It’s been awhile since I posted anything here. Most of my blogging activity is taken up with Christianity 201, which celebrated its 15th Anniversary on April 1st. Each day at 5:30 PM EST, I’ve either begged, borrowed or stolen devotional content from a rather diverse array of sources, although the quantity of original pieces would easily fill a book. I mention that first because C201 was basically a spin-off project of this blog, and some of you reading this subscribe to both.
Then there’s Ruth’s church. Being married to a Pastor would, in more traditional times, make one a Pastor’s wife, but there’s very little written about the unique nuances of being a Pastor’s husband. I try to be helpful, but the work she does is all about her gifts and vision and my role is somewhat limited to leading worship every other week, and then coming alongside as needed.
I also lead worship at another church at least once a month. It’s interesting having a leadership position in two different churches, and it helps that both Pastors are friends. I am occasionally asked to speak at both churches, which I really enjoy.
Once a month, I act as co-chair of our local ministerial association, which includes a larger number of representatives of parachurch organizations. It also involves giving a few hours each month to communications and meeting planning. I think it’s great what our leaders here did over a decade ago: Taking an organization that was just for clergy, and opening it up to people engaged in various types of ministry endeavor, including the Christian school, a ministry of compassion, the Christian radio station, the Christian bookstore, two youth outreach organizations, chaplains from four different institutions, and so on. We eat pizza and go around the circle sharing the latest developments in our work and pray together. Once a year we combine our efforts to produce a large, combined Good Friday service.
Our family also still own a Christian bookstore, which faces all the challenges of an industry in decline, and the extra challenge of being located in a small town. We want to close the store down but don’t have a “succession plan” for the merchandise itself. No amount of 50%-off or 60%-off sale tactics really move the needle in a small town, so I resigned myself to simply giving away sections of it to other stores. But then those other stores shut down. There may be, according to people who know, only 43 Christian bookstores in all of Canada; Vancouver Island to Prince Edward Island. Key to keeping the bookstore alive are the conversations which happen with people on the edges of faith, and occasionally, when someone actually buys something, that something is a Bible, which makes it all worthwhile.
We did manage to fit in a few days away this year. One such adventure was what’s called “glamping.” We did two nights, had perfect summer weather days, but unusually cold (5°C/41°F) summer nights. Not cheap, but we definitely plan to do it again. For me, one of the unique takeaways was — because the location was isolated — being on holidays, yet not seeing or speaking with another human for nearly 40 hours, apart from a few phone calls from our son Aaron who was running the store.
We also took three nights in November to basically roam the streets of Montreal. Let me phrase that better, we slept in a hotel at night, but the days were somewhat unstructured. I think Ruth just wanted to be in a place where they speak a different language, though you mostly get by with English in Montreal much better than Quebec City. Food was excellent. We also took the train to get there, which was its own adventure, but a much more positive experience than our train excursion to Halifax the year prior.
If I’m being complete in my 2025 year summary however, I have to say that the my greatest amount of time, emotional investment, mental energy, and spiritual bandwidth was consumed by a young man named Kaleb1. When we first met, he was 13, from a non-Christian, non-churched family, and after reading parts of a Bible, asked a neighbor if he could get a ride to her church. That woman’s willingness to listen to God and not be afraid to be outspoken when he needed spiritual correction is the part of this story which will remain untold here for now, but cannot be minimized.
I was mostly leading worship at the other church when he first arrived at Ruth’s, but she told me about him, and especially about the questions he would ask her. Key faith questions. Theologically mature questions. I was intrigued.
Then he asked her if he could play guitar with her on a Sunday morning. She picked Revelation Song — it’s only four chords, repeated over and over — but then decided working and training a young musician might be more up my alley.
We watched him grow as a musician. We watched him grow spiritually. He was baptized on September 30th. I took him to a large live music Christian event. I took him twice to a type of spiritual retreat farm about 15 minutes from the church. I took him out to lunch a few times.
At the same time, I made sure that the music we were presenting was incrementally more difficult. I tried to think in terms of discipleship, but without the fill-in-the-blanks workbook approach. I took him with me to the other church where he immediately connected with the Pastor there, who is also a competent musician. A few days ago that Pastor described him as “an excellent guitarist.”
Something else you ought to know: We don’t have any prospects of grandchildren in our immediate future. But people will come in the store talking about their grand-kids and the things they do together. It’s hard not to covet. So Kaleb became a surrogate grandchild. For 2025, I got to live what others experience, albeit without the connection of a blood relationship.
I should say here that both churches have policies in place which my UK readers would know as “safeguarding.” (Some larger churches there have a person on staff just for this function; a sort of “risk management officer” concerned with people liabilities instead of accident liabilities.) I also got Kaleb involved with a Christian youth drama group, and had to navigate the slight differences between the policies as they are practically applied by all three groups.
It’s good that we have such policies in place, although a scan of the news reports in the country to the south of us would indicate that vulnerable youth constantly fall victim to nefarious “Christian” workers. (It was constantly reporting those stories in this blog’s “Wednesday Link List” which caused me to start C201. If you want to track that sort of thing, there’s Julie Roys.)
But in some relationships, you have to ask, ‘Who is the vulnerable party?’ Over the past few weeks, we’ve been considering the possibility that even a morally upright youth leader could fall prey to accusation, especially if the youth is from a large non-churched family which resents the difference taking place as he or she gets more serious about following Christ, or simply spends more time as the beneficiary of so much love from their newly acquired church family.
As a friend of ours who is a lifelong youth minister tried to tell us years ago, certain types of ‘safeguarding’ can kill the potential impact of relational youth ministry. Good discipleship takes time, and if you’ve got a dozen kids all doing a program like Youth Alpha at the same time, then you miss out on those late-night, one-to-one conversations.
All that plus this: Kids are complicated. Kaleb is complicated. So while we’re trying to take him to the next level in so many areas — having the Christian summer camp experience; going to another Christian concert — we’re wondering if it’s not a good idea for me to be so intensely involved.
And here’s the thing I didn’t tell you: Right now Kaleb is the youth group. The next person above him in age is 32. It’s an older church. We don’t want to lose him, and I don’t think, having seen a couple of other churches, he wants to leave. So while we’re able to give him the aforementioned experience of the Christian youth drama group, any interactions he has on Sundays are going to involve older adults.
So do you want to know about my 2025? Our 2025? Scan up the page. I have seven paragraphs about everything else and eleven paragraphs about Kaleb. Really not sure what the future holds there. Pray for him. God knows who you’re referring to!
As to our own two boys, Chris just celebrated ten years with an Engineering firm. He lives in Toronto with a bunch of guys a few blocks from a large Church where he serves on the tech team every other week, a commitment of seven hours over three services.
Aaron is back with us after losing four jobs in one day in 2020 to COVID lock-downs and then moving home in late 2022, and works at the Christian bookstore, does ‘turnarounds’ for a woman whose house is an Airbnb, volunteers with the aforementioned Christian drama group, and is finishing the second re-write of his epic novel. A guy goes on a quest. Not my genre, but I’ll get him to do a guest post here sometime and you can sign up to follow his website.(Anyone in publishing reading this? He needs an agent.)
And I’ve already updated you on Ruth, who just celebrated her third Advent season at the church, but you know all that because you get to read her here (C201, actually) every Friday.
So how was your year?
1not his real name
Thinking Out Loud 
