Rejected for Good
Written by Larry Cooney
Sandy and I had an opportunity to meet with Pastor Daniel Brown for breakfast. He’s our hero in ministry, and we admire him greatly. In those days, he was pastor of The Coastlands Church in Santa Cruz, CA, and we were about eight years into our church plant in Port Ludlow, WA. As a friend told me, I was spiritually hemorrhaging by then, so I had an idea to quit the church, pack, and move to Santa Cruz. We’d get jobs, attend church, be happy, and enjoy life and Jesus again. I had stopped enjoying church months or years earlier; it had become a trap for me. I despised that fact because the church, salvation, and Jesus were everything to me until I became a pastor. My goal to become one had become a noose around my neck.
Despairing the church, I called Daniel’s office, and his assistant mentioned that he was coming to the Northwest to lead a conference. We could meet him at the airport, have breakfast with him, and take him to his hotel, she explained, and that’s what we did. We got up early to make the two-hour drive to the airport, but we both woke up with terribly sore throats and headaches. We had no business meeting with anyone except a doctor. But I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to have breakfast with Daniel, so we dressed our only son at the time, took some Tylenol, and started the trek, hoping the meeting would lead to freedom from the trap my church had become.
We met Daniel eight years earlier at a How to Start a Church Conference before we held our first Sunday service. He was brilliant and funny, and his content was inspiring and challenging. He could shift our focus from the strain, stress, and mechanical struggle of starting a church to seeing God’s kingdom and how our church plant fit into it. God’s kingdom is what we wanted and why we took on this project. We did our best to apply the principles Daniel taught, using his materials through the years of planting the church; I received them in the mail like receiving a care package. They always encouraged me.
This morning, though, besides feeling sick, I was in emotional pain; it had accumulated over the last eight years, and I couldn’t shake it. I explain it and the solution I found in Gallant Fool.
During these painful, what turned out to be final days and weeks at the church, I toured and interviewed for the executive director’s position at the Bread of Life Mission. I knew nothing about being a nonprofit administrator. Still, the job prospect was intriguing because, compared to my church in a golf resort, the Skid Row Mission was reaching folks who were desperate and looking for answers. From all appearances, the swarm of huddled homeless men and women who waited in the cold for the Mission’s doors to open, to grab old pastries and use our bathroom seemed like a great mission field to me. It appeared so anyway; maybe I was the only one desperate.
With my throat burning, body aching, and sweating with fever, I wondered how sick I was making Daniel during breakfast. Nervously, desperately, after some small talk, I asked about leaving my church behind and joining his church, to which he bluntly responded, “We don’t import people; we only export. Go work at the Mission.”
I can’t remember who paid for breakfast. Within weeks, I was commuting from our home in Port Ludlow to Seattle every morning. I was relieved to be away from the stress of the church but not keen enough to realize the task into which I stepped. God prevailed despite my not yet addressing the source of stress. Over the years, much of what we put into place to help men find hope at the Mission, I learned from Daniel.
How did that breakfast shape my career? I heeded God’s call and purpose for me to direct the Mission to better days. Because Daniel’s church was a process church that focused on moving people to reach clear outcomes, he was more concerned about training and sending people out of his church and engaging in kingdom work than getting more people to attend. His concept and methods were successful; his church planted over two dozen other churches worldwide, and it was strong enough to quickly repel me away from looking to him to solve my problem.
Pastor, what would it show if you created a pie chart of your team’s collective time and energy? What took more of your time this week, preparing for another quality Sunday morning production, Zig learning to communicate better, Ted and Julia learning to delegate more, Zag not talking about himself so much, or Tristan not being so bossy? Unless we intentionally arrange the parts of our churches to help Zig, Zag, and the others to heal and develop, we will remain trapped in the tyranny of thinking that repeated blockbuster Sundays will grow people. And, unless we inject grace, transparency, and honesty into our community, we’ll neglect the well-being of the people we expect to arrive on Sundays.
