The Rev. Wiliam Patrick Gahan currently serves as the Rector of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Wimberley, Texas.
He has also served parishes, schools and organizations in Beaumont, Texas, Austin, Texas, and Sewannee, Tennessee.

 

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Essay Responses

1. What are you passionate about in your ministry, in your personal life, and in the world around you?

I am passionate about changed lives.  The more I experience how wonderfully and completely God transforms our lives, the more excited I become.  Last Sunday after worship, for instance, a young man – 35 years old or so – approached me with a glum face and said, “I do believe in the Christian message, I’m just tired of not living it.”  He thought I would take that as bad news, yet I knew from my own life that he was on the precipice of a changed life – one that will transform his marriage, his parenting, his work, and his myriad web of associations.  What he thought was bad news was really the entryway of the Good News – the best news a man or woman will ever receive.

Because I am passionate about changed lives, I am eager and ambitious to share the Good News of Jesus Christ with them.  On that accord, my longtime hero is the late Sam Shoemaker, rector of Calvary Church, Pittsburg and one of the silent founders of Alcoholics Anonymous.  Fr. Shoemaker’s famous poem, I Stand by the Door, begins this way:

I stand by the door.
I neither go too far in, nor stay too far out.
The door is the most important door in the world -
It is the door through which men walk when they find God.

All of us in the Church should be poised at the door – better still on the sidewalk or on the street or in our neighbors’ homes clamoring to bring others into the transformative faith community in which we have been imbibed.  True, it takes work, a different kind of work than at first is comfortable for our parishes.  Yet I assure you that once we begin opening the doors wide in our churches – from the largest urban ones to the tiniest missions tucked away in the pines – we will fill them.  

The passion I bring to my vocation proceeds from the deepest reservoir of my self.  I am completely and hopelessly in love with my wife – who was my sixth grade sweetheart in Birmingham, AL and has been my best friend these many years of our marriage and before.  On the very day she consented to marry me, we marched right up to the altar rail at Trinity Church, Natchez, MS, where I was serving as a youth pastor.  We knelt down, and I asked God to bless our marriage and family.  God then changed my life wonderfully and irrevocably through Kay and our three children.

That’s why I continually picture the young mother arising on a Sunday morning determined to change her life.  She shakes her toddler daughter into her tights, brushes the cowlick out of her six year-old son’s hair, and prepares herself for church – a threshold she has not crossed in fifteen years or more.  We must be poised at the door for her arrival, painstakingly taking actions on her behalf from that Sunday morning and throughout the next week.  The parish will likely only get one chance to do so, and that’s the only avenue I know to change the world.

2.  Please elaborate on an occasion or experience, during your ministry, of personal growth and change.

I was somewhat shocked to discover that my greatest challenge in ministry would occur in what seemed to be a sleepy hill country town, Wimberley, Texas.  When I arrived here to serve as rector four years ago, the parish was still smoldering on the pyre of the Gene Robinson consecration.  Several key families left Saint Stephen’s to join Saint John’s, New Braunfels, and they eventually formed the nucleus of a breakaway contingency.  Saint Stephen’s was left with a $1,100,000 building debt, the entirety of our 2004 diocesan assessment unpaid, and, more importantly, a community that was badly frayed with division and distrust.

No sooner did I step into my new office than the heat of the controversy blasted me.  I first began to get notes by mail insisting that I remove all suspected homosexual persons from service at the altar.  From another quarter, a couple I’d come to respect exited the parish because I would not bless the anniversaries of same-sex couples.  

I was beginning to think I had misheard God and taken a bad call.  Not only was the subterranean tension in the parish stifling, but I felt out of place with the very vocal extremists in both parties.  I am an orthodox, Biblically-centered Christian, yet with a comprehensive Anglican sensibility.  I planned neither to eject people from the Lord’s service nor to revise the central tenets of our faith.  In the face of the pressures I was experiencing, I needed advice and fast.

