This is Ben and this is Keith and this is Main Street Lutherans. And today we're going to have a little bit of conversation around the question of what happens when the pastor isn't there. And this isn't about, you know, when you're in the hospital, when you wish that they would come to visit you or, you know, you thought they were going to come to your kid's high school graduation party.

And it's not about ghosts in the church either.

Right.

Right now we are recording this not long after Halloween. Right.

It is about what happens in Sunday worship or in pastoral ministry in your congregation when your pastor is absent on vacation or continuing education or you're between pastors in your, in your church.

Well, they don't. You don't take vacations, do you?

Well, we only work one day a week, so why would we.

That's right, yeah. So how do you take vacations? You even took a sabbatical for that matter.

Yeah. And you know, and I'm, I was at that time in the position of being an associate pastor and part of a pastoral team of two full time pastors on staff. And so, yeah, I had a three month sabbatical a couple of years ago and, and my colleague Kevin Shively covered, you know, about 90% of that time just on his own. You know, he was the one in worship. I think he had one Sunday when he was away during that, that summer and he had some other time off, but during the week. But by and large he was just present and just did it all on his own for those three months. He had sabbaticals as well. He had a different sabbatical model every three years. He got a month off and, and for that month I would just be a solo pastor. And it was during the summer, you know, when things are a little quieter and it just kind of worked out.

And you have a deacon and retired pastors in the congregation, so you've got some resources.

Yeah, yeah, I'm. Now I'm, now I'm a solo pastor. There is a deacon on staff, so I'm not a solo roster leader. But of course there's differences between deacons and pastors. And as far as worship goes, that, that pretty much comes down to being able to preside at sacraments. And so, you know, for example, right now Deacon Margaret is about to go on maternity leave. And yeah, the next couple of months I will be without that backup resource for me as pastor of St. Matthew.

So are you going to play the organ?

I am not.

Okay.

But yeah, so her father, who is our assistant director of music and our organist, her due date is the day of my installation service. She has said that she will not be here, and her dad has said, yeah, and I'm not going to be there either.

Acapella.

Yeah. So I've got a. A dear friend who is also an excellent organist and used to play here at St. Matthew, and he's going to come back and play for that service.

So there you go.

Although Steven's still kind of holding out. He's like, maybe if she delivers a couple days early, I could still come and play for the service. But we're all like, no, that's not gonna happen.

Awesome. So if I remember right, Carla Christopher was. When she was on our podcast, she was filling in for a congregation in Delaware and their synod, the Delaware, Maryland Synod, offered sabbatical time to congregations with solo pastors.

Yeah.

So that's one way to get vacation. And if you're not familiar with sabbatical, that's when usually there's a purpose to the leave. So you may, like in a university setting, a professor may go off to write a book for a few months and they get paid leave to do that, and someone comes in to take on their responsibilities. And I think when you took yours, you'd applied for money from the. The Lily fund.

Yeah. Yeah.

Happens a lot.

I didn't get it right. So my. Yeah. So my focus changed. Right. And Lily, they. Actually, their focus is, for the pastors is considered purely rest and rejuvenation. But, yeah, I know lots of pastors that take the more. Maybe not an intensely academic form, but, you know, take that sabbatical time to pursue some sort of study that would edify their ministry. You know, maybe it's to interview other pastors in similar settings or different settings to learn about, you know, where the church might be going in the future.

So that is to say that. That there are some. There are ways for a congregation to be able to do this without it impacting the finances of the congregation and having to pay two pastors at once.

Right.

To the vacation time.

Yeah. Since the sabbatical is paid leave, you've got to be able to pay that pastor, even though it feels like you're paying them to not do their job.

But your regular vacation time, is that standard across the synod that you're in or the church at large, or is it negotiated individually?

So I think the minimum recommended salary for pastors, at least in our synod, and maybe it's pretty common across the elca, is Four weeks. Four weeks minimum vacation time per year for full time roster leaders and St. Matt's does that. This setting actually has a unique add on to that. They give a four day weekend each quarter. So. So I get four weeks vacation which includes four Sundays and then these four four day weekends. I'm actually getting ready to take a four day weekend this weekend. And so yeah, St. Matthew is going to have a supply pastor for the weekend. Now she's a member of the congregation, but she's agreed to fill in and preach and preside this Sunday for both of our services.

