As a child, we had missionaries come to our church all the time. They always encouraged us to pray and ask God if He wanted us to serve on the mission field. That meant moving to a foreign country, far from home and my family. The term missionary wasn’t something I considered when I thought about doing ministry just an hour and a half away from home. But, honestly, the way my parent’s pastor phrased that question to us… “have you ever thought about being a missionary”… really made me stop and think. It was a fresh outlook. It gave me a new perspective on this unique opportunity.
After speaking to my parent’s pastor about possibly leading worship at this church plant, after praying about it and realizing that this was something right in our wheelhouse, something we felt capable of doing, and something we felt like God just laid right in our lap, we agreed to do it.
So, in late January 2021, we began our new adventure. Each week we learned new songs, practiced them as a family, and then drove to this new church each Sunday.
We had never been a part of a church plant before. So this process was all new for us. It was a new opportunity for us as a family, and we embraced it. We learned to look forward to the services each week, and honestly, we didn’t even mind the long drive. It was a good time spent together as a family.
We would have a “practice” week with the church plant team and us. We would go through the sermon and the songs, and then the next week, we would invite people in the community to come to the service and repeat the same one we had practiced the week before.
This continued each week until Easter Sunday 2021, which was the official launch Sunday.
The time we spent working up to Easter was so good for us. We were ministering, using our gifts, and being a part of a church without any strings attached. It was the perfect thing for us in our mindset at the time.
We were also leading worship as a family. It felt so good to be singing regularly and getting to lead in that capacity. It was something I had longed for, for many years. It was something I felt called to do and something I was rarely able to do at Tree Town. I sang more in one year at this church plant than my entire 12 years at Tree Town. This just felt right. I was thankful that God had given us this amazing opportunity.
We were not in a place where we could handle the emotional stress of becoming a part of a church. There was no way I could’ve walked into a church each and every Sunday close to home. I had too much healing left to do. We all felt this way. The hurt was deep. We weren’t ready to trust a church again. So, we felt no rush to join a new church. In fact, we clearly felt like God was telling us to wait, hold back, and give ourselves time. And so, we did.
We left our house every Sunday morning at 7:30. We arrived at the church for rehearsal at 9:00. Church started at 10:30. We left by noon and were home in time to take a nice Sunday afternoon nap. We found ourselves home and settled earlier than we ever had when we attended Tree Town. Even though Tree Town was much closer, we always had so many things to do before we could leave that we usually got home quite late, and, many times, had to return for Sunday evening services or some kind of meeting.
Although we enjoyed meeting and making connections with these new people in the church plant, when we came home, we were far enough away that they were not a part of our everyday lives. We got in; we got out. We led worship, and we left. We felt connected but still separate. It was perfect.
It was also something that we could never have done on our own. Something we would never have dreamed of doing. We had zero ties to this town. On our own, this would never have been our plan. I honestly don’t know what we might have done. We probably might have continued watching church from our couch or attended bigger churches in the city nearby where we could just blend in. We might have quit altogether.
This opportunity was definitely a God thing.
Just to be completely transparent, before this experience, I had toyed with the idea of being done with church forever. It was just too hard. My list of grievances against the church and its people was long. I didn’t want to ever be vulnerable again. I live with my guard up, but during this time, I was wearing proverbial full-body armor. I wasn’t interested in getting hurt again. It was only my faith in Jesus that kept me going. I had to dig deep and find the strength not to trust the process or the church or even its people… just Jesus. I had to separate what Jesus meant for the church to be from what humans had made it. If I’m honest, I’m still working through that process, and I may continue for the rest of my life.
We spent one entire year driving to this church, one-year leading worship in a city foreign to us, one year getting to know a group of people, and one year healing from all the hurt in Tree Town. One year separating our identities from Tree Town… one year. When that year was over, we had been gone from Tree Town for two whole years. And though 24 months had passed, much of the pain was still fresh.
