I returned from the Florida retreat center a very confused young man.
I wanted Gene to remain for me the man I'd always imagined him to be. I'd gambled my youth on Gene and on Atlanta, and I wanted to wake up and find I'd been right all along. I wanted my clouds of doubt to part, and to find I'd faithfully puzzled through the hard riddles to earn a job in the kingdom. I wanted to be one of the guys who would change the world, save the church, and suffer in quiet dignity for the rest of my life, regretting nothing I'd done along the way. Remembering the little man I'd seen behind the curtain in that Florida retreat center left those desires on life-support.
The mighty wizard of Oz was shattered into a million pieces. I'd walked my yellow brick road in hopes of finding brain, heart and courage only to have Gene disappoint me in these very qualities. But maybe that was my only problem? Maybe I was simply disappointed that my hero had clay feet? Maybe in my intractibility I would reject Christ Himself, had I the opportunity to sit at His feet instead of Gene's. Gene was not the mighty wizard I imagined him to be, nor that he advertised himself to be, but maybe he was still the man God had put in my life. It was mine to decide whether the real man behind the curtain was worth following.
The last week of the conference did nothing to help me decide. It was more of the same. I volunteered to confront Lenny directly, and to let him know the score of the game in which he was caught. It was my last action of the conference, and our conversation lasted two or three hours. I was a good deal more honest than I had been with the sister I'd confronted earlier, and I listened a great deal better.
I left feeling like we understood each other, and we arrived in time to attend the last conference meeting of the whole church with Gene. Yet again, Gene expected to straighten things out once and for all. Maybe Lenny came to that meeting a little too prepared because, again, nothing significant happened. Maybe I played a part in the cooling the fireworks; I don't know. If so, it was not due to any noble intent on my part. I wanted Lenny to decide to be fully in the church or fully out, and to quit hovering on the edge like he had been. I was still very much trying to walk Gene's straight and narrow path.
After the meeting, I loaded my bags back in the car and headed home to Atlanta. The eight hour ride, just me and my incessantly buzzing questions, was not to be envied. I could not go back to my first intent of serving under Gene's ministry 'til death, nor move on to the new idea of getting out before it was too late. Cutting and running held no appeal for me. Some day having to write a history like this was a heartbreaking thought.
Zig Ziglar tells about an old shoe salesman who decided to show the uninformed kid how powerful a sales position really could be. The kid was merely trying to help customers pick their own shoes, but the old salesman explained how his job was to help the customer pick wisely. The rub was that the kid believed every customer knew exactly what he wanted. Finally, the old salesman pulled out all the stops. He told the kid he'd sell the longest lasting, best made, but ugliest shoe in the store to whomever next came through the door.
The hapless customer asked for assistance, and the salesman brought him a couple shoes in the style he asked for, plus the ugly shoes. He let the customer try on the ugly shoe. He said it was butt-ugly. Then he tried the other shoe, and it was the wrong color. So the salesman went back for another shoe size and style. When he returned, he let the customer try the ugly shoe again. The customer looked at it, and decided against it, then tried the other styles. After a short discussion, the salesman went back for more shoes. On his third trip out, he had the customer try all the other shoes, then finally the ugly shoe once again.
This time, the customer bought the well-built, long lasting, ugly shoe.
The strangeness of the shoe is what had thrown the customer off. It was simple unfamiliarity. The third time the customer saw the ugly shoe, it was no longer strange. He could see it for what it was, and having become familiar with it, he decided to take it home.
So it was with me and leaving Gene. I had never listened to such a thought as disagreeing with my mentor before, but I was wining and dining it now. Over the next several months the idea grew a little more familiar, a little more believable, a little more possible, a little more probable.
One day Gene called an emergency meeting of the church in my living room.
The whole church came together to hear whatever news was weighing so heavily on Gene's mind. We were all scared. We'd been in trouble before, and we didn't know what could possibly have gone so wrong. Gene had just returned from Florida, so we suspected it was something from down there, but one never knows. We were right. It was Florida.
He told us that Florida's struggles had gone on too long, and that the struggles were all due to Lenny's negative influence. Gene recounted how he had worked for a month during his training conference, then written and phoned Florida trying to drag them out of their problems. Finally, he had visited Florida alone, and only then learned the true extent of their problems.
While in Florida, during a brothers' meeting, Gene had taken a vote asking who were the most influential people in the church there. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lenny was voted the most influential person in Florida. The rest of the votes had been scattered around as expected, and Gene had gotten a few votes himself, but Lenny was the most influential member of that church.
After that vote, Gene continued, his hand had been forced. He could not willingly split a church, so he had been forced to step aside as the father of the church in Florida. He had handed control of the church over to Lenny, and requested that every member of the church follow Lenny with all the faithfulness they had shown in following him.
We were stunned.
I'm sure the brothers and sisters in Florida were devastated.
That such a fate should come to such a faithful church was deeply shocking to us all. I was reeling. I fought to rationalize what Gene had done, wondering how it could be the right thing to do. I knew Lenny, and I knew the other brothers there, and I knew Gene. It was a matter of finding the missing link. I was missing something obvious, but key. I kept shuffling the players and games in my mind, seeking the combination that made it all come together.
Until I talked to one of the sisters in the church.
She said, "You believed that crap? None of that's what happened. Lenny won that vote and Gene lost his temper. They thought Lenny was the most influential person in the church, so Gene decided they could stew in their juices and gave the whole church to him. Gene knows it'll never last, and he was too angry to care who it hurt."
Wow. That was definitely the missing piece. Her explanation covered character, motive and opportunity perfectly. There were no gaps.
We sat for about an hour, connecting dots. We looked back at times Gene told us he was doing things for our good, and somehow those things always matched up with better with his convenience or emotions than ours. We looked at the way Gene treated influential brothers, and he always found a way cool their jets. And now, when the church in Florida withheld their affirmation, Gene lashed out.
No one knows what is happening in a man, except the spirit of the man and his Lord. I'll never know why Gene handled the church in Florida the way he did. I'll never know why he reacted the way he did to Florida, but when Gene rejected the church in Florida the ugliest shoe in the store started looking really good to me. I'd be walking away from Gene Edwards.
But it wouldn't be easy.
The old voice grew stronger as I slowly accepted my decision. My flesh screamed, "What about your work?! You have to mature into a worker in God's kingdom, and for that you need the church. You have to save the church, not run from its problems." I grew truly. I fantasized that I might change Gene's style, or run off and start another church, or that everything might just turn out OK. I'd built an inner world around waiting for the day I'd emerge from my cocoon and be a worthwhile person in God's kingdom. Breaking out of that cocoon was a slow, painful process. Losing my best hope of being "somebody," riding on Gene's coattails, was terrifying. Leaving Gene meant going back to just being Kevin, instead of Kevin Knox, church planter in training.
I couldn't really believe I'd be "somebody" as anything less than a church planter.
Slowly, though, walking away from Gene grew real to me. I loved the brothers and sisters in my church, but I realized I'd have to leave them. Too much of what they talked about was rationalizing the things Gene was doing in Florida, Lithia Springs, and all the churches. Many of their discussions assumed my implicit agreement with everything Gene was doing, and I'd have to leave the room or change the subject if they started wondering why I was so quiet. It was not workable, and I began to resign myself to my final departure from Gene's churches, from my church.
There were a couple of obstacles.
I lived in the heart of the Lithia Springs church, and I had promised to leave quietly if ever the time came. Gene was careful to teach that silence was golden, and anything else was a dishonor. If, at any point, you were unhappy with the church or the worker you were to talk to no one about it. And the day you decided to leave, you must leave without giving reasons, without confiding in friends, sharing your hurts, without "accidently" taking anyone with you. From the beginning, I'd promised to leave quietly and alone, and at the end I intended to keep my word.
That promise was a lot easier to make when I was sure I'd never, ever leave. Now that I was leaving, silence was a grave test. But was my word worth anything or not? I was silent. I said nothing, and prayed the Lord would show me an open door when His time would come. I prayed a lot - out loud.
The door opened painfully slowly, but when it finally opened no man could shut it.
One day while I was doing some of my freelance programming, Gene called. He had not called me three times in the nine years I knew him, so he had my full attention. To hear from Gene was an odd, odd thing. He called to ask me about the y2k bug. Did I know what it was? Did I know how serious it might be? Was it a threat to embedded systems? They were pretty technical questions coming from a pretty non-technical guy.
It so happened I'd just finished coding my very first y2k fix a day or so before he'd called. I had been examining some code from the Internet for reuse in one of my projects, and I noted a comment left by its second developer. He identified that the original code was vulnerable to the y2k bug, explained exactly what the y2k bug was, and outlined how his fix corrected the problem. (He explained all that in a 3 sentence comment. Computer programmers are very terse communicators.) From that day forward, I never wrote another y2k-vulnerable program, but that wasn't a big deal. The whole fix was only 2 lines long.
I explained to Gene that the y2k bug was mostly harmless. I explained what it was, that it could be very dangerous if us programmers could not make the fixes, but we would. The fixes typically took a few minutes apiece, and we all loved pizza and overtime. Embedded systems absolutely could not be hurt by the y2k bug, because they kept time in "seconds from the epoch," not Gregorian dates, so they'd never know the current year had 3 zeros in it. The electrical transmission grid was safe. I had solid knowledge on that one, because in my day job I formerly worked with 3-phase industrial generators. I let Gene know that I thoroughly knew what I was talking about on y2k, and that he need not worry about it.
Gene hung up, and I wondered whether I'd heard the last of it. I had not, but it was months before I found out what was brewing.
In late 1998, Gene released a book decrying the unavoidable disaster that would end Western Civilization forever. Y2k, he said, would take down the electrical transmission grid and all electrical generators. Without electricity we'd soon find ourselves living in the stone-age. There would be food riots radiating 50 miles outside of every major city, and little things like toilet paper would become the scarcest, most valuable commodities in our lives.
It took every ounce of discipline in my heart to read that book, but I did - from cover to cover. It was not a pleasant experience.
Gene's churches went into light panic mode, but Gene was prepared. He called us all together and layed out his plan. He assured us he'd been exercising practical parental care for us while we were still oblivious to the danger. He'd already thought through the ramifications and the wisest course of action for us. We only needed to believe the seriousness of the problem, and be thankful God had given us such a careful church planter.
He had already purchased a tract of land just across the Alabama border, more than 50 miles from any major city, and was preparing that land to be subsistence farmed. He counseled all of us to cash out our 401k's, taking the tax hit for early withdrawal, and invest that money into emergency supplies and a portion of the Alabama land. We'd move the supplies to Alabama throughout 1998 and some time in late 1999 everyone could evacuate there to start a new life.
My jaw went slack.
Brothers and sisters quickly figured out that I was not on board with Gene's plans and preparations. Not cashing out my 401k and buying zero emergency supplies was probably their first clue. At first a couple people asked me what I thought of the whole thing, but gradually they just left me alone. I was not 100% sure Gene was wrong, of course, but there was no way I was throwing my future in with Gene Edwards again on a subject about which he knew nothing - computers and farming were both in that category.
I watched saints cash out five-figure 401k's back when we thought that was a lot of money. They gave half their money to the IRS, spent the rest on disaster supplies and farmland, and then watched as the stock market soared (was it 40%?) in the ensuing months. I figured that a $25,000 401k was worth $14,000 after it was pulled, instead of the $35,000 to which it would have grown. I watched living rooms fill up with canned and dry foods, water, and survival gear. I listened while city-slickers debated what they could and could not grow in Alabama soil. The intensity kept ramping up, and I kept playing dumb. Finally, they reached the point of requiring a commitment from me.
They needed to know who was in and who was out.
That's how y2k gave me an open door out of the church. I went through it with peace in my heart. In Nov, 1998 I officially announced I would not be moving to Alabama and I was taking a break from the church. In late Jan, 1999 I announced that I would never be returning. In Mar, 1999 I received a piece of personal news that confirmed leaving was the right decision, but by that time I was already gone. I received that personal news exactly because I had finally left, so it was no factor in my decision. I hit the door because Gene did not treat churches the way he advertised he would, and Gene's y2k blunder was my convenient excuse.
I was well and truly gone, and never looked back.
I stayed in Atlanta through Dec 31, 1999, to see my company through the turning of the millenium. My family and I watched movies on the projector screen, while I babysat my computers through the transition into the new century. We had pizza that night, and not a single system hiccuped. I have no idea what the churches said or thought or did when all the lights were working on Jan 1, 2000. When I leave something I leave it for keeps, but I'm sure they congratulated themselves for preparing so well. It's human nature to always see the good in the things we do, and I don't blame them a bit. I shudder to think how much dried food I'd still be eating if I'd never gone to that training retreat with Gene.
I know the churches carried on after I left, and continued to explore the things I once held so important. I trust they found the Lord together, as I did with them during the good years. Their hearts were turned to the Lord, and He always hears His people. I praise Him for the hope I still hold that He's blessed them over the years.
For my part, I've slowly learned to enjoy being a regular Joe, a normal Christian. This month I will even sign the dotted line and become a thankful member of an organized church. My brothers from Atlanta will tut-tut me, and I will mourn my faded dreams just as if they'd been real. And somehow all of us, no matter what we've decided, will know that we are walking where the Lord has put us.
I'm not sure life gets any better than that.
And so I close the book on some of my dreams. As I look back at the pride that dragged me down, the pain I've caused and felt, the places the Lord has brought me, and the joy I've found at last, the letter from James seems to answer my story best:
Blessed are those who persevere under trial, because when they have stood the test, they will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.
When tempted, no one should say, "God is tempting me." For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each of you is tempted when you are dragged away by your own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.
Don't be deceived, my dear brothers and sisters. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.
Praise the Lord's mercy, it's never too late to stand the test.
Kevin Knox
Showing posts with label Confession. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Confession. Show all posts
04 February, 2008
02 February, 2008
There and Back Again: Against the Wind
In late 1996 I received an invitation for which I'd prayed since 1982. I would be allowed to spend a month with Gene Edwards, being shown how to nurture a church.
'96 had been a busy year. Gene poured his heart into rebuilding the church in Atlanta, and we began to see fruit. Our numbers went back into the double digits, as Gene put out the word that he would be working directly and specially with Atlanta over the coming years. And work with us he did. He publicized living room conferences and delivered some stunningly rich messages for us living in Atlanta and for those deciding whether to throw their lot in with us.
Gene hinted to us that he had never really liked Ormewood Park. It took little prodding to convince us to abandon the scene of our recent pain. Property values had gone up there too much, anyway. We needed to remove obstacles to entry for new folk, if we were going to make it back from the brink of death. Ormewood Park's inner-city feel scared people off even before housing prices soared into 6 digits. We all moved out to Lithia Springs on the West side of Atlanta.
Excitement and hope were back in Atlanta, and they felt good. Most of Gene's other churches seemed to be doing well, too, making it a good year for everyone. The church in Florida was the only exception. During our drought of '94 and '95 it was largely Florida's commitment to the Lord and their enthusiastic love for us that had kept our noses above water. We'd sent most of our inquirers and visitors down to Florida for two years, and they'd all come back with the highest praise for what they saw there. We'd even visited them ourselves, just to be reminded what it was like to be in the Lord's blessing. To hear that they were sliding toward trouble was worrisome, but then again, we'd seen up-close and personal that every honeymoon has to end eventually. Things were great all over, and Florida would bounce back, we were sure.
