Installation of Pastor Rolly Stahl

_{Ephesians 4:11-13 | Sunday 10th July 2022 | Bishop David Altus}

¹¹ So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, ¹² to equip his people for ministry, so that the body of Christ may be built up ¹³ until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.  Ephesians 4:11-13.

It’s good to be with you today as you welcome your new Pastor.  That’s him on the screen.  Well, it was him!  That is an old photo of your new pastor.  I took it in September 1997.  It was a sad month in world history: Princess Diana died, Mother Theresa died and the Crows won their first flag…

Rolly and I went to Germany as part of our development as pastors.  A lot of life and ministry has happened for both of us since then.  But more about that photo later…

Today Rolly, it’s good to be here with you as St Johns receives you as their pastor, a gift from the hand and the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ himself.  St John’s, remember that Rolly is a gift from God to you. And Rolly you are allowed to think of yourself as ’God’s gift to this church!’  God’s word says so.

St Paul reminds us in Ephesians 4:11 that the risen and ascended Lord Jesus gives gifts to his church through the Holy Spirit – not money to fix our leaking church rooves or to cover our budget deficits, but the gift of people, people like you, for ministry.  Your ministry to, and among God’s people is not our idea, it is Christ’s will, design and gift to his church.

¹¹ So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers,

It is interesting that multiple gifts, multiple roles are mentioned and they all have to do with speaking the faith.  They don’t seem to be exhaustive either.  (Maybe today we are too restrictive when it comes to what God might have in mind for ministry.  We seem to put all our eggs in the ‘pastor’ box.  The Bishops are opening up that box in the year ahead and exploring it for the sake of the needs of the church and the landscape we find ourselves in today.  What is the shape of the word and sacrament ministry gift Jesus wants and may best serve the LCA today?  Pray about that.

The earlier verses of Ephesians 4 remind us that we have all received God’s greatest gift – his grace, the gift of forgiveness and eternal life in Jesus Christ.

• We enjoy him as our one Lord,
• We share in one faith and one baptism, we live with a common hope,
• We are gifted by the same Holy Spirit who has given gifts to all of us for our part in the ministry of making him known and building up his body.

⁷ to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it

Every person in the church is a gift and each has been given gifts to use, but Rolly you are being given as a gift to this congregation with a special speaking role for Christ and gifts to fulfil it.

As an LCA pastor you are called to feed and lead his people for Jesus, to be a shepherd publicly proclaiming his word to them in preaching and teaching, assuring them that their sins are forgiven, praying for them, baptising and feeding them with Christ’s own body and blood.

Your calling and gift is to speak Christ’s own word to the whole body here for him.  But sometimes your greatest gift will be to keep your mouth shut – so today you will promise to ‘speak and listen to them’, and after listening to the sins and problems of these people, to assure them that what you hear in private stays there as if they have told Christ himself.

St Paul does not say that the purpose of being the gift of shepherd – teacher to these people is ‘so they can now sit back and let you do the ministry for them’, no, but St Pauls says Christ’s vision for you ministry here is ¹² to equip his people for ministry, so that the body of Christ may be built up ¹³ until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

Body building – that’s what you are into as a pastor.  Just as you have obviously worked on yourself (if I might say so) since that ‘before’ photo was taken.  You are here to exercise and hone and shape and strengthen the body of Jesus here, to be the best these people can be with their gifts for God through the ministry that belongs to this whole congregation not just its pastor.

Rolly you don’t build from scratch.  You build on the ministry of Eugene and Allan and others.  And the shape of the body that you are aiming for here is Jesus himself.  Christ’s body, the church is not meant to reflect its pastor’s image and stamp but Jesus’ image.  St Paul says the unity and maturity in Christ are two goals of your body building here.  In my words St Paul is saying to you:

• Teach them well so they share a common conviction of faith in Jesus that they can clearly speak in their own words to the world.
• Live in unity and peace among them and work at maintaining the unity the Spirit has given these people as a witness to Christ in a disintegrating and fractured world.  And…
• Serve into their lives with preaching and teaching to grow these people to live as mature Christians in the world, not easily put off course, and so they consistently and accurately reflect Jesus himself to the word around them.

