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July 7, 2009 | My first job in the church was “janitor.” At 16, I was hired by McKinley Methodist Church in the hills of East Tennessee to clean, dust, stoke the furnace and mow the grounds, including the cemetery. That last task was the hardest. In the days before weed eaters, trimming grass by hand from around dozens of tombstones was back-breaking work. And getting up at 4:30 a.m. on cold winter Sundays to light the furnace was no picnic. As janitor, I had to be first at the church and last to leave. Waiting around to lock up regularly tested my patience.

Looking back a half century later, however, I realize that job was the start of a lifelong process of discipleship and leadership formation. It gave me knowledge and habits that later proved invaluable: Being first to arrive and last to leave; wrestling control of a thermostat; balancing commitment to those in the cemetery with those in the pews; paying attention to the cleanliness of the floors and the height of the grass; and accepting that church pay seldom equals the value of work performed. All good things for a pastor or bishop to know.

Admittedly, my motivation was never a desire to be formed for church leadership. I was in it for the money, $16 a month. Yet that job was the soil in which my call to ordained ministry was planted and took root. An experience filled with prevenient grace, it still motivates and shapes my life and ministry.

As a church janitor, I first connected my work with God. The pastor, John Bacon, helped me see that I wasn’t just cleaning floors or mowing grass. I was “taking care of God’s house.” Though I had not yet linked my baptism with vocation and had never heard of the missio Dei, I knew that God cared how well I cleaned the church and kept the cemetery. It was my first hint that a sense of calling and connection with God’s mission are fundamental to church leadership.

Being a janitor gave me my first taste of theological reflection. It was a wedge that cracked open my understanding of salvation itself. Rather than being primarily about the forgiveness of personal sins, salvation, I began to suspect, was about much more, even the healing of the entire cosmos. John and the members of that country church taught me that God cares about issues big and small. The God who is concerned with war, poverty, disease and salvation is the same God who uses a boy’s lunch to feed a multitude, marks the sparrow’s fall and honors faithfulness in small responsibilities. Mopping floors and washing windows fit into God’s mission.

In valuing my work, the church also taught me that wisdom, insight and ministry gifts are found at all levels, even among those without authority, position or power. In a hierarchical world, leadership is almost always top down, vested in those with titles, positions, degrees and clout. Although janitors are near the bottom of any organizational chart, at McKinley Methodist I was more than the shy kid who took care of the building and grounds. They elected me to the board, invited me to help teach vacation Bible school and asked me to make an announcement during Sunday worship -- my first time speaking before a crowd, all 75 people.

To this custodian, church really was the body of Christ in which the members “that seem to be weaker are indispensable” and the “less respectable members are treated with… respect”(1 Corinthians 12:22-23). The son of a farmer and millworker, I learned from John that God notices the poor, defends the powerless and calls the nobodies. He taught me that a janitor’s basic identity is in the imago Dei long before I could pronounce the term. Whether supervising my work or encouraging me to be a youth leader, he was mentoring me as a child of God and a future pastor. Over the years, he helped me understand that ministry is not a ladder to climb but an identity and a mission.