Restoring Kingdom Builders

I am excited!  Tomorrow afternoon, our new ministry, Restoring Kingdom Builders, will hold its first board meeting.  We will be making decisions on a mission statement, goals, bylaws, and a budget, as well as making formative plans for our first Wellness Retreat later this year.

RKB is dedicated to educating Christians in the prevention and management of church conflict from a biblical perspective – especially as it relates to pastors – and to beginning the healing process for pastors and their families who experience a forced exit from a church.

It feels like I am starting my ministry life over.

Let me give you a brief recap of my ministerial career – which spans more than 35 years – so you can see how I have been exposed to these issues for most of my life.  (Warning: the following material deals with the dark side of the church.  But I know you can handle it!)

If you read my last blog post, you know that my father was a pastor in Garden Grove, and after two years of conflict (mostly with the governing board), he resigned his position when I was eleven.  Nineteen months later, he died of cancer.  While the stress from the conflict may not have caused his death, it most likely accelerated the cancer’s growth.  Since my dad lacked support from the board and his denomination, he had to suffer alone professionally.  Part of me wants to go back in time and fix that situation, but although I can’t, I can help other pastors who go through similar trials.

When our family finally left, we took refuge in another Orange County church.  When the pastor eventually resigned (for positive reasons), the congregation called a new pastor, who abruptly fired the most popular staff member.  His ministry never recovered.  Years later, I read an article he wrote about that experience, and there was far more conflict in that church than I ever knew.  After he was forced to resign, that pastor became a psychologist on the East Coast.

When my best friend invited me to some special youth meetings at his church (once again, in Garden Grove), I loved the church, and pretty soon, our whole family was going there.  But two years later, the founding pastor resigned under mysterious circumstances.  The church eventually called a former member who had been a medical missionary in Saudi Arabia to be their pastor.  After becoming his youth pastor and later marrying his daughter, my father-in-law was eventually forced out as pastor, too.  (But it had nothing to do with my marriage!)

Largely due to the influence of one of my cousins and her husband, I was later called to be the youth pastor of a church in Orange, California.  Less than a year later, in a messy public meeting, the congregation voted the pastor out of office.  (Now there was a case study!)  That was the church where I learned what not to do.

After seventeen months in that church, I was called to be the youth pastor of another church in Garden Grove.  While my tenure there went well, the pastor was relentlessly attacked and was so emotionally devastated that he could barely function.  After he retired, he never performed any pastoral functions (like weddings or funerals) again.  Although I wasn’t in a position to make things right, I had friends on both sides of the conflict, but I always supported my pastor in public.

After I graduated from seminary, I was called to pastor a small church in the Silicon Valley city of Sunnyvale.  The previous pastor – you guessed it – had been fired after only one year on the job.  After a couple years there, I figured I was next on the board’s “hit list,” but at the eleventh hour, a sister church in Santa Clara invited us to merge with them.  I became the new pastor of the merged church, but only after the pastor from the other church was forced to leave.  (Have you detected a pattern yet?)

Several years into my ministry in Santa Clara, an older couple formed a group with the intent of getting rid of me as pastor.  While they were unsuccessful, we lost 20% of our congregation when they formed a new church only a mile away.

In the meantime, I made friends with many pastors in our district, but six or seven of them suddenly resigned their ministries within a couple years.  When I contacted them, they told me they had been forced out of their churches by either the governing board or a vocal minority.  I was shocked to discover that most of these pastors did not receive an adequate severance package and had been stigmatized.  These pastors also told me – to a man – that I was the only pastor in our district to contact them.  That was three decades ago.

Everything culminated in the late 1980s when the pastor from a prominent district church was unceremoniously forced out of office by his board with help from district personnel.  His dismissal resulted in legal action against both the church and the district.  While the political thing to do was support the district, I knew what really happened (I still have the documentation) and disagreed strongly with the way things were done.  My eyes were opened to the way that politics often trumps righteousness in church circles – and it grieved me greatly.

So I wrote an article for our denominational magazine called “Who Cares For Lost Shepherds?”  Christians like to talk about reaching lost sheep for Christ, but I wondered aloud why so few believers seem to care about pastors (shepherds) that are forced out of churches – especially those who have not committed impeachable offenses.

I also did a study (with the knowledge and consent of district leaders) on what happened to pastors who had left their churches in our district.  I discovered that 50 out of 60 pastors who had left their churches also left the denomination – and there was no way to track how they were doing or where they had gone.  Those pastors just vanished.  That troubled me.  It still does.

My ministry in the 1990s went well.  I served as the pastor of an outreach-oriented church in Santa Clara, but after seven years there, I was worn out and considered going into clergy caregiving.  I had lunch with conflict expert Speed Leas in his home and later attended the CareGivers Forum conference in Colorado, but it wasn’t God’s time for me to be involved in ministering to pastors just yet.

After becoming the senior pastor of a church in California, I entered the Doctor of Ministry program at Fuller Seminary.  When it came time to declare my topic for my doctoral project, I chose to write on attacks by church antagonists informed by family systems theory.  I reveled in all the researching and writing for the project and learned a great deal about such situations.

For a few years, I taught workshops at an area-wide Christian leadership convention, and my best-attended sessions had to do with conflict in churches.

Then after 10 1/2 years in the same church, I experienced every pastor’s nightmare myself – and I learned even more going through that ordeal.

After moving to Arizona, I asked the Lord what His next assignment was for me.  Good friends suggested that I teach at a Christian college or seminary, or that I become a pastor again, or that I become an interim pastor, or maybe even a church staff member.  But to be honest, none of those positions excited me in the least.  If I ever do return to church ministry, my wife has informed me that I might once again become a bachelor.

Even though it means starting over, the Lord has given me a passion for pastors, their families, and churches that have been wounded by conflict, and I intend to follow His leading and build this ministry until the day He calls me home.

So if you hear about a pastor or spouse who are going through rough waters, encourage them to contact me.  I look forward to ministering to my wounded brothers and sisters in the days ahead.

Thankfully, I have several mentors who have been doing similiar ministries for years, and they are available to me for counsel and encouragement.

Will you pray for Restoring Kingdom Builders?  Please ask the Father:

*that our first board meeting will go well.

*that we can obtain our non-profit and tax-exempt status faster than usual.

*that the Lord will help me finish my book soon.

*that God will send wounded pastors and their spouses our way.

*that God’s people will generously support our ministry.

If you do decide to pray for our ministry, will you let me know?  It would mean a lot to Kim and me to know that you are praying for our ministry as it begins.

Thank you so much for reading my blog.  I’m constantly amazed at how many people look in on it every few days.  May the Lord richly bless you and grant you His peace today and always.

Let’s shed some light on the dark side of the church!