170- Retirement from Ministry- Really?

170- Retirement from Ministry- Really?

Welcome to Strength for Today's Pastor, conversations with current senior pastors and leaders which will strengthen and help you in your pastoral ministry. And now, here's your host, Bill Holdridge of Coyman Ministries. Welcome to podcast number 170.

I am with Brian Heminger of Las Vegas, Nevada. Brian is a longtime friend, and the reason we're talking with Brian today is because he is a senior pastor, now retired from a long ministry in Half Moon Bay, but his life and his ministry mirrors so many of the things that we talk about here in this podcast, and so many have contributed different bits of pieces of the things that we're going to discuss. But, but they're all in one in Brian. He's just like the composite of all of these lessons and all of these journeys and valleys and mountaintops and everything else that has gone on. So we're doing it for that reason, and I think it's going to be encouraging.

Brian's a wonderful brother in Christ. Brian, welcome to the program. It's great to have you.

Thanks, Bill. I'm really humbled to be here because I listen to your podcast, and now to be the subject on it, I'm kind of stoked about that. Well, you know, maybe that's the way to get on, listen to the podcast, and then you'll get invited.

Yeah, amen. Anyway, you've got quite a ministry background. You came to the Lord in 1981. Praise the Lord for that. And then, were you married to Carol when you came to the Lord?
No. We got married about a year and a half after we both got saved, but we got saved about a week apart from each other.

That's perfect. That's perfect. Yeah.

And you were married for a lot of years, and that took you all the way through up to your time in Half Moon Bay, well into that. And then you lost her. She went home to heaven in what year, 2010, you said? Yeah.

She had breast cancer, and it metastasized into her liver. And long story short, the Lord just said it's time for her to come home. And that certainly wasn't my plan, but it was God's plan.

And an important lesson I learned there is that I surrendered my life to Christ, but so had she. And so she was okay with what God was going to do with her life. Praise the Lord.

But it's hard to lose. It's hard to lose. Oh, man.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Someone you love so much.

And then the Lord blessed you with a new bride, a new companion, someone who's a great fit for you. Oh, yeah. And that happened just a few years later, right? You've been married 13 years now? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. It'll be 13 years later this year. So about two and a half years after.

Definitely did not see that coming. Uh-huh. Well, you know, a lot of guys in the position that you found yourself in kind of say that to themselves.

I just don't see this happening. But then the Lord has different ideas. And she's a great fit for you.

She's a wonderful woman. Oh, yes. She is.

Look, God was not kidding when he said it's not good for a man to be alone. Right. Yeah, I can totally relate to that.

So your salvation in 1971, and then you got— Yeah, 81. Yeah, 81. Yeah, that's what I meant to say.

But I said 71 anyway. Anyway, and then you were discipled initially. You found your way to Harvest Christian Fellowship with Pastor Greg Laurie.

Yeah. Greg was a huge influence on me as far as ministering is concerned, because it's in his church that I learned what biblical exposition is. And that every single week, that verse-by-verse study through the entirety of God's Word.

And as you know about Greg, too, always with an emphasis towards evangelism. And so that's really where I learned to do what I do initially. That's wonderful, because that's, as you know, as we've talked about before, expositional Bible teaching isn't as common as it ought to be.

So for you to have landed there is great. Yeah. I mean, again, God knew what he was doing.

I like to say God's a professional. He's done this before. And it was that grounding that I got there that, as we were discussing just yesterday, I believe has kept Calvary Chapel vital and useful to God's kingdom for all of these decades, when so many other movements never, ever have lasted this long.

But it's that commitment to the verse-by-verse teaching of the entirety of God's Word. Yeah. I agree with you so much.

So then after that, you became an assistant pastor at Calvary Chapel Claremont, California, and you were there for a period of time. Talk about that season a little bit. Yeah.

That was a direct result of talking with Pastor Greg about how to get into the ministry. Because I had been struggling with the call, feeling the call, finally surrendered to the call. And since Greg was my pastor, and I knew him well enough to sit down and have a conversation with him about it, and he made some suggestions about what I could do next.

And in trying to decide whether to start something new or get involved in something else, I connected with Pastor Marco Alvarez, who was just starting a new Calvary Chapel in my hometown in Claremont, California. And so I connected with him, and that was a connection that changed the entire course of my life. So you were there for five years.