Into this exciting time Gene sent that monster of an invitation I mentioned above. He invited each church to send a brother to a retreat center in Florida to spend a month with him. He had observed that churches have down times and need encouragement. He could not be everywhere at once, so he decided to leverage some of his hard work. His idea was to prepare brothers from several churches to be able to visit and encourage the other churches through their hard times. He made it clear that the brothers sent to this retreat would not be learning to plant churches like he did, but only to encourage other churches. We would not be following in his footsteps, so no one would get too uptight about going or not going.
Right.
When Atlanta received the news, I was in "timeout." Harry and I had been kicked out of the brothers' meetings for not playing well with the other saints. Our presence was hindering the decision making process of the whole church, and detracting from her progress. You've probably heard me mention this before, but before I could even think about hoping some day to maybe be allowed back in I was required to read, "How to Win Friends and Influence People," ... twice. I needed the correction. I know I tell the story often enough, but I cannot help it! It was one of the most painful and profitable things that has ever been done for me.
In spite of my arrogance, I was surprised when I was one of the people the church chose to send. I was less surprised that Harry was chosen to go. For some reason, Harry could only stay two weeks but I was able to get all four weeks off from work and I took them. I'm pretty sure I'd have quit my job otherwise, but I worked for good people and they understood. I cannot imagine anything that could have kept me from that month.
I'm still glad I went, but for other reasons than I expected.
My fondest, most meaningful memories of that month in Florida are of the canoeing.
There was a little postage-stamp size pond set aside from the middle of the retreat center, and it had a canoe with a paddle. During the many moments of stress there, I would hop in the canoe and let the powerful wind push me along to the wayward shore. Once there, I would turn the canoe around and throw all my weight into paddling back up through the wind. It was a tremendous workout. If I pushed with less than all my strength or with a low stroke-count, I'd make no progress or even drift backwards. If, in my haste and exertion, I pointed the bow more than a few inches to the left or right, though, the wind would grab me and spin the whole canoe back in the direction from which I'd come. I'd lose dozens of feet of progress before I could get back on track every time that happened. The moments of abandon on that pond were deeply needed.
I faced a head wind the whole month.
There were seven of us there for two weeks, and six the rest of the time. We met in Gene's suite three times a day, and took meals in the cafeteria a quarter mile away. There was homework, note taking, and several oral reports. There was also a little ping pong, and a certain amount of time for me to keep my freelance web work on track. I stayed alone the public suite, and think the other suite had a good deal more fun. That suited me just fine. I was happiest when able to replay the events of each lesson and discussion in my mind. I only visited the other suite once in the entire month, if I recall, and I was content for things to be that way.
The first shock to my system came when I learned Gene's true views on prayer. Gene had been teaching us about prayer for 7 years, and I pretty much knew his spiel from beginning to end. In fact, I had gotten myself in trouble when he started one of his talks on the subject by saying, "I've never shared this publicly before..." Gene commonly starts messages with this phrase, and invariably I've heard him speak on that subject publicly a number of times. I stage whispered to the room, "Oh. Another rerun."
(For some reason, Gene and I had an on-again/off-again relationship.)
I had long heard Gene teach that one must first quiet the mind, before attempting to enter the presence of God in prayer. That made sense to me, even though I was quite fond of the Puritan tradition of prayer. Entering the presence of God in prayer always involved my mind and emotions at some point, but I could see the value of silence serving as the door to the deepest prayer. I embraced Gene's teachings on silence happily. For seven years I happily understood Gene to teach this very thing, so when Gene started repeating himself on our retreat I again embraced the practice of silence with joy.
We started with baby steps, doing the things Gene had taught us over and over again every six months since 1990. As the days rolled on, he added more and more and more silence to our prayers. Then he took away the crutch of the few words we had been speaking. Then we capped the silence with silence. Finally, it dawned on me that we were never going to advance to spoken, meaningful prayer.
Like those dreams where you suddenly notice you've been naked all day at school, I learned I'd been hearing Gene wrong for 7 years. I learned I'd been campaigning for real prayer from a false position for 7 years. I learned Gene really did teach something I found dangerous and unchristian. (I've already shared my thoughts on centering, silent prayer here.) Gene believed silence was more meaningful and spiritual than any expression of praise or repentance, and somehow I'd never noticed.
The discovery left me stunned and a little wobbly, but still standing. The hardest realization was the prayer itself, but that I could have been so wrong about what Gene believed. In 1992 I had even written Gene a 3 page letter (that's pretty short for me) explaining how I thought some of the members of our church were misunderstanding him. I complained that people in our church were merely doing transcendental meditation, and experiencing the relaxation benefits of meditation, but then claiming spiritual growth. I asked Gene to clarify this confusion for everyone, because it was not good to let people wander so far away from what he really meant. I thought nothing of it when Gene did not reply to that letter, it's not his way. I thought of it on that retreat, though. I was the one who was wrong about Gene's meaning all along. I was the one with no clothes on.
I thought about whether I should quit the conference and head back home. And I prayed about it. (Yes, out loud.) It seemed both that the Lord was not ready for me to leave, and that I could abide this difference with my church planter.
I pushed my canoe up into the wind, carefully keeping my bow pointed straight at the opposite shore. I accepted that I might have to disagree with such a man and still gladly follow him.
The second blow to my system was deeper and harsher.
Gene had chosen to have our little training on encouragement in Florida for a reason. The church in Florida was currently experiencing a time as dark and lonely as Atlanta's had been just a year ago. Gene intended to let us watch him lift that church. He even intended for us to dirty our hands a little bit helping him, but not too much.
It was very important to Gene that we be properly softened with impossible demands and clever ridicule. He often pitted us against each other and compared us unfavorably to each other. Not that this was in some way new during this conference. For seven years Gene had often "softened" brothers who showed signs of wanting to serve the Lord. Some were put off by this method, but my four years in the US Army made me comfortable with it. Drill Sergeants worked in this same way, and very effectively. The difference between a Drill's method and Gene's was one of duration. The Army treated its finest like trash for a few months, then spent the rest of their time building them back up again. Gene only saw fit to do the building back up part after ... well, I don't know exactly when. It seemed to me he waited much too long in several cases.
I could not imagine a more exciting use of our month in Florida than pulling a church out of the mire, nor a more valuable learning experience than watching an old worker in the Lord ply his trade. I was pumped.
I went in with huge expectations, too, from my years of reading Gene's declarations and principles. Gene has written at length regarding his standards, the Lord's standards in fact, for workers when interacting with a church in crisis. The core of his ethic was that room should always be given for the Lord to work the church's redemption, and the worker should always be the one to suffer. If there were a crisis in a church, it was almost always a crisis in leadership at some level, and the leader could best diffuse it by give the church Christ and taking upon himself the cross.
In a crisis of leadership in the church, a responsible worker would surrender the church into the Lord's care. Sure, a leader might try to defend the people of God on His own, but he would be subject to too many mistakes. He would almost certainly succumb to the temptation to defend "his own work" rather than God's people. He would most likely hurt people who would otherwise never even have know there was an issue. And mostly, he would pick up the tools of politics, manipulation and authority and learn to wield them.
There's an old mechanic's joke teaching people to buy 1 lb hammers.
"Don't ever buy a 2 lb hammer."
"Why not?"
"Because some day you might use it!"
Gene had taught us never to pick up these tools, and never to "defend the work of God." If it were truly God's work, let God defend it. He conjured images for us of dangerous workers in God's kingdom who had devastated entire churches for sake of "defending" the flock from "wolves." And he explicated those images, showing us how the real wolf was the worker who defended his own ministry at terrible cost to God's holy children.
His teaching on saving churches was positive, too. He explained that the church really only needed one thing, and it was not a thing at all. The church did not need messages, shepherding, counselling, or even defending, though she could benefit from all those things. The church needed Christ.
If a try to combine Gene's positive and negative lessons, I'd say that a church in crisis needed a rich, deep, living experience of Jesus Christ. She didn't need wolves to be shot nor rules to be established. She needed to be reminded of the work and character of her Bridegroom. Nothing less would do, and every trick of men and pastors was "less" than Christ.
We were into the second week before Gene felt prepared to start working with the nearby church. He called a special meeting to tell us what the church needed, and what he needed for us to do.
Gene told us about two sisters in that church. They had formed a clique of two, and they were constantly distracting themselves while he was preaching. In fact, he told us, they had unpleasant expressions on their faces the whole time he was preaching, and they were quenching his spirit. He would be unable to minister effectively in that church until two things happened.
1) They quit being a negative clique together. Their friendship needed to be sacrificed for the good of the church.
2) They developed better attitudes.
We were to visit that church over the weekend, and make that happen.
A mature man, a man without a selfish agenda of self-promotion, would have balked right there. I was not that man. I was a little man with big fantasies, and when I was sic'd on a victim, I sic'd.
Some people wonder how Nazi soldiers did the awful things their leaders asked them to do. It's easy. When you can get a man to focus on whether he's courageous enough, dedicated enough, man enough to overcome his own squeamishness, he will do anything. I already believed I was supposed to be being "someone" for the Lord, and if this was what Gene said I had to do to grow into that role, then this is what I had to do.
I would speak to one of the sisters, and someone else would speak to the other.
Like any other man in the depths of sin, I made a big point of being as kind as possible in breaking my sister's heart. My heart broke watching her, but I shut that down and did the job I'd been asked to do. I explained the damage her relationship was doing to the church, and that her friendship needed to be transformed or end. I also explained how her distracting habits were hurting the meetings of the church. And I saw the look of confusion and pain I brought to her face.
She didn't cry until after I'd left, but we both knew she would.
I never forgot the glass of water she and her husband served me while I was breaking her heart, the hospitality I accepted while I was bringing injustice into their home.
Some of you have emailed me and told me about meetings you were going to have with angry church leadership. Now you know how I knew what they would say. I've been those men, and I've hurt the children of the Lord for the convenience of a leader.
By the time I made it back to the conference grounds, I was squarely in the middle of a cognitive crisis. I was sure I had performed adequately, but I felt like death warmed over. Gene approved of me, but I did not. The two could not mix in my mind, so I shoved them to the back of it and dug more deeply into the training.
My little canoe started showing signs of heavy use.
By the next weekend, the whole story had changed. Those two sisters had never been the problem at all. No, instead the problem was two brothers. They were strangers in the church, having only moved in a year or two earlier, and they were too close to each other. In fact, Lenny was the leader and Terry was his lapdog, but together they were causing every problem in that church.
Gene aimed to cure the problem once and for all.
His plan was to call all the "black hats" and "white hats" of the church out to the conference center for a reckoning. All the brothers who were causing problems and all the brothers who were keeping things together would gather with us, the brothers in training, and Gene would settle all scores. (The brothers who did not get invited were probably hurt the worst. Who wants to be nobody in the family he loves so deeply?)
Gene worked hard to prepare us for that weekend meeting. He had us each read a selected passage from Paul without commentary. He chose all the passages that selfish men use to justify defending their work against sheep in wolves' clothing. They were all the passages about Paul kicking divisive people out of the church, and coming to the church with a rod, and the kingdom of God being built on power. Gene chose all the verses he had spent a lifetime writing and preaching he'd never use.
He told us that he would use every one of them, and that he would always use them. We were all dead silent. He promised us he would use them more swiftly and more brutally than we'd ever imagined before, until the wolves were scared away. Then he'd have a quiet laugh with all the sheep who remained and put away his scary verses, his rod and his power, and everyone would be happy again.
And he told us we'd all be there in that meeting with him to see how it should be done.
He capped our preparations off with this threat, "I'll be watching every one of you. I'll be watching your eyes to see whether you blink, and if you do I'll know it, and I'll know what you're made of."
The meeting rolled around, and nothing memorable happened. I'll never know what Gene thought of us, but I don't remember anything being said that warranted a blink. I remember everyone walking out and wondering why they'd even been called out to the retreat center. I remember wondering whether I'd blinked, too, and whether I should have. We'd publicly read Gene's tough-guy verses for him, but no one had risen to the bait. No one had really opened up and gotten honest.
I didn't really wonder why.
The last couple weeks of the conference forked into two separate conferences happening in the same living room. The first was the repeated rehashing of Lenny's and Terry's sins and how to split those two from each other. As Gene worked through this problem out loud with us, he identified a coherent enemy and a solution. He had delivered a message in the year or two leading up to our retreat regarding friendships that mutated into enemies of the church. Now he reapplied that lesson to Terry. He even sent a tape of that message to Lenny and Terry for them to listen to before the next weekend. Gene worked his way around to the conclusions that Lenny was bad for the church, that Terry was being sucked along, and that he would have to find a way to fix that problem.
At the same time, though, we talked about the heart-purity needed in the ministry, the brokenness. We talked about church history and the practical day-to-day grind of making sure a living room is properly ventilated, comfortably furnished, and suitably cleaned. Gene spent a lot of time trying to convince us that beautiful sermons are nothing compared to looking out for the little things.
He told us the old story about Watchman Nee visiting a church every year for three years. They had requested him to come and advise them why they were not growing in the Lord. The first two years he left, to everyone's consternation, without saying a word. The third year, he finally spoke. He pointed up at the clock at the back of the church, and observed that it had been broken the first day he came, and it was still broken. Then he left without saying anything else. I assume the story is fiction, but it was impressive.
Gene drilled home to us that caring for the little things, caring for maintenance, caring for comfort, was the real work of God. The people of God would take care of ministering Christ to each other, if someone would just keep the bathroom clean and the room bright and the clocks ticking. That job would fall to us because everyone else would overlook it.
It's hard to underestimate Gene's attachment to history, either. He took us over into the public suite and had us lay out a piece of butcher paper on a long table. On this piece of butcher paper he drew a picture of a bookcase with several shelves, and then he proceeded to draw a library of Christian history that he needed to know would be written before he died. There were series and period pieces and accountings of little groups in every age from before Genesis to after the Revelation. The church, he said, needed to know her place in the eternal drama of God's plan. She needed to be saved from her tunnel vision of the present, and have her eyes opened to the sweeping grandeur of God's eternal campaign for His bride.
When the felt-tip bookshelf was full, Gene looked up and asked me point-blank whether I'd agree to be the one to write these books, to carry this project to completion after he was gone.
He had no idea the cognitive dissonance wracking my heart at that moment. The things Gene said about prayer threatened to blow me to left, and the things he had me do to a sister threatened to blow me off to the right. The things he'd planned for Lenny were like a gale in my face. I was paddling my canoe upwind for all I was worth, but I wasn't sure I was strong enough to make it. I wasn't sure I could push hard enough to overcome those questions, and I wasn't sure I could keep from turning aside. I was paddling ferociously, but not single-mindedly. I wondered with I should be paddling with the wind instead of against it? Was I even in the right pond? I didn't know any more.
I've never been less prepared for a moment of decision in my life.
For all my doubts, I was still paddling into the gale with all my strength. I just didn't know whether I should be. I really didn't know. Gene wore his pecadillos on his sleeve and admitted them freely. Was that enough? Was it enough for him to be human and admit it? Or should I demand a standard of him to which I could not rise myself? Could I really be sure I was right about silence in prayer? Could I really be sure Gene was wrong to defend the church in the way he'd chosen? Was I sure enough to throw away this opportunity? I had a chance to co-author a whole library with the best church historian I'd ever known. Should I say no? I had a reputation for cussedly saying, "No." Wouldn't overcoming my stubbornnes be a good thing? The flesh lay on either side. There was no way to make this decision.
I didn't make it.
None of those thoughts went through my head at that moment. I'd already thought them all through in my canoe, and I'd never found the bottom of my heart. I'd never find it with 7 men staring at me.
