continued…
August 2008
It was during this time that God was really working on my husband and me. We loved these people. We loved this church, but we couldn’t follow this pastor any longer. I remember my husband coming home one day and telling me that he was feeling extremely convicted. He said he felt like we had two options, either we followed the pastor’s leading, or we left. We both knew the answer.
We sought the advice of a trusted youth pastor from another church in town. His advice after hearing what had been going on was that we should just rip the Band-Aid. There was no reason to wait when we knew the answer. This meeting happened on a Monday night. Things moved quickly.
The very next Wednesday night was the monthly church business meeting. We decided that this was the right time to make our exit. We couldn’t just disappear because we held too many positions in the church. It would’ve been very irresponsible for us to just pick up and leave. We owed these people we loved an explanation, and we thought it would be the right thing to just be upfront and honest with the pastor. He was the reason we were leaving, and we felt like he should know. We scheduled a meeting with the pastor before the church service to tell him that we planned to resign from our positions during the business that night and we would be leaving. That meeting was interesting… but it would require a post of its own.
The business meeting started, and the pastor turned it over to us. My husband explained to the church that we felt like it was time for us to leave the church and that we were resigning our positions, effective immediately. He told the people that we loved them, and we would be back to visit whenever we could. I sat on the pew and cried my eyes out, unable to speak a word.
Our parents were members of this church. All our friends were there. This was hard.
My husband and I had spent hours praying that we would be able to leave in a peaceful time because we remembered that my dad had always said that you never leave in the midst of trouble. We just wanted to get out quietly.
We sat down.
The business meeting continued. The church voted to accept our resignations. The pastor brought up the next item of business.
The pastor began by asking the church to pay a bill to an architect. He started trying to explain it away. He fumbled around with his words. He placed blame on everyone but himself, and finally, he just said the church had to pay this bill to an architect that the church had never approved. An architect the church had never heard of. An architect that the church knew nothing about.
Buckle up… the pastor found a company in a nearby town that would design your building for free IF you used them to actually build the building. This family-owned business was a metal building company; the father built the buildings and the daughter was an architect. They drew up a detailed plan for the prospective new church building. But the church never approved this, and the congregants were stunned. This was an extreme amount of money to pay to a company for a building plan that the church wouldn’t be using. Money was tight. The church could barely pay the bills we had. An exorbitant amount of money for a plan that had never been approved wasn’t something the church could easily pay. The pastor made all kinds of excuses, but they weren’t well received.
Are you ready for it??? The plan was for a 120 ft by 120 ft metal building with a 3 to 12 pitch roof. The one he had been trying to sell to his Building Committee for months. The dimensions he continually repeated to everyone who would listen; the pastor’s preferred design, the exact plan that he wanted. The plan that he had been pushing for the last year. The one the committee and everyone else in the church had no interest in building.
It all began to make sense.
The pastor had gone on his own to this company. They told him that they would draw up a design and once it was built, they would roll the cost of the design into the building. The pastor was counting on no one ever finding out. He planned to sell this idea and plan to the church, then recommend this company… and you can figure out the rest. He never planned to get caught. Whether his actions were malicious or just stupid, we may never know.
But this is what we do know… A group of men from the church went to visit this company after the fact to get the real story. Come to find out they had been demanding their money for several months. Many calls had been made to the pastor to collect this money and still the church hadn’t been informed. In fact, because the architect had been a woman, the pastor had refused repeatedly to deal directly with her over the issue. He would ask to deal with her father. When she told him that she was the one in charge of the company, he argued that he didn’t want to deal with her, he dealt only with men. It was only because the company was threatening legal action that he finally brought it to the church.
Scandal anyone?
We left in the nick of time. Trouble was brewing.
By the time we got home that night, I had the worst headache of my life. I was physically ill. My parents and my grandmother stopped by my house and we all cried together. We had just officially left our church family; the church my husband was born and raised in and the church I had been a member of for 20 years. This was the church where we met and fell in love, the church we were married in, the church where our children were dedicated to the Lord, and in the same night we left, scandal had descended upon the church. Our parents were still there. How could they go back? It felt like they would be returning to enemy territory, and we wouldn’t be there to help them. But we had officially left before there was trouble, only about 10 minutes before, but we made it.
The very next Sunday we woke up like normal and got ready for church. It never occurred to us to take a week off, to spend some time resting, to take a much-needed sabbatical…nope we got up, got dressed, and headed to church. We sat in the driveway debating on which way we should go. But you know where we wanted to go the most? We wanted to turn and go right back to the same church, to the familiarity, to our family, to our comfort. The pain was almost unbearable. Though we knew we had done the right thing, it hurt.
Meanwhile back at our old church, over the next several weeks the pastor convinced his faithful few that he was innocent. He called a special business meeting on a Sunday morning. The church was packed with people who hadn’t been there in years. When the service ended, he called for an “unplanned” vote of confidence. He left the sanctuary. The moderator stood in the pulpit… “if you love your pastor and believe that he is capable of pastoring this church, stand up”, he said. People that hadn’t darkened the doors in years stood to show their approval along with the faithful few who still believed the pastor was amazing, the ones that catered to him, the ones who believed that he could never do anything wrong and the ones he had coached. It was a clear majority. Those people sat back down.
“If you don’t have confidence in your pastor and don’t believe he is capable of leading this church, please stand,” he asked next. My parents, along with a few others, stood that morning. They were in the minority.
I can’t even imagine the bravery this took. To stand up in a small church declaring that you didn’t have confidence in the pastor, for everyone in the sanctuary to know how you voted… this was as bad as it could be. The latest issue with the architect and money was just icing on the cake. There were years of things that had piled up. My parents had been struggling the same way we had, they just weren’t ready to leave, but this had been escalating. They were now in the pastor’s way. They were against him, and he couldn’t have that. He needed them gone. This vote of confidence had been planned to separate the loyal members from the dissenters. So, because of this, my parents, my husband’s parents, and a few of our very close friends had been intentionally called out for all to see and to be reported back to the pastor. They had no option but to leave. The pastor would rather have fewer members, members that thought he could do no wrong than have someone in his congregation that disagreed with him in any way. It was kind of like he was a cult leader.
I was standing in Sam’s Wholesale Club in the paper towel aisle that Sunday morning when my momma called me to tell me what had happened. She was sobbing. She was broken. Once again, it was over.
Church hurt… Strike 2
Until Next Time,
Whitney