Letter to the Pastor of My Youth

Bro. Joe Srygley of First Baptist Church in Atlanta, Texas, where I grew up, will be honored tomorrow for thirty years of pastoral leadership at FBC Atlanta. A number of individuals who have called him pastor, especially those who have gone on to full-time ministry, have been asked to write him a letter to be included in an anthology of letters that he will receive tomorrow. The following is simply my letter to him:

Dear Bro. Joe,

I am writing to you from a desk in my Seattle apartment, gazing out of the window at thousands of homes scattered across hills and valleys, trails of chimney smoke on this cold wintry day, and a few crows chasing each other across rooftops. I am struck by the beauty of the city skyline, the Space Needle, Greenlake, and the magnificent mountaintops. It is here that I have found something far beyond what I could have imagined, a height to look out at the wonders of God around me and a depth to recognize the responsibility I have in speaking truth to the lost, tending well to what God has placed me over, and enjoying the beauty of God’s Creation in this community that I now call my home.

As I sit and gaze and write, I am thinking of you, your life and ministry, the first inklings of your calling, and the retrospective meaning-making that comes at such a time as this. I wonder what it must be like for you, gazing back, and what it must have been like when you were where I now am, gazing forward. I am writing as a celebration of what is just one of many significant milestones in a long life of faith and ministry in the service of Christ. It is not the end of your road by any measure, and, in some ways, in may provide fresh beginnings to what you’re already doing. I hope that God will bless you in this time of honor and remembrance.

I’m also writing as a way of remembering who you have been to me, as you will always be, the pastor of my youth. In all the many ways that you have influenced me, in fact pastored me, I wonder what paths I might have chosen were you not in my life. And I realize that you can probably have very little understanding of the breadth and depth of the ways that your preaching and friendship actually guided me through such critical years of my faith development.

I was born into the Atlanta community and the fellowship of First Baptist Church, and I have fond memories of attending three-year-old preschool in Mrs. Poole’s class. We moved to Carthage at the end of that year and did not move back until I was entering the fourth-grade. Our first year back, we attended First United Methodist Church, as we had attended the FUMC in Carthage. My Dad grew up Methodist, and those were the few years that we, as a family, gave it a try. In fifth-grade I was back at First Baptist Church and in for what would serve to be some of the most formative years of my life.

It was in fifth-grade that I became a pew-warmer on Sunday mornings under your preaching. I remember, above all else, one important message that kept ringing in my ears, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” It was always a theme weaved into your preaching, a fabric of grace that, first, offered me spiritual eyes to see that God was not just a theological abstraction but our Lord, present and real, and, second, initiated in me the hope and faith to know that, beyond the fact that God was good, that He loved me.

When it struck me that God was real and that He loved me and desired relationship with me, I was in a position where I could do no other but to call out to Him in faith. And, in fifth-grade, I kneeled beside my bed one night and prayed that God would forgive me of my sins against Him and cleanse me of all unrighteousness. I prayed for grace. Shortly after, I descended our stairs to tell my Mom what I had just done.

I can’t remember exactly how many times I met with you or what the interactions might have been like, but I do remember that during the next week I had the opportunity to sit and talk with you about my decision to follow Christ. I think it must be difficult, from a pastor’s perspective, to comprehend the well of emotion and spiritual heartiness that can actually lie beneath the surface of some quiet, shy kid who comes forward with such a profession of faith. But, to that child, the moment may be so chock full of meaning and destiny that his entire vocational life may be set on course by that initial experience of pastoral leadership.

This is because, in those first moments together of face to face conversation and insight, you became embedded in my consciousness as an image of grace. You shepherded me through that narrow gate. And you became, in those short but meaningful conversations the week before my baptism, something more than just an abstraction yourself. You knew me, you loved me, and you were offering to guide me as I crawled through a door that, once I was through it, became larger than life to me. Something about your pastoral guidance allowed me to lean confidently into you, and you, in the moment of allowing my fall underneath the surface of the water, were the flesh and blood that brought me out again. You were the face of Christ to me.

