Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor (eBook)

PREFACE

S ome pastors, mightily endowed by God, are remarkable gifts to the church. They love their people, they handle Scripture well, they see many conversions, their ministries span generations, they understand their culture yet refuse to be domesticated by it, they are theologically robust and personally disciplined. I do not need to provide you with a list of names: you know some of these people, and you have been encouraged and challenged by them, as I have. Some of them, of course, carry enormous burdens that watching Christians do not readily see. Nevertheless, when we ourselves are not being tempted by the green-eyed monster, we thank God for such Christian leaders from the past and pray for the current ones.

Most of us, however, serve in more modest patches. Most pastors will not regularly preach to thousands, let alone tens of thousands. They will not write influential books, they will not supervise large staffs, and they will never see more than modest growth. They will plug away at their care for the aged, at their visitation, at their counseling, at their Bible studies and preaching. Some will work with so little support that they will prepare their own bulletins. They cannot possibly discern whether the constraints of their own sphere of service owe more to the specific challenges of the local situation or to their own shortcomings. Once in a while they will cast a wistful eye on “successful” ministries. Many of them will attend the conferences sponsored by the revered masters and come away with a slightly discordant combination of, on the one hand, gratitude and encouragement and, on the other, jealousy, feelings of inadequacy, and guilt.

Most of us—let us be frank—are ordinary pastors.

Dad was one of them. This little book is a modest attempt to let the voice and ministry of one ordinary pastor be heard, for such servants have much to teach us.

Sporadically across a ministry that spanned almost six decades, Dad kept journals. There is almost nothing from the first twenty-five years (roughly 1933–1959); most of the journals belong to 1959–1992. Yet these latter documents sometimes comment with perceptive retrospection on Dad’s memories of the early years. Even in the years covered by the journals, Dad sometimes went for a block of time without recording anything. At other times he recorded nothing more than the mundane details of his ordinary ministry: his sermon preparation, lists of people he visited that day, mundane duties of administration, his prayer lists, picking up the kids from school—that sort of thing. And sometimes he carried on for pages of self-reflection, confession, addressing God through his words on the page in heart-wrenching intercession. Certainly he never expected any of his lines to be published: he wrote as a matter of self-discipline, to hold himself accountable. He was not trying to write classic devotional literature.

In addition to his journal, he penned thousands of pages of sermon notes. Ever the pack rat, he kept all the letters he received, and copies of many of the letters he wrote. After Dad had left this life, my brother Jim sent me all the files, and I found every letter I had ever sent home—two or three thousand pages. And clippings: Dad kept envelopes and files and scrapbooks of clippings from newspapers and other publications, trying to keep abreast of what was going on, not only in his own patch but, selectively, throughout the world.

At one point I wondered if there was enough worthy material in the journals to make a book. In that case, these “memoirs of an ordinary pastor” would have been using the word memoirs in the sense that the plural form usually enjoys: the work would have been autobiographical, and I would have merely edited it. You would have had before you Dad’s “take” on his ordinary ministry. But frankly, the journals as a whole do not lend themselves to publication. Large chunks of his life and service would not have been accounted for—and in any case, countless pages do not merit wide circulation. So eventually I decided to make this book an amalgam. I have tried to weave together some of the material in Dad’s journals (“memoirs” in the narrow sense) with memories and reports from other people (what a “memoir” often refers to in the singular). My brother and sister have sent along several pages of their own memories and reflections; the churches Dad served have loaned me their records; trusted friends in Québec have advised me what books and essays I should read to remind myself of the time and place when and where Dad served.

Sometimes I have appealed to his letters, especially in the early years of his ministry when he was not keeping a journal. Where I have done so, I have usually masked the names of those who wrote or those who received letters from Dad by using their initials, for some of these folk are still alive, and certainly most of their children are. Occasionally I have edited these materials in order to correct obvious mistakes (typos and the like), but I have taken care not to change the meaning. When I have inserted an asterisk beside the date, it is to indicate that I have not included everything Dad wrote for that date, but only part of it.

So this is not a critical biography. If it were, I would have included much more about Dad’s ancestry, far more factual details of his ministry, a full account of his wife and our Mum, prolonged probing of the social and historical circumstances of his life and service, more theological probing of his thought, and an attempt at a critical evaluation of his life. But my aim is much more modest: to convey enough of his ministry and his own thought that ordinary ministers are encouraged, not least by the thought that the God of Augustine, Calvin, Spurgeon, and Piper is no less the God of Tom Carson, and of you and me.

Three more brief explanations will set the stage. First, the bulk of Dad’s ministry was in French Canada. That is a foreign culture to many readers in the English-speaking world; so in the first chapter I’ve tried to fill in at least a few of the details needed to make Dad’s vision and passion coherent. In the first half of the twentieth century, Québec was the most Roman Catholic “nation” in the world, if that can be assessed by the per capita numbers of priests and nuns it sent out as Catholic missionaries to other countries. Evangelical witness was extraordinarily difficult. Between 1950 and 1952, Baptist ministers spent a total of eight years in jail for preaching the gospel (though the charge was inevitably something like “inciting to riot” or “disturbing the peace”). By contrast, today Québec is astonishingly secular, even anti-clerical. Dad’s life spanned the years of dramatic change—though rarely at the time did Dad or other ministers fully grasp the significance of the changes through which they were living.

Second, Dad’s journals were written sometimes in English, sometimes in French. English prevails in the early years of the journals; the final years are mostly in French. Sometimes Dad would switch from one language to the other in the middle of a sentence, or back and forth several times in the middle of the day’s entry. Here, of course, everything has been put into English. Beginning his ministry when he did, inevitably his English Bible was the King James Version; his French Bible was the less outdated Louis Segond Version of 1910. Neither is widely used today, but in deference to Dad’s historical and cultural location, I’ve preserved the KJV for Dad’s Bible quotations, unless he himself departs from the older versions. I have, of course, translated the rare snippets of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin.

Third, I have decided to refer to Dad as Tom (as all his friends called him) in the ordinary course of this book, and to Mum (that’s the dominant Canadian spelling where British influence prevails) as Marg or Margaret (Dad often called her “my dear” but commonly addressed her or referred to her as Marg; he sometimes wrote of her as Margaret). The exception will be when I am talking about family matters. Then they will become “Dad” and “Mum” again.

My thanks to my sister Joyce and my brother Jim for their anecdotes, suggestions, and criticisms. Heartfelt appreciation goes to Michel Lemaire for providing me with important materials that I would have had to spend a lot more time gathering myself. It would be unthinkable to finish this Preface without expressing gratitude beyond measure to Église Baptiste de Montclair and its two pastors during the final years of Dad’s life, viz. the brothers André and Pierre Constant. I know full well that these men and many others feel indebted to Dad. All I can say is that they and the church they served discharged the debt full well in the love and support they provided him during Mum’s eight-year descent through Alzheimer’s and in his final three years of living on his own. For you see, he was never on his own. God displayed his great love for him in the church’s faithful care, making sure the chores around the house got done, even encouraging him in his return to preaching, visiting, and counseling again, at the age of seventy-eight.

At the risk of saying too much prematurely, I end this Preface with two observations. The first is that Dad’s “glass half-empty” awareness of his failures and inadequacies rarely aligns with the view of him taken...