Many of you know the about the great things that have been happening to Kim and I and the boys through the glory of God. In the past month, we have rededicated our lives to Christ, gotten baptized, and joined the church. A number of things that we have been searching for and hoping for over the course of the last few years have happened very quickly for us, and it has been wonderful. Overall, I think I can speak for Kim when I say that we feel rejuvenated, more focused, less stressed, and it’s just as though we have a comforting assurance from the Lord. I may have mentioned in a previous post that we were baptized on October 1, and the service was just a wonderful experience from beginning to end. We had family members there to support us, the church was embracing us with love and excitement…..it was great.Then the wheels came off at church 3 days later. Real bad.
Without going into much detail, I guess I’ll just say that there was a huge division in the church that was proposed by the senior pastor, in which 2 wonderful Christian people who both have a huge (and I mean gigantic here) role in the church, would be dismissed for reasons, as described to us directly by these two people, were unwarranted reasons. Niether of these two people had done anything morally wrong or unbiblical to warrant their dismissal. It was all about, it seems, personality differences with the senior pastor. I have since done a significant amount of research on church conflict and divisions, and numerous accounts support the following concept:
The true shepherd of the church will be the one who seeks to keep the church together. He will not initiate a split as a solution. He will seek to settle the legitimate issues, while maintaining his focus on the higher issue of Christ-centered unity.
So this helps clear up what is really a complex situation – for me. We attended an emergency church informational meeting on 10/10, in which one person after another stood up and voiced their emotional displeasure with the senior pastor in regards to direct encounters that they had had with him. The deacons of the church each spoke about a meeting that recently took place in which the senior pastor and elders asked the deacons to sign a form authorizing the termination of these two employees. It was clear that most of the deacons were very opposed to signing such a form and did not agree with it or how this was being handled. I could go one and on, but the bottom line is that right now, nobody knows what is going to happen. The senior pastor has cleared out his office and as a result the church thought that he had resigned, but apparently that is not the case.
This has just been tough on us for several reasons. For this to happen immediately after we made this strong commitment to the church is rough. And we have very strong opinions about one of the staff members who was to be fired. This guy is a great Christian. He leads the Praise and Worship music team, and invited me to come in and play some drums for the group. I have wanted to play the drums again for the longest time, and to have a chance to do it for the glory of God was just an opportunity that I felt very blessed to have. He is very inspiring just by being himself, and we find it outrageous to think of terminating him. His wife also is a teacher at the church, and was actually Jackson’s preschool teacher last year. She really did a good job with Jackson and the rest of the class. The kids love her. Jackson would come home and talk about what she taught him about Jesus that day was very influential on us going to the church in the first place.
Anyhow, it is a long story. And it is a real mess right now. But we are just praying for God’s will to happen, and we have faith in that.
