How does a pastor lose 25 percent of his congregation? It’s surprisingly easy. For instance, he can start using wine for communion without adequately preparing the congregation. That is sure to lose a family or two. For the record, I had the elders’ full support and continued to offer grape juice as well. But I failed to realize how emotionally charged the change would be.
Foolish mistakes like that weren’t the biggest problems, however. I’m a lousy administrator and don’t have a good mind for details. Unfortunately, ignoring the business side of the church doesn’t make it go away. Early in 2011 I began having a vague sense that the church budget was in rough shape. As the year continued, I realized that my faith and optimism were actually naïveté. On April 30, all the illusions came crashing down when the deacons told me the church had used up all its savings and I had to take desperate measures, including finding a second job.
Three weeks later, I found myself in the back room of the Mount Vernon Starbucks, putting on my green apron for the first time. I clearly remember the anxiety I felt. I was worried how my second job would affect my church. I also experienced the normal fears of a first day at work. Will I be able to keep up? Is this a big mistake? Will the other kids like me?
My biggest concern was how this would affect my family. Grace and Sarah thought my new job was cool, but I knew their enthusiasm would wear off as they started to feel my increased absence. I had to work closing shifts, which meant that three or four nights a week, Marilyn put them to bed without me. You have to understand that tucking my daughters into bed is still one of the best parts of my day. I seldom miss it and feel guilty when I do, as if I’ve lost something I can never regain. Even now, a year later, writing about those lost nights is difficult for me.
On the other hand, I was also a little excited. I’d always thought working at Starbucks would be fun. I love people, I love coffee, and Starbucks is a great place for both. I was also looking forward to a job that ended when I clocked off. The busyness of that job was a welcome distraction from church budgets, unfinished sermons, and other challenges of ministry.
I was also feeling other things that day—disappointment, doubt, and failure. This was not the story I had written in my head. I had a different picture of success and thought it would come more naturally. I hadn’t planned on having to become a bivocational pastor. In theory, I believed working a second job in order to stay in ministry was a noble thing. In theory. But there I was, the second-oldest partner (employee) in the store, getting ready to serve coffee to the pastors I used to meet in that same Starbucks for coffee.
Coffee Ministry
The Starbucks era (as I now call it) wasn’t the first time God has used coffee to help me grow. When my home church invited me to join the staff a decade earlier, it wasn’t to fill a position, but because the senior pastor, Bruce, saw potential in me. I was pretty proud of that fact. But shortly after I started, we lost our receptionist, so guess what the brand-new, top-of-his-class pastor got to do? There I was, the most educated person on staff, answering phones and making coffee.
I wish I could say I humbly and gratefully accepted the post, but the truth is I resented it. I begrudged not being able to use my talents. I was frustrated no one cared that I could read Greek and that Bruce discouraged the congregation from calling him (and me) Pastor. Making the coffee became the symbol of everything I resented. Every morning, I put it off as long as possible, hoping someone else would do it. When I actually did make the coffee, I wasn’t terribly concerned about quality (no small offense in the Northwest) and wasn’t very diligent to keep the coffee area clean.
I’ve since learned that we tend to turn our noses up at some of God’s best gifts. We’re like a young child who’s just been given a $10,000 savings bond but would gladly trade it for a candy bar. Over the next few years, God used that coffee to confront my self-importance and teach me how to enjoy serving others. I began to see making the coffee as a gift—I carefully measured the coffee grounds and kept the area spotless. I started to pray for everyone who would drink the coffee that day. When we hired a receptionist, I actually missed making the coffee and even tried to arrive a little early each morning to make the first pot.
So you’d think I would have welcomed my job at Starbucks as a new learning opportunity. Instead, my feelings were mixed at best. I begged God to make everything go back to how it used to be, and I found myself resenting Starbucks just as I had resented being a receptionist. But I also knew that God was still very much in control and that he didn’t do anything randomly. Sitting in the back room of Starbucks, reading the company’s sexual harassment policy, I reluctantly believed my time there would be a gift, which is to say, an act of grace.
Running the Race
Many Christians think that grace basically means “Jesus saved me from my sins and now I get to go to heaven.” But grace is far bigger than that.
A couple years ago, I ran my first half-marathon. It was actually fun in a “that didn’t suck as much as I thought it would” sort of way. It was a cool and clear January morning, a perfect day for a race. We ran through the Skagit farmland, past fields, barns, and cows, with bald eagles circling overhead (watching for stragglers, I suppose). The foothills were covered in snow and looked glorious in the rare winter sun. Between the view and the conversations with my friend, I almost didn’t notice how much my feet hurt.
