The title ended. The calling did not.

Somebody used to call you by a title.

Pastor. Reverend. Minister. Rabbi. Father. Whatever the word was, you answered to it for years. People said it in the grocery store. Your children heard it said about you. It went on the letterhead and the sign out front and eventually it went somewhere deeper than that. It stopped being what you were called and started being who you were.

And then it ended.

Maybe you retired on your own terms and everyone clapped. Maybe the church could no longer pay you. Maybe your marriage came apart, or your health did, or something happened that you still cannot say out loud without your chest going tight. We are not going to guess. But we know what the morning after feels like, because we have both had that morning.

Wayne had one where there was no choice in it at all.

Years later, the two of us had a different kind of morning. We looked at each other and decided together to step outside the walls. Nobody made us. That was almost thirty years ago now, and we are still out here, and we are still in ministry.

That last sentence is the reason for this letter.

What actually ended

Here is what we want to say as plainly as we know how.

Your position ended. Your title ended. Your office, your parking spot, your place on the platform, the building you knew better than your own house — all of that ended, and we are not going to pretend that is a small thing. It is not a small thing. Grieve it properly.

But your giftedness did not end. Your calling did not end. The thing in you that made people bring you their worst day did not end. None of that was ever issued by a board, and none of it can be revoked by one.

We have watched too many good people confuse the loss of a role with the loss of a self. They walk away believing they have been disqualified. They have not been disqualified. They have been unhoused.

There is a difference, and the difference is everything.

The part of the work you may have overlooked

Think back over the years you gave.

You preached, and you sat in meetings, and you built budgets, and you managed people who did not always want to be managed. And somewhere in the middle of all that, you did the weddings. You did the funerals. You did the baby dedications and the blessings and the christenings.

If you are honest, those were often the extra. They landed on top of an already full week. They took your Saturdays. There was rarely any money in them and sometimes there was no thanks either. More than one of us has driven home from a graveside on empty.

So here is the question we would like to put to you.

In all those years, where were you closest to your people?

Not in the sermon. Not in the office. You were closest to them in a hospital room the hour after a baby arrived. You were closest to them standing beside a couple who could not stop shaking. You were closest to them in a kitchen full of casseroles nobody was eating, three days after the worst phone call of their lives.

Birth. Marriage. Death.

That is where you were let all the way in. That was never the extra. That was the centre, and the rest of it was scaffolding.

We did not understand that either, not for a long time. We understand it now.

A step sideways, not a step over

Here is what we are not asking you to do.

We are not asking you to retrain. We are not asking you to go back to school, take up a trade, learn a software platform, or start over at the bottom of something at fifty-eight years old. You have already done the hardest parts of this work, many times, often exhausted, and usually for free.

What we are describing is a shift to the right. A small turn, not a reversal.

The world of rites of passage is asking for exactly what you already carry. It wants someone who can hold a room where people are undone. It wants someone who is not frightened of grief and does not rush past joy. It wants someone who has stood at a graveside enough times to know what to do with the silence.

That is a rare person. You may not know how rare, because you have spent your whole life surrounded by others who could do it too. Out here, most people cannot.

And out here, this work is honoured. It is honoured with real thanks and, we will say it plainly, with real income. Nobody is asking you to do it on top of everything else anymore. It is not the extra now. It is the work.

You are not meant to do this alone

There is one more thing, and for many people it turns out to be the hardest part.

You did not just lose a title. You lost a community. You lost the people who knew your name and the rhythm of a week with other people in it. You may be finding that the phone is quieter than you expected.

So build another one.

That is what we did. We found people in our own community who shared our values and cared about the same moments we cared about. A photographer. A venue owner. Someone who made cakes. People who had nothing to do with our theology and everything to do with our purpose. We brought them close, and over time they became something we had not planned on.

They became a missional community.

Our mission was simple. Reach into people’s lives at their thresholds. Do it well, do it with honour, and do it together. There is no building, no board, and no budget meeting. There is a group of like-minded people pointed at the same good work.

We believe this is where a great deal of ministry in North America is heading. Not away from the church, but out past its walls, into the places where people were always going to be at their most open anyway.

If any of this landed

We are not selling you anything today, and there is nothing at the bottom of this page to sign.

We wrote this because we know how many of you there are, and we know that almost nobody is speaking to you. You were handed a benediction and a card and then a very long silence. Somebody should have called.

So consider this the call.

If you read this and something in you sat up — if you found yourself thinking about a specific funeral, or a specific couple, or the one graveside you have never quite been able to leave — we would like to hear from you. Not a form. Not a funnel. A conversation with two people who made this crossing and came out the other side still doing what they were made to do.

Ministry does not end because a title ends.

We are proof of that. So are the hundreds who are out here with us.

Come and find out.