Broken Churches Led By Broken People part 2

I always seem to procrastinate with the posting. I doddle around on Facebook and then check my email, check my messages, hoping to get caught up in something else.

For the most part, I loved my church growing up. I loved the music especially. :) Around about 7th grade our old worship pastor moved on to another job. He was the traditional hymns and piano kind of guy. I learned many of the hymns I know today from his time. The old people loved him too:) So when we got a new guy who had just come off the mission field from England and the Czech Republic who had a guitar and kid who played the djembe there was a bit of an exodus. He mentioned once to me and a few others that he would get angry letters in the offering tray about it. I imagine that would be a difficult thing. It's interesting how an offering plate can be passed around and the offering from the body are notes of... well, not encouragement.

I loved this new worship leader. He and his family were so full of life and fun. His wife played piano and they had such a heart for international missions. It was as though we had a worship pastor and missions pastor all in one. At the time our youth pastor was encouraging us to be a part of the church, serve in adult ministries, not just to be the future church but to BE the church. As a home schooler this didn't seem too bad to me. I was comfortable with adults and went to some of our Equipping Classes. I think these days they would be called Small Groups. I also got to sing on the worship team. I remember someone asking me what year I was in college and I told them I was in seventh grade. I was tall for my age, but still... really? Whatever. Seriously though, I don't think I've grown an inch since then. :)

Anyways, so after our new worship leader came our youth pastor was called to leave maybe a year later. He gave us four months to find a new youth pastor.

We went nine months without a youth pastor. The parents tried to do their best to step in, but we had been probably too enamored with our first youth pastor, plus, they were our PARENTS... :) really? Who wants them? I started a youth worship team and we were TERRIBLE. I played the piano and this other guy played electric guitar, we tried to incorporate a trumpet, it was terrible.

We got a new youth pastor the middle of my ninth grade year. I wasn't sure about him, he seemed too happy or goofy or something. Now as I look back I see that he had a genuine heart and a desire to be led by the Spirit. He helped me to break outside of my perfect shell. One weekend on a retreat he had an open time of sharing. I knew I needed to tell the truth about my struggle with an eating disorder, my lonliness, my struggles with sexual fantasies... I didn't want to. For some reason I got up there anyways and shared through tears in front of my youth group of about fifty or sixty kids. As a result I had three girls come up to me that night and tell me they were struggling with some of the same things. Since that night I have made a pledge with the Lord that I would be honest at all costs. I knew He would be faithful to bring others into my life I could share with and it didn't matter who knew.

Lord, what do You want me to share? What kind of details? I don't want to slander anyone, but I want to be holy in the way I say stuff... I want to be honest.

Okay, let's just count here. I've seen three youth pastors leave our little church, three worship pastors, four teaching pastors... there was a pastor "disagreement" that was never truly resolved I felt. I think that was the biggest blow. The pastor who left was gracious and moved to another state to continue pastoring, but still about half the church left. It was hard to watch people leave. Easier to see them go on good terms than bad ones. I had one youth pastor take four months to leave, another one left in two weeks. One worship pastor left to go work as a chef, another left to do full time missions around the world, another one left to make a more "seeker friendly" church... I think... I can think of two friends specifically who were hurt by one pastor's ministry and him confronting them on wrong grounds, I guess it was just messy and people lying and stuff like that. ...

Okay, all of that junk to say, the church is led by broken people. So many times I have asked God why? Why did you allow this? These people are wrong! But God quietly responds that He put men in charge who are broken. The more they realize that and live in a dependence on Him, the better. They will be held to a higher standard and God is a just God. Jesus was the hardest on the teachers of the law, I wonder if that's because there was a carnage of people in their path.

We are to submit ourselves to the authority God has placed in our lives. We are to live faithfully to where He has called us to be. We are to do all things without grumbling or complaining. We are to search the scriptures for ourselves and make sure that no one is committing heresy. We are to grow where we are planted and do what He has called us to do.

Broken Churches Led By Broken People

Today I was thinking about the brokenness of my church background. A lot of people have been hurt by church goers, church leadership, church hypocrites... need I say more? The other day I had a woman say to me, you have no idea what I've been through in my church. I thought, yeah, I have no idea, but I probably have a pretty good idea and I have been through a lot of crap too.

