Today is the anniversary of the day that my wife Kim and I were married.
You know, it doesn’t seem that long ago.
Kim’s father became the pastor of my church in the summer of 1973. I had just been hired by the elders to be the youth pastor for the summer. I told a good friend that I hoped the new pastor’s two oldest daughters were ugly so I could focus on my ministry.
One day, just after I started work, a large blue Suburban pulled up in front of the church office. All eight members of the new pastor’s family had driven together from Chicago to Garden Grove, and they wanted to know the location of their temporary home. While telling them, I hardly noticed who was in the vehicle.
Over the next few weeks, I don’t remember talking to Kim, even though I was the new youth guy. One of my best friends, though, saddled up to me and asked, “How can I get to know Kim?”
But I wasn’t interested – in anybody.
Yet one night, after talking with her a little, I asked Kim if she’d like to go to the San Diego Zoo the following Saturday. She said yes. My brother John had asked a girl to go with him, too.
Every week in a discipleship group I led, I assigned a spiritual exercise called a “discipline.” The discipline for that week was that no one in the group was supposed to listen to the radio. (Hey, music in 1973 wasn’t all that great anyway.) So instead of listening to tunes while I drove to San Diego, Kim and I talked. (I don’t know what my brother was doing in the back seat.)
And we talked as we walked around the zoo. And we talked when I drove home.
While I liked Kim, I didn’t really know what to do after that. But one guy in the group definitely did. He invited her out the following Friday night to a car race. She went. I heard about it and wasn’t happy. (I was thinking about asking the Lord to revoke his salvation.)
One night, Kim shared that she was having a hard time with the boy friend she left back in Chicago. I offered to listen. We ended up driving to the beach.
I came home and told my mother that I knew I had met the girl I was going to marry.
A few nights later, I was at home when I heard a noise outside. There was toilet paper hanging from our mailbox – at 7:30 in the evening. I looked around for the culprit, and found Kim, hiding under a car.
That was a good sign.
I asked her out again the following weekend, and then took her to Disneyland. When you took a girl to Disneyland back then, it represented a sizeable investment.
Another night, some people from our church went to the Los Angeles Rescue Mission to put on a service. When I heard that Kim was going, my interest in Skid Row skyrocketed. She gave a testimony that night, and I sensed how much she cared about people who hurt.
Another time, we went to the Griffith Park Observatory and stayed out late. Kim’s dad didn’t know where we were, and he had the cops combing Griffith Park looking for us. (Kim sauntered in around 4:30 am., but that was the last time we ever tried that move!)
Honestly, we were just talking.
After dating Kim for only two months, Kim’s dad had a meeting with my brother and me one night. (My brother was dating her sister.) Her father told us that he blessed both of our relationships. That was cool.
Kim and I stayed up all night before the Rose Parade in Pasadena the following New Year’s Day, and for the first time, we started talking about getting married. We were young but in love.
We went together for two years before tying the knot. The ceremony was held at our home church.
I had taken a full-time job as church custodian (I prefer the term ecclesiastical engineer) so we could get married before I started seminary. The morning of the ceremony, I came to church to spend my normal 5 hours cleaning up the place before Sunday – and promptly locked my keys in the car. Only my mother had an extra key, and she laughed uproariously when she arrived to let me in.
Later on, the deacons told me they had voted that I didn’t have to clean up the church on my wedding day – but they forgot to tell me. (If I hadn’t done it, who would have?)
The church was packed even though it was a scorching hot afternoon. Kim’s dad preached a l-o-n-g sermon while we both knelt on stage.
We went to Yosemite for our honeymoon. We were so financially challenged that our friends rifled through the wedding cards and gave us any cash they found.
That was 36 years ago!
When we first started dating, Kim and I had a serious discussion about the future. I believed that God had called me to be a pastor. She preferred to be a missionary. I couldn’t envision myself living overseas in another culture. But because we couldn’t envision living apart, either, she gave up her dreams for me.
There are so many things I love about Kim. She is kind, sweet, compassionate, energetic, feisty, EC – and a lot of fun.
But most of all, I love her heart.
2 children, 3 apartments, 9 houses, 9 churches, and 10 surgeries later, we’re still madly in love – and truth be told, just plain mad.