But when looked him in the eye, I knew I couldn't say yes. So I said, "No." I told him I was "shooting at another target." I had no clue what that meant, but he didn't ask and the conversation moved on.
From that moment, I was outsider in the only place I'd ever hoped to be at home.
There were still a couple more scenes left to play out.
'96 had been a busy year. Gene poured his heart into rebuilding the church in Atlanta, and we began to see fruit. Our numbers went back into the double digits, as Gene put out the word that he would be working directly and specially with Atlanta over the coming years. And work with us he did. He publicized living room conferences and delivered some stunningly rich messages for us living in Atlanta and for those deciding whether to throw their lot in with us.
Gene hinted to us that he had never really liked Ormewood Park. It took little prodding to convince us to abandon the scene of our recent pain. Property values had gone up there too much, anyway. We needed to remove obstacles to entry for new folk, if we were going to make it back from the brink of death. Ormewood Park's inner-city feel scared people off even before housing prices soared into 6 digits. We all moved out to Lithia Springs on the West side of Atlanta.
Excitement and hope were back in Atlanta, and they felt good. Most of Gene's other churches seemed to be doing well, too, making it a good year for everyone. The church in Florida was the only exception. During our drought of '94 and '95 it was largely Florida's commitment to the Lord and their enthusiastic love for us that had kept our noses above water. We'd sent most of our inquirers and visitors down to Florida for two years, and they'd all come back with the highest praise for what they saw there. We'd even visited them ourselves, just to be reminded what it was like to be in the Lord's blessing. To hear that they were sliding toward trouble was worrisome, but then again, we'd seen up-close and personal that every honeymoon has to end eventually. Things were great all over, and Florida would bounce back, we were sure.
Into this exciting time Gene sent that monster of an invitation I mentioned above. He invited each church to send a brother to a retreat center in Florida to spend a month with him. He had observed that churches have down times and need encouragement. He could not be everywhere at once, so he decided to leverage some of his hard work. His idea was to prepare brothers from several churches to be able to visit and encourage the other churches through their hard times. He made it clear that the brothers sent to this retreat would not be learning to plant churches like he did, but only to encourage other churches. We would not be following in his footsteps, so no one would get too uptight about going or not going.
Right.
When Atlanta received the news, I was in "timeout." Harry and I had been kicked out of the brothers' meetings for not playing well with the other saints. Our presence was hindering the decision making process of the whole church, and detracting from her progress. You've probably heard me mention this before, but before I could even think about hoping some day to maybe be allowed back in I was required to read, "How to Win Friends and Influence People," ... twice. I needed the correction. I know I tell the story often enough, but I cannot help it! It was one of the most painful and profitable things that has ever been done for me.
In spite of my arrogance, I was surprised when I was one of the people the church chose to send. I was less surprised that Harry was chosen to go. For some reason, Harry could only stay two weeks but I was able to get all four weeks off from work and I took them. I'm pretty sure I'd have quit my job otherwise, but I worked for good people and they understood. I cannot imagine anything that could have kept me from that month.
I'm still glad I went, but for other reasons than I expected.
My fondest, most meaningful memories of that month in Florida are of the canoeing.
There was a little postage-stamp size pond set aside from the middle of the retreat center, and it had a canoe with a paddle. During the many moments of stress there, I would hop in the canoe and let the powerful wind push me along to the wayward shore. Once there, I would turn the canoe around and throw all my weight into paddling back up through the wind. It was a tremendous workout. If I pushed with less than all my strength or with a low stroke-count, I'd make no progress or even drift backwards. If, in my haste and exertion, I pointed the bow more than a few inches to the left or right, though, the wind would grab me and spin the whole canoe back in the direction from which I'd come. I'd lose dozens of feet of progress before I could get back on track every time that happened. The moments of abandon on that pond were deeply needed.
I faced a head wind the whole month.
There were seven of us there for two weeks, and six the rest of the time. We met in Gene's suite three times a day, and took meals in the cafeteria a quarter mile away. There was homework, note taking, and several oral reports. There was also a little ping pong, and a certain amount of time for me to keep my freelance web work on track. I stayed alone the public suite, and think the other suite had a good deal more fun. That suited me just fine. I was happiest when able to replay the events of each lesson and discussion in my mind. I only visited the other suite once in the entire month, if I recall, and I was content for things to be that way.
The first shock to my system came when I learned Gene's true views on prayer. Gene had been teaching us about prayer for 7 years, and I pretty much knew his spiel from beginning to end. In fact, I had gotten myself in trouble when he started one of his talks on the subject by saying, "I've never shared this publicly before..." Gene commonly starts messages with this phrase, and invariably I've heard him speak on that subject publicly a number of times. I stage whispered to the room, "Oh. Another rerun."
(For some reason, Gene and I had an on-again/off-again relationship.)
I had long heard Gene teach that one must first quiet the mind, before attempting to enter the presence of God in prayer. That made sense to me, even though I was quite fond of the Puritan tradition of prayer. Entering the presence of God in prayer always involved my mind and emotions at some point, but I could see the value of silence serving as the door to the deepest prayer. I embraced Gene's teachings on silence happily. For seven years I happily understood Gene to teach this very thing, so when Gene started repeating himself on our retreat I again embraced the practice of silence with joy.
We started with baby steps, doing the things Gene had taught us over and over again every six months since 1990. As the days rolled on, he added more and more and more silence to our prayers. Then he took away the crutch of the few words we had been speaking. Then we capped the silence with silence. Finally, it dawned on me that we were never going to advance to spoken, meaningful prayer.
Like those dreams where you suddenly notice you've been naked all day at school, I learned I'd been hearing Gene wrong for 7 years. I learned I'd been campaigning for real prayer from a false position for 7 years. I learned Gene really did teach something I found dangerous and unchristian. (I've already shared my thoughts on centering, silent prayer here.) Gene believed silence was more meaningful and spiritual than any expression of praise or repentance, and somehow I'd never noticed.
The discovery left me stunned and a little wobbly, but still standing. The hardest realization was the prayer itself, but that I could have been so wrong about what Gene believed. In 1992 I had even written Gene a 3 page letter (that's pretty short for me) explaining how I thought some of the members of our church were misunderstanding him. I complained that people in our church were merely doing transcendental meditation, and experiencing the relaxation benefits of meditation, but then claiming spiritual growth. I asked Gene to clarify this confusion for everyone, because it was not good to let people wander so far away from what he really meant. I thought nothing of it when Gene did not reply to that letter, it's not his way. I thought of it on that retreat, though. I was the one who was wrong about Gene's meaning all along. I was the one with no clothes on.
I thought about whether I should quit the conference and head back home. And I prayed about it. (Yes, out loud.) It seemed both that the Lord was not ready for me to leave, and that I could abide this difference with my church planter.
I pushed my canoe up into the wind, carefully keeping my bow pointed straight at the opposite shore. I accepted that I might have to disagree with such a man and still gladly follow him.
The second blow to my system was deeper and harsher.
Gene had chosen to have our little training on encouragement in Florida for a reason. The church in Florida was currently experiencing a time as dark and lonely as Atlanta's had been just a year ago. Gene intended to let us watch him lift that church. He even intended for us to dirty our hands a little bit helping him, but not too much.
It was very important to Gene that we be properly softened with impossible demands and clever ridicule. He often pitted us against each other and compared us unfavorably to each other. Not that this was in some way new during this conference. For seven years Gene had often "softened" brothers who showed signs of wanting to serve the Lord. Some were put off by this method, but my four years in the US Army made me comfortable with it. Drill Sergeants worked in this same way, and very effectively. The difference between a Drill's method and Gene's was one of duration. The Army treated its finest like trash for a few months, then spent the rest of their time building them back up again. Gene only saw fit to do the building back up part after ... well, I don't know exactly when. It seemed to me he waited much too long in several cases.
I could not imagine a more exciting use of our month in Florida than pulling a church out of the mire, nor a more valuable learning experience than watching an old worker in the Lord ply his trade. I was pumped.
I went in with huge expectations, too, from my years of reading Gene's declarations and principles. Gene has written at length regarding his standards, the Lord's standards in fact, for workers when interacting with a church in crisis. The core of his ethic was that room should always be given for the Lord to work the church's redemption, and the worker should always be the one to suffer. If there were a crisis in a church, it was almost always a crisis in leadership at some level, and the leader could best diffuse it by give the church Christ and taking upon himself the cross.
In a crisis of leadership in the church, a responsible worker would surrender the church into the Lord's care. Sure, a leader might try to defend the people of God on His own, but he would be subject to too many mistakes. He would almost certainly succumb to the temptation to defend "his own work" rather than God's people. He would most likely hurt people who would otherwise never even have know there was an issue. And mostly, he would pick up the tools of politics, manipulation and authority and learn to wield them.
There's an old mechanic's joke teaching people to buy 1 lb hammers.
"Don't ever buy a 2 lb hammer."
"Why not?"
"Because some day you might use it!"
Gene had taught us never to pick up these tools, and never to "defend the work of God." If it were truly God's work, let God defend it. He conjured images for us of dangerous workers in God's kingdom who had devastated entire churches for sake of "defending" the flock from "wolves." And he explicated those images, showing us how the real wolf was the worker who defended his own ministry at terrible cost to God's holy children.
His teaching on saving churches was positive, too. He explained that the church really only needed one thing, and it was not a thing at all. The church did not need messages, shepherding, counselling, or even defending, though she could benefit from all those things. The church needed Christ.
If a try to combine Gene's positive and negative lessons, I'd say that a church in crisis needed a rich, deep, living experience of Jesus Christ. She didn't need wolves to be shot nor rules to be established. She needed to be reminded of the work and character of her Bridegroom. Nothing less would do, and every trick of men and pastors was "less" than Christ.
We were into the second week before Gene felt prepared to start working with the nearby church. He called a special meeting to tell us what the church needed, and what he needed for us to do.
Gene told us about two sisters in that church. They had formed a clique of two, and they were constantly distracting themselves while he was preaching. In fact, he told us, they had unpleasant expressions on their faces the whole time he was preaching, and they were quenching his spirit. He would be unable to minister effectively in that church until two things happened.
1) They quit being a negative clique together. Their friendship needed to be sacrificed for the good of the church.
2) They developed better attitudes.
We were to visit that church over the weekend, and make that happen.
A mature man, a man without a selfish agenda of self-promotion, would have balked right there. I was not that man. I was a little man with big fantasies, and when I was sic'd on a victim, I sic'd.
Some people wonder how Nazi soldiers did the awful things their leaders asked them to do. It's easy. When you can get a man to focus on whether he's courageous enough, dedicated enough, man enough to overcome his own squeamishness, he will do anything. I already believed I was supposed to be being "someone" for the Lord, and if this was what Gene said I had to do to grow into that role, then this is what I had to do.
I would speak to one of the sisters, and someone else would speak to the other.
Like any other man in the depths of sin, I made a big point of being as kind as possible in breaking my sister's heart. My heart broke watching her, but I shut that down and did the job I'd been asked to do. I explained the damage her relationship was doing to the church, and that her friendship needed to be transformed or end. I also explained how her distracting habits were hurting the meetings of the church. And I saw the look of confusion and pain I brought to her face.
She didn't cry until after I'd left, but we both knew she would.
I never forgot the glass of water she and her husband served me while I was breaking her heart, the hospitality I accepted while I was bringing injustice into their home.
Some of you have emailed me and told me about meetings you were going to have with angry church leadership. Now you know how I knew what they would say. I've been those men, and I've hurt the children of the Lord for the convenience of a leader.
By the time I made it back to the conference grounds, I was squarely in the middle of a cognitive crisis. I was sure I had performed adequately, but I felt like death warmed over. Gene approved of me, but I did not. The two could not mix in my mind, so I shoved them to the back of it and dug more deeply into the training.
My little canoe started showing signs of heavy use.
By the next weekend, the whole story had changed. Those two sisters had never been the problem at all. No, instead the problem was two brothers. They were strangers in the church, having only moved in a year or two earlier, and they were too close to each other. In fact, Lenny was the leader and Terry was his lapdog, but together they were causing every problem in that church.
Gene aimed to cure the problem once and for all.
His plan was to call all the "black hats" and "white hats" of the church out to the conference center for a reckoning. All the brothers who were causing problems and all the brothers who were keeping things together would gather with us, the brothers in training, and Gene would settle all scores. (The brothers who did not get invited were probably hurt the worst. Who wants to be nobody in the family he loves so deeply?)
Gene worked hard to prepare us for that weekend meeting. He had us each read a selected passage from Paul without commentary. He chose all the passages that selfish men use to justify defending their work against sheep in wolves' clothing. They were all the passages about Paul kicking divisive people out of the church, and coming to the church with a rod, and the kingdom of God being built on power. Gene chose all the verses he had spent a lifetime writing and preaching he'd never use.
He told us that he would use every one of them, and that he would always use them. We were all dead silent. He promised us he would use them more swiftly and more brutally than we'd ever imagined before, until the wolves were scared away. Then he'd have a quiet laugh with all the sheep who remained and put away his scary verses, his rod and his power, and everyone would be happy again.
And he told us we'd all be there in that meeting with him to see how it should be done.
He capped our preparations off with this threat, "I'll be watching every one of you. I'll be watching your eyes to see whether you blink, and if you do I'll know it, and I'll know what you're made of."
The meeting rolled around, and nothing memorable happened. I'll never know what Gene thought of us, but I don't remember anything being said that warranted a blink. I remember everyone walking out and wondering why they'd even been called out to the retreat center. I remember wondering whether I'd blinked, too, and whether I should have. We'd publicly read Gene's tough-guy verses for him, but no one had risen to the bait. No one had really opened up and gotten honest.
I didn't really wonder why.
The last couple weeks of the conference forked into two separate conferences happening in the same living room. The first was the repeated rehashing of Lenny's and Terry's sins and how to split those two from each other. As Gene worked through this problem out loud with us, he identified a coherent enemy and a solution. He had delivered a message in the year or two leading up to our retreat regarding friendships that mutated into enemies of the church. Now he reapplied that lesson to Terry. He even sent a tape of that message to Lenny and Terry for them to listen to before the next weekend. Gene worked his way around to the conclusions that Lenny was bad for the church, that Terry was being sucked along, and that he would have to find a way to fix that problem.
At the same time, though, we talked about the heart-purity needed in the ministry, the brokenness. We talked about church history and the practical day-to-day grind of making sure a living room is properly ventilated, comfortably furnished, and suitably cleaned. Gene spent a lot of time trying to convince us that beautiful sermons are nothing compared to looking out for the little things.
He told us the old story about Watchman Nee visiting a church every year for three years. They had requested him to come and advise them why they were not growing in the Lord. The first two years he left, to everyone's consternation, without saying a word. The third year, he finally spoke. He pointed up at the clock at the back of the church, and observed that it had been broken the first day he came, and it was still broken. Then he left without saying anything else. I assume the story is fiction, but it was impressive.
Gene drilled home to us that caring for the little things, caring for maintenance, caring for comfort, was the real work of God. The people of God would take care of ministering Christ to each other, if someone would just keep the bathroom clean and the room bright and the clocks ticking. That job would fall to us because everyone else would overlook it.
It's hard to underestimate Gene's attachment to history, either. He took us over into the public suite and had us lay out a piece of butcher paper on a long table. On this piece of butcher paper he drew a picture of a bookcase with several shelves, and then he proceeded to draw a library of Christian history that he needed to know would be written before he died. There were series and period pieces and accountings of little groups in every age from before Genesis to after the Revelation. The church, he said, needed to know her place in the eternal drama of God's plan. She needed to be saved from her tunnel vision of the present, and have her eyes opened to the sweeping grandeur of God's eternal campaign for His bride.
