Why Lots of Church Staffers Secretly Hate Easter

If you’ve never worked for a church, you may not know the level of tension and stress that comes with Easter Sunday. Among church staffers, Easter is often referred to as “the Super Bowl of church services.” I have been working in churches—in one capacity or another—for fifteen years, and this mentality has been present every single year.

I woke up this morning with an extra degree of anxiety because today is Monday and Easter Sunday is six days away. I barely slept last night. I have hardly shaken off the “pastor hangover” from yesterday, and I am already completely consumed with stress over how Easter Sunday will go.

(“Pastor hangover,” by the way, is when a pastor wakes up on Monday tired with a headache and can’t completely remember everything he or she said the day before).

But then—just now, actually—I had a realization, and it calmed me down. I realized that I don’t have to live like that. Part of what makes Collective Church so wonderful and special is that we get to make our own rules and set our own standards for what makes a successful Easter (or any other Sunday, for that matter).

I’ve been part of churches that crank everything all the way up to eleven on Easter. They pull out all of the bells and whistles—fog machines (for real), concession stands, gift bags, top-notch video production, popular cover songs (well, church popular, which means they are roughly three to five years past the point of being popular to the rest of the world), and everything else they can fit in there with the kitchen sink. Everybody is on high alert like an Emergency Room staff during a full moon. It’s crazy.

As a result, Easter for me has never been joyful or celebratory or fun. Instead, it’s been stressful and exhausting.

But like I said, I don’t have to live like that, and I don’t have to make my staff and volunteers live like that, either.

So here’s what we’re going to do at Collective Church for Easter: We’re going to have a church service just like we do every week. We will do everything we can do in order to make the experience good and interesting and creative, because that’s what we do every week. We will also have an Easter Egg Hunt for the kids, because it’s fun.

But we will do all of these things as ourselves. I’m not renting a sound system or a video projector or setting up a giant inflatable waving thing outside the hotel where we have our services because that’s not who we are.

I think Easter is often treated by churches as if they are going on a first date, and they want to make sure they show up in a super impressive way. We preach sermons about being yourself, and then we do everything we can to make ourselves seem cooler than we really are.

And we don’t have to live like that.

Do I want people to attend our church on Easter? Of course I do. And I would be thrilled if they decided to come back again. But if they do come back, I want them to recognize us when they get there. That’s why we will be doing our Easter services as ourselves.

Easter is a time when we celebrate resurrection and renewal—when we remind ourselves that there is a better story that we are invited to participate in. Should that really be loaded down with unreasonable expectations and undue anxiety?

So I’m letting us all off the hook. We will not treat Easter like the Super Bowl of church services. We will treat Easter like a normal Sunday in which we try our best to give people a meaningful experience.

(You should know that I'm writing this for myself as much as anyone else. I plan to revisit this post several times this week as the anxiety rises and falls.)

If we are to be the kind of church that offers grace and peace to our people, we need to be open to receive that same grace and peace when we feel the greatest pressure to perform.

So Happy Easter, everybody.

Grace and peace be with you.

Welcome to Church. We Will Disappoint You.

Since starting Collective, I have encountered lots of wounded people who feel that their wounds are the result of a former church experience. I have lost count on the number of times I have heard people say,

“I was burned by a church,” or

 “After that happened, I never wanted to go back to a church again,”  or

“I can’t believe a church could treat someone that way!”

Or some variation on these statements.

There are lots of people who left (or were forced to leave) a church under dark, negative circumstances.

And I sympathize. In my life, I have been involved in a handful of churches—sometimes as staff and sometimes as layperson—and I have experienced the dark side of church just like lots of other people. When I left my last church job—before deciding to start Collective Church—I thought I was done working in churches for good.

(There’s a whole other conversation about what working for a church can do to a pastor or staff person, and I’m sure we’ll get to that at some point here on the blog.)

Whenever I hear someone’s story of mistreatment or unfairness within a church, my first emotional response is to get angry and silently promise myself that I would never allow something like that to happen in a church where I was the pastor. I listen as people grieve their past experiences, and I feel superior because I tell myself that Collective Church is above that kind of behavior.

But we aren’t.

