I retired in 2018 at 66 and a half years old after serving for 33 years as pastor of Village Baptist Church in Bowie, Maryland. Before that, I served for eight years as associate pastor of Montgomery Hills Baptist Church in Silver Spring, Maryland, another D.C. suburb. Both churches are members of the D.C. Baptist Convention.
I decided to retire at that time for several reasons. I figured I had enough money in retirement accounts to live on, and my church was doing well.
Attendance and the church’s financial situation were good. Also, several years before I retired, I had recruited Rev. Dr. Starlette Thomas to serve as our part-time associate pastor.
I hoped that Pastor Star could help the church keep going after I retired, and that’s exactly what she did. She served as the interim pastor for the first year and a half after I retired, leaving the church in good shape when it called Rev. Emily Holladay as my successor.
I also retired in 2018 because I felt I was still going strong as a pastor, and I didn’t want to wait until I was burned out. Pastoral ministry is exacting work, and I’ve witnessed some pastors decline in their later years. I wanted to give the church my best until the end of my service.
Having been retired for almost eight years, I’ve learned some lessons along the way. I have learned that pastoral service can continue even into retirement.
I continue to conduct funerals and occasional weddings and occasionally serve as a guest preacher. I’ve also served on ordination councils for the D.C. Baptist Convention.
Pastoral ministry can also continue through writing. I’ve had seven books published since I retired.
I wrote my first book, Storytelling in Preaching, in 1988 when I was serving as pastor of Village Baptist Church. That book was based on my doctoral research project, so it did not require much additional research.
Frankly, I was just too busy as a pastor to write many books. I was busy writing a lot of sermons—namely, a new one every week.
I included a catalog of my sermons as an appendix to my first post-retirement book, Preaching for the Long Haul: A Case Study on Long-Term Pastoral Ministry. It lists 1,496 Sunday morning sermons I preached at Village Baptist Church between 1985 and 2017.
I preached even more, but many manuscripts were lost in a fire that destroyed our church building. I later reconstructed an almost complete record by sorting through old files at home and noting each sermon’s date, text and title.
I included 35 of the sermons I had preached at Village in Preaching for the Long Haul, which was published by Nurturing Faith in December 2019, almost two years after I retired. I did not intend to write any more, but then the pandemic hit.
Like most people, I stayed at home until vaccines became available. With a lot of time on my hands, I wrote four books for Nurturing Faith in the Spelunking Scripture Bible study series. Those books also contained sermons that I had written and preached while pastor at Village.
In the first two years after I retired, my wife Linda and I traveled often, making several trips to visit my mother in Texas. One visit came after the sudden loss of my sister. We had planned to keep traveling in 2020, including a Good Faith Media tour to Glacier National Park, but the pandemic put everything on hold and postponed the trip until summer 2021.
Three of my Spelunking Scripture books—Christmas, The Letters of Paul, and Acts and the General Epistles of the New Testament—were published in 2021, followed by Easter in 2022. Later that year, I released The Barefoot Eulogist: Speaking a Good Word While Standing on Holy Ground, a collection of eulogies I’ve given along with guidance on writing them. The families graciously permitted me to include the tributes written for their loved ones.
My most recent book, The Passion of Christ in the Synoptic Gospels, was published by Nurturing Faith in late 2024. I don’t know if more books are ahead, but the seven I’ve written so far have been another meaningful way to continue my ministry in retirement.
Linda and I knew we would have to find a new church home once I retired. The irony is that three of my best friends were pastors of local Baptist churches, and we could have attended any of their congregations. But I wasn’t choosing one of them over the other two! So, we had to find a “neutral site” for Sunday worship.
The Sunday after I retired, we attended worship at the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C. I knew the pastor, Rev. Julie Pennington-Russell, though not well.
We chose First Baptist because our friend Dr. James Langley was a member there. Years earlier, he had served as executive director of the D.C. Baptist Convention. In 1984, he had even given my name to the Village pastor search committee—without telling me.
Over the years, Dr. Langley became one of my closest friends. My wife, Linda, and I often met him and his wife, Jean at the National Gallery of Art, where Jean worked and volunteered. We would tour the latest exhibit and then enjoy lunch together.
Jean died suddenly in 2002, and Dr. Langley asked me to deliver her eulogy.
After my retirement, we began sitting with Dr. Langley each Sunday at First Baptist. Sadly, about six months later, he passed away after a brief illness.
He had asked me to give his eulogy as well. Linda and I joined the church the day after his memorial service—partly as a tribute to him.
Since then, we’ve become active members. Linda co-chairs the Congregational Care support team, and I co-chaired the capital campaign for the new community building. I also serve on the personnel committee and occasionally preach when Pastor Julie is away.
Finding a new church home has been one of the great blessings of retirement.
Pastoral ministry is more than a job; it’s a calling. It doesn’t end when the paycheck stops. It remains part of who I am and how I serve as a Christian, although Saturday nights are far less stressful.
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A native of Fort Worth, Texas, Bruce Salmon served for 33 years as pastor of Village Baptist Church in Bowie, Maryland. He received his Bachelor of Arts with a major in English from Baylor University and the Master of Divinity and Doctor of Ministry degrees from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
