Welcome to Church. We Will Disappoint You.

Since starting Collective, I have encountered lots of wounded people who feel that their wounds are the result of a former church experience. I have lost count on the number of times I have heard people say,

“I was burned by a church,” or

 “After that happened, I never wanted to go back to a church again,”  or

“I can’t believe a church could treat someone that way!”

Or some variation on these statements.

There are lots of people who left (or were forced to leave) a church under dark, negative circumstances.

And I sympathize. In my life, I have been involved in a handful of churches—sometimes as staff and sometimes as layperson—and I have experienced the dark side of church just like lots of other people. When I left my last church job—before deciding to start Collective Church—I thought I was done working in churches for good.

(There’s a whole other conversation about what working for a church can do to a pastor or staff person, and I’m sure we’ll get to that at some point here on the blog.)

Whenever I hear someone’s story of mistreatment or unfairness within a church, my first emotional response is to get angry and silently promise myself that I would never allow something like that to happen in a church where I was the pastor. I listen as people grieve their past experiences, and I feel superior because I tell myself that Collective Church is above that kind of behavior.

But we aren’t.

After that first rush of self-congratulatory piety, my feet return to the ground, and I remind myself that I—along with every other person who attends my church—am fully capable of infliction pain on other people. Going to seminary didn’t immunize me from being short-sighted, and a decade and-a-half spent working in churches hasn’t protected me from waking up in the morning as a deeply flawed human being.

A few years ago, I randomly started thinking about a conversation I had with a high school student when I was a youth pastor. She came to me seeking counsel, and--as I remembered the conversation--I knew that I had given her bad advice. My heart was in the right place, but I didn’t know what I was doing. So—as I relived this event in my memory—I sent this young woman (now a full grown adult, graduated from college), and I told her that I was sorry and that I hoped she could forgive me for giving her poor counsel. She replied and was very gracious; she clearly remembered our conversation from years before, and she recalled with a great deal of accuracy what I had said to her. She said she knew that I had meant well, and she appreciated that I reached out to say I was sorry.

Here’s something most pastors don’t want you to know: we frequently have no idea what we are doing. We might pretend we do, but we don’t. Most of us went to school and learned a lot about Greek and Hebrew and Martin Luther and how to preach a sermon, but almost none of us have any great insight on how to help people in exactly the way they need to be helped all the time. Sometimes we get it right; but we get it wrong just as often.

When we first started Collective Church, I secretly agonized over the fear of making a mistake and making our church the object of someone’s “I-was-burned-by-a-church” story.

If you think about it, it’s pretty inevitable. Everyone has expectations over what their church should do and what people should say in a given circumstance, and when we don’t meet those expectations, people get upset. If a person misses church for three weeks in a row and they don’t receive a phone call, that person might complain that “I was gone for three whole weeks, and nobody cared enough to even pick up the phone!” But then someone else could be absent for three weeks, receive a phone call from a church staff person, and then complain that “I was only gone for three weeks, and then they started badgering me!” Believe it or not, I have heard both of these complaints, almost verbatim, from different people about the same church.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that a church—any church—is made up of human beings who are certain to make mistakes along the way. If you are part of a church for any length of time, there will come a day when you feel frustrated with that church. I guarantee it.

Nadia Bolz-Weber—a pastor in Denver—writes this in her book Pastrix:

Every human community will disappoint us, regardless of how well-intentioned or inclusive. But I am totally idealistic about God’s redeeming work in my life and in the world…. I wanted [the people in my church] to hear me: This community will disappoint them. It’s a matter of when, not if. We will let them down or I’ll say something stupid and hurt their feelings. I then invite them on this side of their inevitable disappointment to decide if they’ll stick around after it happens…. Welcome to [our church]. We will disappoint you.

Don't get me wrong: There are times when leaving is the right choice. I know of pastors who preach sermons or write blog posts about how it’s wrong or selfish to leave a church, even if you’re miserable. I won’t say that. Sometimes you need to go. If there has been abuse or chronic, systematic mistreatment of people, there comes a point when you may feel that your very presence in that place is a way of condoning the behavior—as if continuing your participation in that church somehow makes you complicit in the dark patterns. If you need to leave because of an injustice or because the situation cannot be redeemed, then you should go.

However, if you have been disappointed because of a misunderstanding or because of a personal conflict or because of some other inevitable side-effect of being in community with a bunch of other flawed, broken people, then can I invite you to look for reconciliation? Most churches are filled with people who insist that there is resurrection in the world, and sometimes we need to be agents of that resurrection. Sometimes we need to be the ones who allow for the possibility that redemption is still possible in this place.