Initially, the purpose was for you to grow into the ministry, possibly even there at that church. You know, I was open for whatever the Lord wanted to do. And I was born and raised in Claremont, so I lived there my entire life.

And I had no vision at all for leaving, but I was willing. You know, if that's what God wanted to do, I was willing to do it. Like we were talking here just the other day about a couple of different places that I had looked at that I felt maybe the Lord was calling me there.

But I spent five years there with Pastor Marco Alvarez, and anybody that knows him would confirm what I'm about to tell you, but Marco was a man of great integrity. And so I learned a lot about what the ministry is and what it isn't, spending those five years with him. He was my graduate degree, really.

Boy, what an advantage you had. I mean, by the time you planted in Half Moon Bay, you had been a Christian for 18 years plus. Yeah.

And I compare that to my own story. It was like five years, you know? So that's an advantage that you had. Yeah.

And in addition to that, too, is for all of the years that I lived in Southern California, I moved to Half Moon Bay in 99, which I know we'll get to. But for the 14 years previous to that move, I taught a home Bible study. And as you know about home Bible studies, it's an excellent place to cut your teeth.

And not only did I learn a lot, I made every mistake you could ever possibly want to make and lived to tell about it, but I learned the lesson as a result. So teaching a home Bible study was an excellent place to learn how to teach. Yeah, same here.

That's what happened with me growing up in that kind of an environment, learning to teach for just a few years, and then boom, I'm planting a church. Go figure, right? Yeah, exactly. Okay, so then you eventually moved to Half Moon Bay in 1999, like you said, and you planted the church.

And you were bi-vocational the entire time that you pastored there. Tell us about that. I know about it, but maybe our hearers don't know about your story there.

Well, the interesting thing was the job, the trade really that I had, I was a professional hairstylist. And little did I know when I started cutting hair, which was in 1978, if you can imagine that, I never could have imagined that that would be my vocation while pastoring the church. The beauty of it, of course, was that I had a flexible schedule, so I could work when I wanted to or work when I needed to.

In addition to that, it's an incredible study. I mean, I spent 45 years behind the chair. That's a graduate degree in human nature, is just listening to people talk and having the opportunity, I can't even tell you how many times, to share the Lord with people.

I've had people get saved right in my chair while I was cutting their hair. And it was a great ministry. But what I didn't foresee coming was that it gave me the opportunity to pastor a church without ever taking a salary.

And although the church did give me a housing allowance, which paid for part of the rent, I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area. But the opportunity to not have to take a salary from the church was a huge benefit to the church for the entire time that I was there. And you were there as a professional hairstylist in Half Moon Bay, correct? So you were working in, yeah.

So you were actually reaching the community from behind that chair. Very, very much so. Because virtually 100% of my clientele was local people.

And you talk to people, not just at work, but wherever you go. And everybody wants to know, why did you move to Half Moon Bay? And then the door is open to tell them the story. And so whether it was at work, talking to clients, or just around the community.

And you know Half Moon Bay, it's a small town. You know, I got to just talk to people everywhere I went and tell them the story about why we came there. Yeah, that's beautiful.

And you know, the whole idea there of bi-vocational ministry, you know, our natural tendency is to work to avoid it. We want to be full time in ministry. But you and I both know, and you were one of them for so many years, that there are great advantages to being bi-vocational.

You're in the community; you're with the people. Whereas those that are completely vocational in their pastoral ministry, it's easy to get isolated from the community that we're serving. So we have to actually search for ways to remain connected to people that are outside of our church bubble.

Yeah, that is, I couldn't have said it better myself, because I have absolutely nothing against anybody that is a strictly vocational pastor. And it would have been great, but that just was not what the Lord had for me in that community at that time. And the good thing was, is it kept me up to my frontal lobes in unbelievers every single day.

And so I always had, I think anyways, I always had a really good sense of what the world outside of the church was thinking and what they were going through. And so I always felt connected deeply to the unbelieving world, which was my mission field. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I can see that in you, knowing you as I do. You have a way of seeing the human race that is cool. I mean, it's a learning experience every time I speak with you about those kinds of things.

So in Half Moon Bay, you pastored for many years, and you retired from that role how long ago? Tell us about that. That was coming up on almost three years ago now. Crazy.

