Going... Going... Gone.

Our minister announced yesterday that he is going to be leaving our church; his last sermon will be January 13.

This shouldn't be a big deal, I'm Methodist and our ministers get new assignments all the time, but this one is different. We got Ross on a 5 year loan from the Methodist Conference in South Africa, where he had been serving as General Secretary. We knew he'd be leaving, but we thought we'd have 2 more years. His mother's health has been declining this year and he announced that he and his wife felt they needed to move back to take care of her. Which makes it worse, because you can't get upset about him leaving when he's doing the right thing.

I was thinking last night about the impact he's had in the short time he's been here. I'd be lying if I said everyone in our congregation adored him. Change makes some people nervous, and Ross has been a constant activist for change. He likes to shake up the complacent. For an awful lot of us, he's challenged the way we think about religon, both on a organized church level and a very personal level. We have been exceptionally lucky to have him.

On a personal note, it was one of Ross' early sermons that lit a spark and led me to join the church through baptism a couple of months after his arrival. He did threaten to have me (and a few others) excommunicated after a certain incident that resulted in 30 plastic flamingos inhabiting his yard for 24 hours, but he forgave me enough to officiate my wedding a year later. He drove 2 hours to my family's tiny Baptist church in Nowhere, Mississippi, complete with white robes, to marry Greg and I. Believe it or not, our tiny Baptist church's congregation LOVED him.

A Methodist preacher from South Africa, preaching a wedding in a small Baptist church in Philadelphia, Mississippi and getting rave reviews. That's not something you see every day. But it's exactly why we're going to miss him so deeply. Christianity shouldn't be complacent, it should be energetic and shake things up with surprising results. I do hope that trend continues for our church after Ross leaves.