How It All Began

I was so excited to be interviewing for our first pastorate! We had been told by our District Superintendent that the Rockton, Illinois church was a parsonage chapel. That was fine with me! Ken's sister and brother-in-law lived in a parsonage chapel. It was wonderful! The house was completely private. You couldn't even see the entrance into the church from the house. You actually felt like you had a house with a separate church building. I could live with that!



It was about an hour and a half drive from Rock Island, where we lived, to Rockton. We left town early so we would arrive in time to look the town over a bit, and, of course, find the building.



Rockton was, and still is, a lovely little town of about 2200 people. In a town that size, everyone usually knows just about everyone else. They certainly know where everything is, like gas stations, stores, the police department, post office, and churches. We looked around town, then began our search for the church. We found it to be well hidden! No one in Rockton that we talked to had ever even heard of the Rockton Church of the Nazarene. Not even the owner of the gas station right down the street from the church had ever heard of it! Finally, with no help from the locals, we found the parsonage chapel I was so anxious to see.



There it sat, on a huge lot, with a long driveway leading from the service road to the building. The exterior of the building wasn't too bad. It just looked like a small ranch style house. There were no distinguishing marks of a church. As my eyes left the building and began to scan the rest of the property, my attention was drawn to something quite unexpected. The toilet was sitting under a tree in the front yard. My excitement began to wane!



Not wanting to be too hasty in my judgement, I figured there was a good explanation for having the toilet in the yard. I decided to reserve judgement until I saw the interior. I still had visions of Donna and John's parsonage chapel dancing in my head. Some of the parishioners that were working on the house, to get it ready for a new parsonage family, met us at the door leading into the house. They were all smiles and gave us a warm welcome. We stepped inside the kitchen to find nothing like the parsonage chapel of my dreams!



The entrance to the house, from outside, led directly into a large kitchen. There was no separate dining area, but the kitchen was big enough to be an "eat-in." Across the room, to the right, I saw two more doorways, one with a door and one without. The one without a door led from the kitchen into a very small living room. The one with a door led directly from the kitchen into the back of the sanctuary of the church. How convenient! Open the door, and you're in church!



I told you in an earlier writing about the nursery window that had been cut into the living room wall and about the small bedrooms and bath. It wasn't pretty. It was nothing like what I was expecting. It was not at all big enough to house a family of six! It was horrible! I just wanted to go home and never look back. If Kenny thought I was going to move out of a big two story, three bedroom house just down the street from some of our closest church friends in Rock Island, to live in this little cracker box of a house with a nursery window in the living room, he was crazy!



We got through the interview, loaded everyone into the car, and headed for home, sweet home! I looked across the car at my husband and said, with great resolve, "If I never see that place again, it will be too soon!" His reply --- "That's too bad, because I think this is where God wants us to be."



God knew how I felt. I made sure of that! I put Him to the test. I asked Him to do things that only He could do in order to show me this was really His will. God met every challenge. There was no doubt in my mind that going to a pitiful little parsonage chapel, to begin our pastoral ministry, was definitely God's will for our lives. And so began the great adventure of our lifetime.