00-START HERE: What's Next?

What's Next?

I have two stickers on the top of my laptop. When anyone comes into my office and sees me working, they’ll see two things. First, they’ll see a sticker of a line drawing of the administration building at my alma mater, Mercer University. If that doesn’t let you know that I can be a bit of a nerd, there’s another sticker with the simple phrase, “What’s Next?” Over the years, that sticker and that question has haunted many church goers and staff members who find themselves in my office working through various challenges.

It’s nerdy because it’s a reference to a 2000’s Aaron Sorkin political drama called The West Wing. I didn’t watch the show when it was on television. I was a high school student at that time, and I was more into MTV because I was into music and MTV still played music at that point in history (I promise to try to keep the Get off My Lawn comments to a minimum). In the series, the fictional president, Josiah (Jed) Bartlett, played by Martin Sheen, often uses this phrase when they have exhausted how to move forward on one issue and he’s ready to move on to the next. It’s usually used to move from complaining about an issue to moving on to something you can change.

I began to have a fondness for the show because streaming platforms (like Netflix and Hulu) really became commonplace about the time I became the Lead Pastor of what was then Berean Assembly of God and is now Centerville Community Church (CCC from now on). As I have pastored that church for going on 14 years, helping myself and others discover “What’s Next?” has become and integral part of my story.

MY STORY—THE JOURNEY TO CCC

            I grew up in what I would call Middle Georgia. There are those in metro Atlanta who think everything south of I-285 is “South Georgia” but there’s a lovely place in the middle. I had an average upbringing, but in a good way. In hindsight, it was very normal and stable compared to a lot of folks I’ve since met and pastored. I was blessed to receive an above average education. The local public schools in my hometown are famously challenged, even now more than 30 years since I would have been in kindergarten. My parents decided to make the very real sacrifice of putting my sister and me through a prestigious, college preparatory private school from kindergarten through 12^th grade. I say sacrifice because while I attended school with a lot of doctors and lawyers kids, I’m the child of a paralegal and an electrician. We led a very comfortable life, and God has blessed my parents tremendously, but I was often stunned by the homes my classmates lived in when I would visit.

I didn’t realize how good my education was until I became a freshman at Mercer University, a private university with Baptist heritage located in my hometown of Macon, Georgia. Freshman year kicked my butt. It was very hard, but I had been taught the skills to pull out passing grades. Many of my original classmates from the local area who had attended the local public schools disappeared after Christmas.

We also attended church. One of my most abused preacher jokes is that growing up I had a real drug problem…I was drug to church every time the doors opened (pause for forced laughter). I attended, volunteered, and interned at that church, Parkway Assembly of God, until I took my first ministry job and moved away from home. I began serving as a youth pastor at a church plant in LaGrange, Georgia and had what is unfortunately, a pretty typical start to my ministry career. The average tenure for a youth pastor is about eighteen months and that was about right. I worked at three churches being everything from youth pastor, worship pastor, church administrator, and custodian from the fall of 2009 until I became the pastor of what is now CCC on December 16^th, 2013.

I had success as a youth pastor. Every group I oversaw grew significantly. We walked with students and their families through good times and bad. Along the way I married my college sweetheart, who is a high school English teacher and also has a huge heart for students. We were and are a good match. As we lived and worked in the church, we began to experience two common frustrations for anyone who has spend time inside the church.

First, you really get to know these kids during their formative middle and high school years, then they dash off into adulthood, many never to be seen again. If that wasn’t hard enough, we found ourselves frequently criticized by church leadership who wanted to see these, newly described, “young adults” matriculate from youth ministry into adult ministry. The problem was they had narrowly crafted that same adult ministry to attract and serve a much older demographic because that demographic pays the bills. Church leadership is then shocked that, having nothing built for them, the young adult leaves church (not their faith), and the poor youth pastor gets a quarterly scolding for losing them to the world (probably on the heels of the pastor getting a similar scolding from a deacon who’s kids came home from college with some big ideas). In every community in the south, churches get known for things. “That church is great for kids.” “That one is more traditional.” “They have a killer youth program.” We were left asking, “Is it possible to build a church that serves everyone well?” The answer, by the way, is yes. The struggle is, that leads to a healthy body of believers but not necessarily to runaway church growth. More on that some other time.