Maybe one of the best things we experienced during our time at the church plant was getting to know my parent’s pastor in a new environment. Before this time, he was simply our parent’s pastor and our friend. He had never held a pastoral role in our lives.
We were upfront and completely honest with this pastor about our time at Tree Town and how wounded we were. He was familiar with our story before Tree Town because he was our parent’s pastor, and they had walked through the same church hurt we had been a part of.
I will never forget our conversation with him one Sunday after the church service. Our daughter decided to stay home that day, so it was just me, Jeremy, and our son. I don’t even remember how the conversation started or where it ended. I just remember that somewhere in that conversation, this pastor said something like… I know you’ve been hurt, and I know that much of that hurt has come from pastors, and I just want you to know that you don’t owe me any kind of trust because of a title. I understand and respect how hard it is for you to trust pastors; you have every right to feel that way. He understood that what we had walked through immediately made us leery of all pastors. He continued by saying that he would earn our trust because trust was something that should have to be earned, not just expected because of one’s “title.”
I’m sure that my face showed pure shock. So a pastor could be humble? A pastor thought that a title meant nothing and that he should earn trust… it wasn’t just expected?
I gained an unexplainable amount of respect for him that day. And throughout our time at the church plant, he practiced what he said. He put actions to his words.
The other thing that happened while we were there was that we reconnected with some old friends. The associate pastor of my parent’s church was our lifetime friend. He left his childhood church, the same one where Jeremy and I were married soon after we did, where the pastor was a dictator. This friend was a few years younger than us but had always been a very close friend. Every other week this friend would teach at the church plant. It was almost as if those 12 years apart had never happened. We fell into a comfortable routine with this friend/associate pastor. Spending time with him and his family reminded us of all the good times we had at that church. It reminded us of all we left and how much we missed those connections.
I’ve thought about this a lot. I often wonder why God sent us to Tree Town. Why was it necessary for us to go through all that, to give years of our lives to a church and its ministry, just to be hurt again? Why couldn’t we have stayed with these people who loved us? Why couldn’t it have been easier? And then I am reminded of these things…
We met so many amazing people at Tree Town… some of who we no longer have contact with and many who will forever be a part of our lives. I literally see the face of certain people when I begin to question things. I think of the kids who became like my own… one who will be married this summer and another in college who comes home to see us often. I think about friends who I would never have known without Tree Town, friends I can’t imagine my life without. My very best friend in the whole wide world is someone I met at Tree Town Baptist.
It was worth it… just like the years we spent at the church before… all the pain and hurt… it was worth it. It was part of God’s plan. We may never know how God used us during our time at Tree Town Baptist or how God used others in our lives while we were there. We had no doubt that God called us there, and we had no doubt when He called us away. It was for a season.
The relationships we lost, those hurt, those still hurt, those relationships were also only for a season… but the relationships that provided lifelong friends, those friends that never turned their backs on us… yep, those were worth it.
We never dreamed that God would bring these people from our old church back into our lives. They went one way when they left, and we went another. We joined a very established, traditional church, and they planted a very nontraditional church. We weren’t going in the same direction. It would seem that God was taking them on one path and taking us on an entirely different one. We never saw those paths crossing again, but God did.
I’m going to stop there this week… I’ll end with this…
When we began to talk things out with my parent’s pastor, when we looked at him and told him that we never, ever thought we would be helping with a church plant or reconnecting with these people again, we discussed the uncertainty, the worry, the concern that after being on a totally different path for 12 long years and returning to familiar people that this could cause confusion and even some bitterness. Would these people think that we just left them and now we were showing up out of nowhere… We wanted to respect those feelings because they were valid… we had indeed been gone for 12 years… they didn’t owe us acceptance.
He looked at us and simply said, 12 years ago, it wasn’t your time… 12 years ago, you were supposed to be at Tree Town… it just wasn’t your time… maybe now it’s your time.
Until Next Time,
Whitney