Interview With a Retired Pastor

An interview with Rev. Horace and wife Tennie Hilton of Wrightsville Beach, NC for Dr. Jim Coffield, Introduction to Counseling, Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, October 2003.

I spent a couple of hours with a retired pastor and his wife this past week. We are on a first name basis, so I will refer to them as Horace and Tennie. Horace mentioned with pride that this year marks the fifty-fifth anniversary of his ordination. It is obvious that they both consider their years in the ministry well-spent in spite of some negative aspects, though they rarely focused their conversation on the negative. Horace retired from pastoral ministry at age sixty-five (he’s now eighty-two), but has continued preaching regularly in various pulpits during the intervening years. However, his health is failing now, so he is less able to get around. His first love is preaching, but he hated administration. He says that he developed clearer boundaries within his ministry in the later years, simply telling church leaders that they would have to find someone else to uphold the administrative end of things. Tennie learned a similar lesson. In the early days, she tried to involve herself in a variety of ministries all at the same time – women’s ministry, singing in the choir, serving in the nursery – but in later years, she realized that her energy was best spent one-on-one with people. She usually attended every service, so she adopted the strategy of sitting near the back so that she could slip out at the end of the service to greet people on the front porch when they came out. She said that that may be the only time she would see them and get to know them. They both noted that “people need a personal touch” from the pastor and his wife. The people need to know that you care about them. Horace made a practice of phone calling people on their birthday to wish them a "Happy Birthday," and he still calls many people today.

When I asked them about how they recovered from failures such as in their ministry in Knoxville, TN where they said things didn’t go very well,

Response to "The Healing Path" by Dan Allender

By Daniel L. Sonnenberg, 2003.
I really wanted to like Allender since Dr. Coffield said he was one of his favorite authors. But I found him difficult to read – all the way to the end. Like [John] Eldredge, he uses parabolic, poetic language to express himself in prose. I’ve been reading so much theology, it seems I would enjoy a change of pace, but I didn’t. However, once I got past the elusive, non-concrete “desire,” the “embrace,” the “dream of hope,” the “dance of love,” and the “wildness of God.” I was finally able to understand the thrust of his theme. And it’s great!

God’s perspective on pain and suffering, says Allender, is different from ours. It is the rare person, he says, who anticipates pain, let alone embraces it on arrival. We must learn to live in this fallen world with God’s perspective “from above” while living here below. God would lead us on a healing journey through this evil world, but we often stray from the path, missing out on the redemption he has in store for us in this life. Healing, he says, is not “the resolution of the past,” rather, it is “the use of our past to draw us into deeper relationship with God…”

From Fear to Freedom: A Testimony of Emotional Healing

by Daniel L. Sonnenberg, 2009.

This is what the LORD says: "Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls..." (Jer 6:16 NIV)

While we were living in Florida and attending seminary a number of years ago, I discovered something new and something old about myself and about God and his word. In the process, I discovered an ancient path on which to walk. I began the discovery in a counseling class during our counseling partner rotations. In a group of three, we took turns counseling, being counseled and observing one another. During that rotation as a counselee, I heard myself saying repeatedly that I was angry about this and angry about that, and it got my attention. A few weeks later I asked my professor about it. During the conversation he said some things that also got my attention. One of them was that fear is usually a signal to us that something needs to change. An even more striking statement was that he thought that it was fear behind my anger and that I was perhaps the most fearful person he had ever met. That certainly got my attention because he had been a counselor for some twenty years. We agreed that since he was my professor it would be better if he could set up some meetings with me and one of his colleagues to talk about it some more.