by Kerry Williams
My family is currently experiencing a full circle moment in our sons’ lives, as our youngest entered his freshman year in high school and our oldest finishes his senior year. It is only the second time they have been in the same school together, the only other time being the year our youngest started kindergarten, so they will have a shared school experience only during one's very first year and one's very last.
I am not inclined to romanticize the high school experience, but I am interested in beginnings and endings. I wonder about the difference between the times we are aware of moments of transition and the times we don’t know they’re happening. There are so many instances when we look back on our life and see the seed of a new beginning that we didn’t know was there, or sense that something is winding down and changes are coming though we aren’t sure exactly what they’ll be.
This time of parenting for me feels like I have a keen intellectual understanding of the endings and new beginnings I am witnessing, with the added sense of having no idea what this transition will look like for both my kids and for me. It perfectly parallels this season for our church. We here at Pilgrim knew that there was an ending coming a couple of years ago, as a minister’s retirement is a tangible thing, but we thought we would be celebrating that ending and a new beginning simultaneously, with maybe a hiccup or two but basically keeping on keeping on.
Little did we know that we would be spending so much time in the space in between. In between ministers, in between pandemic surges, in between economic forces, you name it!
So now we might feel a sense of relief, purpose, and maybe a healthy dose of weariness as we look for a very clear new beginning with our new minister joining our flock. But I wonder if “beginning” is the right word for our state of being at the moment. We began the transition to a new minister as soon as we started writing the profile of our church to try to capture who we were, who we are, and who we would like to become. In a process that very much mirrors adolescence, we seem to have so many different ways we could grow and a few insecurities about what our future may hold. We are starving for some guidance and yet certainly don’t want to compromise our identity and independence. Can you pinpoint the time your adolescence began and when it ended? I doubt it. We all tend to flail about for a while before we realize we’re not flailing anymore, and we don’t know exactly when that shift occurred.
I think that’s where we are during this time for Pilgrim. We are embarking on something that we know is new but we’re not sure what the journey will bring. We know what we value and we are ready to become something we haven’t fully envisioned yet. The thing we need to give ourselves right now is grace. Grace to try new things, grace to make mistakes, grace to get where we’re going in the time it may take, grace to be a little unsettled. It is an exciting time! We may not want to experience adolescence again (I know I don’t) but we can’t deny that that time of stretching and figuring things out made us who we are today. So let’s enter this time of transition as a church family with all the grace we can muster for ourselves, for the process, and for everyone else along on this journey. And maybe we can check back in this time next year to look back and see ourselves flailing just a little bit less, stronger and far more interesting for all we’ve done together.
— Kerry Williams is a member of the Minister Search Task Force
and serves as Vice Moderator for Pilgrim Church