“THIS IS MY STORY - THIS IS MY SONG”

 

Part III: "The Jonah Man”

 

Readings: Psalm 105:1-11, Jonah 1:1-10, Matthew 28:16-20, 1 Timothy 4:6-10

Preached at Beckley Presbyterian Church on April 24 2005

 

For the last couple of Sundays I’ve been answering questions that folk had asked me since moving to the church here.  My accent has a habit of evoking the response, “Gee, You ain’t from round here are yer?”  When people find out I came from Great Britain, usually it isn’t long before somebody asks, “Well what made you decide to come to America?”

 

I’ve been sharing how it was as a teenager that I became involved in the church, and how in my early twenties I felt God called me to offer myself as a candidate for the ministry of the Presbyterian Church of Wales.

 

As I shared last week, this call to be part of the established church was not something that I had ever seriously contemplated.  Having been brought up near the City of Liverpool, whose only famous sons I knew about were the Fab-Four (known as the Beatles), I had a rebellious streak within me that had a profound distrust of authority and institutions.  I can certainly identify with the prophet Jonah, whose first thought when God called Him to go one way was the desire to head as quickly as possible in the opposite direction.

 

Even when I departed from my home near Liverpool to study at Aberystwyth Theological College (part of the University of Wales), I was still nursing a real hope that.. well.. God had only called me to be a candidate for the ministry.  God hadn’t actually said I had to become a preacher. People who went to theological colleges ended up in all sorts of occupations.  Offering myself as a candidate did not mean … absolutely, definitely, positively…. that my destiny was to be standing in a pulpit preaching God’s Word.

 

One year went by, then the next, and then the third year, and it was time to sit final exams for a Bachelor of Divinity degree which I’m glad to say I managed to pass.  All the time I’m saying to God, “C’mon now, time’s getting short here.  I’m a candidate like you asked, it’s time for You to get me out!”

 

Following the degree part of the course, candidates went on to study for a certificate in pastoral studies.  And sure enough there was my name on the list for that second course… the one that some of the students called “Preacher Training.”   I was now no longer on the candidate list but on the list of prospective students open to receive a call to serve a church.

 

And…darn it…by half way through the year there were even a couple of churches out there expressing an interest in having me as their pastor.  Only then did I really understand that there comes a point in our lives when it’s time to stop telling God what we think God should be doing and start trying to be a part of the things God actually is doing.

 

For Jonah it took sitting inside the belly of a stinky fish before he realized that yes, maybe doing what God asked could result in a favorable outcome for his life.  In chapter 2 of Jonah he concludes a prayer about his plight with the phrase, “Deliverance belongs to the Lord.”  Shortly afterward he is deposited on the shores of Nineveh in order to begin his task.

 

I’m just glad that it didn’t take being thrown off a ship into the raging waves by a group of angry sailors, only to be swallowed up by a whale, that convinced me to accept the preacher’s role.  It was quite enough having to go to Wales to study, without being swallowed by one!

 

Accept ‘A Call’ I did, to two wonderful churches in the beautiful Welsh Vale of Clwyd, in two market towns called Denbigh and Ruthin.  What I didn’t realize about the town of Denbigh was that it housed a large mental hospital, and that “Going to Denbigh’ was a euphemism for being sent to the funny-farm.

 

Such did however explain why people would look at me rather strangely when they asked what I was going to do after seminary, and I’d smile and say, “I’m going to Denbigh”.  But after twenty years of being part of this institution we call the church, I am of the opinion that being a little bit crazy is probably a help rather than a hindrance for pastoral ministry.

 

I could write a book about experiences in the different churches I’ve served, and one day I might just do that.  After being in Denbigh and Ruthin, I moved on to inner city ministry in Liverpool, which included some chaplaincy work at a large Children’s hospital, before accepting a call to minister in the churches of Menai Bridge and Caernarfon in North Wales.

 

Menai Bridge was noted for being the first English Speaking Welsh Presbyterian Church in the very Welsh speaking area in which it was situated, whilst Caernarfon boasted a castle where the Prince of Wales was invested with his office, making it a Mecca for tourists from all over the world.  The Presbyterian Church in Caernarfon was situated right on the square almost in the shadow of the castle’s walls.

 

Now all of this is by way of a lengthy introduction to explaining how it was that I came to America.  Did I hear a voice from the heavens saying, “Go to West Virginia?”  Was it something that I had secretly been planning and hoping for all along.  Did some scripture verse jump out of the bible to direct my path?  Would be it were that simple!

 

Over the years I’ve learned something about the guidance of God.  It can be most irregular. Almost as Spock used to say to Captain Kirk, “Illogical, Captain.”  That as we place our trust in God and commit our way to doing the things God wants us to do, both God’s methods and the outcome can be wildly unpredictable.

 

This was a message that Jonah found hard to understand. When he reluctantly marched into Nineveh declaring God’s judgment on its God-forsaken inhabitants, the last thing he was expecting was that they would listen, respond, and set about amending their lives so as to live the way God wanted them to.

 

Jonah’s waiting for the fireworks.  He wants to see the Ninevites get blasted by the judgment of God.  The story ends with Jonah in an angry sulk, sitting in the shade of a tree which dies, leaving him hotter and stickier than ever.  God suggests that Jonah is acting foolishly and that as God, He had every right to forgive whomsoever He wished to and to show mercy where ever mercy was needed.  And it was certainly needed in Nineveh.  So, Jonah, “Get over it!’