Right before we started dating, Gordon Lightfoot came out with a song called Beautiful. The song begins:
At times, I just don’t know
How you could be anything but beautiful
To think that I was made for you
And you were made for me
That’s how I still feel, more than three decades after marrying my bride.
Happy anniversary, Kimbelina! I love you now more than ever.
Restoring Kingdom Builders 
Why Attack Pastors?
Posted in Church Conflict, Conflict with Church Board, Conflict with Church Staff, Conflict with the Pastor, Pastoral Termination, Please Comment! on August 3, 2011| 4 Comments »
I’ve been reading a book by Gary Pinion called Crushed: The Perilous Side of Ministry. A pastor for 30 years, Gary knows the dark side of the church firsthand.
He tells the story of a pastor who moved to a church in the South hoping to stay for a lifetime. The pastor received a 96% affirmative vote from the congregation. The church had a competent staff, a large bank account, and claimed that all they needed was “a good leader.”
After a short while, the church expanded from one to two services, and the church appeared successful. But several of the governing leaders began engaging in “guerilla warfare” behind the scenes.
After 21 months, the pastor was shaking hands at the end of the second service when he was asked to go immediately to his office. When the pastor arrived, he was shocked to see 21 men there who asked for his resignation by 5 pm that evening.
The pastor called aside a man in the group – someone he thought was his friend – and asked, “Why?” His friend could not give any reason and seemed to be embarrassed to be part of the lynch mob.
Why? Why do some people attack their pastor? Why do they verbally crucify him to others? Why do they start a whispering campaign against him? Why do they meet in secret, exaggerate charges against him, fail to speak with him directly, and then covertly attempt to force him to resign? Why?
For starters, some people are angry with God. They view the pastor as God’s leader and messenger in their church. They aren’t comfortable verbally attacking God – after all, He’s invisible and inaudible – so they pursue God’s visible and audible servant instead. My guess is that they aren’t conscious of what they’re doing, but they do it anyway.
When King Herod Antipas arrested, imprisoned, and then executed John the Baptist, the real culprit behind the execution was his new wife, Herodias. Because John had been telling Herod that “it is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife,” we’re told that Herodias “nursed a grudge against John and wanted to kill him” (Mark 6:18-19). But John wasn’t the source of the Jewish law: God was. John was merely God’s messenger. Some people attack godly leaders – including pastors – because they are angry with God about something.
Second, some people are angry with their father. Paul told several churches that he was their spiritual father (1 Cor. 4:15; 1 Thess. 2:11) and that they were his spiritual children. That’s a great metaphor if you sensed that your father loved you when you were a child. But if your relationship with your dad involved pain, it’s easy to transfer that pain to another father-like figure: the pastor.
When I was a pastor, I didn’t mind if some people viewed me as a father figure. If a person was raised by an abusive or cruel father, I tried to show them by example that a man can be loving and kind. But I can think of several situations where I had to say something tough to someone – even though I said it gently – and they reacted with anger against me. When I thought about it later on, I realized that I may have sounded like their father. While I don’t think people are conscious of doing this, the pastor usually isn’t aware of the dynamics, either.
Third, some people feel their pastor has slighted them. In my first pastorate, we had a service every Sunday evening. One night, there were 25 people present, and I got a brainstorm: let’s go around the room and offer words of encouragement to each person present. Everyone thought it was a great idea.
The people loved saying kind things about each other and hearing others say positive things about them. It was only later that I discovered, to my horror, that we had missed Norman completely. I wish someone had pointed it out, and I didn’t do it on purpose, but the damage was done. (To his credit, Norman didn’t attack me – but he and his wife slowly vanished from church life.)
This is why I was always careful as a pastor about complimenting individuals in public. If I thanked the music director for a great song but not his vocalists, they would be upset. If I thanked a staff member for an achievement but didn’t thank the other staff, they would be upset. When it comes to hurts, some people are turtles while others are skunks. When hurt, the turtles – like Norman – pull into their shell. The skunks – and I could give you a whole list of names! – spray a foul odor on anyone they meet. The lesson is clear: never slight a skunk!
When Paul wrote Romans 16, he greeted several dozen people by name at the church in Rome. I wonder if he missed anybody? If I had one chance to be immortalized in the pages of Scripture, and found out I was slighted … you get the picture.
I’ll share four more reasons people attack their pastors next time. Can you think of any more?
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