Detox Alert

Detoxing From Church has morphed from the single article I wrote in 2003 to become a website-within-a-website. You'll find the original article there, plus a variety of (former) blog-posts dealing with various issues surrounding the whole very necessary concept of detoxing from church.

Given the number of links to the original article over the years, I've often pondered if I should re-write or expand on it. This format will be an attempt to address the issue more fully, without toying with the original article.

Unlike the New Coke fiasco of 1985.

Bula Vinaka

Bula Vinaka means "welcome" in Fijian. As our Crossroads DTS got underway this week, we treated all the new students (as well as the Korean DTS students, and ESL as well) to a traditional Fijian "pig in the ground" (well, TWO pigs, actually -- there were a lot of mouths to feed).

Click on the picture to see the traditional haka that the Fijians performed in our humble dining hall to welcome the students. (File size approx. 4.5MB, but totally worth it, trust me!)

Yesterday, I brought all of our family's collection of djembe's to the base, and if you think the haka was boisterous, you should have seen and heard the hour-long worship time when Fijians, Canadians, Tongans, Koreans, Swiss, Germans, Americans and South Africans let loose.

This is going to be a fun Discipleship Training School, methinks!

Let The Pigeons Loose!

The past two weeks have been a crazy rush of finishing renovations at the YWAM base, finalizing all aspects of the Crossroads Discipleship Training School (which Wendy & I will be staffing & teaching at), and just the usual and expected general mayhem that accompanies the beginning of two -- count 'em, TWO -- DTS's at the same time (the other is Korean-language KDTS), while also running an ESL (English As Second Language) school as well.

Tomorrow we kick off the DTS's with a traditional Fijian "pig in the ground" lu'au, complete with letting the various South Seas Islanders loose with some of their awe-inspiring dances (we have a lot of Fijians and some Tongans on staff here). It will be a total blast!

Then, as the DTS's begin the next morning, I may find some semblance of normalcy returning, and with it more regular blogging.

An Aside

On a recent trip into the freezing Canadian Prairies, as we wound our way through a forest gravel road, 50 miles south of Medicine Hat, late at night, we suddenly heard our 17-year-old daughter Jo pipe up from the backseat:

"The Lord says there's a deer on the road right around the next curve."

I slowed down as we navigated the curve (the trees were very thick and it was pitch-black out), and voilà!, there was the deer. Because I had slowed down, we didn't have a head-on collision with the deer in the headlights.

Glad my daughter speaks up when God tells her stuff!

A New Kind of Vision

Okay, so it's a well-documented and established fact that I'm 45 years old, making me pretty much the poster child for middle-age. And everyone knows that middle-aged people need new glasses, especially those prone to driving way too slow on the highway.

I had discovered in the last six or seven months that I needed to take OFF my glasses to read the excruciatingly small fonts found on things like, oh, Advil bottles or Jason Clark's blog. I was expecting to join the club of over-40 wearers of "progressive lenses". They tell me that it's "amazing" that I made it to 45 before needing them, which makes about as much sense as British Columbians taking credit for the Rocky Mountains -- it just is, no credit to anybody.

So, now I'm sitting at my computer screen, angling my head in different directions, fighting vertigo worthy of a series of tidal waves in the open ocean.

The only real surprise -- which shouldn't have been, really -- is how danged expensive getting old is. You'd think us older folk would get a little respect, instead of people seeing us as just another cash cow. If we can still find our wallets with our new-fangled progressive lenses on, that is.

Y'all excuse me while I go fall up the stairs.

Detox: Resurfacing

In January of 1999, about eighteen months into the detox journey, I remember having nachos and Alexander Keith’s India Pale Ale (Canada’s finest brew) with a good friend, and suddenly having an epiphany that – when all detoxing and debating and deconstruction is said and done – I and only I am the one who can choose what kind of person I am going to be.

And I decided that I was tired of feeling dead. Another friend referred to his struggle with being “twisted and bitter”, which became as common as phrase as Brother Maynard’s CLB (church-left-behind) would later become.