Awesome. Well, that segues us right into talking about what supply means and the different forms of that.

So you've done some supply preaching lately? Quite a bit.

I'm doing a whole lot more coming up. So if, if you happen to have a church in southeast Michigan, I probably don't have time to supply before the end of the year. Honestly, actually I don't. I know that for sure.

If you're in Southern California, he might try to make it happen.

That's right. January would be great. We'll need to work with the bishop though somehow. Yeah. So yeah. So part of the reason that we're talking about this is that in our conference, which is like a cluster, if you have clusters instead of conferences, a subdivision of the synod, it has a dean conference. Dean. Our synod is made up of six congregations. One of those congregations finally just called a pastor after a few years of being sort of, sort of interim. They had an interim for, for a while and then had a dedicated supply pastor who's a retired both pastor and assistant to the bishop. But they just, they just installed that pastor I think two weeks ago. And then as she was coming on two of the other congregations. So this is, this is three out of the six. Two other congregations had pastors leave, one retired and one went to another congregation in the synod. And so those were not announced very. With much space between them. So, so it was sort of, I think one gave a month and the other one maybe a few weeks. Just like a couple weeks. Because you keep those things fairly quiet. By the way, the call of a pastor from one church to another usually rubs some people wrong along the way. And so, you know, good HR practice is not to talk about these things until they're done. But, but it's also good for. Well, sometimes it's good for community, sometimes it hurts anyway. But so, so we've got these two congregations that needed supply pastors and interims very quickly. Right. And, and so Pastor Jack, who had Just been working and a lot of people that listen to the show know Pastor Jack. So he was at Faith.

He's like the one guest, guest contributor that we haven't actually had on the air yet. We just talk about him a lot.

Yeah, yeah, he comes up a lot. He knows everybody. So he was filling in at Faith for about a year and now he's filling in at St Philip in Trenton most weeks, I think. And when he can't do it, they're calling me. And when St. Paul in Dearborn, Michigan is, they're trying to get an interim established and they don't have that yet, so I'm getting the call there. So I'm dealing with a couple different congregations. I'm preaching to them and in their interim, when they should be in an interim phase, or I guess they are in an interim phase, they just don't have an interim pastor. And so a lot of folks don't, even though they've been in these churches for a long time, they don't really understand that if I'm there to preach on Sunday, I'm not their pastor. And I'm not a pastor anyway because I'm a license lay minister or a synod authorized minister. And so I'm not supposed to be called a pastor, but people do. But so they assume that I will do the things in between. And so that's sort of why it seems good for us to give an idea of this. The other part is that if you are one of our listeners who is just joining the elca, if a church has hurt you in the past and you've trusted a pastor and they go on leave or they take another call, we want to give you the assurance of what might be happening as far as who's in front leading the service and how the church might function while a pastor is gone for temporary or permanent leave for whatever reason. So. Yeah, so that's why we're getting started on this.

Yeah. So. Right. I can see how folks, especially in your situation, you know, you're coming in preaching on a Sunday and they might.

And several Sundays in a row.

Yeah, yeah. And then they're wondering like, hey, you know, my, my spouse is going in for surgery next Wednesday. Can you come into the hospital and, and pray with her beforehand or, or, or afterwards and visit and you're in the position of saying, no, that's not, unfortunately, that's not my role. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or other things. You know what, you know, like why, why do we keep having people switch? So I guess the, the first way to start is, is when a church has a pastor leave retirement or moving to another congregation. Interims.

Right.

That's, that's what we're always aiming for with the church. Because that transition from one pastor to the next can. I don't know that it's ever a short process. It's never like two weeks.

No, no, generally. Generally not.

I guess if there was a intern that was, the pastor was placed there for a full time position as a solo pastor because that happens more and more often, it seems. Right. They would have an end date and they would transition somebody new in right away.

Yeah.

You know, if, if they were going to continue having an inter. Or if they were. Yeah, if they were lucky, an intern. Right.

Worked out that way. Yeah. I know one congregation that did a transition similar to the one I just went through where, where the associate, the, the senior pastor retired. The associate pastor was called to become the new senior pastor. And they did that within a matter of about two months. You know, here at St. Matthew we did it in six months. Four.

Four. Yeah.