A conclusion I came to a long time ago: The Church (the body of Christ) is run by broken people. We live in a broken world and if Jesus had wanted everything to go perfectly he would have stayed and ran things himself. Instead, he sent the Holy Spirit who will guide us. The only problem is that we all sin. Let me say that again, we ALL sin. We are all broken, we are all prone to sin, no one is above it. No one. I have heard of many pastors falling into affairs, evangelists doing things for money, I have seen conflicts, I have seen junk that I never wanted to see.

So this is me telling my story of my church experience. This will all be from my point of view, so there are details that I don't know about, simply because they were kept from me. Some things I will not elaborate on because they are better left unsaid. But here is my story as best I can tell it.

I want to start with a preliminary note about my Dad. He is a faithful man. Mom says he doesn't like change, but I know it's because God has called my Dad to be a stability and pass that stability on to his children. He is the reason why we never changed churches after my church went through a bunch of stuff. Also, in the telling of this I want to bring home the two facts I have learned. Man is sinful, no matter how awesome you think he is and God is good. He is faithful and true and calls us to trust in Him.

When we moved to Little Rock I was eight years old. Mom and Dad told us that we were going to find a church here and when we found it, that would be the one we would stay at. We were not going to church-hop or anything like that. As an eight year old I took the process of finding a church very seriously. I loved our church from the day we first visited. Mom would tell you that it was because the children's church met at a school where all the rooms are little houses. But I liked it because of my Sunday school teachers. They were amazing. I liked the other kids in my class, I just loved the church. So after several visits to other churches we decided on this church.

I loved our church. Loved the people and just the feel of it. We eventually moved into a real church building and I loved it just as much. Throughout those elementary years I just grew to love the church and the people more and more. My faith in God was young and I was learning much.

I remember sometime in the fifth or sixth grade one of our pastors was called to leave and go to another church in another state. He didn't want to go, but the Lord was calling him and so he openly shared with the church the war in his heart and how he wanted to follow God in this. I was sad to see him and his family go. They had a daughter my age and we had become friends. I enjoyed his teaching (yeah, I was in sixth grade and enjoyed his teaching!) But the Lord called him somewhere else.

I came into youth group in the seventh grade. They had junior high and high school then. We had one of the most amazing youth pastors I have ever met. I don't want to exalt him or anything, because he is just human; but his passion for the Lord was compelling. He was also funny and a good musician/worship leader. I still remember the way he taught about Paul and following God through anything. I remember him teaching us to lead with servant leadership. He had us on a secret leadership team called the Ministry Team. He didn't want anyone else to know about it, we weren't supposed to talk about it. We were the ones who he would meet with every few weeks, we were to reach out to the kids who were on the fringe, the newcomers. Our first task was to go and clean up the highway outside of our church. He taught us that Jesus humbled himself and served and we needed to follow his example of servant leadership. I remember a phrase our youth pastor would say: When God says "jump" you say, "how high?"

To my knowledge things were going fine in our church. Everything was wonderful, I would have feelings of peace as I walked through the doors on a Sunday morning or Sunday night. I loved being there, we participated in everything.

Along about the middle of 8th grade a bombshell dropped on my faith. Our youth pastor was being called away to another church in another state. What were we going to do? Are we going to leave the church? I remember my brother asking this question the day our youth pastor made his announcement. I felt like a huge part of my foundation had been ripped out from under me.

He left in a very gracious, smooth way. Let me just say this for any pastors, especially youth pastors out there... if you are planning on leaving your church and going to a new one I would highly highly suggest you not leave suddenly. I have seen it done both ways, slowly and abruptly and I will say it is worth any kind of sacrifice to make transitions as smooth as possible. This gave me time to process, to love, to cry, to figure out what was going on.

That's when I realized I was trusting not just in Jesus, but in our youth pastor as well. I was using his faith as a crutch. Many of my friends had their speculations about why he had to leave, but my conclusion for my own heart is that God was teaching me to trust in Him, not my pastors and teachers. Pastors are teachers are good and necessary, but they are not there for us to place our faith in.

This is the first part of my story, I will continue with more later. It's late though and I need to go to bed.