Canadian National Director Retires

Join us in congratulating Bill Hall on his retirement.

Thank you, Bill and Averil, for your many years of faithful service.

Let’s hear from Bill in his own words.

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Pastor Reflections

I still recall a conversation with the late New Testament scholar Gordon Fee, whom I have long considered a mentor. I returned to Regent College in Vancouver after my first year of pastoral ministry in Saskatchewan. When he asked how things were going now that I was a pastor, I replied, “Sometimes the Church (with a capital C) can be quite maddening — except for the people.” He smiled and said, “Yes. It is really about the people.”

The late Eugene Peterson captured this same truth when reflecting on his own transition from academia and church membership into pastoral ministry:

And then I ‘outed’ as a pastor. After those three years of apprenticeship as a pastor in White Plains, I found myself going to work every day in a church. I was not just a pastor. I was a pastor of a church, a congregation. Pastor was not an autonomous vocation. Pastor wasn’t a vocation negotiated privately between me and God. There was a third party—congregation. It turned out that what I had signed up for required spending a term in church boot camp to get a basic orientation in the conditions I would be dealing with as a pastor of a church. (The Pastor: A Memoir, p. 104)

That has been my story as well. In my 29 years of pastoral ministry, the people Jesus placed in front of me on Sunday mornings taught me far more about what it means to be a pastor than any book I ever read or any training I ever received. In many ways, I never fully graduated from church boot camp.

Along this journey, three lessons in particular have stayed with me:

1. 1. You need the ongoing support of your wife and family.
      My wife, Averil, helped me navigate pastoral life, especially when I struggled with certain expectations — hospital visits, conflict resolution, and the pressures that come with shepherding a congregation. And my children lived their lives as PKs (pastor’s kids), carrying their own share of the burden and grace of pastoral ministry.
   2. People look to you as the expert on life’s hardest moments.
      I will never forget the relief on the faces of two young constables when I entered the apartment of a member whose wife had just died at home. They didn’t know how to respond to the husband’s raw grief as he described how she died beside him while they were watching television. To them, the pastor, the “expert,” had arrived to take charge. Little did they know it was my first time walking into a sudden death.
   3. I learned that I stand before the cross of Jesus just like everyone else.
      Whether I liked it or not, the congregations I served inevitably reflected aspects of my own personality. That was a daily reminder of how much I needed to stay grounded in Christ. Without that grounding, I could easily lead Jesus’ people astray.

Now, as I enter retirement, I know I will miss this stage of my life. But I also know that one never retires from the vocation of being a disciple of Jesus. And I hold close the simple words of a member who, after my final “official” service, shook my hand and said, “Thanks for all you have done.”