New Kids At The Grown Ups Table

Have you ever gotten turned around? You’re driving somewhere and read the map wrong or you have wrong directions and find yourself in a place you don’t recognize? It happened to me recently on a trip to Huntsville, AL. It’s happened to me over the past year and a half in life.

I was driving along doing things according to the map in front of me, and suddenly I found myself in a place I didn’t recognize. Like all good men, I never ask for directions either. Fortunately, I am surrounded by a wife and men who love me and who forced the question on me. I didn’t understand the question at first, but eventually through their persistence and frustration the question got through. When I finally put the map down that I was using I found out both where I was and where I needed to be. So let me tell you a story. Paraphrasing Adam Taylor let me tell you, “A story of me, a story of us, and a story of now.”

The story of me
My journey of faith has been one of big ideas, bold actions, humiliating failures, character flaws, brokenness, and a faithful God and loving friends who believe in me more than I believe or trust in myself.

When I look back upon the highlights of my life I remember the overwhelming moment when I understood grace for the first time in 1981. Before I was a Christian a friend invited me to a Sunday service. I’d been to services before, but when I walked into this one people had eyes closed and faces turned to heaven. They were singing, but it was so much more. I remember thinking, “I’ve been looking for this all my life.” A few months later, after understanding grace, I was part of that amazing love set to music.

I remember the very first family I served through a church, a migrant farm family in Texas who gave me a home-made tortilla for delivering a space heater. To this day it’s the best tortilla I’ve ever eaten.

I think about walking the streets around the Astrodome in Houston from 11:00 pm to 2:00 am to get teen prostitutes off the streets. FYI, I never got to talk to a teen prostitute, but I met plenty of older ones who weren’t interested in what I had to say. They didn’t mind talking, except when the pimp showed up.

I think about sharing Christ on the sea-wall in Galveston and being threatened by bikers and gang-bangers.

I think about the Lord redeeming from massive failures of character and faith – a 10 year trial that forever changed me. It was a breaking that re-made me.

I think about renting tiny, one-room houses in run-down parts of town and meeting the best people (and some real losers).

I think about working in a school district health program but having to get the kids home before 6:00 because that’s when the gun-fire began. I remember a great-grandmother as the primary care-giver for a first grader. She was an amazing woman taking care of two generations lost to addiction, and trying to protect the third.

I remember families suffering from violence and genetic mutation in rural Maryland, and the hope, strength and despair of families on reservations in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin.

I think about Romania and meeting my wife. About doctor’s offices and waiting rooms through crisis pregnancies and innumerable transfusions and fears, and the two healthy sons who are my joy. I think that if I could have them know one thing in life it would be how big, beautiful, and audacious our God is – and how tame most of us make him.

I think about being asked by leaders to leave public health and go into ministry. I remember the people who left as a result. I remember hard years of ministry. Of people loved and relationships lost.

I think about years of seminary with few spare moments and too much time away from family over 8 years.

I think about my first Christian Community Development Association meeting in 2004. It was a time like walking into that church in college for the first time and realizing, “I’ve been looking for this all my life.”

I remember trembling steps into a meeting of elders with my resignation typed up should they reject my plan to follow the Lord. Not as a power-play (I’m not that kind of guy), but because I had nothing else but that plan.

I remember being a little shocked when they said yes.

I remember the fear and confusion and delightful ignorance of moving out in transition. Always partially what I wanted, partially not. But church is about body and group and shared wisdom, not a cult of personality.

I remember picking up a freaked out and panicked Meth addict on the corner of Peachtree Industrial and Peachtree Rd, who couldn’t understand why no one wanted to give her ride to her motel. She looked like a zombie.

I remember Pearl Lane and the chaos of the after-school program. I remember the first time in a room with 4th grade boys who wanted to know where babies come from. I remember trombones and singing Christmas songs. I remember Cheryl Burton teaching me that ministry succeeds not because we don’t fail, but that when we fail we humble ourselves and do the right thing. I remember a boy talking about his fears after someone broke down their door and robbed his family. I remember the loud drunks yelling at each other as we walked by them on my way to taking him back to that same house.

I remember my wife coming out of a session with John Perkins at a CCDA conference in 2006 saying, “We have to move.” To this day it causes tears to well-up in my eyes to see the Lord confirm what he had placed on my heart years before.

I think about kids shouting “Pastor Tim!” as the bus rumbles down a busy road past the church while I’m talking to the police and a guy in hand-cuffs whom I had been helping but who had also been robbing the church at the same time.

I think about the building inspector for Doraville coming to my house because I was a pastor and there were neighbors who needed translation into Mandarin.

I think about the people I talk with at public coffee houses in Theology Café – theology, faith, and conversation outside the walls. Whether it’s one person or a dozen I love every minute of it.

I remember faces and lives lovingly shared with me. I see hundreds of them. But I remember George clearest of all. George (pronounced Gi-yor-geh) was the Romanian boy who prayed with me to ask Jesus into his heart after hearing my story. It was the first time after my divorce and all the ugliness it revealed in me that I had shared it in public. I remember it being trembling and halting. I was far from the flawless example of Christian perfection. George taught me to tell God’s story of His faithfulness and ability to restore scared, divorced, humiliated failures.

If I am dedicated to Christ’s cross, I will tell my story truthfully to reveal the magnificence of his grace and mercy that others might see him and know him and love him for who he is.

This is the story of me.