When the felt-tip bookshelf was full, Gene looked up and asked me point-blank whether I'd agree to be the one to write these books, to carry this project to completion after he was gone.
He had no idea the cognitive dissonance wracking my heart at that moment. The things Gene said about prayer threatened to blow me to left, and the things he had me do to a sister threatened to blow me off to the right. The things he'd planned for Lenny were like a gale in my face. I was paddling my canoe upwind for all I was worth, but I wasn't sure I was strong enough to make it. I wasn't sure I could push hard enough to overcome those questions, and I wasn't sure I could keep from turning aside. I was paddling ferociously, but not single-mindedly. I wondered with I should be paddling with the wind instead of against it? Was I even in the right pond? I didn't know any more.
I've never been less prepared for a moment of decision in my life.
For all my doubts, I was still paddling into the gale with all my strength. I just didn't know whether I should be. I really didn't know. Gene wore his pecadillos on his sleeve and admitted them freely. Was that enough? Was it enough for him to be human and admit it? Or should I demand a standard of him to which I could not rise myself? Could I really be sure I was right about silence in prayer? Could I really be sure Gene was wrong to defend the church in the way he'd chosen? Was I sure enough to throw away this opportunity? I had a chance to co-author a whole library with the best church historian I'd ever known. Should I say no? I had a reputation for cussedly saying, "No." Wouldn't overcoming my stubbornnes be a good thing? The flesh lay on either side. There was no way to make this decision.
I didn't make it.
None of those thoughts went through my head at that moment. I'd already thought them all through in my canoe, and I'd never found the bottom of my heart. I'd never find it with 7 men staring at me.
But when looked him in the eye, I knew I couldn't say yes. So I said, "No." I told him I was "shooting at another target." I had no clue what that meant, but he didn't ask and the conversation moved on.
From that moment, I was outsider in the only place I'd ever hoped to be at home.
There were still a couple more scenes left to play out.
30 January, 2008
There and Back Again: The Honeymoon
At midnight on Dec 31, 1989 there must have been almost twenty of us gathered in one of our living rooms. We were together to take the Lord's Supper for the first time as a new-born church, intimately surrounded by another fifty or more folk. That's right. There were 70 or more people crammed into and around a normal little ranch style home. Very few of us could sit; very few of us could wiggle a finger without poking someone! It was all part of the way Gene had chosen to celebrate our birth as a new church. We committed ourselves to the Lord and to each other that night with intimate prayers, and vowed our hope that we would, one distant day, bury each other. We were committed with everything we had, and we were in for the long haul.
Later that night, out on the front lawn, Gene taught us all get into a big circle and hold hands. Then he broke the circle in one place and made one person the "front" of the line. He had that person start walking a circle within the circle, drawing the whole line behind her. As the line circled within itself over and over, the center of the circle grew smaller and smaller until there was nowhere to go. It was wall-to-wall circles of people holding hands, as tightly packed as human beings can be. Then he had us all throw our hands over each others' shoulders and sing the loudest songs we could out on the front lawn at 1:00 in the morning.
It was simple, brash, innocent, exciting, intimate, and declarative. It was one of the purest moments of joy in my life, and I'll never forswear those memories. It was one of those rare "real" moments, like when you raise your right hand and swear to defend your country and realize you can never look back again. These people whose hair was in my face and arms were on my shoulders, and whose voices were maxed out inches away from my ears, were one solid mass of love to Jesus. I was a part of a single organism with 70+ voices that weighed 14,000 pounds and was committed to loving Jesus with everything it had - forever. Our bond was more than lifelong, it was eternal and it was spiritual and it was real.
Les Miserables has a song:
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the songs of angry men
It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start when tomorrow comes.
This was as different from going to church as joining the Marines is from watching war propaganda. All but 4 of us had left everything behind to be in this place with these people. (There were orginally two dear local families, but they were forced to leave within the first year or two.) We expected a hard beginning followed by a life-long struggle, but we were safely under the caring eye of a man who had been hand-chosen and broken by the Lord. And we had broken bread together.
I have a hard time imagining a life I would have coveted more than mine at that moment.
The next 4 years were a whirlwind.
We had all moved together into a pretty nice neighborhood, but most of us could not afford to purchase there. That meant any who might want to join us would have the same problem. So, our first order of business was to find the perfect neighborhood to start a new church. By April, we were moving into Ormewood Park in Atlanta. By '91, we all lived within a stone's throw of someone's house. Our unofficial standard was that any member of the church should live close enough to everyone to push a baby stroller between homes in the rain. I think all told we ended up with 10 houses in a three block area.
Next, we needed to get the word out.
That was easy. Gene was one of the most charismatic speakers any of us had ever heard, and he was as excited as we were. Every 6 months we ran a conference of some sort, and brought Gene down from Maine to speak. We would send out hundreds of fliers, rent a place for everyone to gather, schedule Gene's speaking, find everyone somewhere to sleep, schedule meals, time airport pickups, answer myriad questions - first from each other and then from attendees, and generally run around like lunatics trying to pull everything together at the last minute.
We learned about "PCC - Pre-Conference Crud." In the last 2 weeks before a conference everything, and I mean everything, would fall apart. Plans, communication lines, relationships, tempers, and feelings of spiritual "greenness" all shattered. We would come closer to hating each other the closer D-Day approached, and we fully loathed the attendees before they ever arrived. Then the first saint would show up from the airport, and we would fall in love all over again - with all the attendees and with each other and with Gene, too. And when Gene started preaching, the revelation of Christ Himself would fill us all with wonder and thankfulness. Our great blessing in being where we were, doing what we were doing, would fill our hearts and the PCC would fade into a distant memory.
Between choosing a neighborhood, moving, setting up housekeeping, running a conference every 6 months for 4 years, and trying to earn a living we lived church. We met often, but it's hard to describe how often. Some of us met every morning at 5:00 or 6:00 am. Some of us usually ate dinner with some other family (especially the single brothers) and a few saints made beer and pizza a regular event. A couple nights a week we did something together - sometimes it was a song-learning meeting (or how could you really belt a new song out during a meeting?), sometimes a planning meeting, sometimes a brothers' or sisters' meeting. The brothers' meetings were where we made all our decisions and set all our plans.
And in between all that, we planned for "the big meeting." Every 3 months or so, we had a meeting where every member of the church was encouraged to share the best thing they'd seen of Christ. The concept was that we were working in the garden of the Lord, and we were to bring our harvest of Christ to be shared with all. That meant that for 3 months, we were responsible to be farming! We only had one key rule about sharing - don't bore anyone. So our "big meetings" tended to major in skits, songs, and stories. Sermons were deemed boring by default, and in 9 years I think we heard maybe 4 sermons by all the members in the church combined.
So, anyway, preparing for the big meeting usually meant meeting once or twice a week with a team of people to get something cool and rich together.
And did I mention several of us had infants?
There was babysitting, and cooking, and one brother was gutting and remodelling his whole house, and another worked loads of overtime (and so did I) and a couple others were self-employed and had unpredictable schedules.
I don't really expect that description to profit you much, except to communicate how we envied one armed paper hangers their easy, structured lives.
We ate, slept, and breathed somehow. I'm not really sure how. There was hardly a waking moment in any of our lives that was not filled with something of great importance. Whether it was a spiritual thing or a family thing or a work thing, none of us was bored for more than a moment. And it was all good. The most common sound to come out of any house where any two or more of us were gathered was laughter.
Not surprisingly, people started to wear down, and that was cool too. No one accepted any disdain toward our tired people. We all knew we'd all need rest some day, and pretty much everyone took time off in some fashion. In fact, Gene made that a constant subject of admonition. He would remind us over and over that we would all need to take a year off someday, and that we should make sure we rested from the blistering pace the church seems to set. So we did. We jealousy guarded anyone who was experiencing any kind of downtime, even when it was Gene being impatient with them. That's not to say we didn't feel some guilt, but we managed our energies as best we could.
With all this excitement going on, you might imagine there were some decisions that needed to be made along the way. And you might imagine there were some strong opinions about those decisions.
You would be right.
The government of the church was simple. The decisions were complicated. Gene was up in Maine, and we did not rely on him for much in the way of decisions, but structure could not have been simpler. The brothers made all the decisions as a group in prayer before the Lord. The brothers then presented the decisions to the sisters who had unquestioned veto power over every decision we made. If the sisters approved our ideas, it was done. Period. Simple. (No, the sisters didn't exercise their power often, but the time or two they did it stuck.)
There were always somewhere around 8 of us brothers in the brothers meetings, and some of us were secretly of the persuasion that we had a vision of what the Lord wanted. In fact, all 8 of us were pretty confident of that very thing. For a long time, we thought one of us was a follower, but we turned out to be wrong. We were all chiefs.
None of us was surprised that we were all Type A's, though Gene seemed to be dismayed at how much friction it caused. It was the most natural thing on Earth. If you call for people to gamble everything for the chance to start something bold, you're not going to get many shrinking violets.
It was in the brothers' meetings that the church seemed to evolve. It was not so much that the decisions we made steered the church, as that we grew together into being the church. And we went through a lot of changes. There were countless formational conflicts. We wrestled with things, and we wrestled with each other. We wrestled with praying and with pontificating. We wrestled with our own natures and we wrestled with the brothers around us. Along the way we learned a lot of respect for each other.
One of our early, and quite famous, conflicts was over tithing. We were Gene's only church (though other churches might have disagreed, Gene always called us the first) so it was important to get things like this right. Should we require a tithe on our own gross incomes? It's not like buying houses had made any of us any richer. But another church with which Gene had a very close relationship, and of which we were in awe, mandated an absolute and accounted tithe of anyone who would participate. Their example was flawless. They were absolutely legalistic on the subject, and they were the freest, most beautiful group of people any of us had ever met.
Our pattern of addressing problems showed through with this first one, and never much changed over the years. Harry (I'll tweak the names since I've not asked anyone's permission to use them) contributed his opinion to the discussion, and then worked hard to gather everyone else's. He formed a solid consensus around a modified position to which everyone could agree, and pitched the case in the brothers' meetings. Everyone was ready to commit to an accounted tithe.
I voted, "Nay."
This is a good time to remember how aggravating Boromir was before he went mad.
For all our years in Atlanta, Harry and I were pretty nearly irreconcilable. Don't get me wrong, I eventually came into conflict with every brother, but Harry and I seemed to be custom-made to rub each other raw. I could not brook his moral flexibility nor his political style, and he could not stand my priggishness nor my stubbornness. I was immovable, even when the whole church stood behind Harry. For my part, I was willing to bow to the brothers' decision, as long as they didn't ask me to agree with it, but that just seemed priggish to everyone. We smoldered together on this one issue for months and months. We dedicated week after week to trying to talk this issue to death, but it wouldn't die. I would not flex.
Amusingly, the decision we finally reached was vetoed by the sisters, and Gene gave all us brothers "a rest" for almost a year while the sisters took over the running of the church.
Liberally mix the excitement of being together with the tension of the brothers' meetings, and you begin to get a feel for those first four years. Everything was at a constant fever pitch, the highs and the lows together, fatiguing us and thrilling us around the clock.
During our honeymoon, it was easy to have the big fights and the living bonds of love flowing deep and strong together. In fact, it was almost natural. More than that, it was what Gene had taught us to expect. A big part of Gene's core message is that every Christian must be broken, destroyed really, before the Lord can use him freely. We knew our fights were a sign that we were still fleshly, still in need of breaking, so we overlooked the conflicts and focused on the feelings of love for each other and for Christ that lifted us above it all.
Until July of 1994.
That summer's conference surpassed everything we'd ever experienced. Gene was in full flight, and his messages the first weekend set us all on fire. Beyond that, though, it was a 9-day conference, and 40 people must have stayed for all 9 days. The first 3 days were at a retreat center, and they were delicious. The next 6 days beat them hands-down. The second part of that conference was other-worldly. We moved 40 people into our few homes, and for a week we had a church of 60 with nothing but free time to worship the Lord, encourage each other, and practice the things we'd learned in that first weekend's messages.
We cooked, we delegated, we laughed, and we hardly slept. We had guest speakers and surprise plans and last-minute saves beyond counting.
It was unbounded joy.
The day after everyone went home, Gene asked us to set the dates for our winter conference.
We said, "No."
We were too tired, and we were going to take that winter off. Pulling off a conference in December would mean getting to work in August, and there was no way we could imagine jumping back on the conference hamster wheel again in a scant month or two. We were thrilled with everything we'd just experienced, but we could not envision ourselves doing it again so soon.
We'd never said no to Gene before.
History has a funny way of morphing, but I will tell you what we told each other after Gene left. We told each other Gene was pissed. His face, his body language, his words; everything said we were in big trouble. There's no word to describe what we felt. The blood literally drained from our faces, and we went into damage control mode. We talked for hours about what to do, and how to balance our exhaustion against Gene's desire to minister. Mostly, though, we talked about how to get out of trouble.
We did not find an answer. We were already too fractured, too exhausted, too hurt to overcome our fear. All those little stress cracks between the brothers turned into fractures. We'd been so high coming off that conference, but within days we were in our first full-blown crisis.
The wheels came off the church in Atlanta in July of 1994.
For the next two years, we had nothing. The meetings were flat. The morning prayer gathings were dry and empty. Gene did not ask us to put on another conference in all those two years, and we didn't know what to do in the silence. Gene refused to come and lift our spirits.
We were alone.
We had spent four years on a high, and we crashed hard.
I cannot communicate the depths of despair we reached. A traditional church keeps meeting every Sunday, and the sermon keeps being preached and the songs keep being sung. We were not wired that way. We needed to be planning and preparing, but planning and preparation require hope and we were too shell-shocked to hope.
For two years, we went through the motions with all the heart we could muster. We had our usual big meetings, but they fizzled. It was not hard to know why they fizzled. We did hardly any preparation for them. We would come up with an idea, and we'd work up some enthusiasm, but one or two people would be too tired. Then a couple people would start hanging around with the tired people, and get tired. Pretty soon, we were nagging each other to work on preparations, and nagging is never encouraging. Then the big meeting would roll around and too many people would try to throw something together at the last minute. The meeting would flop. We'd all pretend that it was great, of course, but it was flat. There was life in Atlanta, but no vitality.
2 years is a long, long time when you live a stone's throw away from the people you're avoiding.
2 years is more than 700 days, and every single sunrise took its toll.
We'd start talking about trying too hard or being more natural or not trying hard enough or being more diligent or who was leading too much and who was following too little. We'd get down to the root of the problem, and how Christ was lacking, and how the real problem was being too tired, and how much we'd rested. If was dark enough and quiet enough, we'd talk about Gene having abandoned us. In the end, we'd usually come around to this being a time of testing.
We needed to stay faithful. We needed to wait on the Lord to return to His church. If we had been abandoned, we'd be remembered again. Gene taught so often on suffering and it's place in the Christian's life that we could not be surprised to be suffering now. It was for this we had moved to Atlanta in the first place.
We were almost 30 strong. A couple of families had joined us from Texas and Carolina on the energy of that July 1994 conference, so we were larger than we'd ever been. Those poor families didn't have the experience of joy in the church, though. They only knew the desert. We all worked to make sure they knew they were loved, and promised them that the rain would come back some day, but the drought went on.
