Ponder anew what the Almighty can do

Three years of ordained ministry is not what I expected

It’s my ordination anniversary today. Three years of ordained ministry.

Three years ago, on the morning of my ordination, we heard the news that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had secured the 2020 election. 

After rejoicing with my family over cinnamon rolls, I met the Senior Minister of the church where I served at a cemetery to assist in presiding over a graveside funeral for a woman I had never met but whose daughter I dearly loved. It felt like a very ordained ministry thing to do.

Then I drove over to the church where I worked and where I would be ordained to meet a host of pastors and should-be pastors. We chatted and longed to hug but couldn’t because we were all masked and the vaccine wasn’t out yet and we were all deathly afraid of getting sick or getting someone else sick. 

My family arrived. My daughter, only two and a half at the time, climbed all over me during the service. It was wonderful.

My best friend, Nicole, played the piano and sang. Here’s a list of the songs we sang.

Two of the best people presided at the table for communion: Pastor Eddie Sharp and Should-Be Pastor Annette Sharp. 

One of my dear friends, Brooke, drove up from Austin to read scripture. 

A pastor and mentor of mine, Rev. Dr. Katie Hays, preached on Matthew 25:1-13, the parable of the bridesmaids, keeping watch for their beloved. And she borrowed from the prophet Habakkuk to further this motif of keeping watch:

“I will stand at my watchpost,

And station myself on the rampart;

I will keep watch to see what the LORD will say to me,

And what the LORD will answer

Concerning my complaint.”

–Habakkuk 2:1

Here is an excerpt from that sermon:

“The kingdom of heaven, Jesus said, requires someone out there, staring through the darkness toward the horizon, waiting for the beautiful, bloodied feet of the runner who sprints toward the city from the battlefield, gasping for breath, shouting in a raspy voice that it is won, that it is done, that a new day dawns soon – not yet, but soon – and what a shame if no one is there to receive the missive!...

But that won’t happen, not even in Jesus’s story, because he has imagined us into it – we, the watchers, we, the impatient prophets pacing the ramparts, we, the shouters. “As the bridegroom was delayed,” Jesus said, “all of them became drowsy and slept. But at midnight there. was. a. shout. ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’”

And who is that shouting, if not old Habakkuk on the wall? Who is there to shout, but those gifted and called for Christian ministry? Who else calls the church awake, announces that our Lord is coming, issues an urgent invitation to come out and meet him? Who else sounds the alarm for the church to wake up and move? If not us, who? If not you, Ashley, who? The bridesmaids do not wake themselves up. Somebody has to make some noise!

So will you let us ordain you to that?”

I said, “With God’s help, I will.”

Earlier this year, I left the church where I served for three and a half years (two of those as their Senior Minister). It was a decision fraught with anxiety and advice-seeking, though I now see that it was a decision that came out of a refinement of my own vocational call to ministry. 

Since then, I’ve taken a hiatus from church in general in order to rest, to heal, and to have a baby. I’ve fielded questions from well-meaning professors about preaching and church work. I’ve spent Sunday mornings at the pool, or the park, or my living room.

All of this while wringing my hands over my identity as a pastor.

Am I a real pastor if I don’t pastor a church?

Intellectually, I know the answer is yes. I know that pastoring is not limited to the confines of a brick-and-mortar congregation or a job description given by a local church. And technically, with the way my denomination’s ordination guidelines work–I am still an ordained clergyperson. 

But on a deeper, existential level, I’ve struggled in part because the realization of the call to ministry came fairly recently in my life. 

Looking back, I know now that I was called to ministry as a teenager, but because I grew up in a tradition that did not ordain women, I didn’t have vocabulary for what that call would look like. My answers to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” were always something along the lines of missionary, pastor’s wife, or some future version of Beth Moore.

But over time, through different rumblings, I found my way to seminary. 

And then I entered the ordination process.

And then I became a pastor of a church.

My thirteen-year-old self could not have imagined this life–there was no language for it for her.

