No One Turns Down the Blessing

One: You Don’t Know Everything

In 1989 I was burnt out. I was also a church dropout. A denominational church pastor was innovating and planting a “contemporary” church. I was invited, and attended the new church. As a result I was renewed in my faith and became an active lay minister. An attorney by trade, I was inspired to read every book I could get my hands on about the subjects of church growth, church planting, leadership and Christian living. Eventually, I served as the executive pastor of the church for a number of years culminating with a building program at a new location.

In the midst of this journey, God gave me a mission: “To support, encourage, and nurture the planting of churches targeted to reach teens-to-twenty-somethings and their parents.” When I took over as the interim pastor of a local Vineyard church, I thought, “I’m finally on the way to my mission!” God had a lesson to teach me in the pastoral ministry: “You don’t know everything.”

During three years as the church pastor, everything I had learned about church growth and leading a church stopped working. As a person who believed that cause and effect were a predictable process, this was a hard time. I also found out, that like Charlie Brown, “I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand.”

I had every possible kind of bad experience, from church splits, to church rebellions, to gossip and slander. I was kind of cheered up when I read a book on pastoral burnout and realized that I hadn’t ended up on the floor of my bathroom in a fetal position, like the author of the book. Eventually, the church had “grown” from about 125 to 30. It was time to call it a day, and start over.