Minister in the Making

This time, Dad talks about one of the biggest mistakes of his life. A choice he lived to regret even 40 years later. After five years at the West Side Church of Christ in Akron, Ohio, Dad was happy and thriving. Then, in what seemed to come out of the blue to everyone--including Dad--he just up and quit one day. In this episode you’ll hear him struggle to answer the question “why?” even after four decades to think about it.

This is a special episode because my mom, Debbie Irwin, is joining my dad for this conversation. We’re talking about the years 1975 to 1978, when Dad and Mom were serving their first church while starting their family. In the last episode, Dad talked about what it was like to be a 24-year old first time head minister for a church hundreds of miles from where he grew up. This week, Dad and Mom will talk about what it was like to be married and become parents during this time in their lives. How did church work change their relationship? How did their relationship help or hinder church work? How did becoming parents change their lives? Their marriage? Their ministries? Who was a better baby: Me or my sister, Michelle?

This episode picks up in January 1975, when Dad was 24 years old and the newly-appointed minister for the West Side Church of Christ in Akron, Ohio. That Dad ended up here was a surprise to everyone. Just one month prior, he had no plans to be a preacher and no plans to ever live north of the Mason-Dixon line. In our conversation today, we talk about what it was like for Dad to take on his first full-time ministry as the “face” and “voice” of a local Church of Christ congregation. We talk about the difference between what Dad learned about church work growing up in the Bible Belt and what he found in the Rust Belt. Dad will talk about how he had to prepare and train himself to be a “pulpit man” and how he did it. He’ll tell us about the sermons he preached, why he chose to preach them, and whether he would ever preach them again. Finally, Dad will talk about what he did right as he began his life in ministry and what he could have done better starting out. We’ll even get into some of the strange expectations that churches place on their ministers, including an insistence that Dad preach his sermons from a 50 pound Bible.

We pick up soon after the calendar turned to 1972. Dad, a 21-year old college dropout, went on a disastrous blind date with a 17-year old high school senior named Debbie Sadler. Just one year after their awkward meeting, they were married. 

Marriage, a new sense of direction, and a sudden job loss convinced Dad that it was time to go back to college. He was soon back at David Lipscomb College, in Nashville, Tennessee, majoring in church education. 

When Dad graduated in December 1974, he got exactly the kind of job offer he hoped to get, but he passed it up to take a job he swore he would never do in a place he never imagined he would live. 

Why?

Listen to this episode and let's find out together.

In this episode, we pick up in the year 1971, the year Dad got kicked out of Christian college, almost ended up going to Vietnam, and really questioned his Christian faith for the first time in his life. You could call 1971 the year of Dad’s wilderness wandering. But in that wilderness, God sent the people who would help Dad find and form his own faith and point him in the direction that would eventually take him into Christian ministry, a role he never imagined or wanted for himself.

People who knew my dad, Travis Irwin, as a Christian minister may think that he dropped out of the sky that way. But in this episode, we find out that Dad went through a time in life when he wasn't sure that Christianity was even true. Growing up in a preacher's family himself, Christianity is what Dad and the rest of the Irwins...just did. 

After spending his first two years at David Lipscomb College having fun, Dad's grades got so bad the dean told him to not come back to school. After a brief scare in which Dad thought he might have to go to Vietnam, he found himself just hanging around and wondering what he was going to do with the rest of his life. He even started wondering if the Christianity he always just assumed was something he could really trust. Some new friends started to show Dad new possibilities for his Christian life. Then, on a blind date in early 1972, he met the woman who would change the course of his life in ways that surprised even him. 

In this episode, Dad talks about growing up as a teenager in the 1960s Bible Belt. He shares what he felt about living through history (Civil Rights, Cold War, and Vietnam), watching his dad give up on making a living as a Christian minister, and making the choice to become a Christian himself. 

Dad was born on March 9, 1950, but we're not going to start learning his life story in the 1950s. To understand the world in which Dad grew up, we need to go back to the decade before he was born: The 1940s. In this episode, Dad talks about his parents, Walter and Doris Irwin, and what they were doing in the ten years leading up to his birth. How did their own families form them? How did they find their way to faith? How did they meet each other and what kind of relationship did they build? How did the life Walter and Doris made together in the 1940s become the world in which Dad grew up.  

My dad, Travis Irwin (70), is retiring from almost 50 years of Christian ministry. This seemed like a good time to ask him a lot of the questions that I've always wanted to ask about faith, family, and work. 

In this first episode, Dad looks back at his life in one broad brushstroke. We'll get down into the details in later episodes.