It was a simple but profound moment, one that I was probably incapable of in the early stages of the disillusionment of the detox, but now – suddenly – it became possible.

In the next few weeks, almost as confirmation from Someone Else, I was asked to lead worship at a youth home group, which eventually translated into leading the group. Andrew Smith invited me to play bass on a cross-Canada worship tour (meaning a five week vacation from The Meaning of Fish), which was an incredible time of soaking in a worship band environment, complete with digital loops, acoustic vibes, and good old-fashioned Delirious?-style abandonment.

It was a season of “coming back to life”.

Some things I noticed during this part of the detox:

• It’s not a return to “business as usual”. You don’t happily re-integrate with the existing structures as if nothing had happened. You’re different and like Neo in The Matrix, you realize “I can’t go back, can I?”
  
  “No,” responds Morpheus (the prophetic voice), “but even if you could, would you really want to?”
  
  
• At the same time, you begin to see (the worship tour was very helpful for me in this regard) that there are “people of the Spark” in almost every configuration of gathering, across many denominational lines. Your focus shifts and you start seeing healthy trees (people of the Spark) instead of only the forest (the “system” of church).
  
  
• You begin to recognize that some of those around you appear to be aggressively committed to Crabby Detox, and while you don’t avoid them altogether, you realize that you need to pull back somewhat in order to pursue life. (They may or may not understand or like you as much if you break the unwritten but monolithic Rule Of Perpetual Crabdom.)
  
  
• You find a greater freedom to affirm what God is doing through the imperfect vessels called “church”, blessing people at whatever point of the journey they find themselves at, while still being an advocate for change.
  
  After all, at some point, all of us were part of “the system” – perhaps even defending and enforcing it – and we have to show the same grace to people still in it as we would like them to show us. (And recognize that, as imperfect people ourselves, we haven’t arrived yet, either!)

And very significantly, you begin exploring and advocating – from a REconstruction motive – for a Christo-centric, Spirit-empowered missional communitas, for the sake of the King, and to partner with Him in the advancing of the Kingdom.

Road To Detox: Addendum

About six years ago, I had the privilege of recording with Rita Springer.

Right away, such a statement conveys a lot of assumptions, expectations, and carries some kind of weight. It can also be misleading and true at the same time.

Have I ever met Rita Springer? No. Well, the closest I came was when David Ruis was driving her somewhere after a worship concert at Winnipeg Centre Vineyard, and he rolled down the passenger window to have a brief roadside chat with me, and Rita was in the passenger seat.

Rita had David as the producer of one of her albums, recorded in Winnipeg, but I wasn’t there for that. However, I was one of four djembe players invited (long after Rita had left town) to play additional percussion on a 90-second segment of one of her songs.

So, while it’s technically true that I am on a Rita Springer album, it’s also very misleading to just say so without giving the whole story.

After reading some of the comments from the original Road To Detox post, I realize that it could be interpreted that I was let go from a church for questioning the dynamics of the conference I wrote about. In reality, it was probably just the last in a growing line of indicators that we were moving in different directions. The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, as it were.

We were already becoming post-charismatic (but not post-Spirit), at a time where some leaders were suggesting that we hadn’t fully “repented” of our evangelical background, or hadn’t properly “renounced” attending Bible college and seminary.

We were passionate about “community” at a time when people were flocking to “anointed” superstars and/or hoping to become the next generation of superstars (the “Joshua & Caleb Generation” or whatever).

And there was also a church merger being explored at the time, and the question of which staff would continue and which would be “let go” was part of the conversation as well. So there were actually a number of contributing factors behind the scenes.

In hindsight, it really was only a matter of time before we would part ways. The events leading up to it were pretty discouraging, but again in hindsight, I think God had a hand in it and the detox journey is one we’re glad to have gone through.

Detox Discoveries

The early months of our season of detox were an interesting mix of trying to find work, figuring out how to buy and pay for a house with no fixed income, getting the kids into a school, caring for a newborn baby, and – in our spare time – starting to process our pastoral and “laity” experiences up to that point (we’d been volunteers for six years with George Mercado, and later, pastors for seven years).