To that end, I sought out a counselor whom I respected but did not know.  Also, I wanted someone who had no supervisory authority over me.  In a moment of supreme lucidity, I called Bishop John McNaughton.  He graciously agreed to see me, and we met at a San Antonio restaurant.  Between bites of my Chicken Caesar salad, I explained to him my dilemma.  Bishop McNaughton listened attentively, but then he put down his own fork, peered at me, and tersely stated:  “Pat, never forget that the parish ministry is all about relationships.”

I thought silently to myself, “Nice quip, Bishop, but now what?”  I didn’t have to wait long.

Bishop McNaughton continued, “Now you go back to Wimberley and make appointments with all those persons making these demands.  Ask them point blank, ‘What do they want to happen to their parish?’  

I was in shock, but I drove back to Wimberley that afternoon and did exactly what he recommended – concluding all the calls by that evening.  And in the next twelve months the average Sunday attendance at Saint Stephen’s increased by 100! 

The change Bp. McNaughton sparked in me was really begun 30 years earlier at the Infantry School at Ft. Benning, GA.  On the day of my commissioning, my commander, CPT James Wolfe, leaned over to me and said, “Remember, Pat, people will only follow you if they want to.”  He was right, and the change has been good.  

3. What are the touchstones in your faith that will guide your responses to the issues now facing – some would say threatening – the Episcopal Church and the world-wide Anglican Communion?

At the very first meeting of our Foundations of Discipleship class, our threshold eight-session newcomer’s course at Saint Stephen’s, we always tell the assembled group: “Remember, where you’ve come from is as important as where you are now.”  That’s an important statement for us to make, as four of every five people entering our parish have never worshipped in an Episcopal Church.

When considering the touchstones of my own faith, I should be quick to add – where I’ve come from is as important as where I am now.  For example, at age fourteen, I was invited by the Order of the Holy Cross to attend Saint Andrew’s School in Sewanee, TN.  It was in that place that I irreversibly became an Anglican.  The Benedictine routine of prayers, shared meals, and communal living got into my bloodstream, never to be removed.

Later, when attending Trinity University in San Antonio, TX, I came under the influence of Campus Crusade for Christ and the Navigators.  The good people in those more ardently evangelical groups patiently led me through the Bible and helped me realize the blessed life Christ offers all people.  At that time, I began to discern the marvelous breath of expression within the larger Christian communion.

While in the military, often serving on very lonely deployments, I turned both to the Holy Scriptures and my catholic faith for strength.  I still have the dog-eared, olive drab green New Testament I stuffed into one of my ammo pouches alongside banana clips of 5.56 caliber ammunition.  Furthermore, because the Army only offers Protestant or Catholic worship in the field, I was drawn ever more strongly to the Eucharist…besides the Catholic chaplain made our parachute jumps with us!

The most difficult moments in my past have been the deaths of both of my younger brothers.  Witnessing my mother’s devastation over the losses she could not prevent, has been very painful for me.  Their deaths have also let me see clearly the limits of my own power and the certainty of my own mortality.

Thus, the touchstones of my faith proceed directly from my sacred history.  I have been marinated in our Anglican tradition.  I cannot imagine being anything other than an Episcopalian, living in communion with my brothers and sisters here and in the other provinces.  Among other things, being an Anglican means that I not only can live with but love those with whom I disagree.  Secondly, I am tethered to the Bible.  I have professed publically and signed an oath stating “I believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and contain all things necessary to salvation.”  I meant it when I said it, when I signed the document, and I will never retreat from it.  Thirdly, the Holy Eucharist reminds me again and again that I am incomplete with out my Lord and Savior and bereft without my brothers and sisters.  Fourth, I am ever mindful of the most insidious sin in my life and others – the sin of idolatry.  On those daily occasions when I imagine I am God, I confess – most often on my knees – that I am not and without Him I am nothing.