A Pastor's Wife Reflects, Part One

On Call Day

This week is pivotal for seminarians in my church body, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. They are candidates, or men finishing their training as pastors and ready to receive divine calls to churches and missions.¹ Last night at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, men received their calls to churches across the United States (and even one to Belize). Tonight, men from Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne will receive theirs. They will head to churches and to people they do not know, to places that are probably foreign to them, perhaps extremely so, to preach and teach the gospel of Jesus.

If it sounds straightforward, the reality is decidedly otherwise. Seminarians face life-changing circumstances this week. Sem wives, or wives of seminarians, also stand at a threshold, along with their children and extended families. I know a handful of sem wives that are waiting today, just like I was. They will relate, as will other pastors’ wives who read this, with my memories of that time.

When my husband prepared for his first call out of CTSFW in 2006, we both were very nervous. Those words don’t honestly capture the fear and trembling, the building exhilaration, the dramatic ferment of that agitating time. Back then, there were more seminarians and fewer calling congregations. Some of Jon’s classmates had to wait to receive calls—not a pleasant experience at the end of extensive and expensive seminary training (tuition was not covered for pastoral students then the way it is now). Fewer calling congregations also meant that district presidents, the gatekeepers of calls in their groups of churches, had less cause to prevent churches with problems from calling usually young, always inexperienced seminarians. They were under extra pressure to get calls for these men. Jon had been told a short time before Call Day that he would, in fact, receive a call. So we breathed a small sigh of relief about that.

Sometimes seminarians were—and still are—interviewed by churches ahead of Call Day. For instance, congregations calling associate pastors needed to make sure the current pastors would mesh with the newbies and vice-versa. But back then, most of the men would be receiving blind calls—calls to churches they’d never heard of. Jon was one of them.

Like other men in his class, my husband had filled out preferences for the placement professor to keep in mind. Would he prefer a small village, a medium-sized town, a big city? Were there geographic areas he’d prefer to live in, like the Midwest or New England or the southwest? Did he have any medical or other needs that would need to be considered?

And of course, since Jon was married, my needs and wants were considered, too. We’d spent his vicarage in Connecticut, and it had been a great experience during our first year of marriage. Would both of us want to go back? We’d lost our first baby there but hoped and prayed for more children. Where would we want to raise them? And other questions loomed large. Could I possibly continue my graduate school education or find a job that fit my current, newish bachelor’s degree skill set? Would we be open to a parsonage—a house owned and maintained by the church—or did we prefer to own our own home? And a huge consideration: how far away from parents and siblings and extended family would we be willing to live?

After a lot of prayer and discussion with me, Jon ended up putting ten different LCMS districts as number ones—as places we would definitely be willing to live.² They ranged from New England to the western great plains. It was not a small region of possibility. And we had no idea where he would go. The unknowns yawned before us, like the expansive view from a high vista, showing bottomless chasms, pleasant valleys, malevolent forests, fertile fields, tumbling and sparkling waters. What would our next life chapters hold?

Just before Call Day, I went to Walmart and bought the biggest atlas I could find to bring to the service. Smartphones hadn’t come out yet, and the atlas would be the way my parents and I could see immediately where Jon and I would be going. I suspected that we’d be in a small town, and I wanted to make sure the maps I had included even the smallest out-of-the-way hamlets. I have a picture of it somewhere; a spiral-bound monstrosity about a foot a half tall and over a foot wide, and more than an inch thick.

When we went into Kramer Chapel for the service, I was physically shaking. I was excited and apprehensive, probably near the height of my emotions. I can’t think of many other moments in our near twenty years of marriage when I felt as nervous as I did then. We were so close to finally knowing where we would end up. As others filled in around us, I sat down with my parents in a pew somewhere nearer the front. As we chatted quietly, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to see my home pastor and his wife sitting behind us. They’d driven from the church in central Ohio where I’d been confirmed and married just to be with us that night. Just thinking about their sacrifice to be there brings tears to my eyes.

Candidates file into Kramer Chapel on a recent Call Day. Source.

We made it through the early parts of the service, the liturgy and the readings and the sermon. I’m sorry to say that I remember exactly nothing specific about what I heard, only that it happened. Finally, the moment everyone had been waiting for finally arrived: the assignment of calls. The seminarians were all sitting together in the front of the chapel, and they rose by rows to stand along the wall to walk up individually to the pastor at the lectern as he called their names. “Jon C. Olson.” My husband stood there, looking remarkably composed—it’s one of his strong suits, keeping calm in basically any situation. “Pastor.” So not an associate or assistant, which wasn’t a surprise. “Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church.” A sole parish, which was good. And now the big reveal… where was this church? “Pipestone, Minnesota.”

Minnesota! I’d actually guessed that as the area we’d go when my sister and mom had questioned me a week or so before. So where in the land of lakes was Pipestone? I flipped to the index in the atlas, running my shaking fingers down the tiny lines of town names. There! I saw the grid assignment. I flipped back to the Minnesota map, my eyes trying to find the town. My father saw it first. He leaned over and with a pen, he circled Pipestone, a small town in the southwest part of the state.

I felt giddy with relief. Not that we actually knew much of anything tangible other than a church name and the name of a town that, up until that evening moment, we’d never heard of. But now we could learn, and plan, and work toward something concrete in the next months. We could settle. We could establish a home among Christians and with each other.

The atlas long ago fell apart, the pages gradually tearing away from the cheap spiral binding. I still have that piece of paper somewhere, still with my father’s circle looped around the dot and the name. It is a vestige of a now longish-ago time, a generation or more, eighteen years. But I still feel the stomach butterflies, the restlessness of not knowing, and the shimmering glow of finding out where God wanted my husband to serve, and thus where we would be together, all in the remembering of that night.

I thought I knew a decent amount about parish life before Jon received his call. The truth was that I did and I didn’t. Every church holds similarities. My family had moved a fair amount in my youth, and I had a trove of memories of three distinct Lutheran churches we’d attended, all with faithful pastors, loving members, Jello and other predictable salads at potlucks. But every church is also different, in ways that show the variety of God’s blessed creations as well as of sinners and their sin.

Call Day is extraordinarily special for seminarians and their wives and families. So are the times that follow it. Stay tuned for thoughts on that soon.

And I will give you shepherds according to My heart, who will feed you with knowledge and understanding.

~ Jeremiah 3:15

1. If you want a deep dive into what a divine call is, and more specifically how various the definitions of it can be, take a look at this paper. No, I haven’t read the whole thing and so no, I’m not signing off on everything in it. Thanks to Pr. Brian Thorson for the updated link here.

2. You can see an LCMS Region and District Map here.