Pastor Wendall Hawley

Today I met with Pastor Wendall Hawley, who has come out of retirement to be interim Assistant Pastor during College Church's transition time between our Senior Pastor Emeritus Kent Hughes and our new Senior Pastor Josh Moody. Here is a photo of him and his wife Nancy from the College Church website.
Just from talking to him and hearing him lead congregational prayer in many services, I can tell that Wendall is a godly man who has served the Lord faithfully for many years. Before this position he's served College church in many capacities including many terms on the council of elders. He's also church planted and pastored churches, served as a chaplain with the military and to the incarcerated, taught Homiletics classes at a seminary, and spent many years serving on the editorial staff of Tyndale House Publishers. He and Nancy have three grown daughters and 11 grandchildren.
Besides sharing with him a little about myself and where my life is headed, I also brought a list of questions along to learn from his storehouse of wisdom. Here are some of the questions I asked him along with a summary of his answers as best I can remember from what I wrote down.

Question 1: What are some of the most important lessons you've learned over the years? both from the experience of pastoring, being an elder and a chaplain, and as a husband to your wife and father to your children?
Don't be in a hurry! Wait on the timing of God.
People don't move as fast in a congregation as pastoral staff often are ready to.
Don't be separatistic toward Christians in other denominations.
Not everybody in your congregation is going to be where you are or have all the right feelings toward God. Don't clamp down to hard when you see it. Expect it. Lovingly shepherd people who are hurting and struggling alot.
Search out mentors rather than just academic learning. There are some gains to being thrown into ministry head on before seminary as well as losses.
Too many pastors make the church their bride. You need to be devoted first to your wife and family at home. If man cannot serve his own home, how can he really serve the church well.
A man should be devoted first to his wife and children before any calling or vocation. Tend to the heart of your wife with gentleness and respect, especially in decision-making.

Question 2: What advice can you give me as I pursue God's calling toward pastoral ministry and marriage?
Wendall had basically already answered this with the last question, so I sort of skipped it.

Question 3: What was your background like and what training did you have for ministry?
Wendall told me about his days in a small fundamentalist church that did not much value education, and how from living in Oregon he got thrown into being a pastor of a church before his undergraduate education was over. He looked back at the hastily put together sermons, and reminisced about how God used him anyways. Later he did a church plant in another part of Oregon, gaining access to an old closed down Presbyterian church by finding out who had the keys, and getting students to lead Sunday school and diving right in. He then went to graduate school and later to seminary.

Question 4: What are a few books that have most impacted you and drawn you closer to the Lord? or what are a few authors in particular that shaped you?
Wendall took a long time to think about this one. Over the years he had built up more than a 5,000 volume library, and during his early years of pastoring he read voraciously, book after book. For a while when he was teaching homiletics courses, he read everything he could get his hands on about homiletics (the study of preaching, basically). He mentioned Spurgeon as one author he comes back to over and over again, and that he never gets tired of. He also suggested reading lots of biographies, since we can learn so much from other people's lives, the ways they failed and struggled along with the ways they exhibited great faith. He honestly also confessed that he didn't know where to start with that question because there was just so much.

Question 5: Since he had mentioned teaching homiletics courses and read so much about it, I figured I'd ask him what his theology of preaching was a what were some important tidbits he could pass along.
He proposed that before preparing and before preaching every sermon, that a preacher ask himself this question, "What is it I want the listener to carry away from this sermon?" Too many sermons wander around on by-roads that don't add to the main point. He also strongly suggested that every sermon should really interact deeply with the lives of the congregation. There should be a real clear connect to daily life. And in order to have that the preacher should consider all that might be going on in the lives of his people during any given Sunday morning. To know that, moreover, he needs to be with his people. He should not just spend time in the study but with the people of his congregation, knowing their struggles, counseling them, learning how to preach prophetically to them.

Question 6: Because I have been so touched and enlightened by both the passion and the theological depth of Pastor Hawley's congregational prayers, I told him so and asked him what thinking he had done about that topic and if he could speak to it at all.
Wendall emphasized that aside from the sermon the pastoral prayer is the most huge, instrumental part of the service, because through it you incorporate scripture into prayer, and thereby you teach your congregation how to pray. He said that he often will work in the concerns of people in the service whom he's talked with even that week. There are many great books out there concerning bible-saturated prayer and he referred me to Martin Luther's A Simple Way to Pray, which I think is available in full online at this link, as well as the great book of Puritan prayers, Valley of Vision.

Before ending our time I invited him and his wife to share their life story with the College Group at After Hours, which they will most likely come to sometime in August, and then asked for him to pray for me to close. He did and it was inspiring and enlivening. I look forward to continuing to see him around, learn from him, and even meeting with him again.