Here’s something a lot of us can relate to: being brand new on the job and approaching your first big challenge.

In this case, the job is being newly ordained — and the challenge is a little something called Easter.

From the Baltimore Sun:

With Sunday rapidly approaching, the Rev. Mervin McKenney admitted to being a bit nervous as he prepared his first Easter sermon as an ordained minister.

The former bank examiner expected a large turnout for this, the holiest of Christian holidays, and he wanted to seize the moment to inspire his flock.

“When I’m in the pulpit and I’m preaching, that’s God speaking through me,” said McKenney, 38, the pastor of Our Saviour Lutheran Church in the Ednor Gardens-Lakeside neighborhood of Northeast Baltimore. “But for that to happen, I’ve got to do the work beforehand.”

For ministers new to their calling, the first Easter is one of many trials as they get to know their congregation, learn day-to-day church management and shoulder responsibility for the spiritual well-being of their parishioners.

Seminary may instill a sense of purpose and teach the basics of the profession, but the hardest lessons are learned afterward, in the routine of preparing weekly sermons, performing jubilant wedding ceremonies and laying the dead to rest.

“A lot of it you can’t learn until you are in the midst of the ministry,” said the Rev. Michael Foppiano, 28, associate pastor at the Roman Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception in Towson. “How do you corral five babies who are being baptized at one time – and their families? What do you say to a dying person’s family?”

Foppiano graduated from Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg in June and has served Immaculate Conception since July. The parish has 3,000 families and celebrates seven Masses every Sunday.

“At Christmas I had to stand up in front of about 600 people stuffed into the church,” he said. “I feel much less nervous after that.”

In delivering homilies, he has adopted a conservative approach and eschewed improvisation. “I think my style is more reserved,” he said, “I like to have a prepared text, and I don’t like to wander away from the pulpit.”

Like Foppiano, McKenney was ordained early last summer and has spent less than a year at his church. He worked as a bank examiner for the federal government in Richmond, Va., before entering the seminary in 2001.

He also tries to err on the side of over-preparation for sermons. He pores over Scripture, prays and reads commentaries from other ministers for oratorical tips.

For his first Easter sermon, he planned to cast the story of Jesus’ Resurrection as a call to spread the message of Christianity. “I want to make sure that what I say about Jesus connects to their lives,” he said. “Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I’m sort of always nervous.”

In trading the organized minutiae of bank operations for the clutter of human souls, he says he’s struggled to acquire a new set of skills.

“I’ve learned that a church is a family – in all the good and bad that goes with that,” he said. “Within each congregation there may be different things they do that reflect their faith. Being a first-time pastor, I don’t want to overstep or miss those.”

He has, however, taken a few chances. Once, when a man who had suffered an aneurysm asked the congregation to pray for him after the service, McKenney broke with tradition and urged the congregation to pray right then. “People said they really felt God’s spirit,” McKenney recalled of the service.

A few blocks north on the Alameda, the Rev. M. Dion Thompson, the 51-year-old pastor of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Covenant, has also floated some new ideas with his congregation. But not without trepidation.

Like the other two pastors, Thompson is green, as clergy go. He finished training at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in Manhattan last spring after leaving a career in journalism at The Sun, and has served as Holy Covenant’s pastor since September.

During a New Year’s service, he borrowed a custom from the African-American celebration of Kwanzaa, urging parishioners to pass a chalice around the church and share their hopes and fears for the new year.

He worried that his congregation might take offense at the ritual, but was delighted with the outcome. “The church had become a sacred and safe place,” he said, “where people could talk about those things.”

Providing spiritual comfort to the sick and elderly, and presiding for the first time at a funeral were more daunting.

“These are awesome responsibilities, not to be taken lightly,” he said. “These are moments when people are at their most fragile, and I have to think about how to carry myself. It’s a profound experience.”

Easter weekend reflects the range of emotion – both sadness and joy – that he’s experienced in his first months as a priest. On Good Friday the church’s altar was stripped bare to evoke the solemnity of Jesus’ entombment. The hymns were somber. “It’s the low point,” said Thompson, “the counterweight to Easter.”

Today, in celebration of the Resurrection, the church was to be decorated with lilies and colorful banners. Women and girls wear bright dresses, and the congregation sings uplifting songs of praise.

Thompson believes that God has helped him prepare for his first Easter sermon. “There are times,” he said, “when you feel like the Holy Spirit just needs a typist.”