A couple of years ago my family and I were visiting the Homestead Craft Village just outside of Waco, Texas. The village belongs to Homestead Heritage, an agrarian Christian community that offers a beautiful picture of people working together to produce what they need. As my kids and I bounded through the shops, I stopped to watch a young carpenter at his work. After a couple of minutes I asked him what he was making. He looked at me and lowered his head. “A coffin.”
There I stood in a room full of platters and decorations and other wood crafts, with nothing to say. For those who know me, that is rare. I stumbled through a polite reply, and then he asked me a question. “Are you a carpenter?”
I had to tell him no. But I told him I have a great appreciation for craft and craftsmen, and that I loved watching him put to work skills he had learned from his community. He went on to tell me the coffin was for his uncle. His uncle was still living. This was a gift, so that he could see the work being done for him.
I have thought a lot about that interaction ever since. As I continue my work in the pastoral office, the work of the craftsman becomes more and more of a model for me. Didn’t Paul tell the Ephesians that the church is being built together into a dwelling place for God? If pastors are to join him in that work, then at some level we are craftsmen.
I have thought for years that one of the things I lacked in my life was a craft. I am an incapable carpenter. I am a liability with any tool in my hand. Ask me to build, make, or repair anything and I am of little use.
But if the work of ministry is craft, then my whole life has been training in the work.
I have spent many words on this site, in other places, and in my preaching on the undue influence of three mentors I never met: Dallas Willard, Eugene Peterson, Wendell Berry. Each of these men has shaped my life and thinking in major ways.
Yet I have remained mostly silent on the one man who most shaped my craft of ministry. Part of the reason is that the other three left books. My dad left no pages. He never sat me down to explain ministry to me. He took me with him.
Gary Griffith, born October 20, 1962, entered eternal rest October 1, 2008, eighteen years ago today. I was seventeen. My dad. The one my name comes from, as I am Gary’s son. A name I hope I earn.
Christian history will not remember my dad. He was a music, youth, and college minister. To my knowledge he preached very few, if any, sermons. But if eighteen years of interactions with those he influenced have taught me anything, it is that no pulpit is required for pastoring. All that is required is availability.
I remember how much my dad wanted to make people comfortable. I’ll never forget him teaching me that the way you dressed as a pastor was a way to make people feel comfortable. There were some people who could never connect with him in a coat and tie, so he changed into his jorts, his LifeShare blood center free t-shirt, and those ugly red flip flops so they could be comfortable.
He took me to visit the older ladies in their homes when they couldn’t come to church anymore, always treating it like an adventure we were on together. If we went to Mrs. Smart’s house maybe we’d get a bottled coke, or to Mrs. Irene’s and get a cookie, or best of all Mrs. Glass’s and I’d get to play in the treehouse. But I was never there just to play. I was there to listen, to watch, to participate.
I joke often at my church that all I want to do is preach and visit old ladies. Maybe that is because it is what I learned to do first.
I spent part of today going through pictures of the last couple of years of his life. In almost every one he is surrounded by church members doing something silly. Dancing in a sombrero. Making a whole dinner party laugh. Cheering at some obscure kids sporting event.
The craft he taught me was ministry, and these were the tools he showed me. Availability. Humor, to soften the edges of a broken or angry person. And most of all: pray with and for people.
He has been gone longer now than I had him. I am only now seeing how he was shaping me for what would come, before he or I even knew it. He did not know I would be a pastor, and neither did I. He was preparing me to be a kind of man, and that is what made me a certain kind of pastor.
I told that young carpenter no, and that was true. Is what my dad handed me a craft the way that young man would recognize it? Maybe not. There is no bench, no set of chisels, no community in Waco that certifies it. But I believe it is no less craft.
A couple of weeks ago I needed to make a late evening hospital visit with my son. We walked into the room of one of our beloved church members, and we hugged, we laughed, and we prayed.
We were walking the same halls I walked with my dad when he made hospital visits with me, back when I was young enough to think I was just along for the ride.
As we left, I told my son about the icees my dad would always get me in that cafeteria, and about what he told me every time: show up, smile, pray.
He asked if he could get an icee, sadly they were closed. Then he said, “You know dad, maybe one day I’d want to be a pastor.”
I smiled at him. “Ok. But remember, whatever you are, we always show up for our people.”
The tools of our craft require no box, son. They require our lives.
I think you create things with words. And I am the better for it.