After that first rush of self-congratulatory piety, my feet return to the ground, and I remind myself that I—along with every other person who attends my church—am fully capable of infliction pain on other people. Going to seminary didn’t immunize me from being short-sighted, and a decade and-a-half spent working in churches hasn’t protected me from waking up in the morning as a deeply flawed human being.

A few years ago, I randomly started thinking about a conversation I had with a high school student when I was a youth pastor. She came to me seeking counsel, and--as I remembered the conversation--I knew that I had given her bad advice. My heart was in the right place, but I didn’t know what I was doing. So—as I relived this event in my memory—I sent this young woman (now a full grown adult, graduated from college), and I told her that I was sorry and that I hoped she could forgive me for giving her poor counsel. She replied and was very gracious; she clearly remembered our conversation from years before, and she recalled with a great deal of accuracy what I had said to her. She said she knew that I had meant well, and she appreciated that I reached out to say I was sorry.

Here’s something most pastors don’t want you to know: we frequently have no idea what we are doing. We might pretend we do, but we don’t. Most of us went to school and learned a lot about Greek and Hebrew and Martin Luther and how to preach a sermon, but almost none of us have any great insight on how to help people in exactly the way they need to be helped all the time. Sometimes we get it right; but we get it wrong just as often.

When we first started Collective Church, I secretly agonized over the fear of making a mistake and making our church the object of someone’s “I-was-burned-by-a-church” story.

If you think about it, it’s pretty inevitable. Everyone has expectations over what their church should do and what people should say in a given circumstance, and when we don’t meet those expectations, people get upset. If a person misses church for three weeks in a row and they don’t receive a phone call, that person might complain that “I was gone for three whole weeks, and nobody cared enough to even pick up the phone!” But then someone else could be absent for three weeks, receive a phone call from a church staff person, and then complain that “I was only gone for three weeks, and then they started badgering me!” Believe it or not, I have heard both of these complaints, almost verbatim, from different people about the same church.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that a church—any church—is made up of human beings who are certain to make mistakes along the way. If you are part of a church for any length of time, there will come a day when you feel frustrated with that church. I guarantee it.

Nadia Bolz-Weber—a pastor in Denver—writes this in her book Pastrix:

Every human community will disappoint us, regardless of how well-intentioned or inclusive. But I am totally idealistic about God’s redeeming work in my life and in the world…. I wanted [the people in my church] to hear me: This community will disappoint them. It’s a matter of when, not if. We will let them down or I’ll say something stupid and hurt their feelings. I then invite them on this side of their inevitable disappointment to decide if they’ll stick around after it happens…. Welcome to [our church]. We will disappoint you.

Don't get me wrong: There are times when leaving is the right choice. I know of pastors who preach sermons or write blog posts about how it’s wrong or selfish to leave a church, even if you’re miserable. I won’t say that. Sometimes you need to go. If there has been abuse or chronic, systematic mistreatment of people, there comes a point when you may feel that your very presence in that place is a way of condoning the behavior—as if continuing your participation in that church somehow makes you complicit in the dark patterns. If you need to leave because of an injustice or because the situation cannot be redeemed, then you should go.

However, if you have been disappointed because of a misunderstanding or because of a personal conflict or because of some other inevitable side-effect of being in community with a bunch of other flawed, broken people, then can I invite you to look for reconciliation? Most churches are filled with people who insist that there is resurrection in the world, and sometimes we need to be agents of that resurrection. Sometimes we need to be the ones who allow for the possibility that redemption is still possible in this place.

Like Nadia Bolz-Weber says, I am idealistic about God’s redeeming work, and sometimes that means allowing a church to heal from the inside and hoping for some kind of renewal. Maybe the most honest experience of church some of us will have will be in the moments when we forgive and are forgiven.

As I said before, sometimes you need to leave. If you are in a toxic, destructive environment, you owe it to yourself to get out of there.

But if the conflict can be resolved—if an apology, a cup of coffee, a hug, or a handshake can somehow bring healing to a situation—then I hope you will keep trying. You owe that to yourself, too.

The church can be a beautiful place, even if it is filled with screw-ups like me.

