I was church shopping in 2011 and was settling in on First Presbyterian in Burlingame under the pastoral care of Paul Watermulder. I have some conditioned bias for old-white-dude-pastors, probably because the handful of meaningful ministers I’d experienced from high school through New York came from a pretty standard mold that Paul fit perfectly (or so I thought).
He came to my house one Tuesday afternoon to talk about “burl pres” and their mission and he shared his story.
He had been a police officer in Oakland during the incredibly violent 70s and was inspired by the service, commitment and sacrifice of his fellow officers. To rise up in the ranks and earn a living wage, you pretty much had to get a law degree, and with a young wife and baby on the way he was preparing to start night classes. Paul had a strained relationship with his father, a presbyterian minister, but agreed to meet him in Chicago for some Cubs action and bridge building before he entered this next phase of life. The father-son weekend was uneventful and surface until the final morning in the hotel when his dad asked “if you could anything with your life, what would you do?”. And without missing a beat, Paul said “become a minister”. It is here in the story where Paul pauses for dramatic effect and says “and in that moment, Jesus appeared behind my father in that Chicago hotel room and simply said ‘then do it’”.
The next line of the story is “Obviously, that’s the only time I’ve seen Jesus, I’m not a lunatic. But it set me on this path.”
It must be some flavor of liberating and invigorating to have a faith so strong and rooted in a deep/unfaltering/unquestioning belief. Pastor Paul brought the power to that congregation.