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Abbotsford, B.C.
MB pastor wins sabbatical award


Andrew Dyck of King Road MB Church in Abbotsford, B.C. was awarded a Study Grant for Pastoral Leaders given out by The Louisville Institute. He was one of only 40 pastors from across North America to receive the award in 2002, out of 236 applicants.

Transition

The grant came at a time of transition for both Dyck and the church. After five years as associate pastor, in the fall of 2001, Dyck was asked by the church to become senior pastor, effective May 1, 2002, when senior pastor Al Enns retired. It was agreed that Dyck would be given a four-month sabbatical from January to April to prepare for the transition. While provision for this had been considered earlier, it was the first time a pastor at the church had actually taken a sabbatical.

The church is also in transition. It is composed primarily of immigrants who have come to Canada from Mennonite colonies in South America since 1960 and of Mennonites who have immigrated to Canada from the former Soviet Union since 1980. However, this immigration has largely ceased, and the congregation has been transitioning to ministry in English, a generation or so after other Mennonite Brethren congregations. Dyck, as a second-generation Canadian, is the first senior pastor at the church who is not fluent in German. (George Baier has been hired as an associate pastor to help fill the gap; his primary role is to preach in the church’s German service and minister to German-speaking members of the congregation.)

The purpose of a sabbatical

Dyck had first learned of the Louisville Institute program through information circulated by B.C. MB Conference minister Ike Bergen; the information had come to Bergen from Bruce Guenther, a professor at MB Biblical Seminary–ACTS in Langley, B.C. The Institute provides funding for pastoral sabbaticals, but also guidance. Dyck’s sabbatical included a three-day orientation at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary in Kentucky featuring presentations on topics such as “How to have a good sabbatical”.

The sabbatical included some significant study, but Dyck learned that there is a fundamental difference between an academic sabbatical and a pastoral sabbatical. Professors take sabbaticals so that they can do research and write articles and books. Pastors take sabbaticals as “Sabbaths” – so that they can rest and be spiritually renewed. Dyck had originally tried to do too much, but soon saw the wisdom of scaling back. Another pastor, Karen Heidebrecht Thiessen, who had taken some maternity leaves, offered some wise advice: She said that she had not begun planning her church ministries until the last week or two of her leaves. Dyck took this advice. He did not use the sabbatical to plan his next sermon series, for instance, but found the sabbatical generated a lot of ideas for a number of sermon series. “My creative edge is back,” he says.

He and his family were also careful to absent themselves from King Road. Instead, he, his wife Martha and their three children visited a wide variety of other congregations. Fortunately, the children saw this as an adventure, asking, “Where are we going this week?”

Dyck also joined nine other MBs to begin a two-year series of retreats and spiritual direction under the leadership of Steve Imbach, focusing on prayer, listening to God and discernment; this experience is intended to prepare them to give spiritual direction to others.

Study

Dyck’s sabbatical did include some formal study. He and Martha attended Eastern Mennonite Seminary’s four-day School for Leadership Training in Virginia. He took a course on Luke and Acts at Regent College in Vancouver; of particular interest was the early church’s experience of a rural-oriented people taking the gospel to cities. From Associated Canadian Theological Schools in Langley, B.C., he took a course in Greek and a directed study under Bruce Guenther on the cultural character of the evangelical tradition.

For the latter course, Dyck wrote a 40-page paper on “Faith and Culture at King Road MB Church”. Faith and culture, he says, are like a knotted web of bungie cords; they need to be disentangled and examined, but they always spring back into the knot. He is critical of the idea that a church should have no culture, since every person and every group has a culture. Some Christian leaders say that the church should drop culture and be “purely evangelical”. Such leaders fail to see that “North American evangelicalism” has all kinds of culture attached to it, in terms of music, polity, worship styles, nationalism and ways of doing things. Culture is part of the created order, and we should honestly admit the existence of our church culture. King Road, for instance, should not be embarrassed about its various immigrant cultures or about the fact that its culture is changing. But a church should always be critiquing its culture as well. Solomon’s temple was very similar to other temples built in that era – but it contained no statue of Baal. In church we can freely use many parts of the surrounding culture, but not all. The key question is: Is what we are doing biblical?

 – jc

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Last modified August 13, 2002.

© 2002 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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