There are four United Church of Christ congregations within a 25 mile radius of our home. This is very different from the other places we have lived, but for all of our professional careers we have served congregations in areas where there were sister churches not too far away. Our first call was to two congregations that were 16 miles apart. In Idaho, there were two UCC congregations in our town. The same was true in South Dakota. The cluster of congregations in our county is the result of mission activities in the 1880s and 1890s when congregations in the Northeastern United States sent missionaries and provided support for new churches in our area. The northwest was a very remote area at the time, reached by ships that traveled around the tip of South America. The journey was long and arduous in the years before rail lines reached the Pacific.

After our official retirement from First Congregational Church of Bellingham we are taking a few weeks off from worshipping with that congregation. We will continue to be members of the congregation and we plan to make it our home church in the long run, but it is an adjustment for us and for the congregation for us to shift from members of the church staff to regular members of the congregation. Fortunately for us, we have had excellent mentors in that process. Our predecessor pastor in our first congregations remained a member of one of those congregations for the seven years we served. And in South Dakota, our predecessor pastor retired in the community and remained a member of the congregation for the rest of his life, which included the 25 years we served as pastors there. So we have positive feelings about how the transition from pastor to member can take place and good models in those pastors.

Following their example, we are taking a brief break from regular worship with the congregation as they develop new habits and turn to other leaders for pastoral care. Luckily for us we have three United Church of Christ congregations that are closer to our house than First Congregational Church of Bellingham. Today we visit the third of those congregations: United Church of Ferndale. A couple of stories are in my mind as I think of how our lives have brought us to this experience.

We chose First Congregational Church of Bellingham before we moved to this house. When we chose it we were living in a rental home in Mount Vernon. At the time we didn’t know we would end up serving the congregation as Interim Ministers of Faith Formation. We did think that it was very possible we would move closer to Bellingham because our son had moved to this area, but we didn’t know where we would find a home to live. The 30 miles from our home seemed like a reasonable commute for Sunday mornings and we chose the congregation because it was a similar size to the church we had belonged to in South Dakota. We enjoyed the music program and the worship services. Furthermore, the covid pandemic was raging at the time and churches around here were not meeting in person. It is as easy to attend online worship at a distant congregation as one that is closer. We joined the congregation in an online service. The rite of membership was pre-recorded for that service.

As it turned out when we found our home and moved north we are now 20 miles on the other side of the congregation and drive right by the town of Ferndale with the United Church of Ferndale on our way to church in Bellingham.

The second story goes back even further. Back in the early spring of 1985 we were searching for a new call to ministry. We had enjoyed our pastorate of two congregations in rural North Dakota. Our children were born while we were pastors there and we had made deep connections. However, sharing a single job with a relatively small salary meant that we had to seek additional employment to support our family and there weren’t many options for us in that place, so we began to consider a move. We hoped to move to Montana where we had grown up, but there weren’t many congregations seeking pastors in that state at the time, so we circulated our profiles in the neighboring states including Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. One of the congregations that expressed interest in hiring us was the United Church of Ferndale.

When we were packing to move from South Dakota, I cleaned out my files and discovered the correspondence we exchanged with the congregation. I had taken copious hand-written notes about the area including the miles to the ski resort on Mount Baker, miles to the beach, miles from my Sister’s home in Portland, Oregon, and other things about the place.

As it turned out, Wright Congregational United Church of Christ in Boise, Idaho was farther along in its search process and offered us an interview before the congregation in Ferndale. Not wanting to play two congregations against each other, I wrote to the Conference Minister and had the congregation in Ferndale informed that we would suspend conversations with them until we knew the outcome of our candidacy as pastors in Boise. Since we received the call to serve in Boise, we never visited the church in Ferndale.

This morning, 38 years later, we will worship with that congregation for the first time. It will be an opportunity to think of what might have been. Our children were 2 and 4 at the time. They would have thought of this place as their home. As it turned out, our son has a Ferndale address, but didn’t move here until 2020 when their family had three children, their son older than he would have been if we had moved to Ferndale when he was a child. Of course we don’t know if they would have called us to be pastors. We don’t know if we would have moved here back then. It isn’t the way our lives worked out.

Still there is a bit of fascination with the congregation and we are eager to experience worship with the church it has become in the intervening decades. Our lives are a journey with many unexpected twists and turns. This morning is an opportunity to think of one of those turns and how a different path might have led to a similar destination.