And. And that seemed pretty quick. So this other place did it, you know, in half that time. But they, that's just, that's how they planned it. They arranged it that way. But yeah, most of the time in interim, you know, I think like a year is kind of the shortest that anybody expects, expects an interim to last. And it's probably much more likely to be 18 to 24 months. I think is a fairly typical interim process. And the thought behind that is that, you know, you've got a pastor who leaves and you know, kind of sidestepping for a moment the circumstances as to why they've left and assuming that it wasn't, you know, under some sort of turmoil. But you know, maybe they just retire. Retired, maybe their spouse took a job in a different part of the country, they had to move, whatever it might be. You know, you're going to go through the process of finding a new pastor and that's going to take some time because there's a lot of paperwork involved. You know, there is not a dearth of available clergy in just anywhere that you happen to be in the country. And so that's going to take some time. So the idea of the interim pastor is to fill that gap, to come in and whether they're full time or part time, they're at least a presence, at minimum of anything that's going to be called an interim situation. They're going to be a presence on Sunday in at least some capacity during the week, whether that's to be a part of council meetings or visit shut ins or people in the hospital, whatever that might be. That's going to be kind of the minimum. And then, you know, more than that, perhaps they are like a full time pastor in that, that place for a year or two. And maybe they're doing everything, you know, attending all the meetings, seeing all the shut ins, leading all the Bible studies, helping with vbs and confirmation and all of that. But then once that, once that next permanent pastor is called the interim is, is done and they depart. And sometimes they are what's called or thought of as a trained interim pastor. That's what they do. And so they've got all the pastor, they've got all the education of a pastor and they're also trained in what it means to take on these short term commitments in congregations. And there's a, you know, it's a special skill set to be able to come in, establish relationships, be there, be present, be effective, and then, and then leave in fairly short order. You know, 18 months, two years is not a very long time.

And then another, you know, we, we often say that, you know, all people are broken. Right. And, and because congregations are made up of people, all congregations are broken in some way.

Sure.

As perfect as we may look on the outside or feel on the inside, there's always a problem of some sort and it's always good to get, be able to fix that. It's very difficult for someone new coming in to try to fix those things.

Right.

And so an interim can, can do some of that if they're specially trained to do it.

Yeah. And oftentimes they have that, that extra education or experience of having just done this before that, you know, let's say, let's say the last pastor didn't leave under ideal circumstances. Maybe there was some sort of, I don't know, fraud or some sort of scandal in the congregation financially or an affair, you know, with a member of the congregation or something. And so that pastor lives under less than ideal circumstances and there's going to be, you know, hurt and pain and mistrust and rumors and all kinds of stuff that are the fallout of that. Because you know, like you just said, we're human, we make mistakes. And a good interim pastor, a well trained interim pastor and an experienced interim pastor can help process some of that grief and hurt and leave the congregation more ready to accept the next called pastor and give them the space and freedom to do their job with some of that baggage cleaned up and healed as, as best as can be done in a little while. So that's.

Yeah. And we'll get into the call process in another episode that, that deserves at least one episode there.

Yeah, yeah. Because it's, it's, you know, my, my wife who was a psychotherapist and has worked in other kinds of fields and just, you know, you just know people and different jobs and things and like, she's like, you have a really long interview process. You know, it takes a long time to take a new call as a pastor. It's, it's a very drawn out and some, some from some perspectives a needlessly drawn out process. But you know, we feel different.

Right. But, but we all know places where it has not been long enough and things were not revealed. Sure. At the right time. So. Yeah, definitely. And the culprit or candidacy process, very similar, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. So we've got interims. That's the long term sort of fill in thing. Then we've got supply pastures, which is what I'm doing. You did a good bit of that you've talked about on the podcast too. So supply pastures are like a one day thing, right?

Can be. Yeah, it can be. You're right, it is, it's like a, it can be a one day thing or it can be a consecutive one day thing. Like some of what you describing where you've got, you know, you might come in just to preach one Sunday for a pastor who's, you know, going to be taking a vacation or you know, going to a family wedding or something on the weekend. And so that supply pastor just comes in, you know, maybe they're scheduled months in advance or maybe it's an emergency and they only found out about it three days ago. And they're gonna, they're gonna learn as best they can what worship typically looks like in that setting and, and lead it as, as close to that as they can and preach the sermon and maybe preside at the sacrament and, and get paid a stipend and then they're done and they go home and, and then maybe, maybe sometimes they come in and do that a couple weeks in a row or a few times a year. You know, it might be that a particular pastor or a particular congregation kind of gets a relationship established with this, with this supply and just says, hey, you know, whenever I'm going out of town, I try to get this same person to fill in because people seem to like them and they know the routine and, and it's just an easy fit.