Then one of the core, founding families moved to another of Gene's new churches in another town.
In scant months the church in Atlanta crashed from almost 30 members to fewer than 10. Remember that leaving the church in Atlanta meant selling your home, leaving your job, and giving up on the dream. Once the first family moved, though, 3/4 of the church vanished overnight. Before a year had passed, 20 of our brothers and sisters were gone.
Les Miserables has another song. It really doesn't deserve to be read, but to be sung by a man in or near tears. When I sing this one, I almost always give it its due:
There's a grief that can't be spoken.
There's a pain goes on and on.
Empty chairs at empty tables
Now my friends are dead and gone.
Here they talked of revolution.
Here it was they lit the flame.
Here they sang about `tomorrow'
And tomorrow never came.
Oh my friends, my friends, don't ask me
What your sacrifice was for
Empty chairs at empty tables
Where my friends will sing no more.
None of my brothers was dead, but the hole they left in our lives still bleeds. It always will. They are good brothers, and our love was true. Nobody left that church with a heart unscarred. Gene had promised us that 364 of the pills might kill us. Now we knew what he meant.
In 1996 Gene returned to the handful of us who remained. We wept together and poured out our hearts. There wasn't much to say that we didn't all already know, but Gene listened and comforted us all. When we were done, he asked whether we wanted to shut down or continue.
We decided to continue.
That night Gene explained to us that Dec 31, 1989 was the official start date of his mature ministry. And he explained that 40 years would tell whether his ministry was a success or a failure. 40 years was the time of testing, and no church's testimony could affirm his work before Dec 31, 2029. He was willing to fail, and to let the church fade away if that was what the Lord and we wanted, but he was willing to throw his back into it if we wanted to stay.
That was enough.
After Sherman visited Atlanta in 1864, the phoenix became the city's symbol. It seemed we would need to take that symbol to heart ourselves. Gene committed to rebuilding the Atlanta church from the ashes, and we committed to being there to make it happen.
The second church in Atlanta was a very different girl than the first.
Later that night, out on the front lawn, Gene taught us all get into a big circle and hold hands. Then he broke the circle in one place and made one person the "front" of the line. He had that person start walking a circle within the circle, drawing the whole line behind her. As the line circled within itself over and over, the center of the circle grew smaller and smaller until there was nowhere to go. It was wall-to-wall circles of people holding hands, as tightly packed as human beings can be. Then he had us all throw our hands over each others' shoulders and sing the loudest songs we could out on the front lawn at 1:00 in the morning.
It was simple, brash, innocent, exciting, intimate, and declarative. It was one of the purest moments of joy in my life, and I'll never forswear those memories. It was one of those rare "real" moments, like when you raise your right hand and swear to defend your country and realize you can never look back again. These people whose hair was in my face and arms were on my shoulders, and whose voices were maxed out inches away from my ears, were one solid mass of love to Jesus. I was a part of a single organism with 70+ voices that weighed 14,000 pounds and was committed to loving Jesus with everything it had - forever. Our bond was more than lifelong, it was eternal and it was spiritual and it was real.
Les Miserables has a song:
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the songs of angry men
It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start when tomorrow comes.
This was as different from going to church as joining the Marines is from watching war propaganda. All but 4 of us had left everything behind to be in this place with these people. (There were orginally two dear local families, but they were forced to leave within the first year or two.) We expected a hard beginning followed by a life-long struggle, but we were safely under the caring eye of a man who had been hand-chosen and broken by the Lord. And we had broken bread together.
I have a hard time imagining a life I would have coveted more than mine at that moment.
The next 4 years were a whirlwind.
We had all moved together into a pretty nice neighborhood, but most of us could not afford to purchase there. That meant any who might want to join us would have the same problem. So, our first order of business was to find the perfect neighborhood to start a new church. By April, we were moving into Ormewood Park in Atlanta. By '91, we all lived within a stone's throw of someone's house. Our unofficial standard was that any member of the church should live close enough to everyone to push a baby stroller between homes in the rain. I think all told we ended up with 10 houses in a three block area.
Next, we needed to get the word out.
That was easy. Gene was one of the most charismatic speakers any of us had ever heard, and he was as excited as we were. Every 6 months we ran a conference of some sort, and brought Gene down from Maine to speak. We would send out hundreds of fliers, rent a place for everyone to gather, schedule Gene's speaking, find everyone somewhere to sleep, schedule meals, time airport pickups, answer myriad questions - first from each other and then from attendees, and generally run around like lunatics trying to pull everything together at the last minute.
We learned about "PCC - Pre-Conference Crud." In the last 2 weeks before a conference everything, and I mean everything, would fall apart. Plans, communication lines, relationships, tempers, and feelings of spiritual "greenness" all shattered. We would come closer to hating each other the closer D-Day approached, and we fully loathed the attendees before they ever arrived. Then the first saint would show up from the airport, and we would fall in love all over again - with all the attendees and with each other and with Gene, too. And when Gene started preaching, the revelation of Christ Himself would fill us all with wonder and thankfulness. Our great blessing in being where we were, doing what we were doing, would fill our hearts and the PCC would fade into a distant memory.
Between choosing a neighborhood, moving, setting up housekeeping, running a conference every 6 months for 4 years, and trying to earn a living we lived church. We met often, but it's hard to describe how often. Some of us met every morning at 5:00 or 6:00 am. Some of us usually ate dinner with some other family (especially the single brothers) and a few saints made beer and pizza a regular event. A couple nights a week we did something together - sometimes it was a song-learning meeting (or how could you really belt a new song out during a meeting?), sometimes a planning meeting, sometimes a brothers' or sisters' meeting. The brothers' meetings were where we made all our decisions and set all our plans.
And in between all that, we planned for "the big meeting." Every 3 months or so, we had a meeting where every member of the church was encouraged to share the best thing they'd seen of Christ. The concept was that we were working in the garden of the Lord, and we were to bring our harvest of Christ to be shared with all. That meant that for 3 months, we were responsible to be farming! We only had one key rule about sharing - don't bore anyone. So our "big meetings" tended to major in skits, songs, and stories. Sermons were deemed boring by default, and in 9 years I think we heard maybe 4 sermons by all the members in the church combined.
So, anyway, preparing for the big meeting usually meant meeting once or twice a week with a team of people to get something cool and rich together.
And did I mention several of us had infants?
There was babysitting, and cooking, and one brother was gutting and remodelling his whole house, and another worked loads of overtime (and so did I) and a couple others were self-employed and had unpredictable schedules.
I don't really expect that description to profit you much, except to communicate how we envied one armed paper hangers their easy, structured lives.
We ate, slept, and breathed somehow. I'm not really sure how. There was hardly a waking moment in any of our lives that was not filled with something of great importance. Whether it was a spiritual thing or a family thing or a work thing, none of us was bored for more than a moment. And it was all good. The most common sound to come out of any house where any two or more of us were gathered was laughter.
Not surprisingly, people started to wear down, and that was cool too. No one accepted any disdain toward our tired people. We all knew we'd all need rest some day, and pretty much everyone took time off in some fashion. In fact, Gene made that a constant subject of admonition. He would remind us over and over that we would all need to take a year off someday, and that we should make sure we rested from the blistering pace the church seems to set. So we did. We jealousy guarded anyone who was experiencing any kind of downtime, even when it was Gene being impatient with them. That's not to say we didn't feel some guilt, but we managed our energies as best we could.
With all this excitement going on, you might imagine there were some decisions that needed to be made along the way. And you might imagine there were some strong opinions about those decisions.
You would be right.
The government of the church was simple. The decisions were complicated. Gene was up in Maine, and we did not rely on him for much in the way of decisions, but structure could not have been simpler. The brothers made all the decisions as a group in prayer before the Lord. The brothers then presented the decisions to the sisters who had unquestioned veto power over every decision we made. If the sisters approved our ideas, it was done. Period. Simple. (No, the sisters didn't exercise their power often, but the time or two they did it stuck.)
There were always somewhere around 8 of us brothers in the brothers meetings, and some of us were secretly of the persuasion that we had a vision of what the Lord wanted. In fact, all 8 of us were pretty confident of that very thing. For a long time, we thought one of us was a follower, but we turned out to be wrong. We were all chiefs.
None of us was surprised that we were all Type A's, though Gene seemed to be dismayed at how much friction it caused. It was the most natural thing on Earth. If you call for people to gamble everything for the chance to start something bold, you're not going to get many shrinking violets.
It was in the brothers' meetings that the church seemed to evolve. It was not so much that the decisions we made steered the church, as that we grew together into being the church. And we went through a lot of changes. There were countless formational conflicts. We wrestled with things, and we wrestled with each other. We wrestled with praying and with pontificating. We wrestled with our own natures and we wrestled with the brothers around us. Along the way we learned a lot of respect for each other.
One of our early, and quite famous, conflicts was over tithing. We were Gene's only church (though other churches might have disagreed, Gene always called us the first) so it was important to get things like this right. Should we require a tithe on our own gross incomes? It's not like buying houses had made any of us any richer. But another church with which Gene had a very close relationship, and of which we were in awe, mandated an absolute and accounted tithe of anyone who would participate. Their example was flawless. They were absolutely legalistic on the subject, and they were the freest, most beautiful group of people any of us had ever met.
Our pattern of addressing problems showed through with this first one, and never much changed over the years. Harry (I'll tweak the names since I've not asked anyone's permission to use them) contributed his opinion to the discussion, and then worked hard to gather everyone else's. He formed a solid consensus around a modified position to which everyone could agree, and pitched the case in the brothers' meetings. Everyone was ready to commit to an accounted tithe.
I voted, "Nay."
This is a good time to remember how aggravating Boromir was before he went mad.
For all our years in Atlanta, Harry and I were pretty nearly irreconcilable. Don't get me wrong, I eventually came into conflict with every brother, but Harry and I seemed to be custom-made to rub each other raw. I could not brook his moral flexibility nor his political style, and he could not stand my priggishness nor my stubbornness. I was immovable, even when the whole church stood behind Harry. For my part, I was willing to bow to the brothers' decision, as long as they didn't ask me to agree with it, but that just seemed priggish to everyone. We smoldered together on this one issue for months and months. We dedicated week after week to trying to talk this issue to death, but it wouldn't die. I would not flex.
Amusingly, the decision we finally reached was vetoed by the sisters, and Gene gave all us brothers "a rest" for almost a year while the sisters took over the running of the church.
Liberally mix the excitement of being together with the tension of the brothers' meetings, and you begin to get a feel for those first four years. Everything was at a constant fever pitch, the highs and the lows together, fatiguing us and thrilling us around the clock.
During our honeymoon, it was easy to have the big fights and the living bonds of love flowing deep and strong together. In fact, it was almost natural. More than that, it was what Gene had taught us to expect. A big part of Gene's core message is that every Christian must be broken, destroyed really, before the Lord can use him freely. We knew our fights were a sign that we were still fleshly, still in need of breaking, so we overlooked the conflicts and focused on the feelings of love for each other and for Christ that lifted us above it all.
Until July of 1994.
That summer's conference surpassed everything we'd ever experienced. Gene was in full flight, and his messages the first weekend set us all on fire. Beyond that, though, it was a 9-day conference, and 40 people must have stayed for all 9 days. The first 3 days were at a retreat center, and they were delicious. The next 6 days beat them hands-down. The second part of that conference was other-worldly. We moved 40 people into our few homes, and for a week we had a church of 60 with nothing but free time to worship the Lord, encourage each other, and practice the things we'd learned in that first weekend's messages.
We cooked, we delegated, we laughed, and we hardly slept. We had guest speakers and surprise plans and last-minute saves beyond counting.
It was unbounded joy.
The day after everyone went home, Gene asked us to set the dates for our winter conference.
We said, "No."
We were too tired, and we were going to take that winter off. Pulling off a conference in December would mean getting to work in August, and there was no way we could imagine jumping back on the conference hamster wheel again in a scant month or two. We were thrilled with everything we'd just experienced, but we could not envision ourselves doing it again so soon.
We'd never said no to Gene before.
History has a funny way of morphing, but I will tell you what we told each other after Gene left. We told each other Gene was pissed. His face, his body language, his words; everything said we were in big trouble. There's no word to describe what we felt. The blood literally drained from our faces, and we went into damage control mode. We talked for hours about what to do, and how to balance our exhaustion against Gene's desire to minister. Mostly, though, we talked about how to get out of trouble.
We did not find an answer. We were already too fractured, too exhausted, too hurt to overcome our fear. All those little stress cracks between the brothers turned into fractures. We'd been so high coming off that conference, but within days we were in our first full-blown crisis.
The wheels came off the church in Atlanta in July of 1994.
For the next two years, we had nothing. The meetings were flat. The morning prayer gathings were dry and empty. Gene did not ask us to put on another conference in all those two years, and we didn't know what to do in the silence. Gene refused to come and lift our spirits.
We were alone.
We had spent four years on a high, and we crashed hard.
I cannot communicate the depths of despair we reached. A traditional church keeps meeting every Sunday, and the sermon keeps being preached and the songs keep being sung. We were not wired that way. We needed to be planning and preparing, but planning and preparation require hope and we were too shell-shocked to hope.
For two years, we went through the motions with all the heart we could muster. We had our usual big meetings, but they fizzled. It was not hard to know why they fizzled. We did hardly any preparation for them. We would come up with an idea, and we'd work up some enthusiasm, but one or two people would be too tired. Then a couple people would start hanging around with the tired people, and get tired. Pretty soon, we were nagging each other to work on preparations, and nagging is never encouraging. Then the big meeting would roll around and too many people would try to throw something together at the last minute. The meeting would flop. We'd all pretend that it was great, of course, but it was flat. There was life in Atlanta, but no vitality.
2 years is a long, long time when you live a stone's throw away from the people you're avoiding.
2 years is more than 700 days, and every single sunrise took its toll.
We'd start talking about trying too hard or being more natural or not trying hard enough or being more diligent or who was leading too much and who was following too little. We'd get down to the root of the problem, and how Christ was lacking, and how the real problem was being too tired, and how much we'd rested. If was dark enough and quiet enough, we'd talk about Gene having abandoned us. In the end, we'd usually come around to this being a time of testing.
We needed to stay faithful. We needed to wait on the Lord to return to His church. If we had been abandoned, we'd be remembered again. Gene taught so often on suffering and it's place in the Christian's life that we could not be surprised to be suffering now. It was for this we had moved to Atlanta in the first place.
We were almost 30 strong. A couple of families had joined us from Texas and Carolina on the energy of that July 1994 conference, so we were larger than we'd ever been. Those poor families didn't have the experience of joy in the church, though. They only knew the desert. We all worked to make sure they knew they were loved, and promised them that the rain would come back some day, but the drought went on.
Then one of the core, founding families moved to another of Gene's new churches in another town.
In scant months the church in Atlanta crashed from almost 30 members to fewer than 10. Remember that leaving the church in Atlanta meant selling your home, leaving your job, and giving up on the dream. Once the first family moved, though, 3/4 of the church vanished overnight. Before a year had passed, 20 of our brothers and sisters were gone.
Les Miserables has another song. It really doesn't deserve to be read, but to be sung by a man in or near tears. When I sing this one, I almost always give it its due:
There's a grief that can't be spoken.
There's a pain goes on and on.
Empty chairs at empty tables
Now my friends are dead and gone.
Here they talked of revolution.
Here it was they lit the flame.
Here they sang about `tomorrow'
And tomorrow never came.