What a New Church Building Is / Is Not

There is a scene in the movie Almost Famous where the band Stillwater leaves their tour bus behind and boards an airplane. The rationale for ditching the bus is that the plane gives the band a greater sense of legitimacy and they can increase the number of shows they play on a tour. In the scene, as the band and entourage walk away from the bus and toward the airplane, the young journalist William Miller looks back at the bus in earnest, a hint of sorrow on his face. They don’t seem to simply be trading one mode of transportation for another; they are losing a part of themselves. In artistic terms, they are “selling out.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about that scene lately.

For the past few months, Collective Church—the church where I pastor—has been preparing for a similar transition. Ever since the church was created in early 2014, our home has been the conference center inside the Marriott hotel near Texas Motor Speedway. But now we are only a few days away from moving out of the hotel and into our own space in downtown Roanoke, Texas.

We began at the Marriott for one simple reason: We had no place else to go. However, it did not take long for the Marriott to stop feeling like a “last option” and to start feeling like home. We made friends with some of the staff members, we developed a rhythm with the building, and we (or at least I) really looked forward to seeing who else might be in the hotel on any given weekend—a Corvette show, a medical convention, a conference dedicated to the care and keeping of competition rodeo horses (yes, that was one of them), etc. My Instagram feed is full of pictures of some of the more interesting neighbors we have had over the past sixteen months.

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And now we say goodbye to the hotel and plant our flag on an old office building on Oak Street in Roanoke. We look back at the tour bus as we board the airplane.

I have only worked for two other churches during my fifteen years of working in ministry, and both of those churches engaged in their own respective major building campaigns during my time at each of them. And as I participated in two different churches’ approach to building and moving, I learned one thing that is probably obvious to anyone reading this post: Moving into a new space is a really big deal.

Churches—pastors, staff, volunteers, casual attenders—place a lot of hope in the power of a new building. I have heard pastors tell their staff (with no irony whatsoever), “If we build it, they will come” (“they, of course, being lots of people). The New Church Building is often viewed as the silver bullet—the one unstoppable force that will vault the church into the next level, whatever that might be.

To be fair, lots of churches do grow when they move into a new or larger space. There are certainly a lot of advantages to settling into a new home. I mean, I can’t really critique this whole thing too much, considering the transition that my church is preparing to make. I’m not criticizing the need or the excitement attached to moving into a new space; I’m simply wondering if we have asked too much of our buildings—if we want them to be something that they cannot ultimately be.

In the name of full disclosure, I should tell you that this post is really more about me than it is about any other pastor or church. I have been mulling over what it means to move into a new church ever since I signed our lease back in February. So here’s what I want to do: I want to really consider what a building is, and in turn, what a building is not.

Let’s start with what a church building is not:

1. A new building is NOT a guarantee of numerical/financial growth

Like I said, lots of pastors view the building as a guarantee for growth, and sometimes that certainly happens. However, it is also possible that you will see almost no growth at all, OR you will receive a few new families, but you may also lose a few families because the church no longer feels like it did in the “good old days.”

I’m not saying we shouldn’t hope for growth when we move into a building; what I am saying is that we should not move solely for the purpose of getting more people or more money. I’ve seen pastors go into deep depression because they bet all of their chips on the hope that they would triple in size when they moved, and their weekly attendance numbers barely flinched. They gambled a lot of money (and quite often borrowed a lot of money) with the belief that the building would yield massive returns, and it hasn’t worked that way.

2. A new building is NOT a solution to all your problems

A new building can certainly solve some problems, but it will create just as many (if not more) problems. The time we spent loading and unloading our stuff into a hotel conference space will now be spent cleaning bathrooms, changing air conditioner filters, and picking up trash in the parking lot. The money we paid for storage will now be spent on utilities.

Also, people are still people, and random problems will always come up. When a pastor says, “Let’s just wait until we get into the new building, and this problem will take care of itself,” nine times out of ten, that pastor is kidding himself (or herself).

So here’s what I think a new building is...

1. A new building is an opportunity to join an existing community

Our church is moving into a specific neighborhood—Downtown Roanoke, Texas. This means that we should start asking ourselves how we can participate in the community—how we can contribute to the well being of our neighbors. If we act as if we are an island unto ourselves or the most important people on the block, we will miss one of the major reasons why any church should be part of a community at all.

