Retirement

Retirement means different things to preachers than it does to laypeople. For the layperson, retiring means that you get to stop doing what you have been doing for many years. For the preacher, it means not doing all of the things you've been doing for many years. One old retired pastor in Kansas City I knew years ago said that retirement was great – you got to preach and teach Bible study as much as you wanted, and you didn't have to go to any church meetings. For many pastors, that truly is a blessing, no longer having to sit through meetings, or wonder what the voters meeting is going to come up with next.

It's probably a good idea to think of it not so much has retiring from job, but rather cutting back on some of the activities you been doing in the past. After all, if the job of the preacher is to proclaim Christ, how do you go about retiring from that? If the job of the preacher is to be an example of Christian living to the flock, how do you go about retiring from that?

I got to thinking about all this after I got the phone call earlier this week that I was being put on a call list. Now I don't know whether I will actually be put on that call list, and I have some very large doubts that any congregation would call an older man, but I have to admit that if I received a call, I would have to think about it very seriously. I wonder what it would do for my health, and what it would do for my wife. Thankfully, though, I really don't have to think about it much, because, after all, it is in God's hands. If he decides to extend the call to me to another congregation, I'll think about it when it happens. Until then, like Luther's comment about what he'd do if he knew the world were ending (he'd still do his duty), I still have trees to plant.