From PK to Double PK

Still finishing up a research article due tomorrow... so another brief post.

Before the Steven Anderson side-track, I had been relating my (and my family's) transition from the conservative evangelicalism of the Southern Baptist Church to the mainline Protestantism of the United Methodist Church. In the course of that shift--about a three-year period in the early nineties when I was in high school--I discovered a love of theatre, I internalized a whole new perspective on God, and my father became a Methodist minister. Since Methodists are appointed by the conference bishop, our family moved from the mid-sized city near Oklahoma City to a tiny town near the Oklahoma/Arkansas border.

It was my senior year. Life in a small town was nothing new, really, but I had grown accustomed to the offerings of the larger city--a robust theatre program in the school, a large group of friends, a university atmosphere. The new town had a stoplight. As I said--tiny.

Nevertheless, my sister and I managed, with the help of a supportive teacher, to start a mini-theatre program there. I adapted to the school's smaller offerings (Spanish instead of Latin, for example), and made friends with folk there. Daddy settled into his familiar role as minister, though he had a new appreciation for how much more regularized the Methodist Church was compared to the Baptists. My sister found a social circle of her own, and she and I went back to being preacher's kids.

My mother, though, was not nearly as content. Having largely supported us through her teaching job for the past few years, going back to being "pastor's wife" as a full-time job did not hold special appeal. It's not that she loved teaching that much--she did not. But she had always been either a kind of informal co-minister with my father or a full-time breadwinner herself. In this particular church, the co-ministerial roles were already more or less filled by a capable congregation. Methodist churches, I find, tend to boast more self-sufficient congregations. Since the clergy itinerancy system rarely lets ministers stay for more than five years in one place, congregations often learn to keep the church's ministries afloat themselves. It left less for my mother to do.

As I've mentioned, my mother had a seminary degree herself--a Master of Religious Education from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The MRE was at the time she earned it the "women's version" of the Master of Divinity, the terminal degree for ordained ministers. Since Baptists (holding to a literal reading of certain verses in the Bible) forbade women from ordination, the MRE was often seen as the obvious choice. Many times I heard Mama express some regret that she had not gone ahead and pursued the M-Div anyway.

It did not take long, however, for Daddy's immediate superior, the District Superintendent (DS), to notice both Mama's theological training and her desire to serve in the ministry. It was that DS who first encouraged Mama to pursue a path similar to that my father was already on: professional ministry as a pastor.

Now, the understanding at the time was that people coming into the ministry from other Protestant faiths, people who had degrees from non-Methodist seminaries, began as a "local pastor" (or "local licensed pastor," as they were called then). Local pastors have full authority of a minister in their local congregations, but they lack the "member in full connection" status of ordained Methodist clergy (e.g., the ability to vote as clergy at Annual Conference meetings). Instead, local pastors undergo a weeks-long condensed training and are assigned to a congregation or two. Daddy's plan was to serve as a local pastor until such time as he could update his seminary degree by taking a few more classes in Methodist history and polity from a nearby (sort-of nearby) seminary. At that time, his M-Div would be accepted by the UMC and he could pursue "elder" status--fully ordained membership.

The same process, our DS told us, could work for Mama.

Thus, soon after I entered college, my mother became a pastor, and I became a double PK.

I remain so proud of my mother for achieving her dream--realizing her calling--of being a minister.

At the same time as she was moving into her new role, however, I was making some other discoveries that greatly affected my faith life.

More tomorrow (when, Lord willing and the creek don't rise, I'll have finished the article to my satisfaction),

JF