So in my agonizing over leaving my church, there was a sense that I had come all this way, I had finally made it, and now I was leaving. I was letting 13-year-old me down. After all that work, after that painful, arduous journey to ordained ministry, I was stepping away from congregational ministry and giving it all up.

That’s certainly one way to frame this story, and it’s a frame through which I looked often over the months I considered leaving.

But then right around the time I left, I listened to Anne Helen Peterson’s podcast, Work Appropriate, in which she interviewed Dominique Baker, who is in academia at SMU. And Baker talked about her journey in academia–specifically when her goals diverged from the institution’s goals for her.

She said that at some point in her career, she had to shift her mindset. She had to decide that her work would be focused on her goals, not on fulfilling the track laid out for her by academia (i.e. tenure and all the things one must do to obtain it), so that if the things she did and worked on fulfilled her goals, but not academia’s, she was still satisfied. 

And I couldn’t help but think about being a pastor in today’s church.

I went to a progressive seminary that educates in postmodern theology, racial justice, sexual and gender identity, power dynamics, and class. 

Yet in some ways, it’s still an old institution preparing us to serve an even older institution.

I graduated seminary in May 2020 and was ordained later that year. I graduated from high school in 2008, right as the recession hit. My generation’s view of the world is jaded, to say the least. 

For me, what the pandemic laid bare with church is that the institution is groaning to be delivered. Serving as the new Senior Minister at a church during a dangerous time in community health and in a time fraught politically, even and especially within my own church walls, made me step back and evaluate the efficacy and credibility of the current iteration of church as we know it. 

It also made me reevaluate my own work within it. 

As I’ve talked about on TikTok, I struggle as someone who has deep, stained glass wounds myself, who is also working within and for an institution that is responsible for those wounds and so many others. 

When people say they can’t return to church, I have not been very evangelistic about trying again because I get it.

How do you work within a system that feels increasingly out of touch and outdated? 

That builds shrines to the past? 

That writes its own mythology of its good?

That worships the image it has built for itself?

What, if anything, is there to be done?

My departure and hiatus have been a chance for me to step back and regroup. To take the long view. To look at it from another angle.

And hopefully, to see myself and how I am reflected back. 

I wanted to be the church’s darling, the up-and-coming pastor with sharp-edged sermons and no-nonsense, compassionate care. But how much of that desire was given to me and how much of it was my own? 

I became burnt out trying to do church a certain way, to be a certain kind of pastor, to serve in a certain approximation of church.

I’m not so certain anymore.

I’m not sure where I fit in the church as an ordained minister who feels a call to church work (to preaching in particular), yet feels so disillusioned and hurt. And tired.

Earlier in this hand-wringing season of vocation, I wondered if I was being unfaithful by not doing church work. Had I “put my hand to the plough” and looked back?

Was I unwilling to plant seeds in a garden in which I’ll never see the blooms?

But I would be remiss to gloss over the fact that I am a clergywoman. There is a burden on clergywomen (and trans and nonbinary folks) that is not there for men, as I’ve seen over and over again trying to explain my fatigue to older men in my denomination as they pat my head. 

Consider how the country, the culture, and the church have depended on women’s emotional labor to survive. Consider how women are responsible for invisible labor, for caretaking, and then consider how that gets muddied in church work. 

It is a particular kind of exhausting to educate the people one pastors about sexism. 

Even after I left my church and plunged into different kinds of ministry work, I felt a vocational floating. I was trying to locate myself on the geographical landscape of faith.

And as I’ve reflected on the past three years of ordained ministry this week, I realize that perhaps I don’t need to locate myself geographically. 

Because no matter where I serve, I am on the rampart. 

That’s the work of this vocation, isn’t it? 

To keep watch and then tell of what I see. 

And where I am today is where my ordination vows have led me. 

I now work in a pediatric hospital as a chaplain. I pastor on TikTok. I write here on Substack. 

My work of keeping watch and telling what I see to the church has made me restless and resistant. It has made me say things to the church at large that are important and things I can’t help but say. 

Because it is what I see. Up here on the rampart, keeping watch. 

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