Black churches are famous for taking their time. And they’ve gotten that reputation from normal services. You better believe you need to empty your schedule for a pastoral anniversary at a black church, and if the pastor and first lady are celebrating their thirty-second pastoral anniversary…Sunday naps? After-church Batman: Arkham Knight? Working on that post calvin theme month post that’s been driving you up the wall? What are those?
I speak from experience.
On June 9, my Uncle Clay and Aunt Jo did in fact celebrate their thirty-second anniversary as senior pastor and first lady of my dad’s childhood church. As much as I love my aunt and uncle, when I lost count of the congregants who had taken the mic to say a word, I did give my watch more than one glance.
But, my wandering mind had to wander somewhere. And in this particular case, it made me think about the highs and lows…of high school football.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. The highs and lows of being a pastor.
If you’re a pastor’s kid, like me, or have been going to church all your life, also like me, then you probably have a list of pastors you know as long as your arm…like me. Off the top of my head: my dad; my Uncle Clay and Uncle Tim; Connie Keene, my late grandfather; Tim Dilena, the founder of my home church; Kevin Ramsby, his successor when Pastor Tim was called back to his native New York; Devin Gough, our current senior pastor who took the mantle when Pastor Kevin was called to Minnesota; Eli and Lisa Harrell, my youth pastors throughout middle school; Justin and Raquel Rohrer, my youth pastors throughout high school; Max and Rachel Boyd, my church’s current youth pastors (and Max’s younger sister went to Calvin. Hi Ally!); Jeff Bonzelaar, my dad’s boss at his job in faith-based rehabilitation…I could keep going, but I think you get the point. Anyone who spends twenty-four years in church is going to rack up a long list of pastors in their contacts, doubly so if you’re a pastor’s kid.
And if you spend a good amount of time with pastors—heck, if you know any pastors in any capacity—you’ll know that the average pastor has stories to tell.
On a hot summer night in 2009, Pastor Kevin was alone in his house, his wife and kids out of town visiting family. Around three in the morning, the sound of shattering glass woke him up. He grabbed the closest weapon, a tennis racket, and charged down the stairs, yelling for the intruder to get stepping.
He ran straight into a blade.
With a butcher knife, the intruder stabbed Pastor Kevin thirty-seven times. The man demanded Pastor Kevin’s car keys and valuables, then left Pastor Kevin bleeding on his kitchen floor while he looted the second floor. Pastor Kevin heard a voice say, They still need you. He managed to get to his feet but was so badly injured he had to hold his intestines in his chest as he stumbled out his front door and down the sidewalk to a neighbor’s house. The neighbor had Pastor Kevin stay on the porch and stood watch for the burglar while he dialed 911. Bleeding, partially disemboweled, and wondering if he would die on that porch, Pastor Kevin cried out to God, begging Him to not let his murder destroy his kids’ faith.
The police officer who came to the scene later reported that on first arrival, they couldn’t determine Pastor Kevin’s race; he was that covered in blood.
The police rushed Pastor Kevin to the hospital, where doctors performed emergency surgeries. He survived and made a full recovery, though the scars still remain. To this day, he has a Glasgow grin-style scar from where his attacker stabbed him in the cheek. The burglar, Wesley McLemore, was eventually caught, convicted, and sent off to prison, but not before Pastor Kevin publicly forgave him at McLemore’s trial.
That’s admittedly the most extreme example of a pastor story I know of, but others are similarly heavy.
Like I previously mentioned, my dad works in faith-based rehab. When people are trying to wean themselves from addiction, emotions run high, sometimes dangerously so. My dad once told me how he had to cut down a resident who had decided to see himself out of the program and off the mortal coil.
Pastor Tim once described in a sermon conducting a funeral of a family—a mother and her kids—killed in a house fire and the haunting image of multiple child coffins mounted in front of the pulpit.
One summer night after my freshman year at Calvin, my sister and I were out with Pastor Devin getting pizza. As we walked back to his car, he got a phone call and asked if we minded making a stop on our commute home. He went to a hospital, and we followed him up to a hospital room where an elderly woman had recently died. We stood out in the hall as Pastor Devin comforted the family and prayed over the recently passed on woman.
I remember breaking down crying when my dad informed me Pat Spriggs, a guy who had made it through the rehab program, had been killed in a car accident.
But, these types of stories are only one side of the coin.
I remember my dad’s voice cracking as he pronounced my youngest brother baptized.
Before my church was a church, it was a pornographic theater. To this day, it’s the filling in a sex work sandwich: a motel frequented by prostitutes and their clientele on the left, a strip club that’s been raided by the police on the right. What’s now the sanctuary used to be the main theater room, and what’s now the hospitality room was the side theater where they showed gay porn. Pastor Tim, in a different sermon, told the story of a prostitute who used to find her clientele at the theater and, when she realized the theater had been converted into a church, began attending. Tragically, her lifestyle caught up with her in the form of contracting HIV, but she gave her life to the Lord and escaped the life of prostitution before she passed away.
I remember Pat Spriggs. Pat not only made it through the program, kicked his addiction for good, and reconciled with his estranged family, but once he’d graduated from the program, he turned around and became a staff member, using his own sobriety like a lighthouse to lead others onto the straight and narrow.
I remember a conversation I had with Dad as we drove around, where he expressed both sorrow at the number of pastors whose ministries have come to a shameful end via scandals in the last few years and gratefulness for the pastors and spiritual mentors in his life who have walked the walk and talked the talk.
My train of thought returned to the present, to person number who-knows coming to the mic and anticipation of church dinner after service. And I thought, Thirty. Two. Years.
Pastoring is one of those fields where emotional taxation is built in. Congregants die; plenty of church members no longer with us got mentions amongst the words of gratitude. Pastors who do marriage counseling will inevitably have a couple of hopeless cases and have to witness firsthand the slow disintegration of marriages and the resulting chaos. A congregation can put their pastor on such a high pedestal that they can fall off without trying.
But pastoring is also a profession where on a yearly, if not a weekly or daily basis, you have people telling you all the ways you’ve put the ‘family’ in spiritual family. It’s a job where a nearly fatal attack can become an extraordinary story of faith and forgiveness. Where you get to help a man rebuild his life and then stand back and watch as he walks others through the same process.
I knew there were ugly stories in those thirty-two years. I knew if I sat down with Uncle Clay and Aunt Jo and asked them, they could tell me stories that would make my hair stand up.
But I also knew they have a church family who loved them and thirty-two years of uplifting stories, even more than the ones I’d heard in that service.
And I didn’t need to ask to know they’d say it was all worth it.
Noah Keene graduated from Calvin University in December 2021 with a major in creative writing and a minor in Spanish. He currently resides in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan. He spends his free time reading and putting his major to good use by working on his first novel. See what he’s reading by following him on Instagram @peachykeenebooks and read his other personal writing by going to thekeenechronicles.com.
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Man, I can’t wait for you to publish a memoir of all the crazy stories you’ve heard being a PK. Crazy stuff.