Like Nadia Bolz-Weber says, I am idealistic about God’s redeeming work, and sometimes that means allowing a church to heal from the inside and hoping for some kind of renewal. Maybe the most honest experience of church some of us will have will be in the moments when we forgive and are forgiven.

As I said before, sometimes you need to leave. If you are in a toxic, destructive environment, you owe it to yourself to get out of there.

But if the conflict can be resolved—if an apology, a cup of coffee, a hug, or a handshake can somehow bring healing to a situation—then I hope you will keep trying. You owe that to yourself, too.

The church can be a beautiful place, even if it is filled with screw-ups like me.

On Answering Questions Nobody is Asking ("Jesus Must Be Crazy")

A couple months ago, I put up a survey on our church's website, asking the question, "What do you think is the most confusing and/or frustrating thing that Jesus ever did or said?"

We received some pretty fascinating responses, and I took the most frequently-asked questions from that survey and turned them into a sermon series called "Jesus Must Be Crazy." We just wrapped up the series this past Sunday, and I cannot tell you how much fun it was.

(Yes I can. It was a lot of fun.)

One of the best parts about being a pastor is that I get to go out learn a bunch of stuff and then come back to my friends at Collective Church and tell them what I learned. It's pretty great. And this series was a big stretch for me, because it forced me to start thinking about a few passages I had never preached about or even heard anybody else preach about. Several of the passages we dealt with have been largely ignored in most churches because they are confusing or scary or frustrating, which I suppose is why so many people wanted to talk about them in the first place.

I once heard a great preacher challenge a room full of preachers by saying, "You need to know if you're trying to answer questions that nobody is asking." What he meant was that sometimes preachers just talk about the stuff that they've always talked about or they deliver boring sermons every single week because they are trying to engage topics and ideas that have grown stale in the minds of their listeners.

That really stuck with me. I've heard lots of boring sermons in my life, and I could look at each of those sermons and tell you why I found them so uninteresting (the typical reasons tend to be overuse of churchy jargon, lack of a central point, and total disinterest in the people who are listening), but I had never really considered that one of the main problems might be that the preachers were trying to answer questions that nobody was asking.

I've written a lot about the nature of preaching and the things I've learned and am still learning about it. Whenever I go back and listen to my sermons, I can hear dozens of ways that I could be better than I am. That's the nature of any art form; you have to keep working, and you have to try and be better today than you were yesterday. But one of the greatest challenges of this whole thing has less to do with style and delivery and more to do with how we engage the subject matter. It's the question, "Am I trying to answer questions that nobody is asking?"

And so, as an exercise in answering the right questions, I did this series. It was a very demanding series that cost me countless hours of research and fact-checking, but it was worth it. I'm sure I'll do something like this again at some point. In fact, more than once I have preached a series based on a specific request from a church member. Why not? It's fun, and it forces me to get outside my own head and experiences and to think about what other people are dealing with. Plus, as I'm doing the research, it's pretty fun to discover something mind-blowing and then to think, "Oh man, that one guy who requested this topic is going to love this!"

So here's to curiosity and to asking questions alongside one another.

Oh, and here's the series:

Part 1: "I Have Come to Bring the Sword"

Part 2: "The So-Called Unforgivable Sin"

Part 3: "Jesus and Anger"

Part 4: "Jesus and Divorce"

Part 5: "Why Have You Forsaken Me?"

Part 6: "Paul Must Be Crazy" (or "Our Silenced Sisters")

What a New Church Building Is / Is Not

There is a scene in the movie Almost Famous where the band Stillwater leaves their tour bus behind and boards an airplane. The rationale for ditching the bus is that the plane gives the band a greater sense of legitimacy and they can increase the number of shows they play on a tour. In the scene, as the band and entourage walk away from the bus and toward the airplane, the young journalist William Miller looks back at the bus in earnest, a hint of sorrow on his face. They don’t seem to simply be trading one mode of transportation for another; they are losing a part of themselves. In artistic terms, they are “selling out.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about that scene lately.

For the past few months, Collective Church—the church where I pastor—has been preparing for a similar transition. Ever since the church was created in early 2014, our home has been the conference center inside the Marriott hotel near Texas Motor Speedway. But now we are only a few days away from moving out of the hotel and into our own space in downtown Roanoke, Texas.

