in response to God’s call. I first felt God leading me on that path while I was a confused, directionless college kid. I had actually taken a semester off from school because I didn’t have a plan for my future, and college was too expensive to just spin my wheels.

During my semester off, I began to pray earnestly that God would show me what He wanted me to do with my life. And He answered that prayer. I began to feel the unshakable impression that God was calling me to serve Him with my life. I wasn’t sure what that meant at first. Did this mean God wanted me to be a pastor? I had never considered that career possibility, and I wasn’t sure it was something I wanted to do.

But when God calls you, He doesn’t give up so easily. I relate very much to the experience of Jeremiah, who described God’s call on his life as a “fire in the bones” that compelled him to do what God said.

There’s more to the story, but the next semester I came back to college as a theology major. I was hired during my senior year, went to seminary immediately after graduating with my undergrad theology degree, and then spent the next decade as a full-time pastor.

Were there ever points along that journey where I questioned if this is really what God wanted me to do? Of course. I don’t know of any pastor who has never wrestled with doubts about God’s calling. How can you engage in spiritual warfare and not face attacks from the enemy on the very core of your identity? There were times where I literally wanted to quit!

But in both good times and bad, I continued to see God reaffirm His calling on my life. And that’s what kept me going. Pastoring is hard. You will not have the courage to press on unless you have that undeniable conviction in the depths of your soul that God has called you to do this.

But now I was facing a different kind of challenge than I’d ever faced before. I was being forced out of my job, told I wasn’t good enough for this conference, but that I should most definitely seek employment in another conference. In fact, that was presented to me as the way to find God’s will for me going forward.

In the January phone call I had with the ministerial director, he repeatedly urged me to send out resumes. “Being open to maybe another conference or two doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s going to be where you guys end up going,” he said. “But I think just maybe being open to that would give God a chance to say, well, look, there’s other places too that could potentially be a good place for ministry going forward.”

Later, in the same conversation, he said: “You know, it’s going to be important to at least test the waters a little bit. It doesn’t necessarily mean that those are rivers that you’re going to navigate. But just be open to where God might be leading. Let’s just pray that He would open that door of opportunity in the right area, where your gifts and your ministry can be fully utilized for God’s Kingdom.”

The message was clear. God’s will for my life was for me to seek employment in another conference, and the way to discern the next steps was to send out my resume. How convenient that God’s will just so happened to coincide with the best interests of the conference.

Unfortunately for them, I did not share the same impression of where God was leading. If I had sensed that He was calling me to go to a particular place of ministry, it would have been a very different story. But I did not sense that. I certainly did not sense that it was His will for me to blindly fire off resumes in the hopes that someone, anyone, might hire me. If I moved, it would only be out of necessity for my employment. And that was not the right motivation.

My thinking process here was also influenced by the fact that I did not see my calling and my career as one and the same. Being called to serve God with my life did not mean I always had to be employed by the Seventh-day Adventist denomination. And that leads me to the third factor.

3. I had lost trust in the conference system.

If this was the first bad experience I’d had in denominational employment, I might have responded differently. Unfortunately, it was not. I had not only my own bad experiences to reflect on, but also the experiences of numerous colleagues who had been through similar things and worse. I knew of multiple pastors in my age bracket who had left full-time clergy work because of how they were mistreated and mismanaged by their employers. There were no guarantees I would have a better time in another conference.

And nothing the conference did during the six torturous months before my final departure from their employment bolstered my faith in how this system operates. On the contrary, their actions shattered my trust entirely.

Take, for instance, the mixed messages I was getting from the ministerial director. The same man who told me there were no positive manifestations of ministry from my ten years of pastoring also told me, “I know that you’ve been called,” and, “You’ve got a lot to offer,” and “I’m happy to be a reference”—all within the same conversation!

To make matters worse, he wasn’t even the decision-maker in this process. When I would ask him questions about the conference’s plans or their thought process, I would hear, “You know, I’m not in the room, Matthew, with administration when they have ADCOM, and so in some ways, I’m at a little bit of a disadvantage to describe it…. And your being able to fully understand it may not be an expectation that I’m able to help you fully with.”

I couldn’t help but wonder to myself, then why am I talking to you instead of to the people responsible for making this decision? Why didn’t they have the integrity and courage to tell me to my face why they were firing me? I felt like they had simply tasked the ministerial director with telling me whatever he thought I needed to hear to steer me in the direction they wanted me to go. Whether that was the right direction for my family and me, or even if it was the direction God wanted me to go, seemed to be of little consequence.

I just could not bring myself to continue subjecting my family to such a fickle system, where our whole lives could be upended at any moment at the whim of leaders who didn’t know me, made no effort to dialog with me, and couldn’t bother to communicate their reasons for firing me.

But on top of all this, there was one more person in whom I had lost confidence.

4. I had lost confidence in myself.

Over the years, I’d faced numerous challenges that undermined my confidence in my ability to do this job. But each time, God had reaffirmed for me that this is where He wanted me to be. Nowhere had that been clearer than at the church I was serving at the time.

When we had accepted the call to come there, we were in a bad place. That’s a whole other story for another time, but on both the personal and professional levels we were struggling. I had not asked for a move. Instead, it was the conference’s ministerial vice president who engineered that after talking with Emmalee and me about what we were going through.

It turned out a move was exactly what we needed—in so many ways, but I’ll mention just one. My first year in that church, the school principal invited me to speak for the school’s week of prayer. I jumped at the opportunity. At the end of the week, I gave an invitation for kids to join Bible study classes if they would like to prepare for baptism, or even if they just wanted to study the Bible more. The response was overwhelming. We had dozens of kids sign up. Many of them asked to be baptized.

Now, I can’t take credit for that. I was the brand-new associate pastor; the school and church had already been laying the groundwork for this. But God used that experience to remind me that I was still called, that He was still using me to build His kingdom. All I had to do was be willing to answer His call.

But now here I was, five years later, being told that I was ineffective, that I had nothing to show for my years of ministry in that church. The long shadow of doubt was being cast on everything I had done as a pastor, not only in that church, but throughout my entire ministry. And this time, there was no positive experience to reaffirm my sense of God’s calling. There was no silver lining behind the clouds to encourage me to keep pressing on. There was only the gaping abyss of the unknown before my feet. I could not see a pathway across.

You can only tell a person that they’re a failure so many times before they start to believe it. I was at the point where I believed it.

Now, I will say that there was another part of me that rejected what the conference was telling me about my ministry. I knew there were people I had positively influenced. I knew there were people I had ministered to when no one else did.

During those six months, there was an internal battle that raged inside my head: the part of me that fought to remember the ways I had seen God work through my ministry; and the part of me that felt too tired to resist what seemed more and more like the inescapable truth that I was a failure.

If that was the only battle I had to fight, perhaps this story would have had a different outcome. But there were too many other factors that weighed against taking the risk to move to a new conference and start all over. I didn’t have it in me to do that, and I didn’t think it was right for my family.

And so my career as a pastor came to an end.

But before the end, I did have one conversation with a member of the administrative committee who had made the decision to fire me. That conversation will be the subject of next week’s blog.

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