Dear brothers and sisters of North East Valley Baptist Church—
This is to notify you that I am resigning my membership in the church. In doing so, I am simply formalising my position as it has been now for 18 months or more, as I have only attended one service there in that time.
I owe it to the church, I think, to explain my reasons for withdrawing from fellowship at Valley Baptist, and to assure you all that I have not been motivated by anger or resentment towards the church or anyone in it. I accepted the decision not to employ me as pastor as the decree of God, and this is still how I see it. But when, after many years of following a course of life governed by a conviction that God had called me to full-time ministry, I finally failed to be taken on by the small church which was my spiritual home, where I had ministered frequently over several years, and where my gifts and abilities (and shortcomings) were well known, I was forced to acknowledge that my conviction of a calling was mistaken, and even delusional. At 59 years old, as I was then, it was time to let the delusion go.
This is why I can no longer be involved in ministry of any sort, at any level. And had I continued attending Valley Baptist, people would have made real efforts to keep me involved, which would have been very difficult to refuse. As it is, I have carried on with the small weekly Bible study I had been doing with half a dozen members of the church. In continuing this involvement, however, I have felt that I was putting myself in a false position simply because I could not bear to disappoint them. I cannot see it as truly consistent with my obedience to God, even though for much of the last year the group has been my only church. After ceasing to attend Sunday services at Valley Baptist, I attended Holy Name intermittently until shortly before last Easter, but I did not attend church again till December, when I started attending Mass at St Bernadette’s on Forbury Rd. I expect to continue there, at least on an occasional basis, now that we are living in the south-west of the city.
The level of ministry I have had in the past, at Dunedin City Apostolic, at Valley Baptist, at St David’s Presbyterian and at the Owaka Presbyterian Church, while I have appreciated it deeply, has not been sufficient to justify the commitment of time and money it has cost me over some 30 years, a commitment that has been financially damaging to my family and, in the end, emotionally and spiritually destructive to myself. As a result, I am resolved not to minister again. In the position I find myself in, I cannot urge others to seek God’s will for their lives, and I cannot proclaim the faithfulness of God, as I cannot reconcile it with my own experience. In my pursuit of ministry, I have left myself unfit for any other employment, or at any rate unfit for consideration by any employer for gainful work.
There is nothing I regret more than my decision to offer up myself and my abilities to God in his service.
I had already gone through virtually all of the soul-searching and heartache that this has entailed in the years before God’s final blow fell. Indeed, it had started long before we first came to Valley Baptist in late 2001. The blow itself was not unexpected, and now that it has fallen, I am no longer looking for answers or solutions. For many years—too many—I followed the philosophy that if I did nothing, nothing would happen, and that the only way to find my place in the service of God was to go on seeking opportunities, to keep as active as I could in ministry, and keep my options open with university study. I kept on doing this, even when things had been looking hopeless for years, in part because nothing else was open to me—I was too old for most employers to consider taking me on, and I thought it at least possible that God still had his good purposes for me in closing all other doors. But even as long ago as early 2004, when I was at a low point spiritually, I wrote the following words as a verse of a song:
I won’t look for leading, sweet voice of the Spirit,
I won’t chase the will of God up a blind alleyway.
I’ll still watch the sunset, I’ll still love my neighbour,
I’ll still play my music, and be grateful while I may.
It took me more than six years after I wrote this to start living by my own advice.
As I said, I am not looking for answers or solutions. There are none, and God keeps his own counsel. I take what enjoyment I can from my family, my friendships and my music, and I no longer insist that my life should have meaning. I go to Mass and participate in the worship, and I greet the people around me in the pews during the exchanging of the Peace, but this is the limit of my involvement. As a non-Catholic, of course, I cannot take the Eucharist. I still seek to live by Christ’s teaching in my dealings with others, and still call myself Christian. And I pray sometimes—especially if someone needs healing or some other intervention from God. But I do not seek God’s guidance, and I have had to close my heart and mind to Christ’s Parable of the Talents.
The truly sad thing to me is that no preacher can even use my life as a sermon illustration. Obviously it can’t be used for encouragement—“Things looked bad, but he persevered, and after five heart-breaking years, suddenly God made it all right, and even the tough stuff finally made sense.” But I can’t be used as an awful warning either. What pastor is ever going to tell his or her congregation that seeking to serve God can seriously stuff up your life? Or even, “Be careful about dedicating your life to the service of God, because if you get it wrong, even seriously wrong, he won’t necessarily let you know.”
So, this is where my life in God finds its conclusion. I hope this clarifies for you why I can no longer be involved in ministry, and my need to be in a place where no-one has any expectation of ministry from me. I pray that God will bless you all, bless Valley Baptist, and bring you anointed ministry in the power of his Holy Spirit.
Much love, always.
Neil Copeland
