New Synod Moderator Says All Are Chosen

by Ray Waddle

The best training Don Padget ever got as a minister was his first career, as a non-minister.

For 16 years he was a civil engineer and a regular churchgoing layman. From his angle in the pew, he could see what makes a good pastor and a good sermon: Don’t berate people with the burden of unrealistic demands, and don’t preach too long.

Don Padget

“I try hard to make a sermon listenable; 10 or 15 minutes is long enough,” he says.

“That’s the best thing I ever did in preparing as a minister — be a person in the pews.”

Padget, 69, is this year’s moderator of the Synod of Living Waters. The one-year position caps a three-decade ministry career. In 2001, he retired from the only church he ever served, First Presbyterian in Allardt, Tennessee, in rural Fentress County.

Padget, born in California and raised in Mississippi, lived all over the country as an engineer, but a new vocational calling led him out of that life and into the church.

The theme of calling still shapes his witness as preacher and churchman. He believes everybody is called to serve one way or another, and no one is outside the scope of God’s redemption.

“Everybody is chosen,” he says. “We are born as God’s children; he gave each of us certain talents. You’re expected to use them for him. We’re all called to do something that makes ourselves useful to God and the world.” Padget, who continues to preach in various capacities, says his sermons aren’t preoccupied with who’s saved and who’s not. Only God does the saving. Instead, Padget sees his role as a guide on the subject of Christ-oriented duty.

“My preaching is never to convert but to educate on what your duties are as a Christian,” he says. “Our task is not to ‘get saved’ but to do God’s work. God will take care of the rest. I try to be a guide to the redeemed.” He places his theology somewhere in the vicinity of universalism. “God loves everyone,” he says.

“God doesn’t give up on anyone. We have three children. I can’t imagine them in a situation where I would cease to love them. If God is the perfect parent, how could he be any less perfect than we are?”

Padget has some favorite sermon themes. “I preach faithfulness. That’s a big one these days. Faithfulness: Stick with your wife or husband. Stick with your church, your family. Stick with what you’re committed to doing.”

Gentleness is another theme. Padget is disturbed by the nationalistic “swagger” in the current climate of war and foreign policy. But he says he does not preach politics, though he is a political liberal and everybody in his congregation knows it. “They know I’m a Democrat, but it never mattered to them as long as I visited them when they were sick.”

Padget and his wife, Mary Ann, have both been long active in their county — for instance, at the Fentress County Food Bank, which regularly serves 600 families, and at the local Red Cross. They also tutor troubled teenagers at the Eckerd Youth Camp. Mary Ann Padget, a retired college English teacher, is on the Allardt city council and an active promoter of books and the local library.

Don Padget, whose ministry has focused on the small-church rural setting, says the Presbyterian Church (USA) would be wise to shore up small congregations more aggressively, perhaps by supplementing small-church pastor salaries. The need is great to attract ministers to small towns and nurture ministries there.

Padget’s church is the only Presbyterian congregation in the county. He says it fulfills a niche for people who weary of fundamentalism. It offers in-depth Bible study and worship that honors the majesty of God. “We have a different message from the other churches: God loves you whether you go up to confess your sins or not. God loved you before you were born, and no one can take that away from you.”

(Ray Waddle, author of A Turbulent Peace: The Psalms for Our Time, is a writer in Nashville.)