If it was an error, its causes were honorable.
Ovid
Those who commit first-class blunders and blatant sins usually know it, and can begin to work on them. But sometimes the categories blur and the markings of a genuine mistake become indistinct. Is everything that appears to be a mistake a mistake?
Alan Taylor felt he was growing fat at First Presbyterian Church in Auburn, California. Not that he was putting on weight; Alan’s trim, well-groomed appearance spoke quietly of accomplishment. He suspected his ministry was assuming the indolent ease.
His nine years in Auburn, a burgeoning Sierra foothill community where forty-niners once panned for gold, had been happy. Maybe too happy. After unbroken success, Alan began to wonder, Am I becoming content to relax and enjoy the journey? His people freely expressed their affection for the Taylors, giving them tickets to the Sacramento Symphony and the use of ski condos at Lake Tahoe. Alan could never be called a freeloader. First Church had grown from four hundred to nearly a thousand under his leadership. But his tendency to reside in the ease of a comfortable position disturbed him.
Writing had provided Alan’s recent excitement. His two books produced speaking engagements and ego strokes. Writing stimulated him, while the church remained a predictable, mastered enterprise.
“I don’t want to just be coasting in my forties,” he confided to his wife, Sue. “I need to stay alive, to be challenged by my ministry, not just by my next book.”
Alan’s daughter contributed to his growing restlessness. “For fifteen years Nikki was a kid you’d want to order from a catalogue,” Alan explains. “She was everything you could want.” But adolescence didn’t treat her gently. Boys twice broke her heart, she was cut from a team, and, in her failing self-esteem, she took up with the wrong crowd at school. In a year’s time, Nikki degenerated from the perfect child to the epitome of a troubled teen.
The Taylors agonized over every turn for the worse. After an all-night escapade with a boy they had forbidden Nikki to see, the fallout included her extreme rebellion and sullenness. Alan and Sue became frantic. Something had to be done for Nikki — and for the family! “If we can only get her out of town,” Alan suggested to Sue, “if we can extract her from the chain of negative elements, Nikki might have a chance.”
Enter Broadmoor Presbyterian Church of Seattle. Ralph Bates, the chairman of the pastor nominating committee, had appreciated Alan’s books. He called Alan, and as they talked over the phone, he said he considered Alan a dynamic “name” pastor able to lend prestige to Broadmoor Presbyterian.
The church was a proud dowager, existing on a handsome endowment and waning reputation. Ralph could remember when it was the church in Seattle. At one time the university president, the mayor, and half the physicians at Harborview Hospital were members. However, the last seventeen years witnessed an exodus of members as Dr. Hedgepath had occupied the pulpit with friendly gentility but ebbing effectiveness.
Ralph figured the church needed a shot in the arm, and Alan Taylor was the man to do it. He and two others flew to Sacramento to talk with Alan. Alan met them at the airport and took them to Old Sacramento for lunch.
Ralph painted a glowing picture of Broadmoor Presbyterian: its grand history, the beautiful Gothic sanctuary, and its pivotal role in meeting Seattle’s needs. Then he turned to Alan and flatly declared, “I believe you’re just the man we need to restore the eminence of our church.” The other two committee members looked surprised by Ralph’s license, but Alan was hooked by the challenge.
They spent the better part of a day talking about the church and Alan’s strengths in ministry. The delegation returned to Seattle convinced they had their man, and that evening Alan rejoiced with Sue over the exciting prospects. After the Taylors’ candidating trip to Seattle that took on the air of a royal visit, the pieces all fell into place. Alan announced his resignation in Auburn, and the Taylors were warmly feted and graciously released. By summer they were ensconced in a Seattle home with a view of Mount Rainier.
Excitement bubbled in the Taylor household — until the first Session meeting. Alan was completely unprepared for what transpired: “I expected some kind of jockeying for position over who runs the church. Usually the elders take an initial wait-and-see approach, but not at Broadmoor. Ralph Bates tied into me that very first meeting.”
Dr. Jekyll came on like Mr. Hyde. “Alan,” Ralph chided, “who gave you permission to change our worship? You may have played fast and loose in laid-back California, but this is Broadmoor. Traditions mean something here.”
Is this the same guy who told me Broadmoor needed changes? Alan wondered. What gives? All I did was move the announcements to the beginning of the service. Alan backpedaled. “Ralph, I’m confused. I didn’t mean to step on any toes, but I thought from our conversations in Sacramento that Broadmoor was ripe for innovation.” And why a public forum to upbraid me?
Ralph responded with an air of innocence. “I’m sorry if you were misled, but we need some stability now, not a lot of new ideas floating around.”
