by Steve Van Winkle, Pastor
Fellowship Baptist Church, Bozeman, MT
Twenty years ago this week, in May 1992, I received my first ministry job offer; that offer prompted me to leave Baptist Bible College a year prematurely and launch the journey that has lasted the bulk of my life. The offer was from Dan Inman who had recently taken the reins of Plains Baptist Church, in Lincoln, NE, my home church since 1987.
For me, Plains Baptist remains a warehouse of unusual memories … I remember prayer requests such as, “Please pray for the man who flashed me this morning.” I watched a person make change in the offering plate one Wednesday evening — honest to goodness, make change.
It’s the church I brought my then girlfriend to after she was saved; it’s where she was baptized and we were married. It’s where we were attending between my first and second year of BBC after our wedding, which is when the pastor we knew well and who had married us, resigned in the summer of 1990.
Upon his resignation, our pastor told us there was a man in Vermont who was interested in the position. The church was down to maybe 25 people, and had fallen into disrepair in all ways imaginable. Even though Cheryl and I were leaving in a few months, I was on the Pulpit Committee. I expressed my thoughts about whether Plains could continue as a going concern in this world.
In the end, the majority suggested we have this person from Vermont come and see how much of a disaster our church actually was in, with the assurance that if anyone would trade a going church in Vermont for what we had, it would have to be of God.
That person was Dan Inman. We scheduled him to preach and get to know what few people remained. That Sunday, a mammoth crowd of 30 or so assembled, and afterward the pulpit committee joined him for lunch at the home of a lovable older lady named Virginia, whose cherry blintzes would make Satan consider converting.
Maybe it was Virginia’s blintzes, but Dan told us he was ready to come be the next pastor if we would have him. Since the only qualification we had for a new pastor was that he be able to fog a mirror, Dan Inman began his final assignment: salvaging the wreck of the SS Plains.
When Cheryl and I later arrived to work for Pastor Inman, we discovered most everyone who had “committed” to support the new pastor was gone. But we set about trying to spruce up the very dated and dilapidated structure. With an indefatigable smile I never fully understood, Pastor Inman managed to eek a little hope out of the remnant that still believed that this church wouldn’t die.
He suffered his first cardiac event while I was with him, and because of this he determined to get healthier. I had been riding a mountain bike as my primary transportation for some time, and he decided a bike would do him good as well. He purchased one and suggested we go riding around town together.
Arriving at the parsonage, I was greeted by one of the funniest sights I have ever seen. He had decked his bike out with a little horn, side-view mirrors, and a tall, orange flag. The only thing it lacked were the cards in the spokes. He wore a helmet that looked a size-and-a-half too small (sporting yet another side-view mirror), gloves, and I think, riding shorts. It was truly a sight to behold.
I confess to having more than a few laughs at that sight over the years, but I mention it now because as I have gotten older, I recognize the sort of — courage — it took for an upper-middle-aged man to try something as foreign as biking, probably knowing he would stick out a little.
Or a lot.
It’s the same kind of courage that I imagine compelled him to follow the Lord to a surefire disaster of a church. Dan Inman did something at Plains Baptist Church I’m not certain anyone else could have: He waited out death until the resurrection. He did it with steady handedness and godly patience and received the rightful, honorable reward of having left his final ministry a much better one than he found.
While contemporary Christianity persists in its rush to celebrate the pyrrhic victories of the over-funded and overexposed ministries to the masses, we should remind ourselves that the bulk of the American church is made up of Dan Inmans.
They are the ministry equivalent of what George Bailey reminded Mr. Potter were the vast majority of people who do “… most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community …” Men like Dan Inman aren’t noticed often nor celebrated much, but they do most of the ministering and visiting and preaching and studying in this nation, and only the people who have come in close contact with them are able to take up the task of remembrance for their labor.
I remember … I remember Pastor Dan Inman doing his ministering and visiting and preaching and studying … faithfully.
Dan Inman died this month. He never pastored over multiple-site services, nor was he ever going to interview Presidents, but what he did was faithful.
Pastor Dan Inman did “faithful” very well.