(Admin's Note: On behalf of our team here at Bring Back The Burning Bush, please allow me to apologize in advance for the dearth of posting over the next week. We have entered that time of spiritual and literal testing known as finals week, and we will all be too busy praying for grace to post until after it's over. To tide you over, I've reposted a blog I wrote on my personal site for the UMC Young Clergy last August - I considered updating some of the references since nearly a year has passed, but I thought it might be more informative in its original state. See you on the other side! - Kate)
My name is Kate Mackereth, and I am a certified candidate for ordination in the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the UMC. I am 22 years old, white, female, and belong to Christ United Methodist Church. Christ UMC is a contemporary, multiracial, theologically conservative congregation just outside the city limits of Frederick, MD. For 20 of the 22 years this congregation has been in operation, we worshipped at Ballenger Creek Middle School, next door to our current property. While attending Messiah College, I worshipped at First United Methodist Church in Mechanicsburg, PA, an 1800-member liturgical congregation. While at First, I served for 18 months as Service Director for their (at that time) new evening contemporary service, U-Turn. At CUMC, I have been active most recently as a worship leader and youth leader.
There were, as I can recall, two important events in my discernment process, which began seven years ago. The first was my decision to attend, and later to join the leadership team, at First UMC in Mechanicsburg. It was a congregation different in almost every way from my home church, including the presence on staff of associate pastor Lucretia Hurley-Browning. My home church would not receive its first woman pastor for another year, and the transition could charitably be described as rocky. However, Lucretia had been on staff at First for five years, and I was able to witness for the first time a woman pastor ministering to a congregation successfully, something I was unsure I would be able to do at that time. Lucretia’s example and guidance over the 2 years I attended First Church was invaluable in helping me to accept not only God’s call for my life, but also His call to ordination. I also received great support and encouragement from the entire U-Turn leadership team, including Rev. Mike Minnix, Ed Geiger, Charlie Renner, Lorette DeWalt, Allison Ometz and their families. The good people of First Church gave me my first real responsibilities in leadership and were always supportive of me in anything I chose to do. That support gave me the freedom to really test the limits of my event-planning, worship-leading and organizational skills, and I discovered that I had a talent for administration.
The second event which confirmed my call to ministry was my visit to Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. I grew up near DC and had always loved the city, but I had no real intention of going to graduate school so close to home and no definite plans to attend graduate school at all when I visited the seminary. But from the moment I arrived on campus, I knew that not only was I going to go to graduate school, but I would be a student at Wesley. The class I sat in on held my attention in a way that no lecture class has ever done; the stories I heard from other students at lunch convinced me that this would be a place where I could explore my call and my beliefs publicly without the censure I had earned for doing so with others in the past. I move to WTS in just a few days, and I am so excited to begin the next part of this insane journey to ordination.
My theological standpoints have changed radically in the year since I formally entered the ordination process. Where I would have self-identified before as a mainstream, middle-of-the-theological road Christian, I now identify myself with pride as a liberal Christian feminist (much to the chagrin of some of my former fellow-congregants at CUMC). The discernment and ordination processes have been difficult, but also freeing for me because they have allowed me to break out of what my ordination mentor calls “the box of theological origin” to discover a set of beliefs that I can finally own as mine, rather than preserve as a hand-me-down heirloom of my predecessors. I have recognized and come to appreciate the place and role of doubt in a vital and evolving faith life – doubt is the room in which God works in our minds and hearts to bring us in tune with Him. Most importantly, I’ve embraced the fact that God’s call on my life is NOT the same yesterday, today and forever – it’s as fluid and changing as my faith in Him, but always imbued with His love for me.
If I have any advice to give to those who are in the midst of or just starting out on this journey, it would be to become dumb. Forget everything you know about yourself and your beliefs, forget everything you think you know about what a good pastor or missionary or whatever looks like. Your preconceived notions about what you have been, who you want to be and what God wants you to be are going to be your biggest stumbling blocks on the road to actually figuring out all that stuff. Don’t let anyone tell you what to think, but don’t think you know what to think either – just let it all go and start fresh, with God as your goal, your desire and your guide. Good luck!
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