My Journey (Part 5)

Miranda came in the other night, looked at me, smiled and said, “You know… it’s Thursday… and you haven’t written since Tuesday….”
I should have written then, but I didn’t. No excuses will be offered, just my sincere apologies… to both of my readers. What would a pseudo-writer do without his wife and mother?

After that conversation with Pastor Keith (I still prefer to call him Pastor Buddy… I don’t know why), I knew I had to act. The problem was, I didn’t want to. I was very comfortable at Christ Community, and my wife loved it as well. Finally, one night I called a pastor that I knew in the area. In fact, I served as an interim youth pastor for this pastor back in the mid-nineties. He has served in bi-vocational ministry in this area for over 20 years, and of all the people I knew, he was the one most likely to know of a church looking for a bi-vocational youth minister.

He wasn’t in, but after I visited with his wife for a while, I shared the purpose of my call. When I asked if she knew of a church that was looking for a youth minister, she told me that their church was. I approached this very slowly as I had no desire to end up in a situation that was simply a bad match.

The church was (and is) a sweet-natured little church located approximately 30 minutes from the edge of nowhere. For those of you familiar with the greater tri-county area, many of the members of this congregation go to Slapout when they go to town. (For those of you not familiar with the area, I promise I am not making up the name.) Like many smaller Baptist churches in a rural setting, the congregation was aging. There was a perceived need for ministry to students, there was an unperceived need for ministry to young families. The pastor and I talked about this at length, and I shared that I was willing to come on board, but only if it was clear that I was coming as an agent of change.

Change is difficult, and change is hard. Sometimes we think we see the horizon when all we really see is the edge of the rut that we have found ourselves in. I served this church for fifteen months, and God blessed our time there. We were able to begin a new ministry by offering a contemporary service one Saturday night a month. People were drawn into a new way of worship, and for folks who think the Southern Gospel is cutting edge, this was a huge step. The church blessed us, and we hopefully blessed them in return. The pastor had confidence in my ability to speak and relied heavily upon me. I was able to speak more times than I can remember during my tenure there.

After about a year, God began to stir in my heart some familiar longings. I had come to this church to be an agent of change, but it simply wasn’t happening in that context. Instead of being true to myself and my burdens, I was becoming a maintainer of the status quo. As we prayed through the various possibilities, we began to seriously consider seminary. In fact, during the winter of 2004, I went through the application process at Beeson Divinity School. Beeson is highly selective, and only a handful of applicants are accepted each year. Our prayer was that God would shut the door if I were not supposed to attend. Before I got my answer from Beeson, I had my answer from God.

Though I had a complete peace about the application process, I developed a complete lack of peace about going to seminary at that time. As we continued to seek the right direction, it became increasingly clear to us.

Miranda and I had possessed a burden for new works, for new ministry models, for the idea of being involved in a church plant for some time. Two of the previous three churches we had been involved with had been less than ten years old, and we felt a calling to be involved more intimately at the beginning stages. Before long, we found ourselves with an opportunity that we simply couldn’t say no to. I resigned my position in mid-March, and on April 1, 2004, I began serving as an associate pastor (Connections Pastor) at the Church at Silver Springs, a church plant that was less than six months old when I came on board.