As we mature in faith, we can begin to lean into Christ Himself in real and meaningful ways. We begin to pray to the image of the invisible God in moments of joy and in moments of grief. We call out to our Lord in moments of solitude for no other reason than to be obedient to His calling on us to follow, so that as we move forward, we can trust that He is truly guiding us. There are times when we feel alone, and we can look back to recognize the abundance of God’s grace infused in every bit of marrow that this life offers. We come to appreciate the fact that “He works all things together for the good of those that love Him and are called according to His purposes.” But we needed a pastor to guide us there.

In the years that would follow, I would lead Bible studies for the youth group and on Thursday mornings before school, play guitar and sing in a rock band about the goodness of Christ, lead worship at a number of venues, become a leader among friends and peers in the church and the community; and, at some point, I began to look around for more guidance. I fixed my eyes on Max Fruge, Dale Perkins, Wes Chambers, and a number of other men and women to help me understand and articulate my faith. I walked alongside Aaron O’Kelley, Robert Butler, Tom Tomberlain, and others, as we began to stand strong and seek God’s hand of guidance to show us the way.

On September 14th, 1996, I came forward after speaking briefly with you and Bro. Wes with a decision to surrender myself to vocational ministry. I was only a sophomore in high school, but I had the courage to make this decision that seemed so clear to me public largely because Aaron had already publicly made his decision to do the same. Later, on October 4th, 1998, you presented Aaron and I both, on the same day, formal licenses as Christian ministers. We were only in the Fall semester of our senior year of high school.

Rewind a bit, and I find myself in my Freshman year of high school. It was the summer before that year that my brother had made a significant life-changing decision to follow Christ in a way that he had never followed before. It was, perhaps, the most significant point of repentance that he has ever experienced in his life. And, in that year, his leadership among peers had encouraged a number of others, Tom Tomberlain, David Smith, Clay May, James Piazza, and others, to make life-altering commitments to Christ and even into ministry.

And I remember at some point, probably in my sophomore year, hearing Tom Tomberlain say to some friends that he had been coming in to meet with you about once a week to talk about questions of faith and to pray with you. I remember shyly inquiring with him, “You do?” I expressed enough interest to have Tom say, “Yeah, you should come with me next week. I’m sure he won’t mind, and it’s really cool.” Something of that communication excited me at the idea that I could know you better than just the preacher at the podium or even just the pastor who had once led me to Christ. It was another turning point: I did come in to see you with Tom, and though we didn’t cover any great theological ground to speak of, I became, in that brief encounter in your office, more than just a name. You began calling out to me in the halls, “Hi Blake!” And it made all the difference in the world.

Over the course of time, I came to see you more and more, sometimes with Aaron, sometimes with Robert, sometimes alone. Once I had a vehicle of my own, I would even drop by fairly regularly either during or at the end of the school-day, especially my junior and senior year. I remember the tremendous satisfaction of dropping by to ask if I could see you. Kathy would call into you by phone to let you know I was there to see you, and, no more quickly than she had hung up the phone, you would open your door and have me “Come on in!” Sometimes this would be during your study hours when you were not to be disturbed. Somehow, on occasion, I would get special privileges to see you. Sometimes, if you were busy, I would walk around the church and visit with everyone else I crossed paths with, and, at some point, I’d be making my way back toward your office, you’d come around a corner and say, “Well, hey there Blake, I didn’t expect to see you there… Do you have a second? Come on in!”

I’m not sure what was going through your head during those times, if you knew I would want to talk with you, if, at times, you felt on edge that you had so many things to do but so very little time to do them, or if you genuinely were excited to see and talk with me, but, either way, I never knew the difference. If it was lunchtime and you had not yet eaten, you would seem in no rush to get away. If you had visits to make or studying to do, I never felt pushed out the door. And, on occasion, if Lea Etta called during our talk to ask you about lunch, you would hold the mouthpiece, ask me if I wanted to come over, and then proceed to let her know you’d be bringing me.

