This is the hardest thing I’ve had to write. I’ve started and stopped a dozen times, unsure of what to write. Almost a year after our stepping out in faith came crashing down,I’m still trying to figure things out and where to go from here. Being in a “wilderness” certainly feels like an apt description.
It wasn’t until my church plant ended in failure that I started seeing what I always thought to be wrong. It was an uneasiness that had grow year after year; something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I put my faith in Christ in my early twenties after many years of “wild living”. It was the early 90’s and I had started attending your basic run of the mill Baptist church.
Even after attending a very conservative Bible Institute, I felt like something was… off. If you were alive in the church at that time you remember there was a shift starting to happen where people were bucking the usual version of “church”. Gone were the hymns and suits and people were leaning towards the more casual, modern feel. But not only that, people were starting to see that churches were more like a country club than a place that was inviting and accepting of everyone.
New to the whole Christian subculture I starting hearing about two very different types of churches. One was the traditional church; very rigid and stuffy, full of tradition and rules and very much based on appearance of godliness and biblical education. And on the other side was the “seeker friendly” church. This version sacrificed depth for freshness and light on biblical instruction and more about feeling good and being welcoming.
I remember thinking to myself “wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a perfect amalgamation of the two?” Naively I thought I could take a church like the first one and make it into the second. Thus, my first shot at “pastoring” failed. And so I moved back home and continued serving in my church while working. We started hosting a small group for young adults at our home. We were a bit older than that age group and had a few kids and it really was wonderful. It was a great community of people and we did life together and we were literally one small little family. Sunday mornings paled in comparison to our mid-week gatherings. It was intimate. It was meaningful.
Fast forward a few years after a marriage separation and reconciliation we’d found a new church. We were blown away by the whole thing. It was what we had always thought was missing from “church”. Acceptance, current, cool… yet still about Jesus. Our kids loved being there and so did we. We were unafraid to invite our friends and got involved in a lot of different aspects. We again hosted a small group and it again felt like a family.
All of our spare time was spent involved in the ministries we got involved in. It was what filled us with joy and purpose and we loved every minute of it. It was then that we felt that God was calling us to move back to where I grew up and try to bring something like it there. We picked up and moved our family (again) and settled in.
After landing in the middle of a church split we found that there were many wounded hearts and bitterness everywhere. With the many people looking for a new church home we found a lot of people giving our new church plant a shot. Numbers grew every week and things looked promising. Our home church asked if we wanted to become another satellite location of theirs and we accepted.
Right at that time the pastor that was running the site we attended called me to tell me that he was stepping down. Citing some un-reconcilable issues with leadership, this was the first twinge of unease I felt. Maybe it was just a fluke, maybe it was just not for him. We pressed on, but the unease grew as well. As I became more involved in the leadership role I was in I started seeing a common theme. People would start working there, get burned out and quit. Pastors would come and go, support staff would leave after a short time… all saying the same things leading them to go.
Yet the numbers of people attending the campuses grew, people making “decisions to follow Jesus” grew and people were baptized. Though it seemed encouraging, still that nagging thought was under the surface of my heart. Something seemed off. Though people were coming off and on to our campus and some people were “making decisions” to follow Jesus, still there was no evidence of any life change. No desire to have any association with Jesus other than come to church on a Sunday morning which they made to seem like it was a sacrifice of their time to be there. No one helped with ministries, no one gave financially, no one joined groups, no one wanted anything to do with becoming more like Jesus.
Eventually It collapsed. We couldn’t do it anymore and we closed the campus and moved back home. Some people weren’t happy with that happening and showed their true colours and what should have been a wonderful thing; I had visions of us all taking my home-town back for Jesus all together, ended with bitterness, ended relationships and what I realize now is the sad fact that I want nothing to do with the church or His people.
