The Celestial Con Man

Until recently, “con man” was not one of my metaphors for God. But as I reflect upon a recent ministry experience, it seems totally appropriate. Let me explain.

Three years ago, my wife and I accepted a “call” to pack up our belongings, say goodbye to everyone we knew, and move 3,000 miles away to minister to young adults on the West Coast. A part of the job description that especially excited us was the prospect of beginning a new, alternative worship service in a rather traditional church setting. I remember enthusiastically discussing this possibility with my supervisor-to-be and other members of the pastoral staff during my interview weekend. We were stoked!

But as the months wore on, our zeal for the new service began to wane as it collided with one of the unfortunate realities of church administration—the agonizingly slow rate of change. Strategic planning, meetings, budgeting, more meetings, proposals, reports, still more meetings… Truly, we observed, the gears of the ecclesiastical machinery turn slowly. The months became a year.

We consoled ourselves with the thought that “surely this year will be the year.” And for a while, at least, it appeared we were right. After still more preliminary budgets, reports, and yes, meetings, it looked like the service would have the green light to begin during the fall. But inexplicably (to me, at least), we learned there would be another delay: the service would be postponed until the following year, we were told. My wife and I began to ask ourselves (and God) if it was time to leave.

We sensed God’s leading to stay, so we did. Then, at the beginning of 2006, our senior pastor decided that we would definitely launch the alternative service as a month-long “worship experiment” in the fall. Not as a full-fledged, permanent worship service, more of a “let’s try it and see how it goes” approach. We were hoping for a bit more buy-in, but at least it was something.

Our core group met through the summer to dream, plan, and pray. Momentum was building. Finally, the big night arrived. Our worship leader welcomed about three hundred folks to the new service and we were underway! The whole month was pure adrenaline rush for me, a blur of phone calls, e-mails, sermons, and worship rehearsals, and, of course, meetings!

At the end of the experiment, the feedback from our church body was overwhelmingly positive. What’s more, church leadership was supportive of the service continuing. I should have been thrilled, but oddly, I wasn’t. although a part of me was still glowing from the success, I had to admit that I was exhausted. It wasn’t long after that realization that I submitted my resignation and we moved back to North Carolina.

A holy set-up

I could give lots of reasons for my decision: the poor fit between my responsibilities as the leader of the new service and my actual gifts and passions, my evolving understanding of the word “pastor,” my growing responsibilities as a husband and father of three small children. But what most intrigues me about my time in the Pacific Northwest is the way that God so masterfully set the whole thing up.

From the perspective of hindsight, the whole thing is almost comical. We moved cross-country in order to begin a new worship service, waited nearly three years to do that, only to realize that in the end it wasn’t really what we wanted to do after all.

It almost goes without saying that the experience had us scratching our heads for a while. Thankfully, a mentor shed some light on the situation by pointing me to a rather obscure verse from the book of Hosea: “Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her” (2:14).

The Hebrew word here for “wilderness” (midbar) more accurately refers to the desert wastelands. I can say that we quite literally experienced this verse during our time in the arid foothills of eastern Washington, a part of the state far removed from the near-constant rainy drizzle that graces Seattle. Our particular valley averaged just eight inches of rain a year!

It seems that God “allured” us into moving there with the idea of launching an alternative, non-traditional worship service. He led us into the desert, far away from our support network of family and friends and everything that we knew. But in the midst of those three years of waiting, struggling, longing and crying, we experienced God “speaking tenderly” to us, reminding us of his presence, that only he (and not ministry success or career advancement) can truly satisfy us.

As I reflect more on my own story and listen to those of others, it seems to me that God does this a lot: from our perspective, he “tricks” us into doing something or going somewhere under the guise of some project or relationship, and then when we get there we find he has much deeper purposes than said project or relationship.

The end of ourselves

The saying goes that about 90 percent of the time, things don’t turn out the way we think they’re going to. Biblically speaking, confounded expectations seem to be an intrinsic feature of the terrain of discipleship. Even one as great as John the Baptist wrestled with disappointment while languishing in Herod’s dungeon: “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?” (Luke 7:20). And Jesus frequently had to confront the Twelve with the reality that he was not the kind of Messiah they were expecting. You might even say that Jesus “allured” them into relationship with him, only to subsequently shatter all their expectations of what that relationship would look like. Only after this shattering could they hear him speaking tenderly to them.

Could it be that a huge part of God’s agenda in such disappointing experiences is to bring us to the end of our own resources, to confront us with our practical idolatry so we’ll stop trusting in other things (chiefly ourselves) and learn to trust him instead? It’s a painful lesson (just ask the Israelites), but a vitally necessary one in our journey with him.

I find comfort in knowing that there is a method to the Con Man’s madness. Whereas a true con man schemes to betray our trust, the Celestial Con Man seeks to engender it. It is one of the beautiful, maddening paradoxes of the Gospel. At the end of the day, God is not out to deceive us but to deepen us, not to trick us but to transform us.

That makes him a con man worthy of our trust.

James Walters lives and ministers in North Carolina.

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