For this race, runners chose between running a 5k (3.1 miles), 10k (6.2 miles), or half-marathon (13.1 miles). At the end of the race, the 5k and 10k runners received a nice little finisher’s ribbon. But the half-marathoners got a finisher’s medal. A couple of miles into the race, the half-marathoners kept going straight while the 5k and 10k folks went to the right. I felt smug about running the “real” race. That smugness diminished significantly when I was passed by several senior ladies. It was completely gone two hours later when I crossed the finish line and narrowly avoided throwing up on the guy who handed me my medal.
Some Christians think grace means God paid your entry fees and put you on the race course, but now it’s up to you to run the race. Other Christians think grace means that if you try really, really hard but complete only the 5k race, God will give you a marathoner’s medal anyway because he’s nice that way. Neither of those goes nearly far enough.
To run with the racing analogy, grace means you’re a quadriplegic who can’t afford a wheelchair, let alone the entry fee. Grace means that the only way you’ll get on the racetrack is if Jesus pays your fee and carries you onto the course. Grace means that the only way you’ll run the race is if Jesus carries you every step of the way. And grace means you’ll cross the finish line and receive the finisher’s crown solely because Jesus carried you across.
What’s your role in all this? Your biggest job is letting Jesus carry you through the race. Invariably, this proves too much for you and me, and we end up head butting Jesus until he lets us wallow in the mud of our sin. Keep in mind that those are cow pastures you’re running by, so that isn’t actually mud. Eventually, we come to our senses and ask him to carry us again.
If that’s also true, is grace a convenient excuse to coast in complacency and do whatever we want? That question shows how little we understand grace. Grace saves us from both obsessive and complacent Christianity. It frees us from both legalism and sin.
Years ago, my friend Jason went hiking in the mountains of Tajikistan along the border of Afghanistan. Americans weren’t particularly popular in that part of the world, so he admits it wasn’t one of the brighter things he’s done. He said the trip up the mountain was hard enough, but coming down was a nightmare. His party was thousands of feet above the valley, making its way down what could be called a path only in the most generous sense of the word. It ran along a narrow ridge and was covered with jagged, loose gravel. Because the decline was so steep on each side, he didn’t actually walk down the path—he slid.
“The trickiest part was staying on the ridge with only a couple feet of leeway on either side,” Jason said. “If you focused too much on the dangers of one side, you naturally overcompensated and started to slide down the other side. The whole way down we had to constantly adjust our slide to avoid going too far off either side to a rather painful end.”
Jason survived and went on to get married, have kids, and take up safer activities, including raising poison dart frogs (he assures me they lose their poison in captivity) and being a missionary in Bolivia.
Picture yourself on that same path, but make it narrower and the drop-off steeper than whatever you imagined. Add fierce winds howling around you, nearly pushing you off one side and then the other. Now imagine a rope anchored every 20 feet and running the entire length of the path. Only when you’re grasping the rope do you dare to look up and enjoy the stunning view before you.
That path describes your Christian journey. The cliff to the left is destructive disobedience. This is complacent Christianity. The cliff to the right is legalism, trying to earn God’s favor by doing all the right things and being a good person. This is obsessive Christianity. Fall off either cliff, and you’ll end up in slavery.
The apostle Paul wrote, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1). He wrote “burdened again” because the Galatians had been saved from slavery to idols and sin, and now they were on the verge of being enslaved to legalism. Jesus had saved them from one cliff, and they were getting ready to cannonball off the other.
What does this have to do with grace? Grace is the rope that keeps you on the path. God’s grace, secured by Christ’s death, got us on the path in the first place. Grasping onto his grace is the only way we can stay on the path and enjoy the journey. And only by his grace can we safely make it home. No matter how many times we fall off the path, Jesus is ready to pull us back up by his grace.
Now I want you to imagine staying on that path without the rope. Does it sound difficult? Actually, it’s not difficult—it’s impossible. The winds of selfishness, lust, bitterness, and a host of other sinful desires threaten to blow us over the left cliff of destructive sin. As soon as we get control over those desires, we begin to feel pretty good about ourselves, and we’re hit by winds of pride and self-righteousness, pushing us toward the right cliff of legalism. Our only hope, every step of the way, is desperate dependence on God’s grace.
To be radically normal is to stay on the path and avoid both cliffs, completely dependent on grace.
The problem with the analogy is that it doesn’t convey how joy-filled the journey is. Try to imagine experiencing some of your happiest moments while walking along that narrow path—seeing your newborn child, going to Disneyland, enjoying your favorite meal…
Now we’re getting closer.
My time at Starbucks was a gift of grace. Through it, God helped me experience things I had only known in theory. For instance, God was kind enough to teach me a lot about patience through difficult customers. None of them tested my patience more than one particularly exuberant Christian. I’ll introduce her to you in the next chapter.