Well, I'll tell you, I Mean, you know, but from a supply pastor perspective. And I. You've talked about this too on the show. Churches may do the almost exact same service, you know, same setting, but, you know, the two churches I'll be at this this month have basically the same setting. I think they're, they're both using the, the real short one that we've got in the red book. And one, the only thing that, that the assisting minister does is read the lessons. They read the lessons in the Psalm and that's it. And so the, the supply pastor reads, does the prayers of the people and you know, all the, all the blessings, all the, all the prayers. And then the other one, I'm. It feels like it changes every time. It feels like maybe the assisting minister gets to choose a little bit or someone trained different people in different ways. But, but there's a lot more. And so sometimes I stand up to do the next piece and the assisting minister is already up to the microphone to do that.

Right.

And I get to awkwardly sit down. And I think I've been there now four times. So, so I would have thought I'd understand this by now. But, but so, so, you know, it's, it's, it's interesting that way. As a supply pastor, you are a journeyman of sorts. Right. Right. Now, now, do pastors that are in congregations, you know that, that do a regular. Is is there ever a situation, I don't know of any for me, but like where a pastor supplies at another congregation and has somebody supply at their congregation that's probably not.

Really don't know of one like that because that of course, wouldn't be cost effective. Why would you, you know, you have a pastor on your staff that you're paying, but then you also play a supply pastor for that weekend so that your pastor can go and get paid by another congregation to preach there. Now, I will say this. There were a couple occasions only in the last year or two where my home church, which is not far from where I live, Glenrock, Pennsylvania, was. Is between pastors and knowing that I'm, you know, have an affinity for this place and that I was one of a pastoral team, they asked me if I was available to come down on any Sundays and preach. And I, I did that once or twice. It was just Sundays where I was not scheduled to preach at St. Matt's and Kevin was. And then I was free to go down there and he just took the service. I, I took a vacation Sunday to just going down and, and preach in Glenrock.

Yeah, but, and I guess, I guess you've got pulpit swaps where maybe two neighboring churches could swap pastors for a weekend or something like that. Yeah, yeah, I've heard that Most often when it's a clergy couple or sometimes.

Happens with like, you know, Advent or Lenten services during the, during the week.

Oh, midweek, see?

Yeah, yeah. Like a rotation around Robin sort of thing.

But those usually don't get compensation like that.

Correct, Right, Yeah.

All right.

Yeah. And then there's. There's something kind of in between an interim and a supply that at least in, in our area is called a stated supply. I don't know, Ben, if you've got a different term.

Well, that's kind of. What, what. Yeah, that's kind of what Pastor Jack was doing.

Yeah. So a stated supply is like. And that's what, that's what my home church in Glenrock was dealing with for a long time. Because they can't afford a, a pastor on staff full time anymore. But they could afford to sort of contract with this. Instead of having like a rotation of various supply pastors on a Sunday and having to schedule different ones every Sunday, they could pay some pastor, like maybe a kind of semi retired pastor, a stipend to be there to be their supply pastor every Sunday. So they would come in and do the Sunday worship and preach. But they likely weren't available for any pastoral care during the week. So they're not doing any teaching, they're not doing any hospital visits, not doing funerals, etc.

So that's kind of usually been the case for a SAM or an LLM too.

Yeah, that's kind of a middle ground where, you know, the congregation's not stuck trying to, you know, scramble and find someone to preach every weekend. They've got that taken care of. But if there is any pastoral care stuff that's going to happen during the week, they've got some other arrangement to manage that maybe the conference or cluster is cooperating with. You know, if one of those members goes in the hospital, one of the other pastors in the area comes to visit, whatever, you know.

Yeah. So how does that work?

