Here's The Story…

I figured now was the time to share the story.  Oh how creative and awesome is our God!

For those of you following our life, you know it’s been about 4.5 years of various disappointments, with regards to ministry.  Jeff shares his perspective of the past 50 months and the lessons learned, and if you want the long version of our San Jose story, you can click The Road to Santa Clara under Featured.  So in the past year it seemed like opportunity after opportunity would arise and fall through, arise and fall through. Through it, the lessons on Expectancy without Expectation came to the surface, as well as myriad other life lessons that God was gracious enough to work into our hearts, lessons that go beyond head knowledge. 

After the disappointment of finding out that we’d not be able to go on staff full-time with our church (as we’d expected), we applied for a youth pastor job in Lake Oswego.  But here’s the thing, I knew Jeff was not called to be a youth pastor.  He’s not above it, that’s not it, it’s just not what he’s wired for.  But we were desperate, and so even though I had that nagging feeling that this wasnot God’s best, I insisted that there was no being picky with regards to serving Jesus. And besides, we needed a paycheck!  During the interview process, we were taking a marriage counseling classs together at Mutnomah.  Our professor overheard that we were interviewing for a youth pastor job, and she said, “Oh you should meet my son-in-law! He’s a pastor in the area and their youth pastor just left so they might be interested.”  Well I thought nothing of it.  We went ahead and interviewed for the Lake Oswego job, and surprise surprise…didn’t get it.  They said, “It doesn’t seem like you’re wired to be a youth pastor.”  Surprise! 🙂 

So, we were back at square one. True to her word, our professor emailed her son-in-law and he contacted Jeff to see if we’d come in. They set up a day and time, and when it came, I said I didn’t even want to go.  “There’s no use,” I insisted.  “They’re looking for a youth pastor and you’re not meant to be a youth pastor.  I’ll not sit in a meeting and lie and say that that’s what we’re meant to do.”  Plus, I had morning sickness horribly, and just didn’t have the heart to sit through any more interviews.  But at the last minute, Jeff talked me into going.  “Let’s just go and be totally honest, just be ourselves, explain we’re not looking for a youth pastor job, and at least we’ve been faithful to do our part.”  Fine.  I went.

We fell in love with Pastor Joel, the son-in-law of our professor, and Chris, the operations director of Willamette Christian Church.  It was like we had an instant connection to them.  We were totally ourselves, at ease, honest, open about our disappointments and experiences.  We spent 2 1/2 hours just talking, sharing our hearts, hearing theirs.  ANd when we left we were greatly encouraged…even though they didn’t have a job available.  It seemed a little pointless to have the meeting when nothing would come of it, but I was still glad to have met them. 

Over the next couple months we visited that church a few times. And again, we fell in love.  The very first time we went I cried through the whole service, God was just ministering so deeply to my heart.  On the way home I cried so hard I would barely breathe. I wanted to be there so bad but knew there was no opportunity for us. The people were instantly kind and welcoming.  There seemed such an ease with the people, even on our first visit. Why, God?  Why show us a church we love but not let us be there? 

The weeks that followed Jeff had an interesting impression from the Lord.  He felt like he was supposed to take some time and sit down and write out his dream job, basically tailor make a job description that would fit perfectly with his spiritual gifts, abilities, temperament, experience, etc.  That seemed a little odd since we didn’t want a minstry to be about us, but Jeff felt strongly that God wanted him to see, on paper, exactly what He had made him for.  He spent quite a bit of time and came up with the job of an “Executive Pastor”,–I term I’d never heard before–basically the 2nd in command of a church who can do discipleship, leadership development, some administration and organization, and overseeing of staff, etc.  Jeff’s such a hybrid of relational and detail/engineering oriented, that this seemed perfect for him. Only one problem…I’d never seen a church hire one of these, at least not around here.  I joked, “Maybe you should email that to Willamette CC and see if they want one of those!” Of course we didn’t do that; we just waited and prayed.

Exactly one week later, Jeff got an email from Chris from Willamette, out of the blue, informing him that they were going to begin a nation-wide search for a person to fulfill the role of …yes… Executive Pastor.  She attached the job description and it was exactly the same as what Jeff had drafted up on his own. Are you kidding me?!  We were giddy with excitement.  Could this really be?

A few weeks later, after visiting a few more times and communicating a bit more, we got an email from Pastor Joel.  It was very kind, but we realized that we were kind of little fish in a big pond, and that the nation-wide search was likely to last months and months, and realistically, at least in our minds, there was no way we were really qualified.  Disappointment.  The same day we got another call from a denomination asking if Jeff would consider being the lead pastor of a small church plant here in our home town.  Sure! We were up for whatever.

So it sounded as if the church plant thing was a done deal and the Willamette thing was not.  Jeff interviewed for the church plant pastoral job and it went great.  They denomination leaders made it sound as if he’d hear back in a few days and probably begin the job in mid-October. Fast!  Then, to our surprise, Willamette called back and wanted an interview.  I didn’t even see any reason in Jeff going, since it seemed like the church plants thing was such a done deal, but Jeff insisted he didn’t want to burn any bridges or count the score before the game was over, so he went to the Willamette interview. Again, it went great. He loved it.  So now, we wait.

To our amazement, the church plant leaders, the ones who said it’d be just a few days, didn’t call back for three weeks.  During that time, Willamette communicated and explained that they’d get back to Jeff in a week…which they did.  They said they would meet as an elder board to determine the “next steps”.  That was on a Tuesday. I assumed by “next steps” they meant the next step in the huge nation-wide process which would take until after the first of the year. I still figured the church plant people would get back to us any second and we’d be moving forward with that.  There was no way we could wait around until then, not knowing if we even had a chance in the world of getting the job.  That’s when God started to speak to my heart … (continued tomorrow)