Who did he think misled me? Alan wondered. He felt the victim of false advertising.
The reality of Broadmoor Presbyterian, at least as Ralph Bates now painted it, was not at all to Alan’s liking. He had come to give strong, innovative leadership to a church wandering in a muddle. That enticed him. But this?
On the way out of the meeting, Ralph steered Alan into a corner. “Alan,” he whispered, “what you want to do, this church needs. But wait. Let me be a buffer for you; lay low for a while.”
“But that’s not me. I’ve always been a strong leader, and this place needs a leader. In two years, it could go totally dormant!”
“Alan, I know this church. Don’t upset the gentry. We’ll all look bad.”
“I’ll think about it” was all Alan could promise. So now he wants me to chaplain the status quo, does he? And why was the rest of the Session so strangely silent?
Alan had enjoyed warm relationships with the chairmen of previous calling committees. They had become his best friends who stood with him in difficult times. In Seattle, Ralph Bates proved his chief antagonist, opposing Alan at every turn. It disheartened Alan as their views of the church and Alan’s role in it clashed like two air masses over Kansas.
Other unexpected problems fell on Alan with the leaves of fall. The church ethos differed from Auburn to Seattle. In California the people represented a plethora of backgrounds, so no one way of doing things prevailed. Not so in Seattle. The congregation of Broadmoor Presbyterian cherished long-established expectations. This caught Alan off guard.
For instance, an unwritten assumption governed staff size: There shall never be more ministers than when old Dr. Kennedy was pastor in the glory days of the late fifties. If he could handle things with two associates, so can anyone else.
For Alan, adding staff back at First Church had been a management matter, not a visceral statement. He couldn’t live with such an arbitrary imposition. He informed the Session, “I need another staff pastor. Three of us cannot adequately meet the needs of a two-thousand-member congregation, especially if we intend to grow!” Ralph opposed it vigorously, but the Session eventually approved it. The feeling was, “You’re the new pastor; we’ll go with you this time and see what happens.” Although he won the battle, Alan had shed some blood on the battlefield, and he had never been wounded like that before.
What have I done here? he wondered. Did I panic and bolt when I should have stayed put in Auburn? Did I make a decision in the midst of emotional turmoil and turn off my brain in the process? Was I making God’s decisions for him? And if so, is all this the result of my disobedience?
A second front drained Alan’s resources from the church battles: Nikki did not take the move well. Seattle was not her home. She missed the hot summers and the inner tube runs down the American River. Too insecure to make new friends in an established social climate, Nikki retreated into her bitterness over what had been “done to her.”
Throughout the summer Nikki coped by sleeping fourteen hours a day. With school in September, her passive symptoms of depression turned active. “Mom,” she ventured one day dragging in from a terrible day at school, “you and Dad would be a lot better off without me, wouldn’t you?”
Sue was startled. “What do you mean by that?”
“It’s just that I’m such a loser. If I were dead, you wouldn’t have to bother with me any more.”
“Nikki, that’s not at all true, and you know it!” Sue was stunned, but when she found a large bottle of sleeping pills squirrelled away in Nikki’s dresser, she and Alan hurried her to a psychiatrist. Afraid they might lose Nikki, they wondered, Have we made a fatal error?
The combination of Nikki’s troubles and the dashing of expectations for the church shook Alan. The excitement of the move had bleached out in the first wash. With Ralph nipping at his heels like a hyperactive sheep dog, the Session meetings drained Alan. The people seemed cold and distant, as if they were waiting to pass judgment on what this bigshot from California could perform.
“By December,” Alan recalls, “I was one day away from leaving the ministry. I contacted a friend in business to see if I might do something besides preaching. If somebody had come along with an offer, I’d have been gone.” The gray Seattle days obscured his view of Mount Rainier.
Alan’s problem with Ralph, although unexpected, was probably inevitable. Fortunately Ralph exercised considerably more sway in the church Alan came to than in the one Alan eventually fashioned. Ralph’s star gradually faded as Alan’s ascended. But Alan couldn’t initially foresee that.
In the midst of his distress, Alan took some missteps. “I became impatient,” he recalls. “I forced almost immediate changes. I later counted thirty-one changes in the first year alone — big things like raising the budget and proposing new staff. Somehow we survived, but the changes came more because of my ego needs than church needs. Since I had made a mistake in coming, I felt I had to make the shoe fit me — and fast — just to survive.”
One fellow stomped into Alan’s office and said, “You’ve stolen our church!”
“Whose church?”
“Our church,” he replied.
“Yours?” asked Alan. “Who owns it?”
“Those of us who started it,” he grumped.
Alan’s counter, “We’re Christ’s church,” rang a little empty with all his maneuvering.
