An Answer to My Very Personal Struggle

 "Lord, I'm not running from you." "I'm not running from anything." "I don't understand what is going on."

These very words have frequently escaped my lips during times of intense, confused, and struggling crying out to God as I tried to understand why things weren't lining up or happening for me the way they were for everyone else. I've known I was called to ordained, pastoral or missional ministry since I was a teenager. That calling had been confirmed over and over again throughout my life by many different people and in many different ways and experiences. Why were my attempts at pastoral ministry being so frustrated and fought against? As far as I knew, I was trying to do things the right way, and getting stuck and shoved to the side.

In my meditation this morning, "I'm not running from anything" was revealed to be a lie. Not a deliberate one to be sure, but a falsehood nonetheless. The truth is that I've been trying to hide and seek safety almost my entire life.

To use an analogy, where secular employment is concerned, I prefer working for large corporations with established structures, rules, and pay schedules, etc. To be honest, it just feels safe to me to be one of the numbers following orders. This mentality was also translated into my somewhat desperate search to be a part of and recognized by large, established church organizations and denominations where there are also structures, rules, protections, and the feeling of safety as I'm surrounded by like-minded people. This was true with New Tribes Mission, and probably explains why I clung to it so desperately even after being rejected by them in no uncertain terms. It is also, to a large extent, how I was taught. That is, I was taught that it is the right thing to do to submit the authority of the larger church and its leadership, to follow the rules and structures. To my autistic mind, structures and rules are comfortable. Having someone above you to tell you what to do is reassuring. The truth is, and this might come as a surprise to some, I really don't like confrontation. It raises my stress levels and can send me into a panic attack.

This is all well and good, but the problem I've been running up against for most of my adult life, from God's perspective, is that He didn't build me for that. He built me to be stubborn. He built me to be able to independently work on my own, and challenge church authority when it's disobedient to Jesus Christ. He built me to be compassionate and empathize with the outcasts and hold those "on the inside" to account. He didn't build me, or call me to ordination to maintain the status quo. He built me to challenge and change it, and if necessary, tear it down so it can be rebuilt as He wants it.

Furthermore, I've known for a long time, decades even, that I wasn't called or built to evangelize non-Christians with Jesus Christ. I was called and built to evangelize and disciple Christians with Jesus Christ. Another concept that flies in the face of the status quo because it presumes that something is wrong with the way things are. More specifically, He called me to go after the outcasts from the church, those who have been hurt, rejected, turned away, or abused by other Christians and the church in general. I've jokingly referred to myself as a "search and rescue" pastor in the past because of the circumstances and situations where I have been most effective in a pastoral role. But the truth is that this calling isn't a joke, and the need to go after the sheep who have run from the churches is overwhelming.

Several years ago, I received a kind of vision from the Lord about this, and was allowed to feel what He felt about the situation. It was overwhelming rage towards irresponsible and hurtful shepherds, and absolute empathy and compassion for the lost sheep. The vision was of sheep who belonged to different pens and pastures all owned by the same person, but tended to by different hired shepherds. But many of the shepherds were abusing the sheep. Some of them were pouring bad feed into the troughs. Some of them were shearing them of their coats during the winter to sell and leaving them cold and unprotected. Some of them were verbally, physically, or even sexually abusive towards their flocks. Some of them just didn't really take care of them, and neglected them so that the sheep were ill, unmanicured, unfed, sick, and even dying. As a result, some of the sheep bolted out of self defense the first chance they got. Some were able to fend of themselves on their own, some were caught and scratched up in thorns, some began to eat poisonous plants, some ate themselves off of cliffs. The owner of the sheep was enraged at the shepherds who had caused this, but his immediate focus was on caring for those who had run and gotten themselves lost, or hurt, or both. The shepherds would be held to account later. So he sends out shepherds into the wilds to care for them. Some of them respond, most if not all are wary at first, and some never learn to trust another shepherd again. Some can be brought back into pens and pastures overseen by responsible, caring shepherds, some are so hurt and damaged that they will never return willingly.

This is the reason why I have gone through the things I have. In order to tend to the sheep who had run or been outcast, I have to be one of them, and know what they are going through. I had to understand what it means or feels like to be poor, scared, pushed away, misunderstood, betrayed, abandoned, and held at arm's length. In all the work situations I've been placed in, almost all of them at or below poverty line regardless of my actual education or abilities, I've encountered people and their stories whom most pastors never see, or if they do, only briefly, and I needed to do this. I needed to go where the runaway sheep were, not expect them to come to me.

What is more heart breaking about this, is that these runaway sheep, many if not most of whom are millennials by the way, are a population which the established churches write off. It doesn't take much searching to find articles on why so many people are leaving the churches. Almost to a one, they are written by pastors or pundits who are either completely mystified about it, or who blame the runaway sheep themselves. They blame their favorite politically liberal scapegoats like the rise of LGBTQ equality, or multi-culturalism, or science and evolution, or anything else possible, except themselves. To a one, they seem to be incapable of looking hard at how they have tended the sheep for the owner. For many of them, it's not entirely their fault. It's how they themselves were taught to do it. For some of them, it's just a devastating failure on their part to remain in Jesus Christ and express His love, life, and person through themselves towards everyone, especially those outcast, abandoned, or different in some way.

I wasn't built, called, or trained by God to follow in their footsteps or become one of them. He had steadfastly kept that from happening, sabotaging my every attempt to "fall in line" and "get with the program" no matter how hard I tried. He built and called me to bring Jesus Christ, and every aspect of Him necessary, to the table. To heal and comfort those who are poor in spirit, hurt, and driven away, and to rebuke and repudiate those who, like the Pharisees, in God's name don't enter the Kingdom of Heaven and keep others from doing so as well. He didn't build me to just plant a church, pastor a church, or preach the Gospel. He built me to bring Jesus Christ to the church which has left Him behind, and no longer understands what it actually means to be His disciple.

This last point is why He put that nagging instinct within me that something was wrong with the church not long after the call towards ministry. It is the reason why I was put on my own quest to learn it myself from the time I was eighteen onwards, looking at the problem from every conceivable angle and viewpoint until things began to fall into place. And all of these things are the reason why I was led through so many different churches and denominations, to observe them from the inside, become a part of them, and build a basis of comparison, as well as to understand that there is no church or denomination where He does not have His people, whether or not we all agree on every little point of theology or practice.

The final thing about all of this is, I have known it or sensed it all or in part for years. I've written about it either whole or in part for years, and still I kept trying to flee to the safety of established churches or denominations, myself fearing the rejection of being different, having a different or even confrontational calling. The truth is that it has terrified me, and as much as I have protested to God that I wasn't running, He knew that wasn't true, even if I didn't. And also, I had a lot to learn and absorb before I was ready which I couldn't from the safety of an established church or seminary's walls. I had to learn things which they couldn't or wouldn't teach me. I had to be able to see the reality of things without their tinted glasses.

So where do I go from here? I think I know what path I need to walk, and where it needs to start, but I can't go into details about it here, not until I have confirmation on other things which are in play.