JACKSON, Miss. (ABP) — In 2003, Chuck Poole left the pastorate of Northminster Baptist Church to minister to the street people of Jackson, Miss., and others living in poverty. Four-and-a-half-years later, he is returning to that same pulpit — changed by the experience, but in ways he can't yet identify.
“I learned a lot that will take me several years to put words to,” he said Nov. 7, three days after the congregation voted to call him as pastor for the second time. Asked how he has changed, Poole said, “Ask me that question five years from now and I will probably be able to answer in a way I can't today.”
Northminster is an upper-middle-class congregation with a deep commitment to inner-city ministry. Poole's decision to leave that comfortable pastorate to work in Jackson's poorest neighborhoods was not a rejection of his ministry at Northminster but, in a way, a fulfillment of it — a decision to practice the kind of hands-on ministry he and the congregation valued, he said.
“I was formed by the church to go and do what I did.”
In 2003 he became director of community ministry for the LifeShare Foundation, a six-year-old organization that helps Jackson's poor children and their families meet basic needs like food, clothing and utility bills. He also taught Bible studies for those families.
After more than four years in that role, however, he discovered he missed some of what he left behind.
“I've loved dearly serving as a community minister, ministering on the street,” he said. “I continue to love it and could do it for the rest of my life. But the rhythms and rituals of the gathered church are so much a part of my life. There was some gravity that kept me drawn to the church as the place where my life was formed and so many lives are formed for the gospel.”
In a sense, he said, his sojourn in the inner city was not a departure from his vocational calling of pastoral ministry but simply another venue for it. “Serving in the inner city was a 'call within the call,'” he explained, quoting Mother Teresa. “I'm going back to my original calling, if that makes sense.”
Poole's work with Lifeshare “was in no way heroic or self-sacrificing,” he insisted. He was paid a salary and benefits and never suffered, he said. “But it was the following of a long-fermenting call in my life,” one that was fueled in part by his experiences as a pastor of well-to-do churches surrounded by poverty.
Ironically, the values that attracted him to a church like Northminster were the same ones that prompted him to leave — a commitment to incarnate the gospel in flesh-and-blood reality.
Both he and Northminster understand he is not exactly the same person who served as pastor from 1997 to 2003, he said, nor is the congregation the same. “I am returning to a place in many ways the same and in many ways different,” he said.
Yet he is not returning as a stranger. Even after he left in 2003, he and his wife, Marcia, remained members of Northminster, which also supported his work with LifeShare. He seldom worshiped at the church, however, because for the past four years he has served as supply preacher for Madison Baptist Fellowship, a new church north of Jackson.
In the meantime, three associate pastors shared preaching duties at Northminster Baptist for two years. Then the congregation called Brian Brewer as pastor in 2005. Brewer resigned in May 2007, when he was hired to teach at Baylor's Truett Baptist Theological Seminary in Waco, Texas.
This time the pastor search committee sought Poole to fill his previous position. He begins Dec. 1.
Poole admitted there is a possibility some at Northminster will expect him to be the same person who left. But if any have that expectation, it hasn't surfaced. “I didn't sense that at all from the pastor search committee,” he said. “They and I all realize that you never step in the same stream twice,” he said. “I'm a different preacher and pastor, but I can't yet say how.”
Poole can articulate a few things he learned during four-and-a-half years among Jackson's poorest.
“I learned a lot about the reasons people live in poverty in 21st-century America — things like child care and transportation. I learned how mundane are some of the things that middle-class and upper-middle-class people worry about, when seen alongside the concerns of people living in poverty.”
Those people also taught him the value of “basic theology,” he said.
“I spent my [earlier] life pondering the nuances of theology,” said Poole, who has authored several books. “Most people in the world don't have the luxury of pondering the nuances of theology. Most people are in need of a much less nuanced theology. I learned to teach and preach in that context.”
Sara Herrington Jones joined Northminster one day before Poole resigned in 2003. While she never knew him as pastor, she said she is excited about his return because of what she has learned about him since.
Working as a volunteer in a local ministry, Herrington Jones met a young inner-city girl whose house was burned down, apparently by vandals. Poole was one of the first people who showed up to help, she said in an e-mail interview, “collecting and delivering items, making temporary housing possible for the family, making phone calls to secure beds, and working to ease the loss, while ministering very personally to the family.”
“He was there physically, not just in word or thought, but there physically meeting needs and comforting,” Herrington Jones said. “He offered the security of God's love, not just in rosy metaphor or rhetoric but in a physical presence, when no 'security' could be found in the world the little girl and her grandmother knew.”
She said she is looking forward to having Poole as her pastor, but “not because he is so capable or beloved, as surely he is, or qualified in education and/or theology.”
She continued: “I do not know what he will be as a spiritual leader, or a pastor from the pulpit, or any of the other perhaps more fluffy ways we measure pastors these days, like statistics of church growth or whatever. But from what I have seen or learned of Chuck, he has a heart of a servant — a servant of God — who ministers to others' needs. That is what makes me excited for the days ahead at Northminster.”
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