You know, I think every pastor, and I think Alistair Begg might have been the one that said this, you live in fear that everyone's gonna discover that you're a complete fraud. And he was the one that said, I quit the ministry every Sunday night, and then Monday morning, I think I'll give it one more go. And so you live with that as a pastor, and I think all pastors do to an extent.

But the one thing that began to creep into my head was that the church in Half Moon Bay was going to grow and it was going to be blessed, but it wouldn't necessarily include me in the next stage of its growth. And I have to tell you, I struggled with that thought for years, years. And you and, of course, my good friend, Pastor Tim Brown, were both a part of, you know, okay, guys, what do I do with this? You know, is this just, you know, after losing my wife, is this just some sort of an emotional reaction to that? Or, you know, am I just listening to the voice of the enemy? Or what is that? So I spent a number of years exploring that, praying through that, talking with people like yourself and Tim about, you know, what do you do with feelings like that and thoughts like that? You know, and that was quite a process.

But you know, God is justified in all of His methods, and that methodology of struggling with that question is what ultimately led me to where I am right now, that yes, the church there was going to go on and God was going to bless it, but He was going to use somebody else to take it to the next step. And so my role, I had fulfilled. My task was done.

Yeah, what a great realization. Like the Lord Jesus said, I have finished the work you've given me to do, and He had. There was still plenty to do, but He had finished what He had been given to do.

And I can relate. In Monterey, where I pastored for 27 years, Brian, I quit, not every Sunday night like Alistair Begg, but there were five times that I can remember specifically where I seriously thought that now was the time for somebody who really knew what they were doing to come in behind me and take the church to the next level. And in my case, it eventually happened that I did retire from that ministry, but the difference is that I acted on those feelings.

And I would bring guys in to candidate, and I'd tell the board, I think it's time and all that, and I'd get the church all upset, and then the Lord would begin to minister to me again, and I'd stay. But that's my story. That's not your story.

So I just thought, you know, we share that in common as well. So during those years, how many years was it all told? Twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven years.

Okay. We've matched again. Oh, no.

Wait a second. No. Sorry.

That was... Are we doing math? Is this math? This is math. Math. As they say in England, maths.

Yeah. It was 23 years. 23 years.

Okay. 23 years. 23 years.

Lots of challenges, lots of ups, lots of downs. We talked yesterday as we were chatting about some of your initial temptations to try to create a church in the image of Harvest Christian Fellowship. Yeah, yeah.

You know, coming out of the Southern California Calvary Chapel bubble, you know, my assumption was, you know, because it's Calvary Chapel, you just say Calvary Chapel and a thousand people show up. And you know, I started learning that that was not the case when I was at Claremont, because it just didn't go that way, and I couldn't understand why. And then when I came to Hapham Bay, I thought, okay, well, I'm going to do it right now.

You know, I've learned how to do this, so I'm going to do the Calvary thing the right way. So I did. And you know, we had 70 people, our very first Sunday evening service that we did, and we had 20 the next week, and then 12 the week after that, you know.

So I'm looking at this going, okay, this is going the wrong way, you know. I'm supposed to be growing exponentially every single week here, because that's what Calvary chapels do. And obviously that's not true, but that's part of that, I think anyways, being in that kind of Southern California bubble.

But that's when I started going, okay, I have to do something now. What do I have to do? I have to do something. And that's where the Lord really sat me down and reminded me once again that the Lord adds to the church as many as are being saved, and that my responsibility was to fulfill the calling that He had placed upon my life, to preach the gospel, to teach the Word, to fulfill the Great Commission, to raise up the next generation of disciples.

And if I stick to that, then whatever happens is—that's on God, not on me. I just wanted to—I just didn't want to mess it up, you know. I didn't want to be the guy that, you know, he did everything right except the most important part.

You know, I didn't want to be that guy. So I really just hunkered down and focused on what I knew was the right thing to do, the biblical thing to do. And that's what I did, and left the rest of it up to the Lord.

And then God blessed after that, you know. So you resolved in your own mind the question that so many of us, we always face this question, what does success mean, and, you know, and how do I attain it? But you answered those questions with what you just said. Yeah, it's—I tell you, the word success is a really bad word to use in relation to the church and the ministry, because success, it implies so many other things that have nothing to do with the Great Commission and the responsibility of a pastor.