We began at the Marriott for one simple reason: We had no place else to go. However, it did not take long for the Marriott to stop feeling like a “last option” and to start feeling like home. We made friends with some of the staff members, we developed a rhythm with the building, and we (or at least I) really looked forward to seeing who else might be in the hotel on any given weekend—a Corvette show, a medical convention, a conference dedicated to the care and keeping of competition rodeo horses (yes, that was one of them), etc. My Instagram feed is full of pictures of some of the more interesting neighbors we have had over the past sixteen months.

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And now we say goodbye to the hotel and plant our flag on an old office building on Oak Street in Roanoke. We look back at the tour bus as we board the airplane.

I have only worked for two other churches during my fifteen years of working in ministry, and both of those churches engaged in their own respective major building campaigns during my time at each of them. And as I participated in two different churches’ approach to building and moving, I learned one thing that is probably obvious to anyone reading this post: Moving into a new space is a really big deal.

Churches—pastors, staff, volunteers, casual attenders—place a lot of hope in the power of a new building. I have heard pastors tell their staff (with no irony whatsoever), “If we build it, they will come” (“they, of course, being lots of people). The New Church Building is often viewed as the silver bullet—the one unstoppable force that will vault the church into the next level, whatever that might be.

To be fair, lots of churches do grow when they move into a new or larger space. There are certainly a lot of advantages to settling into a new home. I mean, I can’t really critique this whole thing too much, considering the transition that my church is preparing to make. I’m not criticizing the need or the excitement attached to moving into a new space; I’m simply wondering if we have asked too much of our buildings—if we want them to be something that they cannot ultimately be.

In the name of full disclosure, I should tell you that this post is really more about me than it is about any other pastor or church. I have been mulling over what it means to move into a new church ever since I signed our lease back in February. So here’s what I want to do: I want to really consider what a building is, and in turn, what a building is not.

Let’s start with what a church building is not:

1. A new building is NOT a guarantee of numerical/financial growth

Like I said, lots of pastors view the building as a guarantee for growth, and sometimes that certainly happens. However, it is also possible that you will see almost no growth at all, OR you will receive a few new families, but you may also lose a few families because the church no longer feels like it did in the “good old days.”

I’m not saying we shouldn’t hope for growth when we move into a building; what I am saying is that we should not move solely for the purpose of getting more people or more money. I’ve seen pastors go into deep depression because they bet all of their chips on the hope that they would triple in size when they moved, and their weekly attendance numbers barely flinched. They gambled a lot of money (and quite often borrowed a lot of money) with the belief that the building would yield massive returns, and it hasn’t worked that way.

2. A new building is NOT a solution to all your problems

A new building can certainly solve some problems, but it will create just as many (if not more) problems. The time we spent loading and unloading our stuff into a hotel conference space will now be spent cleaning bathrooms, changing air conditioner filters, and picking up trash in the parking lot. The money we paid for storage will now be spent on utilities.

Also, people are still people, and random problems will always come up. When a pastor says, “Let’s just wait until we get into the new building, and this problem will take care of itself,” nine times out of ten, that pastor is kidding himself (or herself).

So here’s what I think a new building is...

1. A new building is an opportunity to join an existing community

Our church is moving into a specific neighborhood—Downtown Roanoke, Texas. This means that we should start asking ourselves how we can participate in the community—how we can contribute to the well being of our neighbors. If we act as if we are an island unto ourselves or the most important people on the block, we will miss one of the major reasons why any church should be part of a community at all.

2. A new building is an opportunity to be a host and not just a guest
For the past 16 months, we have been a church that moves around a lot. We’ve mostly been in the hotel, but we have also held services in school cafeterias and HOA clubhouses. As such, our function has largely been as takers rather than givers. We are always in transit, and we depend on the kindness of our hosts (which has been abundant nearly every week).

When we have our own space, we can begin serving new functions and asking new questions. How can we provide space for the people in our community? How can we invite people to sit with us at the table? How can we open our doors and invite people to find some kind of rest or peace within our walls?

So yeah, I feel a lot like William Miller looking back at the old tour bus, hoping that this move doesn’t cost us part of ourselves.

I’m hopeful that this new building will help us spend more time building community with one another instead of spending so much time packing and unpacking boxes, wondering where we could possibly get all these people together for a meal.

We may grow, but we may not. Call me a terrible pastor, but that doesn’t really feel like the point of all of this. The point is that we should be looking for a place to feel safe and at home.  If the Collective Church stops feeling like Collective Church—if we gain a building and lose our soul—we should have just stayed at the hotel.  But if we can provide hope and joy and peace and safety—if we can be good neighbors and serve people food and offer opportunities for people to join the conversation—then I will feel pretty good about boarding this proverbial airplane.

