Reaching Back In Time in Order to Stretch Forward

Revisiting our personal history gives us courage to push ahead

This is the Minnesota Church Center, built one year before I was born, to serve what was then a burgeoning ecumenical movement nationwide. Today it provides office space for The Minnesota Conference of the United Methodist Church, the Minnesota Conference of the United Church of Christ and the Minneapolis area Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. In my personal history, this building is a landmark of my own spiritual journey, and I am once again back today (and will be tomorrow) for an orientation to those beginning pastoral service in the Minnesota Conference.

I am, admittedly, an anomaly having served more than twenty years in this Conference before my recent nine-and-a-half-year sojourn in Virginia. So, while I am technically not “new” to the Minnesota Conference, in a big way I am, because like any other living organism, this religious movement has changed considerably in the past decades.

Today I am recognizing that in order to stretch forward I often have to reach back into my personal history. The backward reach provides me context and grounding as I venture forward.

As I parked in the lot this morning, I was immediately reminded that life for the mainline Christian tradition has changed considerably since my first visit to this building in 1994. Thirty-one years ago I had to circle the parking lot several times in order to find a parking spot; today I had my choice of probably fifty empty places. Entering the building brought pangs of nostalgia. The modern architecture is unchanged. The restrooms, while clean and freshly painted, have not been updated in sixty years. The ground level meeting area as recently as ten years ago had a functioning kitchen service for meals at lunchtime. It appears now to be permanently abandoned. There was a time when bustling bodies, hurrying from meeting to meeting, provided a sense of urgency and energy. Today’s ambiance is much more like a sedate, cool funeral home reception space.

In my first official meeting in the building more than thirty years ago, I was a single, young pastor seeking to transfer my credentials from the denomination of my youth to what was at the time a groaning bulwark of mainline Christianity. I still remember the interview I had with two of the six district superintendents (the Minnesota Conference no longer has “district” superintendents; there are now four “Conference Superintendents”). I met with the “two Duanes,” one a recognized proponent of traditional Christian faith, the other a bona fide theological progressive. I left the meeting startled by the collegial warmth and mutual respect these two leaders had for one another. Although they did not agree theologically, they understood the value of what I would soon learn was called “connectionalism.”

Following that meeting I was eventually offered my first full-time appointment as a United Methodist pastor, and I felt like the most fortunate person I knew. I could see opportunities before me, I was relieved that I would no longer have to battle the “call process” to fulfill my vocational call, and I intuited that I could trust the leaders in this particular system to know me well enough to recommend to the Bishop where I should serve. I can say with integrity I have never had a bad pastoral appointment. Some were more challenging than others, but in each congregation I have served, there have been lovely, beautiful people and communities to learn to love.

I am no longer young. I am no longer married. I am no longer the bright-eyed neophyte I once was. My visit to the MCC today helps me to recollect the life journey that ensued after my initial meeting there. In the years to come, I would be back to the building for conference-level meetings, most of which I was a participant in, a few of which I led. I have now known five bishops who have occupied office space in the building.

This building is a fossil-in-the-making of sorts, if it only stands as a storehouse of institutional memories. And so am I, really, if I attempt to cling to my former life, swept away by my life companion’s death.

I am happy to say that what I am experiencing in my “orientation to the MAC” is, in fact, life-giving and hopeful. The building is very much the same, but the denominational family in which I serve God has been re-inventing itself through the decades. There is a strong, life-sustaining energy from a well-articulated and spiritually grounded set of values, vision and mission. That heartens me as I prayerfully consider what my final decade in ministry will be.

The Minnesota Church Center is an aging building, but there is energy from faithful innovation and deep trust in God’s abiding future. I, too, am an older structure of sorts, and I am hopeful that what began in this place for me more than three decades ago will energize me for what is ahead. The MCC and I have experienced a lot in our sixty years of existence, and I find strength in looking back so that I can stretch forward.