Second, we were watching churches grow rapidly while we watched our colleagues and peers, at those churches and ours, be given the old “tube of toothpaste treatment.” A tube of toothpaste gets squeezed until it has nothing helpful left to give and is then discarded for a new one. Many of the churches and ministries we saw sailing forward had quite a trail of bodies in their wake. We were left asking, “Are we wrecking ourselves for the cause of Christ or in pursuit of what has been deemed success.” The broader question seems to be: “How do you build a church where everyone gets to live?”

CAN WE DO CHURCH DIFFERENTLY?

When I left my last staff position to take on a church that had six (6) people, I was slapped on the back and told, “Don’t worry, you won’t be here long. You’ll get that church up to 100 and you’ll move on to bigger and better.” I don’t want to sound too critical of my leadership, because that was certainly the prevailing wisdom at the moment. Looking back on it, that does not sound like the heart of God. We were left asking, “Would church work if done differently?”

The simple answer is, yes. In the last 14 years we’ve built a community of faith that is pretty different from anything we experience growing up but is seeing lost people become found people and seeing them go from being seeking hope to sharing that hope with others. Don’t get me wrong, the individuals in our church have plenty of issues, me included, but the Church—the community—the body is healthy. We still don’t average 100 on a Sunday, by the way, but that’s not why I’m still here. One of the many ironies of my path to get here is that, after lamenting the drifting away of so many of the students I pastored as a youth pastor, I’m now pulling them, or more and more often, their children back into the boat.

On one of my first Sundays as the pastor here, one of the six commented, “We’re so glad you’re here. Once we get our service looking good we know there are people who are unhappy at their church that will leave and come here.” I replied, “Well, I don’t really have any interest in reaching those people.” Despite their stunned look I pressed on, “They’re just going to come here and be unhappy and, frankly, we have enough unhappy people here already.” Looking back on it, it’s that type of gentle and tactful banter that led all six of them to leave within a month of my installation as pastor. I went on to say something that’s kind of stuck around our church, “We’re not looking for the guy who’s at another church on Sunday morning and trying to convince him to come here. We’re looking for the guy who’s at home, on his couch, in his underwear, eating cereal.” Now, that attitude is probably not for everybody, and we’ve had to make lots of adjustments to how we do faith together at CCC to make this idea to work. Some people didn’t and don’t like it, but my wife likes to remind me that, on my last Sunday before the last of the original members left that my sermon, the straw that broke the camel’s back, was on Matthew 28 and The Great Commission and on how reaching lost people had to be our priority.

DO YOU KNOW THE WAY OUT?

There are more than a dozen churches within a five mile radius of our building, but their total attendance is less than 30% of the surrounding population. We began to ask, “How do we target the people that didn’t go to church?” The how, is not really what this passage is about, but just trust me when I tell you that we were and are successful in filling our church, regularly, with people who had either no faith or church heritage at all, or who had not been engaged in any type of intentional spiritual walk for 20 years or more.

As we pastored these people, we found ourselves walking them through similar challenges. As the guy who’s done a lot of the walking, I found myself wishing I had a compiled list of resources, topics, and guides to point these folks to. It stinks to say, “well I preached good sermon on that seven years ago, let me find you the video.” Now, I’m certainly not the first pastor to write or compile a list of materials to help new believers or anyone who is struggling to get it together, but most of those seem to boil it all down to pray, read your bible, and go to church. That’s definitely good advice, but it’s been our pastoral experience that a lot of folks need more in depth and specific help than that. That’s the purpose of this series of passages, articles, posts, or whatever they become.

Do you need some help?

One of my favorite scenes in The West Wing is between the president’s Chief of Staff, Leo McGarry, who is famously an addict and an alcoholic and has spent time getting treatment and in Alcoholics Anonymous. As he’s pushing one of his staff members to get some similar help he gets asked why he’s doing it. Why is he helping? He tells this parable that has its roots in AA and recovery circles:

This guy’s walking down a street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can’t get out. A doctor passes by, and the guy shouts up, “Hey you, can you help me out?” The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a priest comes along, and the guy shouts up, “Father, I’m down in this hole, can you help me out?” The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by. “Hey Joe, it’s me, can you help me out?” And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, “Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here.” The friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.” 

Over the years, we’ve guided a lot of people out of some deep holes. Holes that they have either dug for themselves or that they were dumped into by their family, or their failure, or their circumstances. The goal of these passages is to have a path to put people on to help them walk out of whatever hole they are in and get them on the path to who God created them to be.