Road to Detox

Emerging Grace has some “deep church” dialogue happening over at Senior Pastor about the role of pastoral/leadership paradigms in a missional setting.

Grace asked me, as a former worship/youth pastor, if I had seen my own values and expectations shift, and whether than meant that I found myself no longer “fitting in”. I promised to share a bit of my own story on that, so here goes:

I had been experiencing a growing frustration with the passivity of our congregation for years. They seemed to be happily addicted to passivity and being perpetually “fed”. I tried training, modeling, teaching – but very, very few people ever seemed to want to take any risks outside of their comfortable status quo.

We created a house church for those interested in leading house churches; Wendy & I taught and modeled house church for six months with these friends. Yet despite the fact that everyone who joined the group KNEW that the whole reason for the group’s existence was to release new house churches, once the six months of equipping, encouraging and modeling were over, there was only ONE new house church started. Wendy & I led it (youth & young adults).

Towards the end of that season of increasing frustration, our church was planning a large conference, with some “big name” speakers and worship leaders. The conference eventually had an attendance of over two thousand, in a rented facility.

As we moved closer to the conference, I felt the Holy Spirit re-illuminating certain passages of Scripture for me personally: “if you want to be great in the Kingdom, be a servant” was the summation and theme. For me, this meant giving away my place on the conference worship team, choosing to not sit in the first two “Reserved For Pastors” rows in the meeting place, stacking and arranging chairs, helping haul sound-gear and set-up, and running the tape duplication table all weekend long for those who wanted copies of the teaching sessions (and wanted them NOW).

From this new vantage point, I saw many disillusioning things:

• Because I had no “pastoral” role or identification, it was fascinating to see how people (guest speakers and attendees) treated me – and the other volunteers serving with me. Basically, we were akin to despised street-dung-sweepers in a caste system. Guest “big name” speakers were rude and demanding (David Ruis was a wonderful exception), and were mostly uptight that their “products” weren’t selling as briskly as they hoped; they blamed the peasants volunteers for being lazy.
  
  
• Sound, lighting, and media techs were treated deplorably by the very people they are busting their butts to serve (those attending the conference to be blessed)
  
  
• With the exception of the lead sound tech and myself, EVERYONE else serving their butts off for no thanks and no common respect, were either youth and/or new believers; and we wonder why they’re leaving our churches in droves?
  
  And last but not least,
  
  
• The pastors did diddly-squat beyond sit in their reserved seats at the front; during ministry time (a BIG deal in charismatic conferences), 90% of the pastors were completely uninvolved, seemingly mainly focused on talking to the big name speakers, trying to arrange lunch dates (and then name-dropping the next day)

By the end of the conference, I was physically exhausted from the long days of hard work, but even more so, I was also emotionally wrecked by the dynamics I got to see from “the other side”.

I’ve long known that many leaders live in a sort of ivory tower of prestige; it was not a new revelation to me, but the sheer magnitude of it, and the pathetic excuses pious justifications, were beginning to completely revolt me.

The reception I got for sharing my observations about the conference was also not a surprise (the intensity, perhaps, but not the reaction itself). It probably shouldn’t have surprised me all that much to have our senior pastor approach me one morning, just three weeks later, to inform me that “God told him” it was time for our family to move on.

The meeting later that afternoon with the elders and staff, where my worship leading was denounced as “quenching the Spirit”, was another obvious nail in our coffin, and as Wendy & I drove home in shock later that day, we knew we were being shoved out the door.

A month later, July 1997, we arrived in Winnipeg (2500 kilometres east), and our season of detoxing from church began with relentless and overpowering intensity. In a somewhat bizarre way, it was almost a relief, as the one thing I was now sure of was this:

I could not reconcile what I saw in the Scriptures about servant leadership, and what I saw in our churches, denominations, and conferences.

Under the current paradigm – whether the hierarchical charismatic “five-fold” power structures, or the hierarchical pastor-as-CEO seeker-sensitive power structures – I don’t fit, nor do I have any desire to.

I’ll post more later about the differences I discovered during our early journey of post-pastoral detox, but for now, Grace, yes I found my values and expectations changing, and that I no longer “fit”.

But I’m okay with that.