Me a Pastor?

It was c-o-l-d in Neshkoro. The Wisconsin winters seemed worse than I remembered them after living in Houston and Africa! It probably had something to do with the heating system in the “winterized” cabin we were renting. Originally built as a summer getaway on a small lake (really a large pond), the heat was supplied by electric panels on the wall baseboards. Left on all the time, those panels kept the room temperature warm enough, but the cement flooring underneath the thin carpeting was ice cold. If you got out of bed, the first thing you did was to slip on a pair of shoes!

I put my study desk in front of a large window so I could look out on the snow-covered prairie for inspiration. Next to my desk was a sliding door which we used to let our spaniel outside. It got so cold that the aluminum handle on the sliding door froze and broke off! Once outside, her favorite thing was to race down to the lake, run down the fishing pier and go skidding off onto the ice.

[In the Spring, the ice thawed, but that didn’t stop our cocker spaniel. She went racing down the pier--the rest was like one of the Road Runner cartoons. After she leapt from the pier, she noticed that there was nothing solid below her--just water. She thrust her paws in front her as if that would stop her in midair. Plummeting into the water, she discovered that she already knew how to swim. That was the last time she ran down the pier!]

I spent my days at my desk with my feet wrapped in a blanket to protect them from the cold cement. I had nothing to do but study. At first this was a luxury, but as I began to peel away the layers of misinformation acquired from nine years and thousands of hours of Thieme’s teaching, I needed to find an outlet for all the new thoughts that were flooding my mind.

Nancy, Pegi’s friend at the hospital actually seemed serious about me leading a bible study and invited me to speak to a group in her home. As I remember, there were five women and one man who came that Monday morning, all in their twenties. I have no idea what I spoke about, but they seemed to enjoy it and asked me to continue on a weekly basis.

A number of the women wanted their husbands to attend, so I arranged to use the Berlin town hall on Wednesday nights. The first Wednesday, I was a bit discouraged that no one showed up, not even Nancy or any of the women who had requested the class in the first place. The following week, it was ten minutes past starting time when Nancy showed up. She got a class all for herself that week. The third week attendance doubled when Nancy and Ted (husband of Nancy’s friend) showed up.

By the sixth week, attendance had grown to about ten people. Struck by ambition, I decided that we needed a Sunday morning event. The town hall was not available long term on Sunday’s, so I rented a commercial space on Main Street that had been a laundromat. With Ted and Nancy’s help, we repainted and carpeted what had been the office. We now had a room that could hold up to 50 people and a carpeted room for children.

Our services were BYOC--Bring Your Own Chair. After a few weeks we accumulated about 25 chairs, but always encouraged people to bring extra folding or lawn chairs for visitors. Some weeks we had 30-40 people attend. By this time, we had moved 17 miles from Neshkoro to Berlin where Pegi worked at the hospital. As the church grew, we began to outgrow the former laundromat. We found a large three bedroom, two-story house on Main Street that we could use both for church in the large living room and our home. We moved in and Berlin Community Bible Church was officially born.

We were a pretty basic church. I still saw ministry as primarily teaching-oriented, so my sermons were bible studies. The only differences between Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings were the hymns that we sang on Sunday. I led the singing and Pegi played a rented electric piano. With my Jewish upbringing and limited exposure to Christian services other than Berachah, there were only about five or six hymns in our repetoire. I tended toward rousing hymns that focused attention away from ourselves to God. There was a cursory prayer before and after my message, but I really didn’t see much sense in public prayer.

I was all business and that business was to understand the Bible. I had been burned by Thieme’s constant reliance on revised “literal” retranslations that seemed only to make the text of the Bible more remote to the reader. Now that I had some knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, I was determined not to fall into the same pattern. My goal was to dig deeply into the Word of God and make its lessons more understandable. Ultimately, I wanted our congregation to find a translation of the Bible that was comfortable for them and spend their time reading it for themselves. I wanted a literate congregation. Of course, that was a challenge as most of the participants had come from mainline denominational backgrounds and were accustomed to having the pastor do the studying to pass on a finished product. I certainly studied, but I wanted to challenge them to check me out in the Bible for themselves. Hopefully, that would lead to intelligent interaction. Boy, was I an idealistic optimist!

I also shared my sources with them and began producing a weekly “bulletin” that had quotations and insights from my favorite theological authors. One author from whom I was gaining great insight was T. Austin-Sparks, a recently deceased Baptist pastor from London. Sparks communicated the “deeper life” truths in a manner that was both understandable and appealing. There was something about his writing that jumped off the pages and “spoke” to me. I don’t know how much my congregation was getting from him, but my spiritual life prospered through his books.

Both the Plymouth Brethren writers and Sparks were specially focused on the “grounds for gathering”--how a New Testament church should really function. Having come out of both the Jesus Freak and Thiemite anti-established church backgrounds, I was determined to have Berlin Community Bible Church be a “true New Testament” church. The early church had not utilized the current pastoral model. Instead, the New Testament concept of a plurality of elders flew in the face of the traditional model of the pastor as the center of authority in a local church. Although I was the central figure in our church, I hoped that time would see the development of a cadre of leadership figures of whom I would be just one.

It was hard to find books by Brethren writers such as Coates, Darby, and Stoney. Their books and Sparks’ privately published books were available through a Christian bookseller in Gaithersburg, Maryland. In the course of ordering more and more books through this bookseller, I found out that he was part of a small “gathering” of believers in Washington D.C. This group was founded by those who had participated in Sparks’ ministry in London. As I was very interested in what a true New Testament church would be like, I began to consider a visit to D.C.

In the early 80s, many of our church members found themselves out of work. Pegi had been suffering from debilitating migraines and had to stop working at Berlin Hospital. That meant that we were being supported by an ever-dwindling offering each Sunday. We had been able to run the ministry, pay the rent and survive on about $200/week in offerings, but now the average offering was sometimes as low as $5 on a Sunday. Most of the offerings were now coming from a family in our church that had a successful dairy farm, but we couldn’t keep leaning on them.

I needed some encouragement, so Pegi and I decided to give everyone a “week off” from church while we drove down to DC visit this New Testament style gathering. We would see if there was some model that we could adapt for Wisconsin that would keep us going forward without money.

Next: “Sparks” In Our Ministry