***

*Note: If you want to know when our first services in the new building will be, stay tuned. I will post here as soon as we are ready to go.

*Another note: I'm sure there are lots of great insights that could have been included here that I did not think of. I've never pastored a church that was moving into a new building, and I know that I have a lot to learn. So it's totally possible that a year from now I could write a post called "All the things I didn't know when I wrote that post about the building," or something like that. Feel free to comment and tell me what I may have overlooked here.

"What in this moment is lacking?"

By nature, I tend to be a pretty anxious person. This is my biggest daily struggle: My imagination causes me to worry about everything.

I panicked over last year’s Ebola scare and started washing my hands about every ten minutes or so.

I regularly worry about mass shootings, which is one of the reasons why the church where I pastor employs an off-duty police officer.

I randomly worry that people in my life are mad at me or that I have somehow done something to upset them.

I worry that our church will fail and that I won’t be able to provide for my family.

I often feel certain that I am somehow doing permanent damage to my children simply by being their father—by being a pastor, by not always knowing how to talk to them, by feeling frustrated when they do things that kids do.

When I have nothing else to worry about, I worry about death.

Sometimes I feel worried about nothing in particular—I will be sitting at my desk or driving in my car or reading a book, and suddenly my pulse will begin to race. Suddenly, I feel anxious, but I can’t even figure out why.

(So starting a church from scratch was definitely the right career move for me, right?)

I used to see a therapist for this, but I can’t currently afford therapy, so I’ve taken to reading and meditating and trying different exercises in order to try and relax a little bit. (Music helps, too.)

I recently discovered an ancient mantra that helps me quite a bit. Someone told me that whenever I begin to feel overwhelmed and anxious, I should pause and ask myself the question, “What in this moment is lacking?”

The basic idea of this question is to remind myself that I can only live in the present, regardless of whatever else is swirling around in my over-active imagination. It is possible to miss out on the present moment because I am so consumed with what has happened or what may happen someday.

In the book of Matthew, Jesus tells his followers, “do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matthew 6:34). I don’t know about you, but being told to “not worry,” even if it comes from the Bible, has never worked for me. I’ve never been told to stop worrying and thought to myself, “Well, that’s a good idea. I should try that.”

But now, in light of this question—“What in this moment is lacking?”—I think I finally get it (or at least I’m starting to); Jesus is pointing out that I can only live in the present moment because that is all that currently exists.

When I worry, I am living either in the past or in the future. I live in the past when I agonize over the things I did, said, or didn’t do—when I replay the same tapes in my head over and over again. But the past is gone—it’s as gone as the Roman Empire and the Silent Film Era. Likewise, when I worry about what has not happened yet—when I think of all of the potential inevitabilities from disease epidemics to personal financial ruin—I am allowing my mind to live in a world that does not exist; I am being guided by data that has not yet been collected.

And so to ask myself “What in this moment is lacking?” is to bring myself back into the present moment. It is the act of looking at my life right now and realizing that things are mostly fine.

So if I ask myself this question—“What in this moment is lacking?”—I might think of various responses:

            I have a sermon to preach soon, and I don’t think it’s very good.

Okay, but you aren’t preaching that sermon right now. That is not lacking in this moment—it will potentially be lacking in a future moment, but not this one.

Or…

I’m worried about my family’s financial future.

Sure, but that’s not in this moment, either. In this moment, you have a job, your bills are paid, your kids are healthy, and your stomach is full.

Obviously, this is not to minimize real problems or actual chaos that will certainly occur at some point in the future. This is not about living in denial or pretending that everything is always fine. Sometimes there will certainly be an honest-to-goodness answer to the question about what is lacking in this moment…

            I’m in pain.

            Or…

            I’m sick.

            Or…

            The bills are due.

But right now, as I write this post, those are not my problems. In this moment, I am sitting in a well-lit room with breakfast in my stomach, gas in my car, and books uploaded on my iPad. I have a wife whom I adore, two amazing and healthy kids, a job that I love, and a wonderful group of friends. I am thirty-four years old, and I have no significant health problems (that I know about). That is the reality of the present moment, and I need to remember to be more grateful for all of these things.

So what in this moment is lacking for me?

Nothing.

I know it won’t always be this way, but it is today. And that’s enough for this moment.

(I’ll try not to worry about whether or not you will like this post)

Blessings, Frequency, and the Poor in Spirit

Yesterday at Collective Church we started a new series called Frequency. The series will revolve around the Beatitudes of Jesus in Matthew. This is the series of phrases Jesus uses to describe people as “blessed.”