And as we've spoken of many times, you know, the word that was the most important to me was faithful. You know, I wanted to be faithful to what God called me to do. And I knew that if I focused on that, then whatever God wanted to do was going to be okay with me.

My responsibility was to be faithful and not worry about anything else at all. Because that whole success thing and the numbers thing, it's such a trap. And any pastor that's listening to this right now knows what I'm talking about, you know.

You just—if you focus on the numbers—I mean, it's like trying to run your life in the pursuit of happiness. You know, it's like if you're after happiness, you're never going to get it. You know, happiness is a byproduct.

And I think oftentimes in the ministry, it's really easy to try to measure our success, you know, as a pastor, just on sheer numbers and what a fallacy that really is, rather than focusing on faithfulness and let God do what he wants to do with that particular body of believers in that place. Yeah, that's right. Well said.

The idea of pursuing success, it's so right. And the success of churches is often measured by the three Bs, you know, buildings, butts, and budgets. Yeah, absolutely.

But it's just all wrong. So I love what you're sharing, Brian. Focus on the Great Commission, being faithful to follow that plan.

And like we were saying yesterday, I think often about Isaiah, who was given a mission, and his mission was to speak to people that couldn't understand it and didn't want to hear it. Yeah, exactly. How long do I have to do this, Lord? Well, until Jerusalem is destroyed and everything's gone.

Oh, well, that sounds like a wonderful outcome to many, many years of ministry. But he was faithful. You know, brother, where, you know, Half Moon Bay is right at the foot of San Francisco.

So I definitely felt like I had that ministry preaching to people that didn't want to hear it and couldn't understand it. But, you know, even that, I have to tell you, and a lot of people told me before I moved up there, well, you know, the Bay Area, that's tough soil. That's as tough a soil as you could ever imagine.

And you know what I felt? I felt the hardest place to minister is wherever there's human beings. That's the hardest place to minister. Because human beings, they've never wanted to hear this.

So San Francisco's no different than any place else. It's just full of human beings that don't know and don't want to hear. I think the advantage there, and I've been thinking about this lately, Brian, is that when you're ministering in a place like Half Moon Bay or San Francisco, anybody that names in the name of Jesus is probably a Christian.

I mean, there's not a whole lot of counterfeit Christianity in situations like that because there's no motive or incentive for them to be counterfeit. There's no reward system. Whereas when we were in the South, are you a Christian was the question I first asked people when we lived there.

And of course they were because they went to the First Baptist Church or they went to the Church of Christ down the street. And so I had to change the language and say, do you have a personal saving relationship with Jesus Christ? And some of them looked at me like, what planet are you from? I don't even know what you're talking about. But there was a reward in that culture for looking like a Christian, talking like one, even though you weren't one, actually.

And the reward was cultural acceptance. Yeah, you know that from traveling around the country and what cultural Christianity looks like when you're in a Southern state or in the Midwest or something like that. And in the Bay Area, the lines are drawn really clean.

Like you said, there's not a whole lot of in between there. Yeah, and that's an advantage. So did you look at it that way when you were there? I mean, did you kind of see that as part of the narrative? Yeah.

Yeah, and because it was the Bay Area, it changed a lot of things in the way that I preach. Like, one thing that was a real important focus of mine in the Bay Area was I never talked about politics. I never brought up politics at all.

Because in the Bay Area, if I said anything that would indicate even remotely my political viewpoint, then people would just shut down, and they wouldn't listen to me at all. But if I told people, yeah, I'm not a Republican, I'm a registered independent, then they would be more willing to listen to me than if they had the idea that I was just another radical right-wing Trump voter or something like that. So I kept politics out of it altogether because I felt, especially in the Bay Area, that if I'm going to offend someone or if they're gonna shut me down, it's gonna be for the sake of Jesus and not for the sake of my politics.

So I always wanted to lead, as it were, with Jesus and not with my political viewpoints. And I certainly have political viewpoints. But the Bay Area was a good place just to set all of that aside and make it all about Jesus and not let what I considered to be, in that environment, a compromising factor enter into it.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, we were similar in Monterey.

Half Moon Bay may have been a couple notches above Monterey in the sense of its radical Yeah. more leaning to the left type of a thing. But still, it was the same kind of concept.

