BISHOP TIM SMITH

Life is What Happens

When Your Making Other Plans

Bishop Tim Smith

Ben did you want to write something again here....??

Life Is What Happens When You’re Making Other Plans

Written by Bishop Tim Smith

My wife Wendy and I, along with our children Matthew (2nd grade), Isaac (kindergarten), and Ruth (age 2) moved from Catawba County to Boone in 1993 when I received a call to serve Grace Lutheran Church. Boone and Grace were truly home for us. All three children graduated from Watauga High, and Wendy taught for 17 years at Blowing Rock School. In January of 2010 I accepted a call to serve Redeemer Lutheran Church in Atlanta and moved there—by myself.

The plan was for Wendy to join me that summer, finishing out her year of teaching in Boone and selling our house. With the tanked economy though, the contract we had to sell our house fell through, Wendy couldn’t find a job in Atlanta, and we were told that Ruth’s instate tuition would be in jeopardy if Wendy moved. What we had hoped to be a five-month separation actually lasted two whole years! At least Wendy got her 20 years in with the state retirement system and retired with full health benefits.

I was 50 when I went to Atlanta. Wendy teases me that it was my mid-life crisis. I tease her that it could have been much worse! All teasing aside, I had almost gone to Redeemer in 2006, but decided not to since we had two children still in high school. At the time, Wendy told the Call Committee, “The timing just isn’t good for our family. If this were three years from now it would be a different story.” Well, the pastor who went to Redeemer left after 16 months, and they contacted me again almost exactly 3 years later and asked if I would consider a call now! This seemed to me more than mere coincidence, given what Wendy had told them. With much trepidation, and yet grieving our empty nest and figuring that I had one good call left in me, I accepted the challenge of being the Senior Pastor of a large urban church.

Redeemer had 3,000 members when I arrived, but they were struggling due to the economic downturn. When I arrived, the budget was exactly $1 million less than the previous year. Hundreds of people had left in the conflict surrounding the previous pastor’s short tenure as well as due to other conflicts in the larger denomination of the ECLA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America).

“What have I done?” Still, as in almost every congregation, there were really good, faithful, supportive people who stepped up to help me find places to live, and slowly but surely, to begin to change the culture. More participation of children and youth in worship. Communion every Sunday. Continuing to find ourselves by losing ourselves in service to the less fortunate. The economy helped, too. We were beginning to grow. We had, relatively speaking, immense resources, great staff, and incredibly gifted, faithful, and generous members. By the time Wendy moved down at the end of 2012, we were turning some corners! We started a new preschool, sent 11 people to seminary, including 9 through our contemporary House of the Rock worship, and started a new ministry called Atlanta Beer and Hymns! Yes, a bar church. We figured if we couldn’t get millennials to come to where we were and do what we were doing, we would go to them!

All this time I felt like God really was calling me to be in this place. I felt that I was the right person at that time to be a bridge between the very traditional and formal Redeemer culture and the need to be church in new and different ways to address a changing and decreasingly-churched culture. Meanwhile, Wendy was very happy for three years in her job teaching Middle School in a Catholic School. We finally bought a house in Atlanta in late 2013. We assumed we would come back to North Carolina to retire.

Then, in late May of this year, I got a call from the NC Lutheran Synod Assembly in Greensboro. They were electing a new bishop after the 18-year tenure of Leonard Bolick (now back in the High Country in the Blackberry community). The process was the ancient “ecclesiastical ballot”--a blank piece of paper on which each of the 650 present write one name of one ELCA pastor from anywhere. The top 7 are invited to speak to the Assembly. Though some had told me they would write my name, I was shocked to be in second place! I had to decide at that point whether to leave my name on the ballot.

I really wasn’t ready to leave Redeemer, as I felt we were finally poised to do proactive rather than reactive ministry. If you leave your name in at that point, you can’t take it out later. The NC Synod, though, was my home, and their need for leadership combined with the fact that both my and Wendy’s parents and all of our adult children live in NC, led me, assuming I wouldn’t be elected anyway, to leave my name in. On the fifth ballot, I was elected—barely—as bishop for a 6-year term. We moved to Salisbury, NC, where I began my term on August 1.

What does a bishop do? I “oversee” the affairs of all the ELCA congregations and professional leaders in NC. I lead worship in a different congregation almost every week, I oversee the call process for congregations needing a pastor or pastors needing a church. I manage conflicts and I help raise up and guide candidates for ministry. I also go to lots of meetings, dedications, ordinations, anniversaries, and homecomings. I’m still learning! What is abundantly clear is that God continues in each of us to work in unexpected ways. Someone said, “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.” God’s call, for all of us, works that way, too. It would only stand to reason for those who believe that Jesus is risen from the dead that God is still alive, still creating, still calling forth. I encourage you to keep your eyes open and pay attention also. It’s likely that God is on the verge of doing a new thing in and through you! ssential. ...

Written by Bishop Tim Smith