It hurts just to write that. It hurts more to think that being a part of any church (particularly as a paid staff) would lead anyone to that place. I love these people. I miss these people. I don’t doubt their heart for Jesus or that they believe that this version of “church” is effective… they wouldn’t continue to grind through adversity without having a deep belief that they were making a difference for the Kingdom of God.
“What will you do now?” I got that question dozens of times in the last weeks before moving back to New Hampshire. I usually just said “Oh I’ll just go back to my old job and make some money and pay off some bills.” It was an easier way to just skirt the real issue… I felt like God had failed me and I wanted nothing to do with His church. That’s not the kind of conversation I wanted to have with acquaintances.
These past months have been a trying one for me/us. What started as a purposeful time stepping back morphed into a full on soul search as to what does God want from the North American church and are we doing it? Which in turn has made me reevaluate what I’ve done, what our current church is doing, as well is what I see from the churches around me. I shared with our campus pastor that I ask myself “what the hell are we even doing?” We valued people making “decisions” but what exactly are they deciding to do? Because from my vantage point it isn’t becoming followers of Jesus. Where was the life change? Where is the total commitment? Where is the becoming like Jesus? I’m not sure, but the issue may be that we (The church in general but specifically our current gathering because that’s what I’m familiar with now) oversimplify what a decision to follow Jesus entails. The gospel is simple but following Jesus is not.
I spent all my time and energy and ruined my family in an effort to make followers of Jesus and it just didn’t happen. So now I find myself at the point where I don’t want to waste my time doing something that simply isn’t making any difference and I’m fooling myself… but worse, I don’t want to succeed at something that doesn’t really matter. I don’t hold any ill will towards them… they’re trying to do what they feel God called them to… I’m just not sure that it involves me at this point though.
It’s been something I’d been uneasy with since joining staff… Right when that campus pastor first left. Constant turnover… some pride issues I saw in certain leaders and some others that I overlooked… and I keep going back to the discipleship piece. That in over a decade and thousands of people supposedly making decisions to become followers of Jesus and yet no one gets hired for a pastoral job from within? Maybe churches were never meant to be this big and complicated.
And again I don’t hold ill will… I’d love to see it flourish but maybe no one person can or should be over that many people. But, more importantly, maybe it’s not how God intended the church to be run. I constantly felt overburdened and rushed… Constantly doing “leadership” things to the point that I no longer could pastor or find time to be if all over myself. It seemed like my job was not to put butts in the seat, not to pastor. It seems like it makes great leaders but poor followers of Jesus.
I’ve spent the past 10 months dissecting and trying to figure out what went wrong… we felt God called us there, we followed and it fell apart. Why? was it poor leadership on my part? Did I misunderstand God’s calling? Was it a last ditch effort for God to reach people in my home before he turns them over to judgment? Or, is it that the version of Jesus we were presenting is not leaning on the total commitment and change in a person’s life and actions that it should, and we in response get people making a decision but not a commitment.
So many churches out there that are trying to grow the church through the gathering… Instead of making disciples. Just because you’re growing the church gathering doesn’t mean that your church is growing. We become so focused on trying to figure out the best way to get seed to take root in rocky soil that we never stopped to look at what kind of seed are we throwing. Perhaps people aren’t becoming followers of Jesus because we aren’t giving them good seed.
I don’t know…but the thing I’m coming to realize is that Jesus said come to Him… not to the church. (at least to my knowledge since we don’t know EVERYTHING he ever said) Our hope is in Jesus, not the Church. Our power is found in His Spirit, not the Church. It’s when those of us that have made the Church our full time job and ministry heap unreasonable expectations on it, on ourselves and on those that come to serve alongside or “under” us, it’s then that the Church becomes the greatest source of frustration. Perhaps we have made it into something that it was never intended to be and therefore is doomed to never work the way it should. And now I just can’t seem to put the pieces back to where I even want to be a part of a church. Maybe that in itself is the definition of “Wilderness Christian.”
#holmanreport #testimony #institutional church
Written by Mark Young
