Church Voices

When I first moved to Owosso I didn’t realize some of the more subtle differences between here and my hometown. I come from a tradition that believes in the priesthood of all believers and so we generally try to strip all titles out when referring to clergy so I started out correcting everyone who wasn’t a member of my congregation (as they had the hang of it already) by asking to just call me Tim. Well, one day I was talking with a funeral director on the phone and he called me Pastor Reed about 12 times in a few minutes. Here’s our actual conversation afterwards:

Me: Could you please just call me Tim?
Him: You got it Pastor Tim.

At that point I gave up. I think at this point if someone called me the Reverend Pastor Priest Pope Reed I’d probably not even notice.