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Broken Pastor, Broken Church
January 1, 2001
Margaret said, "OK, Lord, there's your promise. You will bring us out into a place of abundance." So we began to pray and thank the Lord for the place he had for us.
My body, broken, for you
First Baptist Church of Kenner, Louisiana, split five ways in two years following the departures of two pastors. The preacher they fell in love with pastored there 13 years, grew a small church into a big church, made a name for himself in metropolitan New Orleans, and built a new $5-million dollar sanctuary just before he was called to a larger pastorate in Arkansas.
His successor was a dynamic preacher, too, but he had a more exuberant worship style than most at this traditional Southern Baptist church. That made some uncomfortable and they left. Revelations about his personal life sent hundreds more fleeing.
Seven months after his arrival, a majority of the congregation voted to terminate him. Soon after, worship attendance was less than half its peak, and more than 50 percent of the budget was obligated to debt service. The building program, begun during Louisiana's oil boom, went bust with the oil crisis and the church crisis.
The treasurer laid unpaid invoices on the table in the vestibule. "Take 'em if you can pay 'em," he told the congregation on several occasions. This church was so broke that the interim pastor would not accept a salary; so broke that the pastor search committee was told they could travel only to those places to which they could drive and return home in a single day; and so broken that some members feared they might never call a pastor.
A match made where?
I started writing my "network" as soon as my one-year hiatus began. I made letterhead with all their names—a dozen friends I started collecting in seminary—at the top.
"Keep us in prayer and remember me to any open churches you think appropriate," I asked. Every month or so I sent an update. Their replies were my lifeline.
I preached several revivals. I needed to know that I could preach. Some Sundays we watched First Charlotte's televised service. And church members called us periodically, at first urging me to start a church, and when I declined, just to encourage us. Mostly, we wanted to put the whole experience behind us.
The year was almost over when one of my network friends asked me to preach for him while he was on vacation for three weeks. "You and Margaret can stay in our home. It will be good for you, and the church will be glad to see you," he urged. I had served on staff there many years earlier, and the current pastor and I had become friends during my pastorate in Columbus.
That's how it happened that I was preaching in Jackson, Mississippi, when the pulpit committee from Kenner, a three-hour drive away, visited.
My leave of absence ended the last week of August, and the following Sunday I preached my first sermon as pastor of First Baptist Church of Kenner. I've been there more than ten years.
McKeever's Lincoln
Recently on a visit to the Illinois statehouse in Springfield, I picked up a souvenir book on Abraham Lincoln. I didn't expect it to have such an impact on me, putting these events, now more than a decade past, into perspective.
In The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln, author Michael Burlingame depicts Lincoln's midlife crisis. At age 40, Lincoln retired from public life. At the time he was described as "an honest, capable, but essentially self-centered politician." He was self-doubting and underdeveloped, a man of "largely unsuspected talents." He emerged five years later "speaking with a new seriousness, a new explicitness, a new authority, and thus he grew into a statesman." His sabbatical was one of crisis. Lincoln buried a son, had two sons born, and buried his father. These events were life-changing.
One analyst said it is in a man's midlife that he lets go of some of the attachment to the external world and comes to terms with his own mortality. This crisis prompts individuation, in which a man defines his true calling and fully engages his true gifts.
I seem to have emerged from my own crisis a little tougher. Sometimes when I find a deacon has scheduled an appointment, I think, What have I done now? But I'm sure of my motivations, and whether certain people like me doesn't matter so much anymore.
I've taken things more slowly here than I might have earlier. At times I've told the church, "Let's not do this if we can't have unity on it. We don't need the conflict." I was especially careful during my first four or five years here. We spent a lot of time addressing the issues of guilt and disappointment. Many felt guilty for their actions. The rest were disappointed—in their friends, their pastors, themselves, even God.
Those I had left behind in Charlotte must have been experiencing those same emotions. I had been called to Kenner to do the same ministry that my successor would undertake in Charlotte. My successor, by the way, was Charles Page, the same man who had preceded me. First Baptist of Charlotte called back the pastor whom they had grieved, the one whose ministry had seemed cut short. He has enjoyed a long and successful tenure and still serves there today. By all reports, the church is thriving.
And I am grateful to say that the Kenner church has survived its crisis, too. The church has healed from its deep pain. We paid off the debt in 1998. Burning that note was like being let out of jail. The staff received raises, including our music minister of nine years and our education minister of seven years. And though it has taken ten years to reach this point, we can truly say that God—who has tried us and refined us—has brought us to a place of abundance.
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