We ended up buying an upper/lower duplex in Winnipeg’s North End, renting out the top floor to three friends (all musicians), I joined a “secular” band as a missional presence in Winnipeg’s vibrant musical scene (see Ode To A Drummer), and Wendy began to adapt her hobby of photography (started as a way of dealing with our first son’s death) into a business.

There were actually quite a number of detoxing friends around us in Winnipeg at that time (1997), and while most of us attended the Winnipeg Centre Vineyard, we also met as house church, or house parties, or very destructured irregular gatherings.

Early detox discoveries:

• You don’t realize how common it is for the “official” people to receive many prophetic words of affirmation – and how rare it is for the “laity” – until you’ve moved from one group to another.
  
  
• The people most needing encouragement rarely received it, because encouragement (prophetic or otherwise) seemed to be directly connected to your perceived value to the machinery organization.
  
  
• Many times, I found myself looking in the mirror and really wondering, “Maybe the problem really is me...”
  
  
• When you’re in pain, you’re not the nicest or most consistent person to be around. Although we had legitimate wounds that needed healing, we were kinda prickly, moody, and at times fairly toxic ourselves as we detoxed.
  
  
• Which, being interpreted, means (A) we shouldn’t act so self-righteous or adopt a detoxing-martyr complex if other Christians aren’t rushing to hear us vent (yet again) about church, and (B) we need to find others who understand where we can safely vent, puke, cry, and hash through the issues (for me, that meant starting up the Dead Pastors’ Society at the King’s Head Pub every Monday night)
  
  
  1. Dead Pastors Society Rule #1: It’s safe place to vent, and to recount the gory details of what led to the disillusionment and detox.
     
     
  2. Dead Pastors Society Rule #2: But it isn’t okay to stay bitter or feed bitterness. A safe place to vent was for the purpose of healing.
     
     
  3. Dead Pastors Society Rule #3: It’s a process. Not a quick fix. Sometimes, we met and all we “accomplished” was the quaffing of Guinness and the watching of hockey. And that was (and is) okay.
  
  
• Detoxing takes time. I really resented, at first, that it felt like the Enemy was taking me out of the game for – who knows, maybe a year? But I quickly realized that I had no option but to “embrace the crash” and let it run its course. It turned out to be over a year and a half before I felt myself “coming back to life”.
  
  
• Sad but true: there are a lot of house/simple churches full of detoxing people that are just as sick, controlling, and abusive as their CLB’s – the only change is that now they are in charge. House/simple church is not a magic-wand abra-cadabra solution to the issues of power and control. This realization, in itself, was tragic: you start to wonder if anyone, anywhere is actually capable of living in Christian community, let alone a missionally-focused communitas.
  
  
• I recognized very early on that despite what some extreme anti-leadership people assert, there is a Biblical role of leadership, as some are gifted by the Holy Spirit with leadership, and part of the wrestle as we RE-construct after critique and deconstruction, is about the heart and manner of how people (like me) will understand and function as missional – and charismissional – leaders of communitas.

The comic strip Dilbert is a very funny metaphor for those of us who see similarities between the insanity of corporate bureaucracy & policies, and many church leadership structures (see Don't Step In The Leadership, for example). If you want to understand the perception and reaction of many “laity” to church power structures, just read Dilbert.

And for those in the midst of a season of detoxing from church, I also recommend Dilbert, as laughing is an important part of the healing and reconstructing journey.

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.

Ode to a Drummer

The phone rang. And rang. I sat there in my barely-furnished kitchen, with the phone cradled in one hand, while the piece of paper I'd torn off the "Bass player wanted" poster lay crumpled in the palm of the other. The phone suddenly picked up on the other end, and a voice said, "Yeah?"

Reading from the torn piece of poster in my hand, I began, "I'm looking for The Meaning of Fish."

There was a profound pause on the other end of the phone, and then I heard a voice about an octave deeper solemnly intone, "I am The Meaning of Fish."

