I woke Patti up as I leaped out of bed in the dead of night last Monday morning.
“What’s the matter?” she asked with a groggy voice.
“Someone’s pounding at our door!”
I quickly got into my jeans and began running around frantically checking doors.
“Nothing in front,” I thought as I looked through the peep hole.
I ran to the back door and looked out. “Nothing there, either.”
I ran downstairs and shouted at my mother-in-law in her walk out basement apartment. “Has someone been pounding on your back door?”
“No, no one.”
I checked my Ring Doorbell app on my cell phone. There was nothing on it either.
I guessed that it was all just a nightmare.
I had been having other nightmares that evening too. In one I was wrestling with someone who was beating me with a baseball bat. In another, I was awkwardly talking to church people in some kind of meeting room. They seemed sad.
“Oh…. Wait a minute….” I thought. It was all becoming clear. I had attended my church’s business meeting the day before. It was only the second one I had been to in seventeen years. I wasn’t thrilled about going, but Patti and I wanted to show our support for our new senior pastor and this congregational meeting was his first in his new position.
We arrived late. Very late. We snuck into the back of the auditorium and found a seat on the step of the sound booth. I eventually scooted back on the floor into the sound booth, which felt even better. My anxiety about church business meetings seemed to evaporate as the meeting progressed. It was all very cordial and positive.
But no. As my nightmares had proved, even a great church business meeting like that one could trigger my PTSD.
For me, attending a church business meeting is like finally getting the courage to taste a food again that had made you deathly ill years earlier. Even if you know it’s not going to kill you this time, it still brings back bad memories, really bad memories.
This all began over forty years ago when I was an intern in a large mega church that was transitioning to a new pastor. The previous pastor was very famous and had a long tenure at the church. The current pastor had a very different personality. Add to that dramatically different pastoring and preaching styles – resulting in a precipitous drop in attendance and giving – and we had the perfect formula for explosive congregational meetings and board meetings, all of which I got to witness up close and personal.
It wouldn’t be long before I found myself in similar situations to what that poor pastor experienced: in both my second and third pastorates, I followed founding pastors with long tenures. Both of those pastorates had huge challenges. The first four years of my second pastorate were especially difficult. The congregational meetings during those years became so dire that I felt the need to take out additional life insurance!
Fortunately, the church and I were able to work through those difficult years and we went on to enjoy six more years of fruitful ministry. But the damage had been done. I had developed a morbid dread of congregational meetings.
The upside of all of this is that these experiences created in me a craving to see beauty in the church. I no longer cared so much about being a pastor as I did about genuinely obeying Christ’s command for believers to love each other. That, in turn, led me to the conclusion that loving each other begins with loving the neediest in our congregations: our widowed and single parents.
Of course, the downside is that I’m probably not going to be attending any more congregational meetings. I’ll be sending Patti as my proxy instead.
Sweet dreams.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
Since 2003 New Commandment Men’s Ministries has helped hundreds of churches throughout North American and around the world recruit teams of men who permanently adopt their widowed and single parents in their congregations for the purpose of donating two hours of service to them one Saturday morning each month. We accomplish this with a free training site called New Commandment Men’s Ministry
Learn how to mobilize your men’s ministry to meet every pressing need in your church here.
_______________________________________________________________
Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom
and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.
_______________________________________________________________
