This past week Danielle and I achieved something momentous and life changing. We made the final payment on my student loans, paying them off years early! After fifteen years of never missing a payment, usually paying extra, and at least twice making large bulk payments to shrink the principle, we are done! Educational debt is an absolute scourge on our society, especially for people in my generation and the folks who are younger than me. It is only getting worse. Proverbs 22:7 says, "The borrower is slave to the lender." Well, this borrower is no longer slave to that particular lender.
Having your debt paid gives great freedom. So why am I writing about this on my pastor's blog? Well, the reason is that I have the Church to thank for helping this to happen. This month our congregation is hearing "Stories of Generosity." Here is just such a story.
When I went to college my family was not able to help me financially at all. When I was applying to schools I knew that I had $0. Thankfully I received some scholarships and grants, but I also worked part-time during school and full-time during the summers. In addition to these forms of income, I also took out loans, eventually racking up about $20,000 in debt, which is a lot of money, but much less than a lot of people. When I graduated, I got a job paying $27,000 a year and started making payments six months after graduation. Even though many people I know deferred their loans until they could make more money, I have made every single payment and more. I borrowed the money, so it was my responsibility to pay it.
Three years after graduation, I felt called to go to seminary to study for pastoral ministry. Before I even realized this call on my life, the people of First United Presbyterian Church of Guthrie, Oklahoma discerned this call. Under the leadership of Rev. L. Dale DePue and then Rev. Karen Rogers, the congregation felt that if they discerned God's calling on my life that they needed to help make that happen because a Master of Divinity degree from a seminary is very, very expensive. They took my seminary education on as a mission. The little congregation, which at the time had about 80 folks in worship each week, raised more than $15,000 to help fund my pastoral education.
I think every church should do for their seminarians what FUPC in Guthrie did for me. They truly understood their role in the larger family of the Presbyterian Church (USA). In addition to the generosity of the saints of FUPC-Guthrie, I received a scholarship from the Synod of the Sun (a regional governing body of the PCUSA), as well as a large tuition waiver from the endowment of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Because of the generosity of Presbyterian Christians in Guthrie, Oklahoma, the Synod of the Sun (Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas), and those over the years who had given to APTS, as well as my part-time job in the admissions office, and Danielle's full-time work at the University of Texas, I did not have to take out any loans to fund my seminary education. Some folks leave seminary with $50,000 or more in loans in addition to what they might have already accumulated in undergraduate school. I, on the other hand, took on no additional debt and even made every loan payment while I was in seminary and we continued to give money every single month to the ministries of our home church back in Guthrie. Because of the generosity of the Church, I finished seminary with less debt than when I started seminary. That's not where the church's role in this ends, however.
I cannot imagine how long I would be paying on my educational debt if I would have had to take out loans for seminary. I think it is ridiculous how much seminary costs. It seems to me that as a Church we should find ways to educate our spiritual leaders if we really believe they are called by God to serve in that role. I am very fortunate that my debt did not grow so I was able to make progress on paying it off. This process of paying it off was also helped by a program through the Presbyterian Church (USA) that grants up to $2,500 a year (for up to four years) toward paying off student loan debt if a pastor serves a church with less than 100 members and a budget of less than $100,000. My first church fit both of those criteria. I only stayed there two years (a decision I regret sometimes) but that money helped to knock down the principle, which lessened the interest that compounded over the years. Eventually I ended up coming to serve my current congregation, First Presbyterian Church of Washington Court House, Ohio. This congregation is very generous to me and to my family, which has enabled us to pay extra on the loan every month until this month when we made our final payment.
As brothers and sisters in the family of Christ and as different parts of the same body of Christ we are to take care of each other. "Share with the Lord's people who are in need," Paul writes in Romans 12:13. When we do this, "the service [we] perform is not only supplying the needs of the Lord's people, but is also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God," Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 9:12. We are in this together and if we truly value the church's ministries we will invest financially in those ministries. The same goes for the ministries of our teaching elders (pastors). If we truly value their training and ministry then we must invest in it by paying them well and helping them to pay off their educational loans that made it possible for them to serve our congregations.
Seminary is very expensive--too expensive in my opinion--and too many seminary students and graduates are being left on their own to pay off that debt. It is a shame that so many congregations see the call to pastoral ministry as being a call placed merely on an individual rather than a call placed on that individual and the church together. I am so thankful that the generosity of not just hundreds, but thousands of saints has made it to where at the age of 36 I am completely free of educational debt. By the way, Danielle is free of educational debt as well. This will enable us to give more to the ministries of the Church and to assist those in need, to save for Wyatt and Josselyn's college so they won't have to take on debt, and to save for retirement. "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free," Paul says in Galatians 5:1. Thanks to Christ's Church today I am experiencing even more freedom in Christ. Thanks be to God!
With Gratitude,
Pastor Everett
