Hearing from God…

The next year it felt as though God had put me on a shelf. I had been a “platform” leader every week for nearly three years, on the church council, vocal and active. Now I was licking my wounds in the “back pews” and wondering where God had been in my abortive church planting attempt. My relationship with the pastor had been damaged. I can guarantee you, it wasn’t much fun!
At the same time the pastor was getting excited about the “purpose-driven” way of doing things. A group had been to Saddleback for a conference and he came back drawing baseball diamonds, talking about 101, 201, 301 and 401 classes, and ministry fairs. Just hearing that these ideas were being explored was enough to send me off to learn as much as I could about what Saddleback was doing. Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Church, would be available about four years later, so I was left to listen to hours of audio tapes and to visit the big church meeting in a tent.
There was lots of energy being spent on becoming purpose-driven, but aside from the pastor, there wasn’t much buy-in from the staff and leadership of the church. Every time the pastor drew a baseball diamond, something was lost in the translation.
Eventually I met with the pastor and talked to him about leadership structure and facilities. We had been meeting in a rented church facility each week which was pretty expensive. There had been some shakeups in the administration of the church. God was prompting me to offer to help the pastor move the church to a new location. I told him that I didn’t think the purpose-driven method fit his style. He was more of an “organic” leader. It was time to move. His response, “Let’s do it.”
I had gone from uninvolved to “executive pastor” meeting with the church staff every week. We were heading toward a major move, with fundraising and the logistics of moving an 800-plus congregation. After a lot of research we found a temporary location, the high school gymnasium. There were only a few problems, the sound was awful. the lighting was terrible, and we had not made provision for the adult classes. We were moving from an auditorium that would accommodate about 700 persons comfortable to one where no one was comfortable! We lost about 200 weekly attenders the first week. How’s that for church growth! And the people leaving were not leaving quietly. They were angry and upset. We accidentally planted at least one church that week!
We found a temporary home in a church that would hold about 175 in one service and that had classrooms. Parking was limited but adequate. Three weekend services accommodated our newly-thinned congregation of about 500. We were involved in real estate and financing negotiations on a property that would need to be remodeled extensively.
In the meantime, the weekly staff meetings were grinding me down. They seemed like a waste of time to me. The paid staff wasn’t really committed to the move. As a volunteer who was working about 25 hours a week in church activities I was resentful of those who were drawing salaries and who seemed to be marching to the sound of a different drummer.
Each week, I would sit for hours and listen to the staff members talk, and talk, and talk. My frustration was growing. At the time I was reading a book about paradigm shifts. New inventions cause those kinds of shifts. The automobile was the death of the buggy whip industry. The light bulb closed the gaslight manufacturers. One afternoon, driving away from one of those staff meetings I felt God say to me, “Relax Charlie, these paid staff members and this way of doing church will go the way of the buggy whip. They are out of business. The church of the future will rely on unpaid, non-professional leaders to carry forward the ministry.” This inspiration was enough to calm me down.