Oh my friends, my friends, don't ask me
What your sacrifice was for
Empty chairs at empty tables
Where my friends will sing no more.
None of my brothers was dead, but the hole they left in our lives still bleeds. It always will. They are good brothers, and our love was true. Nobody left that church with a heart unscarred. Gene had promised us that 364 of the pills might kill us. Now we knew what he meant.
In 1996 Gene returned to the handful of us who remained. We wept together and poured out our hearts. There wasn't much to say that we didn't all already know, but Gene listened and comforted us all. When we were done, he asked whether we wanted to shut down or continue.
We decided to continue.
That night Gene explained to us that Dec 31, 1989 was the official start date of his mature ministry. And he explained that 40 years would tell whether his ministry was a success or a failure. 40 years was the time of testing, and no church's testimony could affirm his work before Dec 31, 2029. He was willing to fail, and to let the church fade away if that was what the Lord and we wanted, but he was willing to throw his back into it if we wanted to stay.
That was enough.
After Sherman visited Atlanta in 1864, the phoenix became the city's symbol. It seemed we would need to take that symbol to heart ourselves. Gene committed to rebuilding the Atlanta church from the ashes, and we committed to being there to make it happen.
The second church in Atlanta was a very different girl than the first.
28 January, 2008
There and Back Again: Falling in Love
Joining Gene Edwards' church in Atlanta, 1989 was both the culmination and beginning of a dream.
The beginning because Gene intended with us to change the face of Christianity throughout the world. From the seed of that one little church, he planned to farm seeds that the Wind of the Spirit could use to foment a whole new reformation. And I was going to be there.
The culmination because I had been working toward this dream for 8 years. I was saved in '71, and left the organized church in '81. I sat in a pew for a few months more when I was chasing a girl, but after that brief compromise my resolve was unshakeable. The forces of evil had entombed Christ's bride in a maze of power struggles, filthy money, and weapons-grade theology. I was just the man to save her.
(I leave the reader to discern whether I was an idealistic youth or an egotistical glory hound. I'm not sure there is is a difference, but I can testify that recovery is a slow process.)
I joined two or three home churches between '81 and '87, depending how you count them. They all failed. Home churches have a way of doing that. Lacking power to struggle over, money to hold people through the hard times, and a binding theology beyond home being better than church, it's tough to keep a home church breathing.
Along the way I found Gene Edwards' books.
I found "The Early Church" in '82 and devoured it and half a dozen more books as they came off the presses. I read each one over and over. He was echoing everything I'd ever felt, and extending miles beyond anything I'd thought or heard before. I fell in love. And I fell into despair. As I read his stuff, and as I read between the lines, I could see how the Lord had revealed so many things to him in scripture and history that I should have been able to find on my own. Instead, I was getting so little from the Lord and everything from a man. I began to question whether I really was the man to save the church.
I accepted that the Lord was not revealing things to me as He had to Gene Edwards and C.H. Spurgeon and Jonathon Edwards and Thomas Watson and Watchman Nee and William Bridge. (I include that little list, because one of these things was not like the others - only I didn't know it at the time.) I was not going to be the next Martin Luther, but I prayed over and over that the Lord would send me to an old man, someone who could at least make of me a decent foot soldier. When I actually did find such a man for a little while, though, he rejected me for another kid.
I was so ill-equipped life as to astound. I was a bright child, but not a sensible one. The only reason I survived those years of failure at so many things, and love the largest, was my surrogate mother in the Lord, Fay. I spent about 8 hours a day in her little Christian bookstore and we talked for hours about everything except whatever was on my mind. Theology was purposeful. Weakness was not. But she loved me anyway, and we had a grand year together talking about a hundred things that an older boy is brave enough to bring up. She was and is my mentor in all things spiritual, but she had no ambition to make war for the church so she could not cool the fire driving me. I had seen the way church ought to be, and I ached to see that vision lived out in my time.
With options closing all around me, I joined the army. It seemed like the thing to do at the time, and I've never regretted it - except one little day. I figured out which of my list of favorite authors was not like the others. Every other author in my list was dead, long dead, or almost mythical. All the authors I loved were dead. I had blindly assumed that Gene Edwards was dead, too. I had been a member of the US Army for about 6 months of my 4 year commitment when I read an invitation in the back of his latest book for all comers to join him in Portland, Maine.
I was crestfallen.
There followed a long, long 3 1/2 years of waiting for Uncle Sam release me. Getting married and having a daughter filled the time pleasantly, but I was not where I wanted to be. Still, there was a consolation. Gene announced he would be starting a new church in 1990 in Atlanta, GA. I would be getting out in Feb, '89, so there was plenty of time! My new wife knew the score before we married. When we got free of the Army, we would move East. Our life would really begin in Atlanta. Everything else had been leading there, and I would be blessed to be on the ground from the day this new church began. That was important, maybe even important enough for the Lord to keep me out of Portland.
Gene made it clear in his writings and sermons (I had volumes of his transcribed sermons by this point, and had immersed myself in them) that being in a church from the raw beginning was a prerequisite to eventually planting churches yourself. Being there from the beginning would be thrilling to boot. Getting to Atlanta and established 10 months before the church began was beyond dreamlike for me. I could not have written the story any better than it was playing out before my eyes. I simply stood in awe of the Lord's grace.
And it worked in terms of my fantasies for the Lord's plan for my life, too. There's no reason to believe Timothy was given the kinds of revelations Paul received, so maybe I didn't need to be an idea guy. Maybe I didn't need direct revelation to serve the Lord. I was tickled pink to have Timothy's chance.
I could tell stories for pages, happy, sad, scary, encouraging, funny stories about the church and everyone who came, but that really isn't the point of this writing. When things finally started there were 8 of us brothers, about as many sisters, a handful of children, and hardly two nickles to rub together between us. After we'd pooled all our wealth, there was one shared TV and VCR. We'd carry it around between our houses a couple nights a week. We shared everything, including meals and family fights. We lived so close to each other it was hard to do anything alone, and we loved every second of it. It's hard to describe the camaraderie of college-age kids in love with the Lord. Mix into our natural chemistry the certainty that we were about to turn the world upside down, and we bonded tighter than anything I've ever experienced in my life. It was love all over again.
Gene came down for a week from Maine, and officially launched the church on Dec 31st, 1989. He's a man who understands drama and circumstance, so our planting was a gorgeous affair. It was a several days long conference, in which he preached to us several founding messages. I remember all the stuff he'd want me to remember from those sermons, and several things beside. You can find his core message online if you're so inclined, so I'll not try to reproduce it here. The bottom line was that the church was God's dearest beloved, she needed to be free to love Him the way He loved her, and Atlanta was going to be a church wholly free and wholly Christ's.
I marked two scary things from those messages. I marked them, and I embraced them both. The first was that the biggest natural enemy to the church is the family. A sister whom I knew and respected, visiting from another city, called Gene on that. When the two of them were done with their discussion, Gene had made himself crystal clear. In his church, the family would need to take care of itself. Gene was not there to protect the family, but the church. On the contrary, the family naturally imposed its needs and priorities over Gene's main purpose, and God's purpose for all humanity, the bride of Christ.
I was not sure what to make of that. In retrospect, the decision should have been easy but I was obsessed with saving the world and every sacrifice sounded noble to me. I decided that the paradox was easy enough to live with. I would give myself wholly to both the church and my family, and everything would work out fine. In my wisdom I understood the problem with most people was selfishness. As long as I put both church and family in front of myself, I was sure everything would turn out hunky dory.
The second point of import was that Gene squarely addressed the "c" word. He knew, and we did too, we would spend every year of our existence trying to convince the world we were not a cult. Of course, the first order of business was naturally to convince ourselves that we weren't a cult! Gene took this concern by the horns and discussed it with us honestly.
He foreshadowed the red pill/blue pill dilema of The Matrix by telling us that home churches were like vitamin pills, only most were secretly poison. The vast majority of home churches would end in division, and the average Christian could only survive 2, maybe 3, divisions in a lifetime. So, if we joined a home church that ended up going through a church split, it could cripple us for our entire lives. He painted a picture for us of 365 vitamin pills, of which 364 were deadly poison. He was absolutely threatening about how dangerous home churches could be, and that this one he was planting would be just as dangerous as the rest. He absolutely could not promise us that this church was the one vitamin pill. We would be gambling that Gene was actually a man called, broken, and sent by the Lord, and what we would be gambling was our very spiritual lives.
It beat everything else I'd ever heard, and I loved that he faced the problem directly. I never really had to think about that one.
Who am I kidding? I loved everything. I burned every moment of that conference into my memory banks the way I had recorded the birth of my daughter. My son was born a couple days after the conference ended, so it was one of the most watersheddingest watershed weekends of my life. I don't think a soul could have been on much higher of a high than I was those few days.
In light of the very real risks, Gene gave us some warning signs to watch for. We were to constantly self-evaluate our church, and protect ourselves and our brothers and sisters from sliding into culthood. It was a kind of top-ten list of signs that a church is really a cult.
I only really remembered one. It was one of the last ones. Gene told us, "If the leader of your church ever says to you, 'We are THE work of God on Earth,' don't walk away, run."
9 years later, in November of 1998, Gene Edwards said to a small conference of us in one of our living rooms, "We are THE work of God on Earth." He listed off all the other works that had earned his respect over the years, and how they had fallen by the wayside, and told the little group gathered there that we were the last true work of God on Earth. I was running the recording equipment, and almost wept. I'd been trying to decide for months whether to leave, and that few seconds ripped the decision out of my hands. Gene's church was not a cult, but it was not a healthy place to be either, and he had finally jumped over the line.
And the church was not the only thing growing sicker.
I got sicker with each passing year. My obsession with the pure church had come to define my relationship to God, and it had quietly driven me mad. I've already told how Boromir was driven mad by the lust to power. Here is a good place to remind yourself of his story, but there is another movie that tells my story even better, even word for word.
There's a scene from, "A Beautiful Mind," I cannot forget. Our hero, Dr. Nash, has come to grips with his schizophrenia and is slowly working out how to embrace life again. Now an old man, broken but hopeful, he returns to the office of an old buddy from the school where he was once a professor and asks permission to hang around the campus. He wants to be part of school life again. He humbly pitches his case, but his old buddy hesitates to take the risk. Should he really give a madman an office on his college campus? In that brief moment of suspense, an ageless friend of Dr. Nash's dashes up to the office door. Breathless he shouts and implores, "Tell him about your work! Make him understand how important it is! You cannot let him hinder you now. Your work is too important!"
That old friend was a psychotic delusion, and so was the good doctor's work.
I cannot forget that scene because the blood rushed from my face the first time I saw it (a couple years after leaving the church.) Those exact, senseless words rushed through my mind over and over again while I considered leaving Gene's church, as I left it, and for years after I was gone. "What about your work, Kevin? You cannot abandon the church in her time of need! If you hold on just a little longer, you'll have a breakthrough. Don't quit now! Your work is too important!"
Just like Dr. Nash's delusion, mine was the product of stress interacting with my arrogance and fears. Also like Dr. Nash, finding my way back to reality has been a wearying, worrying and worthwhile experience. About 2 months ago, when I finally seemed to see the church for what she is instead of what I imagined she needed to be, I felt like maybe I had touched bedrock again. It was then that I felt it might be time to tell my story, to work through it in words and see what came up.
In my next post, I'll look at my first years under Gene Edwards.
The beginning because Gene intended with us to change the face of Christianity throughout the world. From the seed of that one little church, he planned to farm seeds that the Wind of the Spirit could use to foment a whole new reformation. And I was going to be there.
The culmination because I had been working toward this dream for 8 years. I was saved in '71, and left the organized church in '81. I sat in a pew for a few months more when I was chasing a girl, but after that brief compromise my resolve was unshakeable. The forces of evil had entombed Christ's bride in a maze of power struggles, filthy money, and weapons-grade theology. I was just the man to save her.
(I leave the reader to discern whether I was an idealistic youth or an egotistical glory hound. I'm not sure there is is a difference, but I can testify that recovery is a slow process.)
I joined two or three home churches between '81 and '87, depending how you count them. They all failed. Home churches have a way of doing that. Lacking power to struggle over, money to hold people through the hard times, and a binding theology beyond home being better than church, it's tough to keep a home church breathing.
Along the way I found Gene Edwards' books.
I found "The Early Church" in '82 and devoured it and half a dozen more books as they came off the presses. I read each one over and over. He was echoing everything I'd ever felt, and extending miles beyond anything I'd thought or heard before. I fell in love. And I fell into despair. As I read his stuff, and as I read between the lines, I could see how the Lord had revealed so many things to him in scripture and history that I should have been able to find on my own. Instead, I was getting so little from the Lord and everything from a man. I began to question whether I really was the man to save the church.
I accepted that the Lord was not revealing things to me as He had to Gene Edwards and C.H. Spurgeon and Jonathon Edwards and Thomas Watson and Watchman Nee and William Bridge. (I include that little list, because one of these things was not like the others - only I didn't know it at the time.) I was not going to be the next Martin Luther, but I prayed over and over that the Lord would send me to an old man, someone who could at least make of me a decent foot soldier. When I actually did find such a man for a little while, though, he rejected me for another kid.
I was so ill-equipped life as to astound. I was a bright child, but not a sensible one. The only reason I survived those years of failure at so many things, and love the largest, was my surrogate mother in the Lord, Fay. I spent about 8 hours a day in her little Christian bookstore and we talked for hours about everything except whatever was on my mind. Theology was purposeful. Weakness was not. But she loved me anyway, and we had a grand year together talking about a hundred things that an older boy is brave enough to bring up. She was and is my mentor in all things spiritual, but she had no ambition to make war for the church so she could not cool the fire driving me. I had seen the way church ought to be, and I ached to see that vision lived out in my time.
With options closing all around me, I joined the army. It seemed like the thing to do at the time, and I've never regretted it - except one little day. I figured out which of my list of favorite authors was not like the others. Every other author in my list was dead, long dead, or almost mythical. All the authors I loved were dead. I had blindly assumed that Gene Edwards was dead, too. I had been a member of the US Army for about 6 months of my 4 year commitment when I read an invitation in the back of his latest book for all comers to join him in Portland, Maine.
I was crestfallen.
There followed a long, long 3 1/2 years of waiting for Uncle Sam release me. Getting married and having a daughter filled the time pleasantly, but I was not where I wanted to be. Still, there was a consolation. Gene announced he would be starting a new church in 1990 in Atlanta, GA. I would be getting out in Feb, '89, so there was plenty of time! My new wife knew the score before we married. When we got free of the Army, we would move East. Our life would really begin in Atlanta. Everything else had been leading there, and I would be blessed to be on the ground from the day this new church began. That was important, maybe even important enough for the Lord to keep me out of Portland.
Gene made it clear in his writings and sermons (I had volumes of his transcribed sermons by this point, and had immersed myself in them) that being in a church from the raw beginning was a prerequisite to eventually planting churches yourself. Being there from the beginning would be thrilling to boot. Getting to Atlanta and established 10 months before the church began was beyond dreamlike for me. I could not have written the story any better than it was playing out before my eyes. I simply stood in awe of the Lord's grace.
And it worked in terms of my fantasies for the Lord's plan for my life, too. There's no reason to believe Timothy was given the kinds of revelations Paul received, so maybe I didn't need to be an idea guy. Maybe I didn't need direct revelation to serve the Lord. I was tickled pink to have Timothy's chance.