So, yeah, I know, I know congregations, especially rural congregations, but it wouldn't be limited to just rural congregations. But let's say there's like, you know, five or six small congregations in a, let's say a school district kind of radius, you know, within 10, 12 miles of each other. Of those five or six congregations, two of them can't afford full time pastors. One of them has a stated supply who does lead worship every week but doesn't do any, any, you know, teaching or hospital visits or anything like that during the week as a material between and the other doesn't have a state of supply. They just get by with various supply pastors that they have to schedule on a weekly basis. So if one of those congregations, let's say one of their members dies, they maybe have a relationship with a neighboring church where that pastor, who is not their pastor, who doesn't preach there on Sunday and doesn't regularly do any teaching or meetings or anything like that. But if they learned that there's a funeral, they would come in and, and handle the funeral service. Or, or maybe if there was going to be a wedding, they might, they might do that. And compensation for those kinds of things are going to vary from place to place. Maybe there's an agreement of some sort. But yeah, that was the case for my mom's church. Is the case still there for a long time that if, if there's any pastoral care to be had for a member during the week, they've got a relationship with a couple of the other churches in the area that somehow they, they choose, you know, I don't know if it's. They call one other pastor and then that person just sees who's available or if they take turns or whatever it is.

Well, and certainly central Pennsylvania or even, you know, here in southern Michigan, those, those other churches in the conference are close to. They're using the same hospitals, right. In the same nursing homes and that. So they're not, they're not outside of their range. I can't imagine in Montana or Nebraska, say, that might be, it might be a pretty hefty pull to get that far out.

So, yeah, yeah, I know here in York, I've got a relationship with a couple of other pastors in solo locations who, you know, routinely when that pastor goes on vacation, they'll call me a couple of months ahead of time and say, hey, I'm going to be out of town, you know, this week and a half or two weeks. If I had any pastoral emergencies, like they've arranged for worship to be covered by someone, right. They'll say, if I've got any pastoral emergencies, you know, somebody is in a car accident or there's a funeral or something, could you handle it? And I, and I say, yeah. And very often, you know, that week or two will go by and I never get a single call. But every once in a while I've gotten a call from, say, the secretary in that church. And they say, hey, pastor, so and so said that you were available in case there was a crisis of some kind. We need somebody for a funeral. Would you be able to handle that? And, yeah, so you just work with the family and just as best you can, have that funeral service, whatever it's.

Going to look like. Yeah. So there's sometimes when a congregation can't get somebody who's ordained or they don't have some sort of licensed lay leadership like what I've got here, and in those cases, the congregation for Sunday leadership or for worship service leadership, whatever days they do that, they can use somebody who is not, that is, a layperson that is, you know, it could be council, it could be council president, could be anybody, but they would do the service of the Word. The part that we insist on having ordained people do is the sacrament of Holy Communion. The rest of the service can be done by anybody. And so that's true for our ecumenical partners, too. I have a friend who's a church secretary in an Episcopal Church, and she's got the lists of people who are doing supply for both the Episcopal Church and for the elca, and she has that list, but there are some people that are on that list that she can't have have preside over communion. And so for her congregation, they elect not to ever use people like that. But some congregations don't want it, don't need to have communion every Sunday or sometimes if a pastor gets sick, you know, and just can't be there that Sunday, they don't have many options.

Yeah. Yeah. We probably ought to say that, you know, in today, in most ELCA congregations, it's fairly standard for churches to have communion weekly on Sundays. That wasn't the case when I was a kid. Probably not when you were either, Ben.

No, that was, that was like 300 years ago, though.

Yeah. Yeah. But it's. It.

I look like Santa Claus right now, by the way.

It was a, you know, it was the practice all through, you know, the Middle Ages. Churches just have legal communion in the Catholic Churches, you know, that most of us know, still have we Communion, but for Lutherans and some other mainline Protestants, that changed at different points in history, and some have maintained having communion less often than weekly, and some have returned. And I'd say most DLCA congregations that I have contact with have weekly communion now, again, but a lot of them have a history of not having had weekly communion in, say, the last 25 years. Years, let's say.

Yeah. And when we went through the ways of the means of Grace, that was one of the things that it asked congregations to do was have communion at least weekly.

Yeah.

As often as they could.

Preference, I guess. Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, it's not required, though. And so a church can choose to do what we call a liturgy of the word or service of the Word, where there is still scripture read and prayers and. And some structured liturgy.

There can be a sermon and it.

Can be a sermon. And that may be, like you said, might be presented by a layperson.

Yeah, we don't require sermons to be given by ordained people.