And I remember the woman that came to me and said, you know, I have just loved coming to this church for these last few months because I left the church when I was a young girl. But what I'm hearing here is good. But last week, when you said, and I had said something that was, you know, she viewed it as political, I can't remember what it was.

She wanted to talk to me about that. And she was close, on the verge of not coming to church anymore. And I thought, well, you know what? I don't want to drive anybody away.

But you know, I want to speak the truth and love. So what we settled on, and I'm sure you did too similarly, is let's instruct the people from the word, teach them a Christian worldview, what it looks like to live as citizens in our world, get them registered to vote, and then tell them to vote consistently with the Christian worldview that they've learned. And we could do that without endorsing a political party, without mentioning a candidate.

And that's what we did. And I was fine with that. I was happy with that.

So was I. And as you well know, too, a lot of this boils down to, you have to know your community. And again, coming back to being bi-vocational, I knew my community. I knew it well, because I was up to my frontal lobes in it every single day.

And so I knew, I heard what people were saying. And so I knew, okay, well, if I want to approach this person with the gospel, I need to not have that be a factor that could compromise my testimony to them. And so that was a big deal for me there.

And I made a conscious, concerted effort to do that. Yeah. Well, well done.

So you, when you retired from Half Moon Bay, you entered into the murky world of transition. And it went well, though, because the Lord provided somebody very supernaturally to take that role and had a heart for it and a love for Half Moon Bay, which I didn't know that that was in your successor's heart. I don't know if you did.

Well, no, no, that came up as a part of our conversation about it. And Pastor Pat, as is oftentimes the case with the Lord, it was just a series of things. And looking back on it all, you can see exactly how God lined the whole thing up.

But when we were right in the middle of it, you know, we had no clue what was happening. We were just kind of poking and prodding and exploring and investigating and talking a little bit here and a little bit there. And then as all of these little bits and pieces came out, by the time we finally kind of got to the conversation, Pat, do you believe the Lord's calling you to come over and take over the pastor to this church? It was like he couldn't wait to get over there and pastor this church.

As a matter of fact, if you don't mind me telling the story, and I know Pat wouldn't, I invited him and his lovely wife, Sandy, to come over and attend the church. We didn't tell anybody anything about anything. Nobody knew anything.

Just Pat and Sandy came for a visit. And so they just sat in church and just listened to the message, and they worshiped with us. And after church, they hung out, and they were talking with people.

And nobody knew who he was at all. And after that, I talked to him about it. And both Pat and Sandy said, we love this church.

Awesome. And I'm like, I know. They're awesome.

I love this church too. But it's just they fell in love with the people of the church right from the get-go. And that, to me, was also not that I was looking for a sign, but just a good indicator.

That's interesting you say that, because we've seen situations in working with churches that are in transition where a candidate would go to the church and not speak, and not even announce that he's coming. The board knew who he was, but not the people that are in the fellowship. And he would come and do what Pat did in Half Moon Bay and Sandy.

And the same thing. They would fall in love, and it helped them understand really how to respond to questions that they would receive when they actually went into some sort of an interview process. It was good.

It was really good. I remember being on both ends of that conversation. I remember talking with you, apart from Pat, and I remember talking to Pat, apart from you.

And it was just fun to watch the Lord work as both sides kind of came together, and eventually the question was asked. Well, you in your transition, as you were talking yesterday, you decided, you made a decision that when you left Half Moon Bay, that church was in the hands of somebody else that Jesus had raised up, and it wasn't yours anymore. How did you get to such a firm conviction there? Because that's not something that every pastor can do.

That is a really good question. And maybe part of that is just personality. I was good at compartmentalizing.

I think, if I can add this in, part of that came out of my struggle with losing my first wife. And how do you move on from that? How do you move forward from that? Because you beat yourself up because you think, okay, if I move forward, that means I'm forgetting her altogether. Well, no, you're not.

You can't. And so how do you move forward? And for me, in that particular case, it was a conscious decision where I said, okay, I need to move forward. I have to move forward.

Otherwise, I'm just going to sink like a stone. And so when it came time to move on from the church that the Lord had used me to pioneer that work, so I had not just an emotional attachment, but literal blood and sweat had gone into that. But part of that was that understanding, and it was drummed into me intellectually, that this isn't my church.

This is the Lord's church. And my responsibility as under shepherd to the great shepherd is to take care of his sheep. And I can't remember who said it.

