Restoring Kingdom Builders

From time-to-time, I plan on posting sections from the book I’m writing about the conflict my wife and I experienced in our last church ministry. After writing about 420 double-spaced pages (with lots of footnotes to bolster my opinions), I still hope to finish the book soon before inviting friends to review it. Here is an excerpt about the difficulty we experienced – and most pastors and their wives experience – after we left our church and community. Realize that this is still in draft form and not in final form. As always, thanks for reading!

Throughout this process, family and friends encouraged us to “let go” and “move on with your lives.”  It has not been easy to do so.  People wanted us to move on out of their own anxiety or because they saw how much pain we were experiencing. One of the challenges I faced when I moved to Arizona is that I wanted to know why the conflict happened.  When many pastors are forced to exit a church, they are able to put the conflict behind them and move on with their lives, but I found that difficult if not impossible.  My analytical brain could not rest until it uncovered the truth about our sensitive situation. The first few months after we moved to Arizona, I was still angry, but as the months wore on, I was more puzzled than anything.  Why did our opponents do what they did?  Based on the destructive aftermath, it just didn’t make any sense to me.

When Kim’s brother Ian was only eighteen, he was killed by a drunk driver.  Kim had never experienced the death of a close loved one before and it really shook her up.  In a sense, her whole faith was dismantled, even though it was rebuilt even stronger later on.  But there were certain actions that she had to take proactively so that healing could begin.  We drove to her brother’s gravesite at Forest Lawn.  We visited the very spot where he was killed.  Kim flew from San Jose to Los Angeles on several occasions to be with her family as they pursued a civil suit against the person who was driving when Ian was killed.  After Kim had done her investigative work, she was finally able to release the injustice committed into God’s hands, but it took her eighteen months to do so.

I operated on the same basis.  After six months or so, I still had unanswered questions about what happened, so I contacted a few of my friends – some of whom still attended the church – and asked them about certain details.  However, some of them interpreted my puzzlement as bitterness and wanted me to “let go” and “move on.”  While I understood the reason for their counsel, I couldn’t move on until I had most of my questions answered.  After we met with some friends from the church in early August, and after consulting with several Christian counselors who specialize in helping pastors with forced exits, I was finally able to be at peace about the events that occurred eight months after our final Sunday.  Writing this book has also been therapeutic for me because it has allowed me to rid my brain of a host of issues and allowed me to regain perspective. But I still have occasional flare-ups of anger and have come to accept them as part of the healing process.

You can’t short-circuit these kinds of feelings.  It’s like trying to hurry up grief after a divorce or the death of a loved one. You have to drink the cup of suffering dry.  You can only put it all behind you when you’re ready, not when others want you to be ready.  Kim and I would go for a few days and be in good spirits, but then something would remind us of what happened and we’d both go into depression for a day or two.  For example, although we enjoyed marked improvement in emotional health after we passed the one-year mark, we then had to move forty minutes away from our place in Surprise toward Phoenix to be closer to Kim’s work.  The move cost us time, energy, money (we lost a deposit on a rental), and possessions (we broke a few things), and the whole moving event triggered negative emotions that we hoped had disappeared: “Why is this the fourth house we’ve lived in over the past fourteen months?  Why do we have to haul all our possessions around again?  Will we ever be able to buy a house and feel settled?  When will we return to the kind of life we once knew?”

Back in Arizona, Kim and I had to engage in a project we had never attempted before: try and find a church home.  While we stayed home a few Sundays – mostly due to physical or emotional exhaustion – we found the process of visiting churches to be extremely daunting.  We perused church websites to determine which churches to visit, but we went to most of them only once.  Nearly every church we visited had edgy music (which we liked), and the music was usually skillfully played and sung, but we often didn’t feel like singing praises to the Lord.  Many of the songs that were presented were taken directly from passages in the Psalms, but the lyrics included verses that praised God and excluded those verses that expressed doubt or anger (like in the imprecatory psalms).  Believe it or not, the way I felt emotionally, I would have welcomed singing some imprecatory psalms from time-to-time, although I’m sure I would have been in the minority!  It seems like most churches want everyone in the congregation to feel good after the worship time without realizing how some people are feeling before worship starts.  In my view, Christian worship times miss the variety of emotions expressed in the Psalter.  We encourage praise and joy but do not want anything to do with depression and anger.  Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to the music of people like Bob Dylan or Van Morrison.  They know how to express a range of emotion through their lyrics, voices, and instruments.  For months, I’ve been drawn to Bob Dylan’s music because, as I listen to him sing (or croak), it seems like Bob understands what I’m going through, while a great many believers do not.  With a few exceptions, most of today’s Christian music doesn’t acknowledge pain or suffering very well.  I realize that singing psalms of lament won’t necessarily help a church to grow, but there must be a reason why so many people don’t sing during worship times. Maybe in many cases, they just don’t feel like singing lyrics that fail to reflect their present state of mind.

It was also difficult for me to hear other pastors teach.  While most of them delivered their messages in a competent style, at times I was appalled at the interpretations of Scripture that I heard given from the pulpit.  (Doesn’t anyone own or consult biblical commentaries anymore?)  One staff pastor preached on the Great Commission in Matthew 28:19-20 and had absolutely no clue what the words really meant or how the passage was structured.  Like many pastors, he read the passage aloud and then said whatever he wanted to say about it.  He went straight to application without ever dealing with interpretation.  But more than anything, I’ve had a tough time listening to pastors ignore Scripture while highlighting their own ideas as if what they have to say is more important than what God says.  My wife and I now attend a mega church, not because it’s large, but because the pastor is an excellent preacher and he knows what he’s doing when he teaches.  (It’s a good thing that pastors don’t speak to other pastors on a regular basis.  We can be a tough audience.)

When I first left our former church, I didn’t want to preach anymore.  Over time, I have come to accept the fact that I may never preach again, at least as my primary calling.  Last Sunday, our pastor talked about the recent death of his father, and recounted how whenever he had a conversation with him, his dad always told him two things: love your wife and preach the Word.  When I heard that, I got choked up.  I have always loved my wife.  I miss preaching the Word.