The SMP Life

This question was the most difficult to answer until my wife reminded me of the journey we’ve been on the past 15 years. The Holy Spirit works in my life with gentle nudges and outright action as evidenced in the following story…

In 2009 I was laid off from my engineering career and was unable to find work. Literally 1000s of hours of work kept resulting in rejection and even worse no responses.

I decided it was time to start looking outside of Spokane and possibly returning home to Montana. During this time we also had to resign from the ELCA; thus, we were also looking for a new church home.

None of which bore any fruit. Every time I was offered a job elsewhere – something would happen to negate the offer. And every church we visited just did not fit and we just couldn’t understand why.

For example, we visited another LCMS church here in Spokane a number of times. We knew people there, the pastor was a good guy and fine preacher but we just couldn’t take the step to make it our church home. We ended up attending a non-denominational church, which we both knew wasn’t it, yet we had family there. We never made any real connection to the people of the church and finally we started searching again – and ended up at Pilgrim Lutheran.

Little did we know this was the Holy Spirit working in our lives. I look back on all the heartache, sweat and tears of this journey and can now see God’s work bringing us to Pilgrim and this venture into the SMP program.

If I’d have gotten that job out of town…

If we’d have joined that other Lutheran church, we’d probably still be there, proverbially fat, dumb and happy.

Attending a non-denominational, non-Lutheran church taught us that we needed to find a confessional Lutheran church body. I have no doubt now that I am a Lutheran Christian – period.

However, the story doesn’t end there.

Yes we found a new church home. But after a year we began to wonder how we were going to fit in to this body. There really didn’t seem to be anything for us beyond a weekly men’s dinner and worship. So last fall (2024), during a planned five week long trip to test our retirement plans of snow birding for our retirement, we had agreed we’d solve the question of staying at Pilgrim. (The question was, Do we cut ties at Pilgrim and end up at that other church? Where we could just blend in with the congregation.)

The Sunday before we left, out of the blue, the head elder (lay minister) cornered me and asked if I’d prayerfully consider joining the elders’ board.

It didn’t take much discussion on our part as both my wife and I felt the Spirit’s work in this. This kept us at Pilgrim and we both have found means by which we can plug in.

A couple months later the Spirit led me to have a rather hard conversation with the head elder about the health of the church – which led to us taking action to address the underlying problems/issues within the congregation. Thus, now we have a continuing working team to implement and monitor the changes that are needed to help Pilgrim become a thriving congregation.

None of this was on my radar three, five, or even 15 years ago. It truly is only by the work of the Spirit in our lives that I am now filling out an application for the Specific Ministry Pastor program. I’ve relayed earlier how prayer was answered specifically this story maybe provides a bit more background.

18 years ago I gave up the call to pursue ministry and truly never expected to be called again. It seems God has other plans.