God's Work in in the Wanderings
Chris Koch
Senior Director of Ministry
On June 20, 2023 I was examined by the Presbytery and approved to seek ordination in the PCUSA. Next week Wednesday, June 28 at 7:30pm, there will be a service where I will be ordained as a Minister of Word and Sacrament. Going through this process has reminded me of Gods work in the midst of our wanderings.
I first entered the ordination process in 2001, as an inquirer in Mission Presbytery in south Texas. The ordination process in the PCUSA was suspended when I took a call as a pastor in a church in the Netherlands, and then I served at a Reformed church in Queens, NYC. I never thought I would be back in the PCUSA or be a pastor in that denomination, yet soon I will be. Though I have served as a pastor for 20 years I believe that God brought me back to this denomination and though the ordination process for a reason.
This process reminds me to trust in what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin describes as “the slow work of God.” In one of his poems de Chardin describes the work of God and these are good words to meditate on:
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient
in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.”
Senior Director of Ministry
On June 20, 2023 I was examined by the Presbytery and approved to seek ordination in the PCUSA. Next week Wednesday, June 28 at 7:30pm, there will be a service where I will be ordained as a Minister of Word and Sacrament. Going through this process has reminded me of Gods work in the midst of our wanderings.
I first entered the ordination process in 2001, as an inquirer in Mission Presbytery in south Texas. The ordination process in the PCUSA was suspended when I took a call as a pastor in a church in the Netherlands, and then I served at a Reformed church in Queens, NYC. I never thought I would be back in the PCUSA or be a pastor in that denomination, yet soon I will be. Though I have served as a pastor for 20 years I believe that God brought me back to this denomination and though the ordination process for a reason.
This process reminds me to trust in what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin describes as “the slow work of God.” In one of his poems de Chardin describes the work of God and these are good words to meditate on:
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient
in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.”