The story of us
Before I was married or ever left Minnesota I’d been invited to Northside Community Evangelical Free Church (now Open Table). The mission pastor of Heather’s very large church had sat next to the pastor of Northside at a conference. The mission pastor handed Heather a hand-written invitation to come to the church when we got to Atlanta (we knew we were moving to Atl before we got married). The first place we visited in Atlanta was the church. That Sunday the first person we met was Jim Wehner. A nice, newly married couple asked us to lunch, Aaron and Kendra Brussat. It was October, 1996.

The church was an amazing expression of faith. They were part of the Right To Life movement praying for and protesting the killing of children through abortion. Many of the church’s leaders had met in jail.

The church had a conviction to reach Bosnian Muslims as an unreached people group. As they pursued that vision a civil war broke out in (then) Yugoslavia. It didn’t stop them. They worked in refugee camps during the war and in the reconstruction that followed. To this day we have missionaries serving in Sarajevo and Mostar.

Soon after we arrived we were asked to help with youth ministry at church. A while later I was asked to leave my job with the CDC and go on staff. We agonized for two months about it before saying “yes.” We said yes with one caveat: we be allowed to move to Bosnia in two years to help there. The church said yes.

Two years later, the Holy Spirit shut the door to Bosnia. Through a vision he called me to pastoral ministry and sent me to seminary. A month into seminary the interim pastor of the church took ill and left. I was asked to preach and lead. I did. The elders asked me to put my name in for the pastoral search. I wasn’t sure why, but I obeyed. A few months later I was offered the job.

When asked why two things came up: my brokenness and authenticity as a Christian, and the conviction that I could lead even with the founding pastor staying in the church. I tried to live with this for almost two years before I had to ask the founding pastor to leave. I didn’t do it well. It didn’t go well.

Through prayer and fasting the Lord led us on another daring journey of faith. Not to political protests or international missions, but to local incarnation. It was a time when many of the stalwarts of the church decided it was time to go in different directions. I didn’t blame them. They served well. They were tired and started focusing on different forms of service.

So we became significantly smaller, sold the building, and moved on. We had new visions of mission and incarnation in places being abandoned. I ended up going to a political protest in Washington DC over budget cuts to the foster care system, WIC, and Medicare. I marched with immigrants in support of their humanity and contributions to society. Same DNA, different expression.

The Lord brought David Park and Peter Choi to be light and hope in my life. Through them he also revealed a most significant improvement to the vision – reconciliation and the hope of a multi-ethnic church.

The Lord, through the Holy Spirit, took us the route we have walked to Cary Reynolds, Pearl Lane, and Communicycle. We have partnered with Movers & Shakers, Theology Café, the C.S. Lewis Institute, Refugee Arts and Refugee Beads. I’ve met pastor’s who sandals I am unworthy to untie; pastors that serve Bosnian, Nepali, Egyptian, and Zomi people.

In 2010 we found ourselves in a new location in an old building. Through the work of the new leadership team we started to strip away the last vestiges of plans, habits, and practices that no longer fit our size, our location, or our needs. It’s been a good and necessary (if not pain-free) process.

To grow stronger and deeper we have a plan for discipleship and small groups and serving immigrant and refugee communities.

This is the story of us.

The story of now
I look around me now and I see myself for the past year inside the walls of a church attending to details. I’m not a manager or an administrator.

My wife calls me tired. My friends and leaders ask me what my passion is. They ask me what I want to be doing with my life. If you could do anything at all what would it be? What’s your dream? What’s your passion!? I didn’t have an answer. When I realized I didn’t have an answer I knew I was lost. Not in the separated from God sense of “lost”, but in the “turned around”, “how did I get to this place,” “using the wrong map” sense of lost.

So I asked my wife and my friends, “Who am I? When am I at my best, my most alive?” They all answered the exact same way. When they did I started to see where I was and how I had gotten there. I also saw more clearly who I am.

I live in a community of full of immigrants and refugees.

I don’t speak Spanish, Cambodian, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Bangladeshi, or any of the other dozen dialects or languages that are all around me. I can’t speak the heart-language to these adults. But I do with their kids.

I see kids willing to talk, but not willing to come to church. I want to go to them.

I look out at the world and the church and the big things I see are “out there.” Lives crushed by injustice and despair. I see someone elected Governor of Georgia whose politics toward people I care about are horrid. I see a fight coming and I want to stand up for those who are caught in the middle, especially the kids who were brought to the US and who have no hope for a future. They have only ever lived in the US and yet they have no options for their ambitions and abilities except on the black market.

I look out at where we are and I want to walk and pray. I want to understand what and who the giants are in this land, in Chamblee and Doraville. I want to step in. I know some of their names – prostitution, gambling, drugs.  I want to be part of the solution.

I am not brave. I am not strong. I am compelled.

And I can’t do this sitting inside the walls of a building.

This is the story of now.

Why am I telling you this story? Because what you heard is important. What you DIDN’T hear is important. What you didn’t hear is that I think about writing sermons, growing the church, or constructing a meaningful worship service. I don’t think about nice buildings and nice budgets.

When I look back I see a pattern. When I look back I feel a pulse.

When I look at now I see real things that need to be tackled in the world around me – outside the walls, with people outside the walls. This is when I am most alive. This is what matters to me. This ignites my passion and gives me something worth living (and dying) for.

So I am stepping away from the inside of the church to work on the outside.  I am not leaving my community, I am going deeper into it.  If the church were larger or had more resources I could probably stay on staff.  But we don’t have more resources and I can’t.

When I was first called into pastoral ministry it came with a vision of man handing me a steering pole to a boat.  My job in the vision was to steer the boat through my section of the river, then hand it off.  It’s that time.

So here we go.  Excited, fearful, at times terrified.  But here we go!