How I managed to go all this time without realizing that John Cougar Mellencamp’s Authority Song should be my life’s theme song I don’t know, but while exercising this morning I really listened to the words for the first time and voila!
Serving three internships (Havelock United Methodist Church and St. Mark’s United Methodist Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Arvada United Methodist Church in Arvada, Colorado) impressed upon me that the “new and improved” United Methodist church was giving no credence to the apprenticeship model that had seemingly served it well for nearly two centuries. Even my employment at Dad’s church was contingent upon successfully completing an undergraduate degree in preparation for admission to a seminary. I had become aware of the historical—and not academic—route into the ordained ministry known as the Course of Study, but the Rocky Mountain Annual Conference would not even acknowledge that such a thing existed even though it was explicitly provided for in the Discipline.
And so it was that I embarked upon the journey of Everyman that introduced me to sales, banking, labor, and finally law enforcement. Even if I was to move to an Annual Conference that accepted the Course of Study, I had to wait until I was old enough (the Discipline requires one to be thirty-five years old to obtain a Local Pastor’s license, something akin to having to be old enough to be elected President of the United States, I suppose). Every endeavor accepted me for my demonstrated abilities instead of credentials, and I hope that it is without bragging that I report I attained the highest levels of achievement in each. My churchmanship remained impeccable and I was finally successful in becoming a certified lay speaker at age thirty.
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