Dear Friends and Colleagues at Rehoboth,

It is a wonderful opportunity to be able to serve with you in mutual ministry during the time you are seeking a new pastor.  I have been pleasingly impressed by your efforts and level of commitment by so many people.  I pray that the Lord will guide an excellent and deeply committed pastor to accept a call to serve with you for many years.

I began serving as Assistant Pastor at Grace, Rochester two days after my ordination at the Synod Convention on June 13, 1963.  Coincidentally, that Saturday I began work was my 25th birthday and the first time I met my future wife, Susan.  For those of you good at math, you now are able to tell how much of an old geezer I really am.  It wasn’t until 1965 that we married, so I probably didn’t make much of an impression on Susan at that crossing of paths in the church library at Grace, but eventually the Spirit worked it out.

Grace, Rochester and Rehoboth have a mutual experience.  In the mid-1800’s you had the blessing of being served in ministry by the famous William A. Passavant, the founder of most of the social ministries in our area and the responsibility for the formation of many congregations and Thiel College.  What a wonderful heritage this is.  This paragraph leads me to the main point of my pastoral letter (you probably are saying, “It’s about time.”)

I’m your “Interim Pastor” – an interesting term.  The synod has several types of interims and a lot of definitions including “local” and “traditional” as adjectives.  I consider my type of interim as being “hybrid” – isn’t that appropriate in the era of automobiles with different energy sources.  The agreement between council and me is “local” during the week and the weekends are as if I were your “stated supply pastor”.  Actually, it won’t mean too much to you, since if you need a pastor, I’ll be around.  The record keeping of time, etc. is going to be very open to flexibility and serving whenever I’m needed, even if it means more hours for the month than planned.

This comes from my sense of vocation in ministry.  Pastor’s serve 24/7, because we give our life to the Lord and the Church.  We don’t work 24/7, although many pastors put in a good 60-80 hour week.  A lot of the time, we are thinking and planning, even though you can’t tell.  The clergy is one of the few professions, that if you catch the pastor with eyes closed sitting in a chair, he or she may not be asleep, but in prayer and meditation.  So it is important to think of the ministry as a special way of serving more than a special form of accomplishment or sense of being a “holy person”.  Good Lutherans know that pastors are just like everybody else – “sinning saved” people.  Also, it is good for laity to know that the term “vocation” applies to them.  They, too are 24/7 servers.  Called to be part of the ministry of spreading the Gospel, although, perhaps in a different occupation for their formal employment.  All of us are part of the ministry of the church.

There is one more thing to clarify.  All ministries are “interim” ministries.  There are only a few times a pastor serves the same place for life, even then some usually preceded and/or followed them.  God bless you in your search for your next “interim”.

Pastor Lawrence Camberg