It might have been Chuck, about not getting your fingerprints all over God's sheep. And it's like, this isn't my church. These are not my people.

God's just given me a responsibility here. And so turning that page was two parts. One was the understanding this is God's church, not mine.

And the other part of that was the relief of, okay, now I don't have that responsibility anymore. That leads to this whole idea of what we were talking about the other day of decompression. So decompression.

Thanks for bringing that word up. So what is that word, and how does it relate to what you experienced? You left. You retired from the church in Half Moon Bay, and then there was the word decompression.

So what does that mean? Yeah. Well, I can only explain it from my experience. But any pastor listening to this knows that you bear far greater burden than anyone really knows that you bear.

And yes, we give it all to the Lord. We pray, but you still bear this incredible weight of responsibility. And then all of a sudden, that's lifted.

And I should qualify that, but we'll qualify that in a minute. But that whole responsibility is lifted. So I've been living with that responsibility for decades, and now all of a sudden, that's gone.

Now what do I do? And so I just, yes, I felt a great weight of responsibility come off. But then it's like, okay, well, what about my identity? What about my usefulness to God and His kingdom? Who am I now after that? And the weirdest thing of all was going to church and just sitting there and listening to the music and listening to the preaching and just sitting there like, what do I do now? How do I do this? And ultimately, really learning to enjoy just sitting there and enjoying just being ministered to. Yeah.

So decompression is that whole process. It is. Yeah.

You discovered some things along the way you were telling me about. You discovered that it was very important to stay in the boat somehow. And so you've continued with your Life of Christ series chronologically on YouTube.

You really have worked on that, developed that. 200-plus lessons that you've done. So you kept yourself... I'm not in a hurry.

Yeah, well, that's good. But it was something. I mean, you were staying sharp.

You were staying focused. You were continuing to do. And as we talked, you mentioned that the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable.

So how does that pertain to what you're talking about in your experience? Well, yeah, you're talking about Romans 11, verse 29. And in the New King James, it says, for the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable, which is a great word. But in another translation, I think it's King James, it says it's without repentance.

And that doesn't sound right to my ear. And so when I looked that word up, irrevocable or without repentance, it literally means without regret. So God literally did not regret calling me into the ministry.

And that really, I guess I could call it a nagging thought that the gifts and calling are irrevocable or without regret. So now what do I do? Well, I had already started Life of Christ in chronological order when I was in Half Moon Bay, and then I left. And a number of people there said, hey, can you keep this going? We want to hear the rest of the series.

And so I started live streaming it every Tuesday night. And we've kept on with that. I started that almost as soon as I got here.

And so that has kept me, as you say, in the boat and keep the skills, if not the sharpest, at least they're still active. And the reality is, is once God calls you to be a pastor, he doesn't un-pastor you. Yeah, that's right.

I was waiting for you to say that. That's great. Yeah.

And I know a lot of pastors and missionaries that once they're out of the boat, they never get back in the boat. And I think that is a shame. And I was fortunate enough to have people that actually wanted to hear what I had to say.

Now, it's not very many, I'll grant you that, but at least there was a few that wanted to hear it. And so I've kept that going. And whatever the Lord wants to do with that is fine by me.

But it's a part of that, you can't go back, you can't un-pastor, you can't not be what you've been or what God made you to be or called you to be. You can't undo that. You can retire all you want, but you never retire from being a Christian and being a servant of the Lord and seeking daily to do what he wants you to do.

And if he's called you into the ministry, if he's called you to be a pastor, you can't undo that. Sure, you could sin horribly and make a mess of your life and do all of that. But for those of us that have stayed on track, more or less, you can't stop being what God called you to be.

He doesn't certainly stop it. He doesn't regret it. Maybe that's what irrevocable means.

In one sense, once a senior pastor, once a pastor teacher, always a pastor teacher, just in different seasons, in different ways. And I point out that most of the pastor teachers in the world are not senior pastors. Yes.

Yeah. This is okay. This is really an important point, because I think one thing that a lot of pastors tend to think is, this is the ministry.

You stand in the pulpit, you preach the gospel, you teach the Word. That's the ministry. But we all know the ministry is a much bigger world than just that.

