Derailed by New Testament Greek

When I was 17 years old, I thought I might become a pastor. I was a sophomore at Cal State LA, working the midnight shift and commuting to classes during the daylight hours. My life had become isolated.

Weekends I would visit friends in another city in another county, and then during the week it would be classes on the urban campus and work on the truck docks of LA. From time to time I continued my habit of attending the church I grew up in. I taught "Sunday" school classes and was "ordained" as a deacon.

I took a comparative religions class and wrote an apologetic for my faith as my final term paper. The thought crossed my mind, I might become a pastor.

It was a couple of years later when I got my draft notice that I "confirmed" my call and changed my major to theology. It was 1969 and the Viet Nam War was in full swing. Like many of my peers I did not want to die in a war. Somehow my student deferment did not prevent my draft notice but the theology major was an immediate deferment.

My new call only lasted a few months into my first class in New Testament Greek. It wasn’t that Greek was impossible to learn. It just seemed so totally irrelevant to my life. When I changed my major my deferment ended and I experienced a couple of more brushes with the military.

During my tenure as a "theo" student I had a chance to examine my motives and my career possibilities. Neither one of them were very good. My denomination did not seem to be interested in an erstwhile student activist turned "student" pastor. My real major in college was extracurricular activities and my passion was editing the student newspaper and working on the campus radio station. In these roles I could exercise my desire to be a world-changer in a way that was very satisfying to me.

It was twenty years later that the next phase of my journey into accidental pastorhood began.