I could tell stories for pages, happy, sad, scary, encouraging, funny stories about the church and everyone who came, but that really isn't the point of this writing. When things finally started there were 8 of us brothers, about as many sisters, a handful of children, and hardly two nickles to rub together between us. After we'd pooled all our wealth, there was one shared TV and VCR. We'd carry it around between our houses a couple nights a week. We shared everything, including meals and family fights. We lived so close to each other it was hard to do anything alone, and we loved every second of it. It's hard to describe the camaraderie of college-age kids in love with the Lord. Mix into our natural chemistry the certainty that we were about to turn the world upside down, and we bonded tighter than anything I've ever experienced in my life. It was love all over again.
Gene came down for a week from Maine, and officially launched the church on Dec 31st, 1989. He's a man who understands drama and circumstance, so our planting was a gorgeous affair. It was a several days long conference, in which he preached to us several founding messages. I remember all the stuff he'd want me to remember from those sermons, and several things beside. You can find his core message online if you're so inclined, so I'll not try to reproduce it here. The bottom line was that the church was God's dearest beloved, she needed to be free to love Him the way He loved her, and Atlanta was going to be a church wholly free and wholly Christ's.
I marked two scary things from those messages. I marked them, and I embraced them both. The first was that the biggest natural enemy to the church is the family. A sister whom I knew and respected, visiting from another city, called Gene on that. When the two of them were done with their discussion, Gene had made himself crystal clear. In his church, the family would need to take care of itself. Gene was not there to protect the family, but the church. On the contrary, the family naturally imposed its needs and priorities over Gene's main purpose, and God's purpose for all humanity, the bride of Christ.
I was not sure what to make of that. In retrospect, the decision should have been easy but I was obsessed with saving the world and every sacrifice sounded noble to me. I decided that the paradox was easy enough to live with. I would give myself wholly to both the church and my family, and everything would work out fine. In my wisdom I understood the problem with most people was selfishness. As long as I put both church and family in front of myself, I was sure everything would turn out hunky dory.
The second point of import was that Gene squarely addressed the "c" word. He knew, and we did too, we would spend every year of our existence trying to convince the world we were not a cult. Of course, the first order of business was naturally to convince ourselves that we weren't a cult! Gene took this concern by the horns and discussed it with us honestly.
He foreshadowed the red pill/blue pill dilema of The Matrix by telling us that home churches were like vitamin pills, only most were secretly poison. The vast majority of home churches would end in division, and the average Christian could only survive 2, maybe 3, divisions in a lifetime. So, if we joined a home church that ended up going through a church split, it could cripple us for our entire lives. He painted a picture for us of 365 vitamin pills, of which 364 were deadly poison. He was absolutely threatening about how dangerous home churches could be, and that this one he was planting would be just as dangerous as the rest. He absolutely could not promise us that this church was the one vitamin pill. We would be gambling that Gene was actually a man called, broken, and sent by the Lord, and what we would be gambling was our very spiritual lives.
It beat everything else I'd ever heard, and I loved that he faced the problem directly. I never really had to think about that one.
Who am I kidding? I loved everything. I burned every moment of that conference into my memory banks the way I had recorded the birth of my daughter. My son was born a couple days after the conference ended, so it was one of the most watersheddingest watershed weekends of my life. I don't think a soul could have been on much higher of a high than I was those few days.
In light of the very real risks, Gene gave us some warning signs to watch for. We were to constantly self-evaluate our church, and protect ourselves and our brothers and sisters from sliding into culthood. It was a kind of top-ten list of signs that a church is really a cult.
I only really remembered one. It was one of the last ones. Gene told us, "If the leader of your church ever says to you, 'We are THE work of God on Earth,' don't walk away, run."
9 years later, in November of 1998, Gene Edwards said to a small conference of us in one of our living rooms, "We are THE work of God on Earth." He listed off all the other works that had earned his respect over the years, and how they had fallen by the wayside, and told the little group gathered there that we were the last true work of God on Earth. I was running the recording equipment, and almost wept. I'd been trying to decide for months whether to leave, and that few seconds ripped the decision out of my hands. Gene's church was not a cult, but it was not a healthy place to be either, and he had finally jumped over the line.
And the church was not the only thing growing sicker.
I got sicker with each passing year. My obsession with the pure church had come to define my relationship to God, and it had quietly driven me mad. I've already told how Boromir was driven mad by the lust to power. Here is a good place to remind yourself of his story, but there is another movie that tells my story even better, even word for word.
There's a scene from, "A Beautiful Mind," I cannot forget. Our hero, Dr. Nash, has come to grips with his schizophrenia and is slowly working out how to embrace life again. Now an old man, broken but hopeful, he returns to the office of an old buddy from the school where he was once a professor and asks permission to hang around the campus. He wants to be part of school life again. He humbly pitches his case, but his old buddy hesitates to take the risk. Should he really give a madman an office on his college campus? In that brief moment of suspense, an ageless friend of Dr. Nash's dashes up to the office door. Breathless he shouts and implores, "Tell him about your work! Make him understand how important it is! You cannot let him hinder you now. Your work is too important!"
That old friend was a psychotic delusion, and so was the good doctor's work.
I cannot forget that scene because the blood rushed from my face the first time I saw it (a couple years after leaving the church.) Those exact, senseless words rushed through my mind over and over again while I considered leaving Gene's church, as I left it, and for years after I was gone. "What about your work, Kevin? You cannot abandon the church in her time of need! If you hold on just a little longer, you'll have a breakthrough. Don't quit now! Your work is too important!"
Just like Dr. Nash's delusion, mine was the product of stress interacting with my arrogance and fears. Also like Dr. Nash, finding my way back to reality has been a wearying, worrying and worthwhile experience. About 2 months ago, when I finally seemed to see the church for what she is instead of what I imagined she needed to be, I felt like maybe I had touched bedrock again. It was then that I felt it might be time to tell my story, to work through it in words and see what came up.
In my next post, I'll look at my first years under Gene Edwards.
26 January, 2008
There and Back Again. A Sheep's Tale
I imagine most of you have read/seen The Lord of the Rings trilogy. For the couple of you who have not, it's a tremendous tale of friendship and love - and power.
In ancient times a ring of power was forged by an evil super-being named Sauron. That ring fell out of his control, but has spent millenia try to manipulate its finders into carrying it back to its rightful owner. It is currently held by an unprepossessing hobbit as a kind of good-luck charm. The wise Gandalf has finally divined its true import, though, and knows that it must be destroyed before it can find its way back to Sauron again. Doing so means that this hobbit, Frodo, must carry the ring back to the place where it was forged - Sauron's own furnace.
The journey takes a couple thousand pages (though others have proposed an alternate solution) and demands everything of Frodo. In the end it is love that allows him to succeed, the love of Frodo's steadfast friend, Samwise Gamgee.
There are countless stories of love in The Lord of the Rings. Faramir's love for Denethor, Gandalf's love for the world, Aragorn's love for Arwyn, Merry's and Pippin's love for each other, Eowyn's father's love for her, Gimli's and Legolas' strange and beautiful bonding, Elrond's love for Arwyn, Frodo's pity for Gollum. The list is long, but none compares to Sam's love for Frodo, and that's the real story.
But Tolkien makes time for one other little story, and one other little character who has always meant more to me than any other of the saga.
Boromir's is the story of power.
And Boromir's is the only story of failure in the whole saga.
And Boromir's is my story.
Boromir's story is simple. All told, I don't think he adds up to 5 pages in the whole book. He was born in the city of men, the eldest son of the Steward of Gondor. Gondor stood for centuries, the sword, stone, and blood of men, holding back the armies and evil of Sauron the great. Denethor led his sons, Boromir and Faramir, in holding back the rising flood of Sauron's evil, but the evil is grown too strong. It is the end of the age. Evil is about to overflow Gondor and ravage the idyllic world of hobbits, elves and dwarves.
If you want to understand Boromir, watch this commercial. Boromir would know his brothers instantly.
Boromir is men's representative in quest to destroy the ring. He is the ninth of 4 hobbits, 1 elf, 1 dwarf, 1 wizard, and 1 ranger.
As the quest wears on, the truth of his mission weighs on Boromir's mind. The ring Frodo bears, the ring he will destroy, is The Ring of Power. The ring Frodo will destroy could guarantee Sauron's destruction. Gondor could save the world, if but Boromir wore the ring.
Boromir is driven mad by the thought and by the tempting seduction of the ring. At the height of his madness, he attempts to steal the ring. Too late, the spell of the ring is broken in his heart, and he repents. By his fall, the party of 9 is broken into 3 parties of 2, 2, and 4. His last act is to sacrifice himself to allow Frodo's escape, but it is the bitter sacrifice of sin's price.
I hope you will forgive and indulge me in retelling that story. I don't know whether it ever leaves my heart.
Tolkien tells it perfectly. The good intentions of a heart do not reduce the evil it can commit. For every good intention, there is a true intention behind it. Sometimes those true intentions are wise, foolish, evil, loving, thoughtless, but they always play out. They have played out in my life so far. There are many years left to measure, but so far the Lord has had to work double-time to redeem the messes I've made.
Just like Boromir.
In Feb of 1989, I joined a new church, one that was going to change the world. In Nov 1998 I withdrew. It's been 9 years since I left that church, and I think it's time to tell the story.
For those of you who like to read ahead, here is the man whose church I joined:
Gene Edwards
And here is his bookstore:
Seedsowers
In ancient times a ring of power was forged by an evil super-being named Sauron. That ring fell out of his control, but has spent millenia try to manipulate its finders into carrying it back to its rightful owner. It is currently held by an unprepossessing hobbit as a kind of good-luck charm. The wise Gandalf has finally divined its true import, though, and knows that it must be destroyed before it can find its way back to Sauron again. Doing so means that this hobbit, Frodo, must carry the ring back to the place where it was forged - Sauron's own furnace.
The journey takes a couple thousand pages (though others have proposed an alternate solution) and demands everything of Frodo. In the end it is love that allows him to succeed, the love of Frodo's steadfast friend, Samwise Gamgee.
There are countless stories of love in The Lord of the Rings. Faramir's love for Denethor, Gandalf's love for the world, Aragorn's love for Arwyn, Merry's and Pippin's love for each other, Eowyn's father's love for her, Gimli's and Legolas' strange and beautiful bonding, Elrond's love for Arwyn, Frodo's pity for Gollum. The list is long, but none compares to Sam's love for Frodo, and that's the real story.
But Tolkien makes time for one other little story, and one other little character who has always meant more to me than any other of the saga.
Boromir's is the story of power.
And Boromir's is the only story of failure in the whole saga.
And Boromir's is my story.
Boromir's story is simple. All told, I don't think he adds up to 5 pages in the whole book. He was born in the city of men, the eldest son of the Steward of Gondor. Gondor stood for centuries, the sword, stone, and blood of men, holding back the armies and evil of Sauron the great. Denethor led his sons, Boromir and Faramir, in holding back the rising flood of Sauron's evil, but the evil is grown too strong. It is the end of the age. Evil is about to overflow Gondor and ravage the idyllic world of hobbits, elves and dwarves.
If you want to understand Boromir, watch this commercial. Boromir would know his brothers instantly.
Boromir is men's representative in quest to destroy the ring. He is the ninth of 4 hobbits, 1 elf, 1 dwarf, 1 wizard, and 1 ranger.
As the quest wears on, the truth of his mission weighs on Boromir's mind. The ring Frodo bears, the ring he will destroy, is The Ring of Power. The ring Frodo will destroy could guarantee Sauron's destruction. Gondor could save the world, if but Boromir wore the ring.
Boromir is driven mad by the thought and by the tempting seduction of the ring. At the height of his madness, he attempts to steal the ring. Too late, the spell of the ring is broken in his heart, and he repents. By his fall, the party of 9 is broken into 3 parties of 2, 2, and 4. His last act is to sacrifice himself to allow Frodo's escape, but it is the bitter sacrifice of sin's price.
I hope you will forgive and indulge me in retelling that story. I don't know whether it ever leaves my heart.
Tolkien tells it perfectly. The good intentions of a heart do not reduce the evil it can commit. For every good intention, there is a true intention behind it. Sometimes those true intentions are wise, foolish, evil, loving, thoughtless, but they always play out. They have played out in my life so far. There are many years left to measure, but so far the Lord has had to work double-time to redeem the messes I've made.
Just like Boromir.
In Feb of 1989, I joined a new church, one that was going to change the world. In Nov 1998 I withdrew. It's been 9 years since I left that church, and I think it's time to tell the story.
For those of you who like to read ahead, here is the man whose church I joined:
Gene Edwards
And here is his bookstore:
Seedsowers
08 December, 2007
Abandoning Faith for Faith
My computer was nice enough to give me a second chance to write this post. Hopefully, this time my work will meet it's high standards of perfection, and it will allow me to save my efforts.
---
I was reared Assemblies of God. It was a charming little combination of Fundamentalism and Prosperity Doctrine. We believed that you had to live perfectly uprightly (no movies, no alcohol, no unprofitable speech, everything - as I recall it, anyway) and that God answered prayer (healings, job miracles, relationship miracles, the whole bit.)
We had the answers.
If you lived holily, and if you clung to Christ, and if you asked for your holy heart's desires wholly believing, you were pretty much set for life and afterlife. God could do amazing things for a man like that, a man willing to do selfless things for God.
Being raised there left me with a twisted view of God.
When Vanessa decided I really wasn't her type at age 18, the event left me baffled. Nothing, and I mean nothing, about her departure made a lick of sense. I was plenty upright. I prayed plenty. I lived plenty holy. I had plenty of faith ... and that's what I want to focus on, faith.
Looking back, I could not have had more faith than I had, at least not in the way I'd been taught. Faith was defined as "the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen" (Heb 11:1). Well, Vanessa was certainly hoped for, right? And since that bad afternoon, she was definitely unseen. So, faith was surely going to be the bridge between her departure and her inevitable return!
And be twice assured that there was no shortage of faith. When they teach about faith they say believing is not good enough. They say you have to trust, and illustrate trust with the famous tightrope across the Grand Canyon metaphor. "Believing" a dude in tights can wheel you safely across the Grand Canyon on a tightrope in a wheelbarrow is not enough. Instead, you have to exercise "faith" by getting in the wheelbarrow and enjoying the ride.
I set a higher standard. I danced a jig in that wheelbarrow, and never looked back.
I never looked at another girl, because Vanessa was coming back. I wrestled with my heart and kept its sorrows in check, because God was planning the perfect answer to the perfect story. I just needed to wait Him out. I consoled myself that faith was my companion during the long, but surely finite wait.
5 years is not a long time, unless you're 18 (or 43, or breathing.)
It was only after 5 years that I finally let go of my illusions. And it was hard. The mental habits were hard to break, but harder was ltg go of the insane conviction (I use the term advisedly) that if I hung on just a little longer my dedication would be vindicated. In surrendering my wishes, I was sure I was disappointing both God and myself, not to mention poor, deprived Vanessa.
I now know there was no real faith in my time pining after Vanessa. What I had was something else. I also know, though, there was some real faith, and that it kept me alive for that five years and the little year that followed.
Let's talk about the difference between faith and optimism.
Optimism is a general outlook that things are going to be OK. Science, psychology, and culture all believe optimism is a great thing for people, and so does Codepoke. Optimism has been proven to extend life expectancy, quality of life, and desirability at parties - all good things. Optimism doesn't actually change whether life throws you lemons or truffles, but it causes you to taste a little bit of everything thrown your way and not throw the truffles back. (Not throwing the truffles back is a good thing.)