And so if you think this is the only way and the only place that God is going to use me in His kingdom, don't limit the Lord like that. Because God can put you wherever He wants to put you and use you however He wants to use you. Right.

And to your point, now that you're not in the senior pastorate and not charged with oversight of the whole show in some way or shape or form, you're the CEO. You're not really the CFO, but you're the CEO. You're the director of the board.

You're the president of the corporation. You're the pastor of the church. And in our model of leadership, the buck more or less stops with the senior pastor.

So once that's retired from, there's a whole boatload of stuff that is now no longer on our shoulders. And some of that was what I call administrivia. Some of it was just the responsibility of having such a central role in the church.

And now I don't have that. So isn't it a place of potential liberty for us? Now we can take the gift mix that God has put in us, and we can choose to do something that really fits that without the excessive oversight responsibilities that we had when we were a senior pastor. Yeah, yeah.

It's once all the mundane, if I can even use that word for some of the business side of the church, once all the mundane stuff is removed, I'm free to focus now on exactly what my gifts and calling are. I'm not distracted, as it were, with those things. And look, having spent 23 years in the pulpit, those are all exceptionally important things, and things that require an enormous amount of attention and integrity and faithfulness.

But with those things off the plate, it's almost like it's a brand-new day. It's a snowy field with no footprints on it. And it's like, where do I wanna go now? What do I wanna do now? And the prayer is, Lord, just somehow find a way to use me, because I've been used before, and I'm not used up yet.

I'm not dead yet. So Lord, use me however you wanna use me. And if you're doing a live stream Bible study, is it great? Filling in a pulpit for somebody, is it great? I'm up for anything.

I love it. That's great. I ain't dead yet.

That's true. We ain't dead yet. But you know what? This is where the senior pastor who retires from his church, if he can get a sense of vision for his future, if he can be thinking that way before he retires from his church, like, what will my life look like? And what can I do? There is still the greatest need for equipping ever in our world.

And we have the very means by which we can equip people, which is the Word of God. So, I mean, look at all the Bible colleges, and all the schools of ministry, and all of the Bible institutes, and just within our family of churches that there are. I mean, it's incredible, the opportunities.

Years ago, the Lord showed me, and I'm just being personal here, Brian, and I apologize to you for this, but years ago, the Lord showed me that the gift of teaching and the gift of being a pastor teacher was going to become a stewardship for me. And a stewardship is something that I need to manage and take care of. And it was specifically, it came up because I was talking to the Lord about more opportunities to teach.

And he gave me a verse, and he said, “As every man has received the gift, so let him minister the same as stewards of the mysteries of God.” And he showed me, you're going to be a steward now. You will come to a place where you're going to be able to teach as much as you want, wherever you want.

And it's pretty much that way. I think it is pretty much that way for men like yourself that have that heart and have that gifting and have that passion to minister the Word. I mean, that's the thing that we love the most, is to see people's lives change through the transforming power of the Holy Spirit and the equipping DNA of the Word of God.

We loved it, and we still do. Yeah, I'm really, really glad you said that, because that really, really ministers to my heart. Because just going back just to what you said here a couple of minutes ago, when I was looking at retirement, I had absolutely no clue what God was going to do.

I had no vision whatsoever for how God was going to use me. So part of my decompression process was, okay, well, here I am. Now what? That's been a big part of my decompression period.

Now what? Okay, yeah, I've got the Bible study going online. Okay, that's good. But is that it? Is there something more? And so that vision of a stewardship, not only of the Word but of the calling itself, that's a life-changing vision for how God could use somebody in the place that they are like me.

Where you're sitting here just going, okay, what next? And I love the process. I love the process, because I love wrestling with these things and struggling with them. But that, that idea of that stewardship, that God's gifts and calling are irrevocable, that is the pathway forward.

That's forward. And that prevents us from getting stagnant or stuck in this retirement, if that's what you want to even call it, and saying, okay, well, my days of usefulness are over. Because they're never over until you're dead.

And since we're not there yet, then let's remain useful as stewards of those great mysteries. Yes, absolutely. That's the point.

I think of Amy Carmichael. She was ill most of the last of her life. And that's when she wrote most of her letters and had most of her prayer ministry continue.

And I think most people would argue that those were the most fruitful years of her life. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting, because I'm looking at this particular period in my life.