Yeah. Which always kind of rubs some people weird. It's like, you know, you can say the words of communion, which are the same everywhere, but you give them the power to preach the word of God to just anybody. And that can. That can lead to some. Some rather heretical sermons at times amongst, you know, other. Other problems. But.

Yeah. Yeah.

The idea, though, is that hopefully, I think the idea in most circumstances is that if a layperson who's not been trained to preach is given that responsibility, there is some guidance, whether it's from, you know, maybe it is the pastor of that congregation who's just not going to be there that Sunday or through the Senate office, they arrange for some kind of. I don't know what to call it, super mentoring.

Well, and there are interesting ways that people do that. Sometimes instead of a sermon, they'll do a hymn sing. The church musician will take song requests.

There might be a former sermon that was delivered by a former pastor. Red. Or some sort of call classic book of sermons and just read a selection out of that. Yeah.

Or that's going back into our church history.

Yeah. I've heard people do like sort of an interactive Bible study kind of setting in that. In that moment, too, when, you know, someone sort of facilitates a conversation around what scripture readings were for the day for a few minutes.

Well, I'm reading God's Trombones right now. And what is that? James Weldon Johnson.

I've heard that. What is that one again?

Yeah, God's Trombones. It's a. It's a black. Black. It's not theology, it's black preaching.

Yeah.

So it's poets poems based on. On black sermons that were passed down year to year. You know, people. People memorized them and.

Yeah.

And did those. So. But he sort of talks about that sort of thing. So.

So that's. Locations, sabbaticals, stated supplies, interims. I served one interim. It was an interesting experience. So it was a congregation in Camphill, Pennsylvania, with two pastors and the Lead pastor was elected bishop. And so he left that call to go and serve as the synod bishop and the associate pastor. It was not unlike the situation that I just navigated. He became the interim lead pastor, and for about six months he just did the job solo. But the call process to call a new lead pastor just seemed bogged down. It was taking longer than anybody thought it should. And so the Synod was looking for someone to come on as a part time interim pastor, basically to help this guy be in two places at once so that he didn't have to lead all the Bible studies, attend all the meetings, lead all the services. And I had done, I'd been doing some supply. This is when I was between calls, was running my own business. And so I wasn't serving a congregation, but I had started doing some supply preaching in the Synod and filling in for pastors that were away on Sundays. And so I got a call from somebody in the bishop's office one day and said, hey, would you be interested in doing this part time interim? And kind of explained to me the circumstance. I said, I'm not a trained interim pastor. And they said, no, we don't need that. We just need someone to be there part time to lead some Bible studies, help with worship, preach once in a while. Okay, fine. So I started doing that and I did that for about six months. And then the guy who was the associate pastor took another call. And so now the synod is left with, all right, this congregation does not have a called pastor. They're in a call process, but it's still taking time.

The guy they've got as a part time interim doesn't really want to be the in the interim.

Well, I mean, they, they had a choice to make. They're like, we could either, we could take this guy who is not a trained interim and just make him full time. He seems to be doing okay there. I've been there six months. Like, you know, I'm getting, getting to know things a little bit.

Yeah.

Or we could bring in a trained interim and then the call process will take even longer. So, so they did, they asked me if I'd consider it and I said sure. So I became a contract interim pastor, which is what I was before. Just now I'm full time.

I'd have to come back to that because that has the potential of having conflict of interest for the bishop at that point, since it's their former congregation.

Oh, yeah, right.

But we'll talk about that when it comes to those transitions.

So I'm now the full Time contracted pastor for this congregation. I'm not available for the permanent call, but I'm the interim, and I did that for two more years. I was there, all told, for two and a half years before that was. And I only left there to come to take this, you call it, as the associate of St. Matthew. Wow. But that was a. That was an interesting experience.

Some say there's still an interim there. What's that?

Yeah. So here's the funny thing that I, you know, I would. You know, we talked about people that are trained interim pastors, and we sometimes call that an intentional interim. Someone who's there.

Yeah.

Because. Because they are there to be an interim and to do some of that maintenance and. And training of healthier congregations and trauma processing and all of that that needs.

And one of my good friends did that for a very long time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, I had to say I was a very unintentional interim. The congregation didn't mean for me to be the interim, and neither did I, and really, neither did the Senate. But.

But the way your businesses were going, it probably helped you out tremendously.