Not much to ask is it!  It’s Christ’s own vision for your ministry here in Ephesians 4:12-13.  And he will give you every grace you need to do it as you look to him.

Now can we go back to that ’before’ photo…  It was taken in Neuendettelsau, Germany.  Lance Steicke asked Rolly and I to go there with 30 others from 20 countries.  The theme was ‘worship and culture’ –how can God’s people best be built up through worship in our own cultures today?

We enjoyed going to the ‘Luther sites’ but the thing that impressed me most was how God had used this small town to be a place of worship, preparation for service in the community, and world mission, including to Australia.  The church bell rang 4x day reminding us we live life in God’s time and grace, and everything we do in daily life is an act of worship and witness.

In the early 1800’s lay people were taught and equipped for life and witness of faith there and some went on to become pastors.  18 missionaries were sent to Australia, outstanding gifts to the church like Flierl who went to PNG and Strehlow to Hermannsburg Central Australia.  (He died 100 years ago this year and when I was up there last week they told me how they are about to thank God for him 100 years after his death later this month).  Pastors are still sent out today from the Centre for World Mission in that little town.  I sat with one of them in Alice Springs on Monday, Michael Jacobsen who is serving with indigenous people north of Alice today.

That little village was not just a training ground for pastors but a place of training for lay people, especially lay-women, disadvantaged women who were equipped for faith and life and service and given an honoured calling as deaconesses to serve the elderly, sick and disabled and in many other ways. Today 6,000 people are employed from there across southern Germany in ministries of service.  Widowed, single and single again women of faith still come there to serve in caring ministries of all kinds as an expression of faith and the love of Jesus.

That little town was a witness to Rolly and I of worship, service and witness to the world.  The faith taught there, the building up of Christ’s body there had an outward focus from the very beginning and our own LCA has been blessed by that outward focussed ministry.  The German word on the fence next to Rolly on in the photograph (I’m not going to try and pronounce it!) means ‘exit, departure and the way out’.  Rolly as their shepherd your gift is to feed and equip God’s people in here for the way out of here, their departure from here into this community and the world where they live.  They come here not to live in here but to be equipped to leave here and live out there for God.  You have a personal teaching gift, so use it in here to inspire, equip and prepare these people to follow Jesus out into the world as his disciples.

Today is not a time to wring our hands about the state of the church in here, but get on with being church in our time out there.  To live individually and together as the body of Christ in our time and place without comparing the body of Christ here today with what it looked like in the past.  Help them to keep on becoming what God says they are to him and for him today.

So a pastor is a gift according to Ephesians 4.  With any gift of God we are always in danger of denigrating the gift or idolising the gift.  We can do that with our pastors too.

So can I offer you some encouragements in relation to God’s gift of pastor Rolly to you today:

1. I simply encourage you to receive Christ’s gift of Rolly, listen to him and look after him as a gift from God not because pastors are becoming scarcer out there, but to honour Christ and the gift Christ has called Rolly to be and bring to you here.
2. Don’t compare him with others, don’t focus on his weaknesses or expect the miraculous from him.  He is not Jesus.  His role is to take you to Jesus.
3. Think carefully about what his best gift is to you from Jesus for your ministry, and to let him use his particular gifts and time carefully to best effect among you.
4. Don’t be possessive of your pastor but let him be a blessing in the changing church landscape around you.

St Paul wrote Ephesians from prison.  He was chained, yet he remembered he was a gift, and in chapter 4 he reminded other workers and the church of that pastoral gift.

Rolly, begin your ministry as a pastor knowing and believing you are ‘God’s gift to this church’.  Devote yourself and your Spirit given gifts to build up the body of Christ here so that, together, you might be the Christ-shaped body he intends his church to be in the world for which he died.

Called (Hebrews 5:1-10)

In the first week of October this year, delegates from Lutheran congregations across Australia and New Zealand met in Sydney to discuss and decide on proposals made by member churches. The biggest item on the agenda was whether women and men can be ordained as pastors in the Lutheran Church of Australia (LCA). We have been wrestling with this question for a long time and people on both sides feel very passionate about what they believe God wants for the LCA. Leading up towards convention, it seemed to me that whichever way the vote went, there would be people who will be hurt, disappointed and unhappy with the result.