Of all the things I could say about your preaching and pastoral leadership at First Baptist Atlanta over the course of my lifetime, one thing has mattered most to me: that you have known me, you have called me by name, you have spoken the truth, not just from the podium, but from the shallow waters of the Mountain Fork river in Broken Bow, as we camped and fished for trout together. You let me into your world, you introduced me to your family, you watched movies with me, you had me over to spend the night, you took me camping, just the two of us, two hours away in another state, you prayed not just for me but with me. Over the course of time, you became to me not just a distant figure, and then not just a pastoral guide, but a mentor and a friend.

I am proud of this landmark anniversary that is a testament to the fiery courage and ambition that has led you to preach the Gospel amidst trial and turmoil and grief as well as joy and unity and celebration all these years. You are petros, a rock, sturdy, unwavering, consistent, trustworthy, safe, and Christlike. And, you are the embodiment of grace. You have taught me enough about sin to know that sin is real and that it corrupts our relationship with God and our purposes in the world; and, you taught me enough about grace to know that “we all sin and fall short of the glory of God,” yet that “God’s grace is sufficient for us.” That despite my sin, I need have no fear in life or death, knowing that Christ loves me through my darkest valleys and that He calls me to love others just the same.

You have been, perhaps, the most significant spiritual guide in my life thus far. Even if I’ve forgotten much of what you have spoken from the pulpit, I could never forget the images and gestures and symbols of meaning and relationship and compassion and genuine interest and laughing so hard that we had to take a few moments just to laugh.

I’ll never forget that during my first ministry position as youth-minister over at Pruitt Lake Baptist Church in Avinger, when I got docked $50.00 out of my weekly paycheck of $100.00 for every little stupid reason they could come up with to dock me, you and Bro. Wes just laughed so hard when I came back and told you that you almost cried. You shared with me your first experiences in ministry, and we all had a big laugh at the sometimes ridiculous ironies in church ministry. And remember when we brought Aaron along on a trip to Broken Bow, when he, a youth minister, kept jokingly saying how much he hated youth ministry? If anyone from the church would have overheard some of our conversations, they would have thought we were being blasphemous or that you had been drinking some of that Native American river water, but, nope, we were just having fun.

Remember when I’d stop in from ETBU to share with you about the wonder and attraction of my latest romance? As seriously and pastorally as you could have, you would share with me about the nature of love and affection, the ins and outs of your own experiences with love, and offer gentle guidance and humble insights. And then we would pray. Now, of course, you just laugh really hard at all the times I cried wolf when I thought I had met the love of my life, but, hey, that’s what friends are for.

Since all that has transpired with me going off to college, then to graduate school, and then marrying Karla, to finding a life here that feels wonderfully like home and a job that is more like a vocation, our time together has diminished and mostly faded into memory. I remember a long phone conversation, not so long ago, as I walked around a cemetery near the church in Wimberley, telling you all about my recent experiences in ministry and my great hope to return to Seattle and find a position of some kind that would fulfill me and provide for our living expenses. You teased me that Karla had stolen your fishing buddy, and we still haven’t made up for the last few times that we’ve planned to make a trip to Broken Bow but haven’t.

I hope to call you sometime soon after the pomp and circumstance of the celebration for you at the church has passed to catch up and reacquaint ourselves with the nuances of our ever-changing lives. You, being a grandfather as well as a wise old (face it) elder in the Church still have ground to cover, relationships to build, ministering to do. If I could offer you anything right now in this brief time of honor, it would be the recognition of how much you mean to me and how greatly I appreciate getting to be just one of many who will ever stand so proudly in the great shadow that you cast.


Sincerely,

Blake Edwards