I Didn't Want to Be a Pastor
I never chose sides between the social and the spiritual gospel. I still have not.
Part 5 of the “Activist to the Pastor” series
I believe God called me to be a minister. But I never thought I was called to be a pastor.
I was at a meeting planning a protest in my hometown. All of a sudden, I got a strange feeling and went outside to get some fresh air. A friend came out to check on me, and I told him I felt like God was telling me to become a minister. He found that hard to believe because I didn’t even attend church.
But that was not quite right. I was always going to church. I just wasn’t going to worship. As an activist and community organizer, I went to churches to spread the word about some issue or call to action. That is where I went because that is where the people were.
I had been raised in a Christian home. My father was a part-time pastor and a full-time English teacher. I had never abandoned my beliefs. But I had stopped attending worship because the church of my youth did not seem to care enough about social justice and public policy. The Jesus I read about in the Bible was concerned about physical well-being as much as personal salvation. I never chose sides between the social and the spiritual gospel. I still have not.
What I was gravitating toward was what we call prophetic ministry rather than the priestly functions of the clergy. My father affirmed that call. He assured me there was room for the kind of ministry I felt led to pursue. So my activism expanded into Christian ministry, and I was working for a man who had never been a pastor himself. Rev. Jesse Jackson was an activist minister whose strategies were rooted in the church and the Bible. But he did not serve a congregation. Neither did I ever plan to.
Then my father died. He was 47 years old. I had only been a licensed minister — a minister in training — for two months. The church turned to me and asked me to fill in while they searched for a successor.
Filling in meant administering the ordinances of the church. That started with Communion two days after his funeral. I had no formal training, but I had watched my father perform these functions all of my life, so I knew how to do them. I just felt like a fish out of water. This was exactly what I had not wanted. But these people needed me, and I could not say no.
At the same time, Rev. Jackson told me I was being promoted to National Coordinator of Operation PUSH, working directly with him every day out of the national headquarters in Chicago. What he did not tell me was that I would need to move. My previous job had involved constant travel, so it had not mattered where I lived. This one required being in Chicago whenever I was not on the road.
For 16 months I delayed. Finally, I had to tell Rev. Jackson that I could not go. My mother needed my help raising my 9-year-old sister in New Jersey. I resigned.
I now had no job, no savings, no investments. My credit was so bad that I was using my deceased father’s American Express card. We had the same name, and as long as I paid the bills on time, no one seemed to mind.
This was the most confused period of my life. But it did not feel confused, because I felt good about my work. Advocating for affordable housing. Fighting against racist policies in law enforcement. Protesting apartheid in South Africa. My activism functioned as a kind of drug that allowed me to live in a fantasy world of nobility while my actual life was dysfunctional.
Preaching a different sermon every week changed that. Being there for families in their hardest moments changed that. It forced me to decide who and what I was going to be.
I finally accepted that both God and the church were calling me to a responsibility I had never wanted and for which I was alarmingly underprepared. But that unwanted role became the thing that made me grow up.