Is your church a place to which people come and receive ministry or a place where you are training them to serve others? Do you recruit greeters, nursery workers, and facility cleaners to produce a high-value church service or to love, mend, and train those who respond? Is the reason you have Children’s activities to teach them about Jesus or to graciously develop patience, humility, and godliness in your workers? Most think the former; the latter, though, creates sustained growth.
Indeed, people care less about what you, leader, know than that you care. See if you can shift your paradigm to find a new way to love, mend, and train somebody (or bodies) in your church this month.
Despairing the church, I called Daniel’s office, and his assistant mentioned that he was coming to the Northwest to lead a conference. We could meet him at the airport, have breakfast with him, and take him to his hotel, she explained, and that’s what we did. We got up early to make the two-hour drive to the airport, but we both woke up with terribly sore throats and headaches. We had no business meeting with anyone except a doctor. But I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to have breakfast with Daniel, so we dressed our only son at the time, took some Tylenol, and started the trek, hoping the meeting would lead to freedom from the trap my church had become.
We met Daniel eight years earlier at a How to Start a Church Conference before we held our first Sunday service. He was brilliant and funny, and his content was inspiring and challenging. He could shift our focus from the strain, stress, and mechanical struggle of starting a church to seeing God’s kingdom and how our church plant fit into it. God’s kingdom is what we wanted and why we took on this project. We did our best to apply the principles Daniel taught, using his materials through the years of planting the church; I received them in the mail like receiving a care package. They always encouraged me.
This morning, though, besides feeling sick, I was in emotional pain; it had accumulated over the last eight years, and I couldn’t shake it. I explain it and the solution I found in Gallant Fool.
During these painful, what turned out to be final days and weeks at the church, I toured and interviewed for the executive director’s position at the Bread of Life Mission. I knew nothing about being a nonprofit administrator. Still, the job prospect was intriguing because, compared to my church in a golf resort, the Skid Row Mission was reaching folks who were desperate and looking for answers. From all appearances, the swarm of huddled homeless men and women who waited in the cold for the Mission’s doors to open, to grab old pastries and use our bathroom seemed like a great mission field to me. It appeared so anyway; maybe I was the only one desperate.
With my throat burning, body aching, and sweating with fever, I wondered how sick I was making Daniel during breakfast. Nervously, desperately, after some small talk, I asked about leaving my church behind and joining his church, to which he bluntly responded, “We don’t import people; we only export. Go work at the Mission.”
I can’t remember who paid for breakfast. Within weeks, I was commuting from our home in Port Ludlow to Seattle every morning. I was relieved to be away from the stress of the church but not keen enough to realize the task into which I stepped. God prevailed despite my not yet addressing the source of stress. Over the years, much of what we put into place to help men find hope at the Mission, I learned from Daniel.
How did that breakfast shape my career? I heeded God’s call and purpose for me to direct the Mission to better days. Because Daniel’s church was a process church that focused on moving people to reach clear outcomes, he was more concerned about training and sending people out of his church and engaging in kingdom work than getting more people to attend. His concept and methods were successful; his church planted over two dozen other churches worldwide, and it was strong enough to quickly repel me away from looking to him to solve my problem.
Pastor, what would it show if you created a pie chart of your team’s collective time and energy? What took more of your time this week, preparing for another quality Sunday morning production, Zig learning to communicate better, Ted and Julia learning to delegate more, Zag not talking about himself so much, or Tristan not being so bossy? Unless we intentionally arrange the parts of our churches to help Zig, Zag, and the others to heal and develop, we will remain trapped in the tyranny of thinking that repeated blockbuster Sundays will grow people. And, unless we inject grace, transparency, and honesty into our community, we’ll neglect the well-being of the people we expect to arrive on Sundays.
Is your church a place to which people come and receive ministry or a place where you are training them to serve others? Do you recruit greeters, nursery workers, and facility cleaners to produce a high-value church service or to love, mend, and train those who respond? Is the reason you have Children’s activities to teach them about Jesus or to graciously develop patience, humility, and godliness in your workers? Most think the former; the latter, though, creates sustained growth.
Indeed, people care less about what you, leader, know than that you care. See if you can shift your paradigm to find a new way to love, mend, and train somebody (or bodies) in your church this month.
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