Pessimism is a general belief that everything goes sour eventually. You might see a truffle, smell a truffle, taste a truffle and have friends coming over for the first time in a month of Sundays to have a truffle, but by pessimism you know those truffles are really lemons in disguise. You're a realist, and you know only a fool would rely on ever getting a real truffle. So, the safest thing to do is figure out how to make people like you for your charm and good nature, rather than sharing a bunch of sour truffles with them. I think I'll call pessimists "truffle tossers" from now on. Why not? Nobody understands what I say anyway. So why not say whatever I feel like?! It won't make any difference. I'm just wasting my time blogging.
(In case you missed the joke, that last bit was me tossing truffles. So was the bit about pessimists winning friends with their charm and good nature.)
Relative to pessimism, optimism is a most excellent thing.
But it's not faith.
Just a little past Hebrews 11:1, the author of Hebrews (yes, it WAS Priscilla!) actually defines what faith is, "And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him."
Faith is a firm trust placed in a promise, based upon the character of the person who makes it.
It takes several things to have faith. It takes someone making a promise, the promise itself, evidence of that person's dependability, and someone to trust the promiser. Faith is always a reasoned response to a promise plus visible, measurable evidence of faithfulness. Faith is a rich, full-bodied decision undertaken by someone with their eyes wide open.
People refer to "blind faith," but that's always a misnomer. What people call blind faith is really blind optimism. Blind faith invested in the "Flying Spaghetti Monster" is actually blind optimism, since there is no evidence of the FSM's dependability. Actually, optimism has to be blind. As soon as there's data to back up optimism, it quits being optimism and starts being observation. Faith, on the other hand, thrives in an atmosphere of fact and data.
Knowing all this would not have brought Vanessa back, but it might have kept my head screwed on in a generally forward direction.
The two facts, 1) that I wanted Vanessa back, and 2) that God was kind did not equal any promise by Him that Vanessa would be delivered with bells on. Instead, I was praying for something I wanted and being optimistic. I thought the powerful impressions made on the mush in my skull constituted a binding contract with God. He did not share my illusion.
But what about the optimism part?
I've been waiting for this moment. I get to mention a word now, that was never once uttered in the same breath with "faith" during my whole childhood.
Wisdom.
I was going to call this post, "The Dance of Wisdom," because when I first got the idea last week, I pictured the answer as a square dance in my head.
It's wisdom that tells us when to lean on faith alone, and when to add optimism to the mix. If you've ever seen a square dance, I picture optimism on the left, faith on the right, and wisdom in the middle.
Faith and optimism are both great dance partners, but it's wisdom that swings its partners round and round, and changes back and forth between them as the music plays. Sometimes wisdom grabs optimism for a couple dosey-does and keeps our chins up. At other times wisdom takes faith in arm, and spins her round and round and remembers what God really has and has not promised. Done right, balancing faith and optimism can actually be fun.
It almost makes me wish I could clap in time to marching music, but a man has to know his limitations. Watching me try to dance would not be a pretty thing. People with rhythm have walked up to me in the past and asked me to what I was clapping, because it sure wasn't to the song I was singing.
Wisdom wanted to tell me that Vanessa was gone, and that gone is gone, but I shut her up. I knew that listening to wisdom was abandoning faith. I spurned wisdom and crowned optimism as the queen of my judgement. I placed a sash over my queen's shoulder that said, "Faith," and told Solomon and his Proverbs that I had something better in hand. I had the crystal ball of my own heart's wishes, and if I wished anything this powerfully, it must come from God. God would make this wish come true. He had to. I had faith.
But the whole time that I was dancing exclusively with optimism, God was growing faith in the quiet back-reaches of my heart.
Looking back, my faith in God's love was far stronger than my optimism for Vanessa. I questioned God's method of bringing her back, for easily imagined reasons, but I never questioned His unchanging care for me.
And His care was a thing He really had promised.
It was the wreck of my make-believe faith that eventually opened my eyes to true faith. Seeing God keep, even in the smoking wreckage of my life, every promise He'd ever made settled my fears. My heart finally rested on the granite of His worthiness. His promise was always true, and His love was always faithful. Finally, faith began to get a little playing time in my life.
I wish I could say wisdom had. ;-) Shortly thereafter I married as foolishly as I'd loved before.
Such is life.
---
I was reared Assemblies of God. It was a charming little combination of Fundamentalism and Prosperity Doctrine. We believed that you had to live perfectly uprightly (no movies, no alcohol, no unprofitable speech, everything - as I recall it, anyway) and that God answered prayer (healings, job miracles, relationship miracles, the whole bit.)
We had the answers.
If you lived holily, and if you clung to Christ, and if you asked for your holy heart's desires wholly believing, you were pretty much set for life and afterlife. God could do amazing things for a man like that, a man willing to do selfless things for God.
Being raised there left me with a twisted view of God.
When Vanessa decided I really wasn't her type at age 18, the event left me baffled. Nothing, and I mean nothing, about her departure made a lick of sense. I was plenty upright. I prayed plenty. I lived plenty holy. I had plenty of faith ... and that's what I want to focus on, faith.
Looking back, I could not have had more faith than I had, at least not in the way I'd been taught. Faith was defined as "the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen" (Heb 11:1). Well, Vanessa was certainly hoped for, right? And since that bad afternoon, she was definitely unseen. So, faith was surely going to be the bridge between her departure and her inevitable return!
And be twice assured that there was no shortage of faith. When they teach about faith they say believing is not good enough. They say you have to trust, and illustrate trust with the famous tightrope across the Grand Canyon metaphor. "Believing" a dude in tights can wheel you safely across the Grand Canyon on a tightrope in a wheelbarrow is not enough. Instead, you have to exercise "faith" by getting in the wheelbarrow and enjoying the ride.
I set a higher standard. I danced a jig in that wheelbarrow, and never looked back.
I never looked at another girl, because Vanessa was coming back. I wrestled with my heart and kept its sorrows in check, because God was planning the perfect answer to the perfect story. I just needed to wait Him out. I consoled myself that faith was my companion during the long, but surely finite wait.
5 years is not a long time, unless you're 18 (or 43, or breathing.)
It was only after 5 years that I finally let go of my illusions. And it was hard. The mental habits were hard to break, but harder was ltg go of the insane conviction (I use the term advisedly) that if I hung on just a little longer my dedication would be vindicated. In surrendering my wishes, I was sure I was disappointing both God and myself, not to mention poor, deprived Vanessa.
I now know there was no real faith in my time pining after Vanessa. What I had was something else. I also know, though, there was some real faith, and that it kept me alive for that five years and the little year that followed.
Let's talk about the difference between faith and optimism.
Optimism is a general outlook that things are going to be OK. Science, psychology, and culture all believe optimism is a great thing for people, and so does Codepoke. Optimism has been proven to extend life expectancy, quality of life, and desirability at parties - all good things. Optimism doesn't actually change whether life throws you lemons or truffles, but it causes you to taste a little bit of everything thrown your way and not throw the truffles back. (Not throwing the truffles back is a good thing.)
Pessimism is a general belief that everything goes sour eventually. You might see a truffle, smell a truffle, taste a truffle and have friends coming over for the first time in a month of Sundays to have a truffle, but by pessimism you know those truffles are really lemons in disguise. You're a realist, and you know only a fool would rely on ever getting a real truffle. So, the safest thing to do is figure out how to make people like you for your charm and good nature, rather than sharing a bunch of sour truffles with them. I think I'll call pessimists "truffle tossers" from now on. Why not? Nobody understands what I say anyway. So why not say whatever I feel like?! It won't make any difference. I'm just wasting my time blogging.
(In case you missed the joke, that last bit was me tossing truffles. So was the bit about pessimists winning friends with their charm and good nature.)
Relative to pessimism, optimism is a most excellent thing.
But it's not faith.
Just a little past Hebrews 11:1, the author of Hebrews (yes, it WAS Priscilla!) actually defines what faith is, "And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him."
Faith is a firm trust placed in a promise, based upon the character of the person who makes it.
It takes several things to have faith. It takes someone making a promise, the promise itself, evidence of that person's dependability, and someone to trust the promiser. Faith is always a reasoned response to a promise plus visible, measurable evidence of faithfulness. Faith is a rich, full-bodied decision undertaken by someone with their eyes wide open.
People refer to "blind faith," but that's always a misnomer. What people call blind faith is really blind optimism. Blind faith invested in the "Flying Spaghetti Monster" is actually blind optimism, since there is no evidence of the FSM's dependability. Actually, optimism has to be blind. As soon as there's data to back up optimism, it quits being optimism and starts being observation. Faith, on the other hand, thrives in an atmosphere of fact and data.
Knowing all this would not have brought Vanessa back, but it might have kept my head screwed on in a generally forward direction.
The two facts, 1) that I wanted Vanessa back, and 2) that God was kind did not equal any promise by Him that Vanessa would be delivered with bells on. Instead, I was praying for something I wanted and being optimistic. I thought the powerful impressions made on the mush in my skull constituted a binding contract with God. He did not share my illusion.
But what about the optimism part?
I've been waiting for this moment. I get to mention a word now, that was never once uttered in the same breath with "faith" during my whole childhood.
Wisdom.
I was going to call this post, "The Dance of Wisdom," because when I first got the idea last week, I pictured the answer as a square dance in my head.
It's wisdom that tells us when to lean on faith alone, and when to add optimism to the mix. If you've ever seen a square dance, I picture optimism on the left, faith on the right, and wisdom in the middle.
Faith and optimism are both great dance partners, but it's wisdom that swings its partners round and round, and changes back and forth between them as the music plays. Sometimes wisdom grabs optimism for a couple dosey-does and keeps our chins up. At other times wisdom takes faith in arm, and spins her round and round and remembers what God really has and has not promised. Done right, balancing faith and optimism can actually be fun.
It almost makes me wish I could clap in time to marching music, but a man has to know his limitations. Watching me try to dance would not be a pretty thing. People with rhythm have walked up to me in the past and asked me to what I was clapping, because it sure wasn't to the song I was singing.
Wisdom wanted to tell me that Vanessa was gone, and that gone is gone, but I shut her up. I knew that listening to wisdom was abandoning faith. I spurned wisdom and crowned optimism as the queen of my judgement. I placed a sash over my queen's shoulder that said, "Faith," and told Solomon and his Proverbs that I had something better in hand. I had the crystal ball of my own heart's wishes, and if I wished anything this powerfully, it must come from God. God would make this wish come true. He had to. I had faith.
But the whole time that I was dancing exclusively with optimism, God was growing faith in the quiet back-reaches of my heart.
Looking back, my faith in God's love was far stronger than my optimism for Vanessa. I questioned God's method of bringing her back, for easily imagined reasons, but I never questioned His unchanging care for me.
And His care was a thing He really had promised.
It was the wreck of my make-believe faith that eventually opened my eyes to true faith. Seeing God keep, even in the smoking wreckage of my life, every promise He'd ever made settled my fears. My heart finally rested on the granite of His worthiness. His promise was always true, and His love was always faithful. Finally, faith began to get a little playing time in my life.
I wish I could say wisdom had. ;-) Shortly thereafter I married as foolishly as I'd loved before.
Such is life.
12 April, 2007
The Milly Meme
Milly gave us 500 words to tell what we believe. I have not had a chance yet to read her link, but I just had to write my 500 words. Great idea, Milly.
I should probably edit mine, but I know I won't have time. Here it is raw.
----
History is the gift of the Father, and its center is Jesus, the Annointed. Every ripple in history exists to display Jesus’ worthiness to rule over it. Within history He gave life to a bride, His own life, and redeemed her from her curse. Now He courts her as He watches her grow, revealing the depth and honesty of His devotion as He enables her to triumph over every hinderance of sin, temptation and evil on her path to an eternity with her Bridegroom.
Within history, Jesus stood as a man, and died as one, but He first in all history rose from death to eternal life. In rising again, He proved that the first man was Adam, and that he had sinned. He proved that Noah and seven other souls were saved from destruction by obedience. He proved that Abram obeyed God, and became the father of many nations. He proved that David was a king of Israel after God’s own heart. He proved that the kingdom of God was meant to sweep over all the earth, and that God was faithful to His promise, and that every knee would yet bow. We will rise.
In His perfect life, Jesus proved that love can be lived on earth, and that it never fails. Love listens, heals, and sets the captives free. He proved that love is the only authority needed to rule the kingdom of God. He proved that love is vastly more to be treasured than life.
In His death, He proved that God’s justice is unmovable, and that God’s mercy is irresistible. His justice was the rock that could not be moved, since we had offended Him irreparably. His mercy embraced that justice, and satisfied its every demand for our sakes. When He carried His Blood into the Holy Place, the stone rolled away from our doom.
In His church, before and after His time on earth, He proves in us that faith allows the weak to love the Invisible One. Him Whom we have never seen we adore and trust and honor. We do His will on earth as it is done in heaven. Far more than not doing what is against His will, we live from our own will, and find that we love doing what He loves.
Here, in this history, we are tempted by our enemy when our hearts lust for the things he and this fallen world offer. We are weak, and we fail, but Jesus advocates for us, and the Spirit leads us into the life that is already ours. We war against the flesh, and in Christ we mortify it, taking the victory He has won for us. In doing so, we show the world that Jesus Christ is the King of all Kings.
The life that we now live is a hard one, full of tribulations, but He has overcome the world and we love Him for it.
History declares and glorifies the Lord Jesus, and we live to love Him.
I should probably edit mine, but I know I won't have time. Here it is raw.
----
History is the gift of the Father, and its center is Jesus, the Annointed. Every ripple in history exists to display Jesus’ worthiness to rule over it. Within history He gave life to a bride, His own life, and redeemed her from her curse. Now He courts her as He watches her grow, revealing the depth and honesty of His devotion as He enables her to triumph over every hinderance of sin, temptation and evil on her path to an eternity with her Bridegroom.
Within history, Jesus stood as a man, and died as one, but He first in all history rose from death to eternal life. In rising again, He proved that the first man was Adam, and that he had sinned. He proved that Noah and seven other souls were saved from destruction by obedience. He proved that Abram obeyed God, and became the father of many nations. He proved that David was a king of Israel after God’s own heart. He proved that the kingdom of God was meant to sweep over all the earth, and that God was faithful to His promise, and that every knee would yet bow. We will rise.
In His perfect life, Jesus proved that love can be lived on earth, and that it never fails. Love listens, heals, and sets the captives free. He proved that love is the only authority needed to rule the kingdom of God. He proved that love is vastly more to be treasured than life.
In His death, He proved that God’s justice is unmovable, and that God’s mercy is irresistible. His justice was the rock that could not be moved, since we had offended Him irreparably. His mercy embraced that justice, and satisfied its every demand for our sakes. When He carried His Blood into the Holy Place, the stone rolled away from our doom.
In His church, before and after His time on earth, He proves in us that faith allows the weak to love the Invisible One. Him Whom we have never seen we adore and trust and honor. We do His will on earth as it is done in heaven. Far more than not doing what is against His will, we live from our own will, and find that we love doing what He loves.
Here, in this history, we are tempted by our enemy when our hearts lust for the things he and this fallen world offer. We are weak, and we fail, but Jesus advocates for us, and the Spirit leads us into the life that is already ours. We war against the flesh, and in Christ we mortify it, taking the victory He has won for us. In doing so, we show the world that Jesus Christ is the King of all Kings.
The life that we now live is a hard one, full of tribulations, but He has overcome the world and we love Him for it.
History declares and glorifies the Lord Jesus, and we live to love Him.
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