2013: The Year of Goodbye

This has been a year of loss for me.  A year of goodbyes.  A year of turning the other cheek.  Of letting go.  
 

Most people who know me know I lost my job recently. 

Leaving a ministry position isn't like losing any other job. For me, its leaving behind my role of helping families pass down their faith to the next generation and teaching children to know God and love his word. 

It was so much more than imparting information.  So much more than an amusing diversion from the attractions of the world out there.  It was teaching them how to read, ask questions, to learn to seek the truth for themselves in the context of our diverse community of faith.  

For each child, I pray that they will encounter the One True God, see him at work, meet him in authentic community - community that knows them and loves them, that works through the hard, mourns all that is loss for them, and also shares in their deepest delights.  

I want them to seek God in prayer and learn to discern the Spirit’s leading.  To worship for God’s sake, with a heart of gratitude and together in a way that includes each member in the Body.  I want them to experience the joy that comes from these things.  I want it to transform them so they seem different to everyone else and so it moves them to share why.

I want them to be angry with injustice and make choices consistent with what's right, regardless of the cost to them.  This is what I want for the whole church, but our kids can grasp what it is to be God's people right from the beginning.  

After years of 40 hours a week with this burning in my heart, I release it to those still in their lives.  To this role that I loved, was called to, and believe had so much potential to build the kingdom, I say goodbye.

That is a lot to leave behind, and yet it scratches just the surface of what I say goodbye to.  I say goodbye to each child, so individually precious, and each one with a purpose they are growing into.  

I love each one.  Yes, I've worked for 40 hours a week, but I've carried them home in my heart and held them in prayer far beyond the hours on duty.  This has been 60 goodbyes, each one a loss.  Each one will take time to grieve.  

It's saying goodbye to parents that I have walked with for years.  Parents who love the Lord with all their heart, soul, mind, strength.  Parents who have been committed to training up their children in the way they should go.  Parents who walked with us, partnering with us to raise our children, too.  It's goodbye to so many friends, left behind. 

And it's so many more goodbyes to senior friends that share their lives like younger people rarely do.  I say goodbye to their stories, to their warm faces and hugs and relentless prayers.  Its hundreds of goodbyes.  

This is the loss of ministry.  Its losing one's family.

But for me the loss doesn't end there because it wasn't a simple parting of ways.  It came after years of being bullied, falling on the wrong side of favoritism and gossip, being pushed out.  For me, though I do leave all of these things behind, the truth is I don’t get to say goodbye.  Not to any of them.  

Its been a year of being stuck.  Helpless.  In many ways, isolated.  

Although we did our very best to follow biblical principles through a very complicated array of circumstances and locked between responsibility to both lead and follow, speak truth yet obey, and even now, I’m not confident that we made the right decisions. We chose to obey the leadership when they silenced us.  That is why we couldn't answer people's questions as they tried to pray for us and care for us.  

My one request was, whatever the leadership did say about why I was leaving, that it would be true, but there was no truth in it. They chose to put forth two competing suggestions and let people think what they might. They preferred to let people think I was on medical leave due to the same health problems I had in the past, and, in case that didn't take, they hinted that there may have been something else wrong with me. 

A lot of people were very concerned about me, because they had prayed with me for years to be well. All we could say was that I wasn't sick, and then awkwardly fall silent when that didn’t make sense and they wanted to know more.  But they asked no more questions. Unfortunately, that left the gossip to fly even further and develop in complexity.  We heard it all.  Some people thought I was very ill again and in the hospital...which wasn't fair to them. The most shocking rumor was that I had been hospitalized in a mental institution for a nervous breakdown. 

I wasn't sick.  I was away because church had become a dangerous place for me - a place of immense stress, not being allowed to speak, and being threatened.

While I was initially on leave a few individuals were allowed to carefully sow seeds of confusion and discontent, lies and slander...and nurture their growth.  After three months away there really was no place for me to come back to, and I was left with the burden of responsibility for the decisions they had made.  

And now, what was once my home and my people is now a strange and foreign place that I can't return to.  Save one I can't imagine, after all that gossip, who might be authentic still in their friendship with me.  At best I could be a great big question mark, but a question that would not be asked.  

These beautifully authentic and transparent relationships that I treasured are lost to me. I can only say another sad goodbye.

While I do believe that every Christian, in some sense, is a leader, I don’t hope to enter Christian leadership within a church again.  I do still hope for ways to minister to others in the context of every day life.  My past ministry roles were such a joy.  Truly, this ministry experience (in terms of my role and relationships) was life-giving too.  But at the same time, I have watched an unsettling trend throughout my life.

Being from a ministry family means I’ve known many pastors.  Many of my peers went into full-time ministry, adding to the number of pastors in my life.  One thing that I’ve learned from observing these spiritual leaders is that church leadership breaks down all the time. Even when leaders are leading faithfully, if followers have their own agenda (and there’s always someone who does) it becomes difficult to lead anyone anywhere.  Gossip proliferates and slander swirls with the belief that the ends justify the means.   

