Musings on 25 Years of Ordained Ministry--12

Leaving Joy--#2

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, for good reason, has procedures and processes in place. Organizations, including churches, need them to prevent chaos, misunderstandings, and preventable problems. Admittedly, Joy was not always good at playing within the rules. It wasn't because we were anti-establishment or believed that we knew better. When you're a big congregation things move quickly and you usually end up asking for forgiveness because you forgot to ask for permission.

My call to start Grace was such a whirlwind that we had the ball rolling before we could meet with the Bishop and get his approval. We finally set up a meeting but he had to cancel. So on January 13, 2005, 3 days before Walt and I were going to officially announce the new start to the Joy congregation, we met with the Bishop. To my relief, he was extremely affirming, in fact very excited. When we told him where we were thinking of planting the new church he mentioned that there was some land out there for a new church. Walt and I had heard about it and we assumed the ELCA owned it. The Bishop also said that his Assistant was the one in charge of new plants and she would need to get in the loop. He would have her call me. But all in all, Walt and I took it as a good meeting and felt we could make the announcement.

More than a week had gone by and no call from the Assistant to the Bishop. So I called her. She was not nearly as affirming as the Bishop, understandably so, as we had been working outside of the system. She also didn't really know what was happening so she said that perhaps we could talk about a new church start in Anthem. She also said the Synod had no money for new church starts. When I told her we were going to take a group of Joy people with us and that Anthem was too far she had two reactions: 1) She was pretty shocked that we had already announced the new church start and 2) When I shared with her where I thought we might want to go, knowing there was land available, she told me that two other Lutheran churches owned that land and intended to start a new congregation there on their own. That's when I was shocked, as now we had bumbled into a partner congregation's mission area. We'd have to find a new area to meet. And, we had no access to Synod funds to get us started.

I was a bit panicked, to say the least. We had lost our ministry area and we had hacked off the Assistant to the Bishop and probably a couple of our partner Lutheran congregations and pastors.

That afternoon, Steve Talmage, then the Pastor of Peace Lutheran and one of the congregations that owned the land, left me a voice mail. He had heard about our new vision from the Assistant to the Bishop (who had set up a meeting for us for the following month). He was very affirming on the phone but he did want to chat.

I called him back immediately and quickly apologized for what seemed to be our encroachment into their area of ministry. Nothing like a big Mega-church seemingly doing its own thing with little regard for anyone else. But that wasn't what we were trying to do. I told him we had misunderstood about the land and that we would find a new area for ministry. At that point he said that things were perhaps changing in their minds; that perhaps rather than them starting the church, they would give the land to a Lutheran congregation that might start in that area. He said, "Perhaps God is bringing us together for a reason!" That phone call was an especially powerful gift in what could have been a very difficult situation.

After a year of meeting with Steve (who is now our Bishop) and Mark Huggenvik, former pastor of American Lutheran, the other congregation who purchased the land, their two congregations voted unanimously to give that 9.5 acres to Grace. What a day! What a God thing--to think two Lutheran churches bought a piece of land 4 years before Grace was a dream in my heart.

But the excitement, setbacks, and adventure were just heating up.