Inspiration

I invited Fred Craddock to preach at Avon Lake UCC on Pentecost Sunday, 2006, to celebrate the grand opening of our new sanctuary. We had lunch in my kitchen before I took him back to the airport. I knew that he had moved to the town of Cherry Log, Georgia, after retiring. He occasionally taught classes on preaching and the Bible to pastors of small, store-front churches in the south - pastors who had received no formal training. And he had begun a non-profit organization, serving the needs of southern Appalachia - specializing in programs for children. I asked him, “What motivated you to start the Craddock Center? When I asked the question, I was thinking to myself, “You could have spent the rest of your life preaching in one big steeple church after another, Sunday after Sunday.” He looked at me and said, “Kelly, one does not retire from one’s ordination vows.”

In the summer of 2021, in a conversation at the Jesuit Retreat Center in Parma, my colleague Luke Lindon told our small clergy group that he knew, personally, of over a dozen ministers who were leaving the ministry or seriously considering doing so. I thought about those 13 or 14 ministers, each of whom had felt called at one time, each of whom took ordination vows with both seriousness and passionate enthusiasm, each of whom was probably grieving in some way.

These ministers, whom I didn’t know but whose stories I could imagine, kept appearing in my mind and heart. Awake, as I often am, at 3 AM, I would think of them. “What can I do? What can be done to help those who are experiencing burnout? Are there some early intervention strategies that might keep other gifted pastors from leaving the ministry?”

I realized I was being called to a ministry of encouragement. I will retire from full-time ministry in 2024, but I am not retiring from my ordination vows.