If we measure success the way the world measures it then we might think leadership always fails.  But, if success is measured in terms of being faithful to God in leadership, doing all that we can with the person God made us, and letting God be the source of power that moves people, then whether there is visible change or not, we’ve done what we were called to do. 

Still, this disturbing trend has worked itself out over and over again as pastor friends have been torn down by churches.  Eleven years ago I watched this happen to my father, just as I was getting married.   And since, many friends who have entered ministry have experienced similar things.  Over and over again church leaders have been brought down because they don’t have the numbers, or ministry isn’t entertaining enough, or because the “prominent members” aren’t kept happy, or worse.  

My experience this past year comes alongside six others (across different denominations) who have been dealing with these same problems.

While it is likely that these things have happened (at least in part) because of some deficit in my/their leadership ability, these pastors are godly people who walk along side others in ministry, share the gospel with the balance of love and truth, and have touched so so many lives.  What is it about Christian fellowship that gives us the “right” and even “responsibility” to tear each other down?  To avoid basic scriptural principles because they’re not “useful”? To tell someone that scriptural standards are “unreasonable in real life,” but “in a perfect world things would work that way.”  Why has it become okay to avoid what the Bible teaches to pursue a perceived “right” agenda? How do we come to the place where these things come not from the people, but from people who have been placed in leadership?

When I look at how scripture describes Christian life, we fall short.  If the church is the Body of Christ shouldn't we look something like him? But I can't see him. I see selfish worship, fake relationships that only go as far as they serve the self, no expectation to grow because God accepts us as we are, and a reluctance to share the faith because that’s someone else’s job. 

I wonder:  Is this a church?  What is the church?  Where is the church?  I expect that many Christians WILL struggle with the temptation to push an agenda in an ungodly way – to undermine, gossip, slander, expect favoritism, to bury the shameful things that happen, to expose the weak and helpless rather than protect and provide for them – but it's wrong each time it happens.  

My hope for the church has been (and continues to be) hard to hold on to. The "church" is out there, but I struggle to see it.  
...Another loss I grieve.

Still one more thing I have lost.  

I've been torn apart again and again by the message that the most useful thing I could do for ministry is never do it again.  I wasn't allowed to ask questions or share my perspective. Instead, I was told that I'm too nice, too mean, too weak, too strong, too awkward, too sure of myself, too meek, too dominating, too young, too old, too smart, incompetent.  

My weaknesses can't be worked on.  My strengths are unfortunate and aren't really useful. And in the end I was told that at the core of it all, there's just something wrong with me, deep down inside, that can't really be articulated.  I was told that until I'm fixed the church can never be healthy.  That anyone who is saying positive things is lying to me because they aren't comfortable telling me the truth.  

If it could have been about my theology, or some ethical problem I could have understood such harsh dealings.  But it wasn't. It was just me. 

I have been deconstructed.  

Regardless of what was formed in me growing up, and what I’d come to love about myself, after all this I am not anymore.  

Perhaps what was said about me is inaccurate, but there is truth in there somewhere. There is. If they could have named what was wrong with me, talked with me about each matter... which was all I would have wanted...but, generalizations and extremes afford no possibility of the identification of something that could be changed. There is no way to grow.  I can never know what's true. I can never become something better.

Instead, I’m left shredded into fragments.  
I don't know what I offer that might be valuable to someone else.  
So, I say goodbye to myself, too.  

Leaving ministry means the loss of our source of income, but it's so much more than a lost job.  It's the death of a vision.  It's hundreds of goodbyes.  It's the loss of my friends - my church family - the very people anyone would normally turn to in a time such as this.  It's the loss of a future.  It's the loss of church.  It's a torn down identity.  

So I leave these pieces of me in 2013.  Loss with no goodbye.  

Where do I go from here?  

I read God's word.  I hold my family close.  I live in my neighborhood.  I lament.  I heal.  I wait for God to move me.

With this proclamation and prayer, I leave behind this year and wait for God to do a new thing.

Psalm 19[a]

For the director of music. A psalm of David.

1 The heavens declare the glory of God;
    the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
2 Day after day they pour forth speech;
    night after night they reveal knowledge.
3 They have no speech, they use no words;
    no sound is heard from them.
4 Yet their voice[b] goes out into all the earth,
    their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun.
5     It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
    like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
6 It rises at one end of the heavens
    and makes its circuit to the other;
    nothing is deprived of its warmth.

7 The law of the Lord is perfect,
    refreshing the soul.
The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy,
    making wise the simple.
8 The precepts of the Lord are right,
    giving joy to the heart.
The commands of the Lord are radiant,
    giving light to the eyes.
9 The fear of the Lord is pure,
    enduring forever.
The decrees of the Lord are firm,
    and all of them are righteous.

10 They are more precious than gold,
    than much pure gold;
they are sweeter than honey,
    than honey from the honeycomb.
11 By them your servant is warned;
    in keeping them there is great reward.
12 But who can discern their own errors?
    Forgive my hidden faults.
13 Keep your servant also from willful sins;
    may they not rule over me.
Then I will be blameless,
    innocent of great transgression.

14 May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart
    be pleasing in your sight,
    Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.