My tent-making got off to a shaky start. I entered the world of web design and digital art in 2001, when the dot-com industry went into the toilet. The bounty of jobs I’d been expecting had vanished. I landed a few contracts, but my resumé was dominated by two strengths: music and faith. Tough to find work outside the church with that experience.
Every pastor who seeks a new career path faces the same challenge: your theological school degree is relatively useless. Besides, your field is respected by adherents to the faith you serve, but it makes you suspect in other work environments. (People don’t want a full-blown minister in the staff room when they’re talking about the partying they did on the weekend.) I applied to the University of Alberta to begin a master’s degree program and was told I’d need at least two years of upgrading. I enrolled and, to pay the bills, took a job in a very traditional church as an associate pastor.
On Sunday mornings at Holyrood Mennonite Church I wore a suit, sang along to traditional hymns and preached from behind a heavy wooden pulpit. I made few, if any, pop culture references. I attended potlucks and taught Sunday school. On Sunday night, however, I wore jeans or shorts and T-shirts while volunteering at the Gathering: light apparel so I wouldn’t sweat too much while jumping around with a guitar strapped to my back. When I preached, I walked around animatedly, with visuals projected on the screen behind me. I attended bible studies over a pint or smoking a cigar around the fire pit in my backyard.
I started my current band, Seven Devil Fix, in 2004. The name is a reference to Jesus casting seven devils out of Mary Magdalene. The number seven in the ancient world was a number of completeness. If you had seven devils, you were a write-off, a lost cause – and Jesus healed a woman in this condition. It was an apt metaphor for what we hoped our music could accomplish.
We started out playing regularly at the Gathering, writing songs for the worship service and recording them onto our first CD. We started playing clubs again. And I discovered something about my two worlds. Somewhere along the line, they’d merged completely in my mind. I no longer thought of one as secular and the other as sacred. We played songs we’d written for church in clubs, and I wasn’t embarrassed. The songs were expressions of who I was. They weren’t musical tracts to convert the unwashed masses. They were tales of my own spiritual journey.
The Gathering helped me with that. While I was still on a pedestal Sunday mornings, I was just Mike at the Gathering. Just another guy who helped out. This attitude also transformed the way I worked at Holyrood Mennonite Church. I wasn’t anyone special. The only difference between me and the people I served was that I got paid to do some specialized tasks that required some professional knowledge. I was no longer up on a pedestal, which ultimately helped me avoid falling off. I stopped living a double life.
Some pastors dislike this attitude. They’d prefer I refer to my job as a “calling.” They’d say I’ve cheapened the station of pastor, or minister, or priest. But that’s a misunderstanding. Being a minister is a calling – but everyone in the world has a calling, too. It’s the thing we dream about, the thing we want to do more than anything. If you believe we’re all spiritual beings, then all work is sacred. Nothing is profane.
I’m no longer a paid pastor. I finished up at Holyrood Mennonite and am concentrating on getting my master’s in comparative literature. I’m also a sessional instructor at King’s University College; my goal is to teach full-time at a university. I still play with Seven Devil Fix. All the money we make from shows is spent paying for our second CD, which we released last year. And I volunteer at the Gathering on Sunday nights, praying and reading the Bible after I finish my school work. Irony of ironies, we moved in with Holyrood Mennonite. It’s a good fit. With real estate prices soaring, we needed a cheaper space. And they needed a better sound system. U
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