We have this idea about the word “blessed” that seems to assume it refers to something tangible that we receive—money, a new house, a good parking space, etc. But when Jesus uses this word, he’s describing something wholly intangible.

For Jesus—and all Jewish rabbis of the 1st Century—to be blessed to be tuned in to the frequency of God. To be blessed is to live with a heightened awareness of who God is and what God is doing in the world.

In fact, it could be argued that the tangible things that we assume are a result of some kind of “blessing” are, in fact, the very things that make it harder for us to truly be blessed. A new car, a full bank account, and a tropical vacation home have the power to distract us from the activity of God in the world. When life becomes about receiving more and building bigger personal empires, it is quite difficult to find the frequency of a God who so often voices support for the poor, the powerless, the foreigner, the hungry, and the disillusioned.

When it comes to blessing and spiritual awareness, no one is more suited to articulate this journey than the great Richard Rohr. In his book The Naked Now, Rohr says this:

“All you can really do in the spiritual life is get tuned to receive the always present message. Once you are tuned, you will receive, and it has nothing to do with worthiness or the group you belong to, but only the inner resonance and a capacity for mutuality. The Sender is absolutely and always present and broadcasting; the only change is with the receiver station” (101-102).

And so, with this in mind, Jesus begins with a paradox: “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3). And that is where our sermon series begins.

When it comes to writing sermons, I've had lots of different teachers with lots of different philosophies on what makes a sermon "good." I spent several years being told that every sermon needed "Application Points"--that people needed to be told what to DO in order for a sermon to be effective. While there are times when this kind of preaching can be helpful (people sometimes need something concrete in order to hold onto an abstract idea), this impulse can become self-defeating.

So when I was writing yesterday's sermon about "Blessed are the poor in spirit," I realized early on in the process that to include any Application Points would kill the sermon--it would defeat the purpose of what Jesus was saying in that phrase because "blessed are the poor in spirit" is a statement about grace.

And grace--by definition--has no Application Points.

Click here to listen to the sermon podcast

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The Hi-Fi Nomads

A few months ago, my friend Barris handed me a CD and said, “Give this a listen and let me know what you think.” He told me that it was a personal project he had been working on for a long time, and he was planning to release it soon. I was honored to receive one of the first copies.

So the next morning I slid the CD into my soon-to-be-antiquated laptop disc drive and proceeded to do my work to the sound of Barris’ album—“Rumors of War.”

As I checked my email and performed a handful of random tasks, I kept getting distracted by the music. Every time a new track would start, I had to stop for about twenty seconds and think, Am I listening to the same album as before?

This is a good thing, by the way. There are some albums that you can play from start to finish and only after the music stops do you realize that you heard every song. There are artists who have locked in on a very specific sound are content to keep working with those same ingredients over and over again. I don’t want uniformity when I listen to an album (unless it’s a concept album, but that’s a whole different animal); I want to feel like the artist is exploring lots of different ways of saying what he or she wants to say. Even the best Beatles albums reflect a lot of different sensibilities and influences (there is probably no better example of this than The White Album).

What I most appreciated about “Rumors of War” is that all of the tracks reveal a broad pallet. I’ve know Barris for a long time, and I know that he listens to pretty much everything—that he appreciates lots of different styles and sounds when it comes to music. Of course, it’s one thing to like lots of different kinds of music (I can do that myself), but it’s a whole other ballgame to try and create something that projects a variety of sounds and influences. “Rumors of War” does exactly that.

There is certainly a Classic Rock influence here, but it would be reductive to limit the album to that descriptor. There is also a whiff of Metal (specifically in seventh track, “Bad Bad Blood”), as well as a little bit of something that reminds me of the Stray Cats or the Old 97’s (specifically in the sixth track, “Stop the World”). However, in spite of its clear influences, “Rumors of War” is its own entity. It copies nothing, but it is reflective of a life lived in appreciation of great musicians.

Don’t get me wrong, the album is consistent—it does not deviate from its overall vision. However, within that consistency there is also great diversity. It’s a tough needle to thread, but somehow Barris has done it.

The consistency is found within the mood of the album; there is a specific intentionality, as if the songwriter is trying to take us somewhere with him. You can almost close your eyes and picture the wheels of a car spinning furiously down a long stretch of desert highway. Come to think of it, this would probably a good album to take on a road trip.

My personal favorite tracks are “Time With You” (Track 2), “Be Set Free” (Track 3), “Kleptomaniac” (Track 5), and “Carlotta Dance” (Track 9). 

Click here to visit The Hi-Fi Nomads' website or to order the album