Such was my introduction to Brad. A very intelligent philosophical kind of guy, who would sometimes show up to band rehearsal wearing a wrap-around skirt, just to see if anyone would comment. After my successful audition, we played together in The Meaning of Fish for three years (audio sample here).

After those frenetic three years of thrashing together, as the band was parting ways, Brad was airlifted to a successful "A-list" Celtic rock band in Winnipeg, where he had more fun than he'd ever had before as a drummer. I attended one of their CD release parties, and it was a great time. When Brad phoned me a year later to invite me to join the Celtic band, at first I thought he was pulling my leg.

But he was serious, and a week after I joined the band, I was playing my first weekend of gigs with them. They don't use chord charts or lyric sheets; it was all by ear and by memory, and it was crazy at first (they had a 50 song play list), but like Brad, I found myself having more fun than ever before as a musician. We were one of the bands invited to play on a Guess Who tribute album when they were inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame; we did a cover of Share The Land.

Brad was an enigma in many ways; we were often roomies when the band was touring, and one time I came out of showering to find him reading the Gideon Bible from the hotel room. He read Genesis 1, closed the Bible, and mockingly said, "Well, I've done my devotions, haven't you?" and left the room for a smoke.

Yet when Wendy was in the hospital, he was the first person to show up in the waiting room, and sat with me for over six hours while we waited to hear what the doctors thought was wrong. And there were other instances, while on the road, where we'd actually have serious talks about life, faith, and spirituality.

St. Patrick's Day is always a good day for Celtic bands; we get paid more for that one night than we make in most weekends. This coming St. Paddy's however, will be a different milestone. I just got word that Brad, now 50 years old, is retiring from drumming that night. Winnipeg's music scene will never be quite the same.

So, here's to you, Brad. You are a great drummer and a good friend. I will miss dropping by to see you play whenever I visit Winnipeg. Truly, the end of an era.

Ammunition & Understanding

I've observed some interesting things over the years as a result of (A) being a "Christian rock" musician when many churches thought it was all satanic, (B) being a Vineyard pastor during the heyday of the Toronto Blessing, and (C) blogging in the midst of the emerging/missional conversation in the late 90's and early 21C.

Strangely, the same things apply to the recent discussion and great comments on personality profiles and their usefulness and/or abusefulness (is that a word?).

All questions during the (A) Christian rock/backmasking wars, (B) the Toronto Blessing, and (C) most things emerging/missional fall into two categories: Questions seeking ammunition in order to press the attack, and Questions seeking understanding, in order to... well, understand.

The use of personality profiles would be very similar, depending on who is using them and why. To gain understanding in order to appreciate the "other" and value the uniqueness of individuals in a missional gathering would be encouraging and freeing. To gain ammunition for the intent of belittling, judging, or manipulating, would obviously be dirty pool and a betrayal/violation of communitas.

Which takes us back again, inexorably, to the issue of missional leadership, and more precisely, the heart, maturity, and trustworthiness of missional leaders.

Meaning, most of us. What has the mirror shown us recently when we've looked in it? Are we trustworthy? Are we mature, or does fear, anger, or undealt-with pain colour our interactions with others?

When we speak of missional leaders, holding to a more community-based way of functioning, it means more of us are leaders, not less. And therefore, the question of seeking understanding or ammunition comes to rest with US in the crosshairs. Tread carefully.

Diseasel

When my son was but a wee lad, Thomas the Tank Engine was a regular staple in our house. In one venerable episode, the whole train-yard was up in arms about the imminent arrival of a diesel engine. Thomas mis-heard the news as "diseasel", and immediately jumped to a railway version of Chicken Little, and panic ensued among all the engines.

We no longer watch Thomas regularly in our household, but the term "diseasel" has become etched in our family lexicon; a visit to the Clan McAlpine homestead will reveal that many of our family insider comments and jokes are testimony to the movies that we watch.

"Diseasel" is the term most recently applied to yours truly, as I am (to use the venacular) as sick as a dog. The only redeeming element is that I have retired to my bed with a yellow high-liter and Alan Hirch's The Forgotten Ways.

Health and regular blogging will hopefully resume in the very near future.