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Commentary
COMMENTARY: On landing safely Bishop Robert Schnase, Jun 24, 2009
Bishop Robert Schnase
By Bishop Robert Schnase Special Contributor
Our family recently celebrated milestones, such as the graduation of our youngest son from high school and the 25th anniversary of my first appointment after graduating from seminary.
I had worked an internship as an associate pastor and had served a circuit of churches for a year in the British Methodist Church, but in June 1984 I received my first full-time, post-seminary appointment: to Wesley United Methodist Church in Harlingen, Texas.
It was a General Conference year, and the cabinet was running late on making appointments. In those days, fresh seminary grads were the last to be appointed. I didn’t hear where I would serve until a week after my graduation service at Perkins School of Theology.
All my friends knew where they were going, but Esther and I waited and waited. People were moving out of the dorms. We tried to reserve a U-Haul trailer, but when the dealer asked where we would take it, we had to tell him that we had no idea: Our destination was somewhere between Sterling City, Texas, and Brownsville, Texas—an expanse or more than 400 miles!
Remember Abraham and Sarah? “They set out, not knowing where they were going . . . ”
Two weeks later, we moved into the parsonage in Harlingen. The first day in the office, I gathered the names of the most seriously ill members and immediately visited them. I wanted to see them before the first Sunday service, since I didn’t want to receive a death call and then have to work with a grieving family without ever having met their loved one.
I also invited the church secretary into the sanctuary, and we walked through the worship service so I would know what people had been accustomed to. Later I repeated the process with the head usher, bulletin in hand, walking through every element and rubric of the service. I changed little, and only over time began to reshape the service gently and slightly to match my own style.
I wrote and rewrote my sermon for the first Sunday, and practiced it in the pulpit, marking and remarking the text. Early Sunday morning, an older colleague called me to say he was praying for me, and telling me that first Sundays are always anxiety-producing and that it would go well. The phone call was grace, a sustaining gift.
On Monday, I prepared my part of the church newsletter and started to organize my week. Late that morning, Rob Rumbo, a deeply committed, lifelong United Methodist, albeit with a cantankerous edge at times, called me.
One of our inactive members had died from cancer. Rob gave me the family’s address and instructions on how to find the house on the outskirts of town. He could hear the anxious pause on my end of the phone as I contemplated my first death call in my first appointment with a family I had never met. Without hesitation, this wonderfully generous layperson filled the gap: “Pastor, how about if I come pick you up at the office and let’s drive out there together to see the family?”
What a gift! His encouragement, his spiritual intuition and his sense of mutual ministry eased my anxiety. He was with me in the room, praying for me as I prayed for the family over their father’s deathbed.
In the years to come, I would help perform the funeral of Rob’s mother, and later his granddaughter and his son, and finally his own.
Not long ago I was on a flight of nearly a thousand miles. The pilots landed the plane safely and we taxied to the gate. And then we waited. And we waited some more. The ground crew was trying to maneuver the jet bridge to the door of the aircraft but it was stuck about a foot from the plane. We could not deplane.
We had made it safely for more than a thousand miles, but we were one foot short of the necessary connection to complete the trip. Only the ground crew could help us with the last 12 inches.
In like manner, through their appointment process Bishop Ernest Dixon Jr. and the cabinet had landed me in Harlingen, Texas, 25 years ago. But without the ground crew that included the secretary, the usher and Rob Rumbo, I might never have completed the connection.
Bishop Robert Schnase