A few weeks prior to convention, I was preparing the themes for my messages during October when I came to Hebrews 5:1-10, the Epistle reading for last Sunday. Verse 4 jumped out to me, which says that

no one can become a high priest simply because they want such an honour. They must be called by God for this work, just as Aaron was. (v4 alt)

As far as I understand, this text has played an important part in the Lutheran understanding of the role of pastors since the Reformation. In the Old Testament, people didn’t volunteer to be a high priest. They needed God to call them. Similarly, Jesus didn’t wake up one morning and decide that he wanted to be the saviour of the world. God called him to that (Hebrews 5:5ff). Following the example of Scripture, then, it has been the Lutheran position since the Reformation that ‘no one should teach publicly in the church or administer the sacraments unless properly called’ (Augsburg Confession Article XIV).

So how does God call people?

One way we can answer this question is to think of a ‘call’ having two elements. The first is an ‘internal’ call, something God places on our hearts that we feel called to do. The second is an ‘external’ call where God works through people and circumstances to open doors and bring us to where he’s leading us. For God to be calling us to something, both need to line up. Sometimes an internal call might come first, or it might be something from outside us that leads us in a certain way. What can be difficult is when an internal call and an external call don’t match up, and either we feel called in a direction where the doors are closed to us, or God opens doors for us that we really don’t want to go through.

I have known people over the years who have really struggled with a disconnect between these internal and external calls. For example, I know people who have felt called to be pastors, both men and women, but for a range of reasons they haven’t been ordained into the public ministry of the church. I have also known people who have had opportunities open to them which they really didn’t want to embrace. Personally, I have had times when I have felt called in certain directions but they didn’t work out, or I have thought that God was leading me in directions I really didn’t want to go. So to a degree I can understand the turmoil and anguish that people can experience when an internal call isn’t in synch with events and circumstances that are happening around us. To be honest, I don’t really have an answer to offer when that happens, other than to keep praying and seeking where God may be calling us.

However, there was something else in Sunday’s readings that I think can help us understand the nature of God’s call a little better. In Mark 10:43,44 Jesus says,

Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be the slave of everyone else. (NLT)

Pastors are called to be servants, not to exercise power or control. We don’t decide to be pastors to find a sense of importance or value or identity. God calls people to serve communities of faith by shepherding them, watching over them, caring for them, and feeding them with the good news of Jesus’s death and resurrection for them. It’s not up to me to walk into a congregation as a new pastor and start telling people how things will or will not be done. Instead, pastors are called to be the servants of God’s people so they will encounter the love and grace of Jesus in us. That doesn’t mean always doing what the congregation wants, because sometimes what we want isn’t good for us. However, it might mean giving up our own rights, our preferences and sometimes even our opinions in order to serve the people God has placed in our care, in order to build them up in faith and love, and equip them to do the good God has planned for all of us to do.

One of the greatest legacies of the Reformation is the idea that God doesn’t just call people to serve him in overtly religious ways. Instead, God calls us to a variety of vocations so that we can serve each other, and so his goodness can grace can flow through us to the people around us. God might call us to be parents, children, grandparents or grandchildren. He might call us to be husbands, wives, or possibly even to serve him and others as a single person. The work we do in our places of employment, our homes, our churches or community organizations, both paid and unpaid, are all callings God places on our lives so we can be his salt and light in the world, and so other people can meet Jesus in us.

Paul’s discussion of the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12:12-31 reminds us that every part is needed for the whole body to function properly. One part isn’t more important or less important than any other. In the same way, the call to be a pastor is no more or less important to the body of Christ than a fulltime, stay at home parent, or the people on the toilet cleaning roster. We’re all vital parts of the body of Christ because we are all called to contribute to the mission of God in the world in different ways.

I honestly don’t know where the LCA will go from here as we continue to struggle with who we believe God is calling to be pastors in our church. I continue to pray that the Spirit of God will pour wisdom into the hearts and minds of our bishops and other leaders as they keep wrestling with this question.

What I do know, though, is what it’s like to struggle with where God may be calling us in our lives. Whatever we think God may be calling us to, and whether the doors are opening for us to follow those calls or not, we need to be listening to each other, praying for each other, and walking together with each other as the body of Christ. No matter where God might be calling us to serve him in our lives, one thing we all have in common is that God calls us his children whom he loves.