 

Again the message that “We know best” is challenged by the thought that whatever we think should happen is not necessarily the way God sees things.  So, there I am in this beautiful area of Wales, enjoying the mountains and the beaches and the castles, and blessed with two children who were blossoming at 10 and 12 years old, and my wife in this wonderful job working in the offices of the Oceanography department.  “Settled’ would be a good word to describe how things were going.

 

One of the ministries that Castle Square Caernarfon Church operated was that on a Saturday morning they would open up the church to visitors and invite them in for a coffee and a chat. One Saturday morning when I wasn’t there, a pastor and his son from the Chicago area walked in.  The son was an organist, and Alan Jones, the organist at Castle Square, was just finishing up his practice for Sunday.  They got to chatting, the son got to play the organ, and a friendship was struck up.

 

A few months later the retired pastor of the Caernarfon church, the Rev Elwyn Edwards, received a letter from the pastor in Chicago asking if he would be interested in doing an exchange trip to Chicago.  As he was retired and no longer the minister, he decided that such a venture was not for him.  However he was kind enough to call me and see if I would be interested.

 

So we thought about it and prayed about it and decided that a twelve week exchange trip to the U.S.A. might be kind of fun.  And the church in Wales agreed that they would carry on paying my salary; so we only had to find the airfares. We would live in each others’ houses, drive each others’ cars, and minister through the summer in each others’ churches. It was all set in stone.

 

Then the phone rang.  It was the pastor from Chicago.  “Got good news and bad news,” he said. “I’ve accepted a call to serve a United Reformed Church in Cornwall, England.  I’m guessing you wouldn’t really be interested in doing an exchange trip to a part of England just over the border from Wales.  However, there’s a guy from our church who is about your age, went into the ministry, and is in a place called Red Wing, in Minnesota.  I’ve spoken with him and he’s interested.  What do you think?”

 

I thought, “Whatever.  Red Wing… Chicago...I’m sure they are much the same.”  So in the summer of 1994 we exchanged pulpits and locations with Rev Gary Elg and family from Red Wing Presbyterian Church in Minnesota and had a great time.  I went back home with the thought that I could put the things I’d learnt to good use in my churches in Wales.  At least that was my plan.

 

Out of the blue I started to get invitations to consider moving to other positions in Wales and England.  Some of them weren’t even to do with me being a traditional minister.  Maybe that ‘Get out” clause from the ministry that I’d expected to come along during my seminary days had finally come to pass.  That ship to Tarshish stays in port for a long time.

 

I investigated some of them, but they just didn’t feel right.  Sure, I could do the jobs.  But y’know, I was kind of settled, and the kids being of an impressionable age and all of that, it would be better to stay where I was.  Following my Minnesota experience, I had though received a subscription to a PC(USA) magazine that contained descriptions of pastoral vacancies.

 

I should explain that the calling process in Wales is very different to that over here.  Wales is a small place.  As a pastor you didn’t call the church, they called you.  So the notion of applying to a church for a position was completely alien to me.  And I knew nothing of the Presbyterian USA’s process of filling in forms and matching candidates to churches and going through committees and presbyteries.  And I knew still less about the whole complicated process of obtaining Visas and permits and all the rest of it in order to live in the United States.

 

But I did entertain the thought ‘I wonder what would happen if I wrote to one of these churches?’ So I did.  A letter along the lines of, “Hello. My name is Adrian.  I’m a pastor.  Believe you might be looking for one.  What do you think?”  Given the system over here, the miracle is that I received any replies at all.

 

A very gracious church in Monroe, Louisiana replied to what must of appeared as a very weird letter, explaining the calling process and how they’d need a little more information than “Hello, my name’s Adrian and I live in Wales.”  After we corresponded they even agreed to fly me over for an interview.  And I went, but I wasn’t the best match for that particular position.  At the same time I was in correspondence with another church in Long Island, New York, but again, things weren’t quite hunky-dory, and we never got as far as the come and see stage.  

 

One evening, in the middle of dinner, the phone rings.  A guy called Mike Smith from a place called Fayetteville, West Virginia, is on the line.  He wants more information.  I suggest calling the nominating Committee I’d met with in Louisiana, and I had a video of me preaching in Minnesota that was somewhere in Long Island.

 

A few weeks later Mike calls again.  Would I come over for an interview?  “Yes,” I said.  I hung up the phone and had to go and look for an atlas.  “Where on earth was Fayetteville?  Come to think of it, where on earth was West Virginia?”

 

In the most unlikely of ways, one thing led to another.  It took a while for God to convince me that leaving the church that had nurtured my faith for a foreign land thousands of miles from my extended family was the right thing to do.  I’d always thought that those bits in the Bible about “Going into all the world” to preach the gospel only applied to other people.  Once again, God thought differently.

 

To cut an equally long story short, after eight wonderful years ministering in Fayetteville, my next move turned out to be only a few miles up the road to this place with a mine of its own, known as Beckley, West Virginia.

 

It’s been quite a journey, and I’ve learnt a lot about the crazy ways that God directs our lives.  It’s had high points and it’s had low points, but I’d do it all over again.  And I’m real excited about what the future may hold for the ministry of the Presbyterian Church in this place.

 

Somebody asked,

"So, what made you decide to come to America?" 

 This was my story, This was my song.

 

 And to God’s name be the Glory!

AMEN.

 

Adrian Pratt