Such was the resistance he encountered with the charter members. Only Alan’s pulpit effectiveness and his credentials from many years of pastoral experience covered for his over-zealousness to “shape up the church.”
Alan began recovering from his mistake in pain’s forced self-examination. What am I in this thing for? Is it pleasure? Recognition? Maybe I was spoiled in Auburn. Titus was surrounded by liars and gluttons; maybe this is my Island of Crete. Who am I to say there’s not some reason for my going through this?
He also took refuge in his marriage. Sue shared the trauma over Nikki and much of the shock of going from a loving, affirming congregation to a more standoffish group. Together they endured what they called “a major change in temperature from a warm shower to a cold.”
Eventually the cold shower warmed. Alan’s humor and warmth lodged in the congregation and started reflecting back on him and his family. People reached out individually. “We started getting dinner invitations,” Alan remembers. “Then we heard that nearly one hundred had gathered in a home to pray for us and communicate support when rumor had it we were unsettled.”
People broke through the cold barriers Alan originally felt. “They gave encouragement enough that I could take the next step until finally I could start walking again” is how Alan put it. That second wind kept him from gasping for oxygen elsewhere.
One of Alan’s heroes, a retired saint, buoyed him. “Alan,” he said, “there isn’t one church reaching Seattle like you can.” To Alan that was like saying “Sic’em” to a dog. It gave him a challenge; it helped him look outside himself. Perhaps pride had something to do with it, but it rekindled Alan’s vision.
Later, visitors from his Auburn parish told him, “Now we see why God led you here. Though we miss you, we realize this is a place where you can really minister.” They perceived what Alan, in his struggle, was missing: his “mistake” was not without redeeming factors. Their encouragement added a page of affirmation to a narrow volume.
Probably the pew-to-pulpit communication accomplished the greatest remedial work. “Every preacher receives communication from the pew while he preaches, both good and bad,” Alan observes. “The pew was my sustaining grace. I was saved by the timely comfort telegraphed by people inspired by God.” In doing the work of the ministry, Alan began to receive the rewards, even when interspersed with brickbats from other quarters.
No dramatic turns catapulted the Taylors into bliss. For many months they lived day to day with the dreary results of a decision that for all the world sure felt like a mistake. With an occasional tactical victory in Session, with a rising incidence of pleasant encounters with parishioners, with a rare period of sunshine in Nikki’s struggle, with the belief that God intends to mend mistakes, but mostly with dogged determination not to stumble recklessly into another blunder, Alan, Sue, and even Nikki weathered that Seattle move.
Three years later, with the church once again a sound vessel on a new course, Alan breathes a sigh of relief, cautiously thankful he didn’t jump ship in the rough waters.
Was It a Mistake?
Did Alan make a mistake going to Broadmoor? Three months after arriving in Seattle, Alan wanted to abandon the ministry altogether. “I thought getting Nikki out of Auburn would be good for her,” Alan explains. “I thought a new challenge would stimulate me. I was wrong. I had used the wrong criteria to force a move. Maybe I was trying to make God’s plan fit my expectations.
“Yet, I believe if I am sincere despite the emotional trauma I am under, if I am following the light as best I know how, even if I make a mistake, God will rescue me. And I’ll grow through it.”
That’s exactly what happened to Alan in Seattle. “The church will never become completely what I expected, and I doubt Ralph will ever be on my side. But he’s coming around. After playing left field without a mitt for three years, maybe he’s beginning to understand the rest of the team is following the coach’s direction.”
For agonizing months it had all the symptoms of a colossal mistake. But is something a mistake that begins like a mistake, develops like a mistake, and feels like a mistake, even when it doesn’t end a horrendous mistake? Perhaps God’s very ability to redeem our blunders colors the picture in hindsight.
“Who knows when to measure a mistake?” Alan muses. “Do you measure it when you first go to town and they stone you, like they did Paul? Or do you stick around and build a church? Broadmoor is a different church now than it was a few years back, but it takes a lot longer to turn a big ship than it does a rowboat.”
Alan is happy now — challenged, successful, and satisfied — without having abandoned Broadmoor Presbyterian. He wouldn’t choose to go through the wringer again, nor would he recommend subjecting a troubled teen to Nikki’s ordeal. Yet the God who reconciled Paul and Barnabas, who redeemed the libertine Augustine, who recommissioned the failed missionary John Wesley, who recovered conspirator Charles Colson — that God habitually uses even our seeming mistakes for his purposes.
Alan stayed at Broadmoor. Others leave their churches when the signs point toward an error. How do you know which course is best?
Copyright ©1987 by Christianity Today