I'm 67 now. I'm going to be 68 later this year. And I'm not looking at these years as being the most fruitful of my life.

But I can't discount that possibility. That's right. That's right.

And I don't think you should. And I don't think any of us should. I think we need to be forward thinking.

Because like you said, until we're dead, we're still usable. Yeah. And who knows? I mean, if the Lord tarries, and it doesn't look like He's gonna, but He might.

If the Lord tarries, we could be living another 20 years or more. God, I hope not. And that's in my DNA, my family history.

I've probably got another 25 years, according to that. And if that were the case, what do I want to be when I grow up? I mean, now I'm 71. But what do I want to be when I'm 95? Am I still going to be viable? And I think there is a possibility of that, for sure.

Well, very good. The transition, then, is into a new phase for you. And I'm so glad that you and Deb are living in Vegas now.

We get to live closer together and hang out a little bit. Yes. And that kind of thing.

I love it. And I'm just thrilled for what the Lord's gonna be doing through your lives. And you've got a winner there.

She loves NFL football and college football. And she follows you into the in-and-out joints that you love to frequent. Yes, she does.

You know, that was a deal-breaker. That was a deal-breaker when we first started dating. You know, it's funny.

I like to tell people that, you know, and you know this, Bill, having the opportunity to be married to an amazing godly woman is an incredible gift. Now I've done it twice. Yes, wow.

And to two times be married to incredible godly women is just—it's just the Lord. It's just the Lord. I never could have done that.

Yeah, praise the Lord. So happy for you guys. That's great.

Thank you. So, moving forward, I want to—before I forget, you're still doing your Tuesday evening class on the chronological life of Christ. Tell the listeners how they can access that, and can they be part of it? Ah, good question.

I'm not even sure what the link is. Okay, so if you go to YouTube and just do a search for my name, Brian Heminger, B-R-I-A-N-H-E-M-I-N-G-E-R, you'll find it. And I think it's my name with a couple of numbers on the end of it.

And I do it every Tuesday night at 7 o'clock. And so it's a live stream. So there's a live chat.

So you can jump in on that. And then all of those messages are archived there on my channel. And the very beginning of that series, you can find on the Calvary Chapel Half Moon Bay YouTube page.

So all the beginning of this series is there. And then the ongoing part of it is here now on my YouTube page. So just look for my name, Brian Heminger, and you'll find it every Tuesday night at 7 o'clock.

That's 7 p.m. Pacific time for those that are listening in other time zones. And okay, so maybe your viewership will increase a little bit here. So hope so.

Yeah, look, you could be one of the seven people that listen to me ongoing. Well, I have watched portions of it recorded, pre-recorded already. I haven't joined you live yet.

So maybe I'll do that. But anyway, it's been great hearing from you and great hearing your story. It's like Yogi Berra once said, it ain't over till it's over.

And that's right. It ain't over till it's over. And here we are, vital and healthy.

And you can still get on a bike and make your way around, I'm sure. And I can still lift weights in the gym and can't throw a baseball anymore. But that's okay.

Well, I never could, so I'm okay there. But now it's just, you know, we talk so often about, you know, finishing well. You know, it's not even so much that I have a vision for finishing well.

It's that I kind of have a vision for I'm just not stopping. There you go. There you go.

Well, isn't the best defense a good offense in that case? Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm just going to keep doing it until I drop.

Well, it's like in football. If you hold on to the ball, the opponent can't score. That's right.

Well, thanks for joining us, Brian. It's been really fun. God bless you, Bill.

Always love hanging out with you. Amen. So you've been listening to Strength for Today's Pastor.

And this is episode 170. And there are going to be show notes attached to this. Actually, there will be a transcript of this entire conversation that you can have access to.

And don't forget that great study that Pastor Brian is doing on the chronological life of Christ and very much in depth. But that's going to be a wonderful study for those that engage in it. So until next time, God bless you.

And may you be fruitful by abiding in Christ and letting him abide in you in Jesus' name. Strength for Today's Pastor is sponsored by Poimen Ministries. You can find us at pointmanministries.com. That's spelled P-O-I-M-E-N ministries.com. If something in today's program prompts a question or comment, or if you have a topic idea for a future episode, just shoot us an email at strongerpastors@gmail.com. That's strongerpastors@gmail.com. 

May the Lord bless you, as you serve Him, His pastors, and His church.