It did. It did. It was honestly, you know, it was a. It really was this, like, kind of formational time for me. You know, I had. I had left working in the church, and I don't need to dwell on this story, but I had left working in the church. I'd gone into business for myself. I was struggling with whether I wanted to be a pastor or not. And that congregation really nurtured and nursed me at least as much as I did them. And it was really. I hope that they got half as much out of that two and a half years as I did, because it really taught me a lot about myself and being a pastor. It was sort of like that. It was sort of like the. It took the place of me being a second call. Second call pastor that I, you know, that. A second career, rather that, you know, I. I became a pastor and then I took a break and went off and taught martial arts and built houses and then came back. You know, I could have done it.

The other way around.

I just gone off and, you know, going into business for myself for 15 years and then. And then decided to follow the call, but I didn't do that. And so, you know, it just. It was a difficult time for me personally, but it was also. It was formational, and I think I'm a better person and a better pastor for it, so.

Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. So this sort of bleeds us over into we're going to wrap up here. We've got some stuff to do. We're not doing a better no. I, I feel like we're, we're getting close to, we're getting close to Festivus. And I have to say I'm kind of disappointed we haven't gotten as many congregations submitted for our better know a congregation thing. So that's my, that's my Festivus decoration.

I really love to get, get some more. But yeah. So if you're listening, please submit a congregation or a senate or a Lutheran affiliated nonprofit, whatever it might be.

If you don't want to talk about your own, talk about somebody else's. Yeah. Yeah. Be nice. Be nice. We'll, we'll know if you're being nice or not. So, so that's part of it. The other thing is that this is episode 48 of Main Street Lutherans and we are going to do an Ask Us Anything for episode 50. One of the things that's become clear and this might have something to do with our, with our better know congregations thing is that we, we get a lot of messages from folks who are not caught up to the current thing. Now we know that we have hundreds of people that listen to each episode that comes out each week each, each two weeks. So there are lots of people that are listening to the current episode, but a lot of the people that interact with us are back. Most recently, one of our listeners had just listened to episode eight. And so in about two years I expect to get a note from him saying that he heard us reference him on episode 48. And so we'll get there eventually. So that's part of the reason we don't get that. But also those folks aren't sending us questions about this. So we have questions about, we do have, have a number of questions, some about why we do the things we do in service, some of them about ourselves, that sort of stuff. Send us any questions that you have about the church, about us, about our opinions on things we're up for just about anything, anything we're not open for, we'll just kick the can down the road. Or actually some of them, they'll become episodes on their own, I'm sure. But go ahead and send those to us. Is mainstreet lutheransmail.com we are also on all the socials, as you know, as we will get to here in a minute. Let's see, those are the big things there. We talked about about this supplying thing. I think next year at least I will probably be getting around a little bit more. I just learned that Festival of Homiletics is canceled for this, this coming year and they're planning to come back in 2027. And so I usually try to set that time away to, to go to that. I want to go somewhere and, and see folks. So if you have something going on and, and I might be able to get, make it to it, let me know. Let us know and we'll even share it on the, on the socials, get that spread out. But lots of fun stuff.

Yeah.

So we are approaching, we are approaching Thanksgiving and we're very thankful for, for your continuing to listen. It's. It's been an amazing journey so far, and it seems like it's going to go on for quite a while.

So what it's, it's been inspiring. It's. The reason we're still going is because people keep listening and we get, we get responses and questions and comments from people and just, just seeing the numbers makes us think, wow, people are appreciating in that way. Might as well do one more. And then it becomes one more. And now here we are near 50.

Yeah. And when, when a bishop, a synod bishop tells you that another synod bishop heard them on the podcast. That's kind of neat. We didn't make this show for bishops. They're allowed to listen. We're not keeping them from doing it, but they, they know everything that we're talking about better than we do, I'm sure. So, so it's, it's kind of a, it's, it's an honor to know that, that folks are listening and we appreciate everybody. It doesn't, doesn't matter, you know, if you've been in a congregation for, for a long time or, or hardly at all. We, we really do appreciate that you're listening and we're kind of surprised you are, actually. So.

All right.

So. All right.

Main Street Lutheran is hosted by Keith Fair and Ben Folt, and the show is produced by Folk Media Productions and find all our contact information links in a transcript in the episode notes. Until next time, go in peace, serve.

The Lord, and thanks be to God.