2. A new building is an opportunity to be a host and not just a guest
For the past 16 months, we have been a church that moves around a lot. We’ve mostly been in the hotel, but we have also held services in school cafeterias and HOA clubhouses. As such, our function has largely been as takers rather than givers. We are always in transit, and we depend on the kindness of our hosts (which has been abundant nearly every week).

When we have our own space, we can begin serving new functions and asking new questions. How can we provide space for the people in our community? How can we invite people to sit with us at the table? How can we open our doors and invite people to find some kind of rest or peace within our walls?

So yeah, I feel a lot like William Miller looking back at the old tour bus, hoping that this move doesn’t cost us part of ourselves.

I’m hopeful that this new building will help us spend more time building community with one another instead of spending so much time packing and unpacking boxes, wondering where we could possibly get all these people together for a meal.

We may grow, but we may not. Call me a terrible pastor, but that doesn’t really feel like the point of all of this. The point is that we should be looking for a place to feel safe and at home.  If the Collective Church stops feeling like Collective Church—if we gain a building and lose our soul—we should have just stayed at the hotel.  But if we can provide hope and joy and peace and safety—if we can be good neighbors and serve people food and offer opportunities for people to join the conversation—then I will feel pretty good about boarding this proverbial airplane.

***

*Note: If you want to know when our first services in the new building will be, stay tuned. I will post here as soon as we are ready to go.

*Another note: I'm sure there are lots of great insights that could have been included here that I did not think of. I've never pastored a church that was moving into a new building, and I know that I have a lot to learn. So it's totally possible that a year from now I could write a post called "All the things I didn't know when I wrote that post about the building," or something like that. Feel free to comment and tell me what I may have overlooked here.

Little Hope Was Arson

There are people who I have failed as a pastor. And, without a doubt, I will fail more people before I’m done. This is a hard truth I have been trying to reconcile myself with, but I don’t like it.

I recently watched a new documentary called Little Hope Was Arson. The film begins as a true crime story revolving around a serial arson investigation in which the arsonists were targeting churches. The story takes place in East Texas (Tyler, Athens, Lindale, Canton, etc.) in 2010. The first church to burn was Little Hope Baptist Church (which is kind of a hilarious name for a church) in Canton, which also inspired the film’s title.

I have been to all of these towns, but I somehow missed this whole story when it was in the news four years ago. So as I am a Texan and love true crime stories and am a pastor, this film had me hooked from the start.

When the citizens of these towns learn that the church fires were done by serial arsonists, the initial reaction is exactly what you would expect: People wanted blood. You have quotes from citizens saying things like “God may forgive whoever did this, but that doesn’t mean I will.” Lots of people were interested in seeing the perpetrators dead. One of the FBI investigators has one of my favorite quotes in the film while discussing how citizens began trying to figure out who was behind the fires. He says, “This is Texas, so yes… they were armed.”

People wanted to protect their church buildings, and they were willing to kill in order to do this. Righteous indignation flowed through the communities.

Eventually, the perpetrators—Jason Bourque and Daniel McAllister—were caught and put on trial. Much of Little Hope Was Arson explores the backstories of these two young men, raising the obvious question: Why did they want to burn churches?

Without getting into too much detail, we learn that each of the boys had experienced a certain amount of pain in their own lives and—justified or not—they blamed God and the Church for much of their struggles.

There is a lot to be gained from watching this film. First of all, we learn to see the perpetrators of these crimes as human, and we get to know their families, which also serves to humanize them. But also—as a pastor—Little Hope Was Arson served as a very real reminder to me that I have a huge responsibility to the families who call me their pastor. Some people attend our services, and they are at a very low point in their lives. I must constantly ask myself and the other leaders in our church: Are we providing a safe place for these people?

Am I interested in controlling/manipulating/exploiting people in order to build my own empire, or am I tuned into the needs of the people who entrust me with their Sunday mornings?

I think about this a lot. It’s why I responded so strongly Elizabeth Esther’s book Girl at the End of the World and why I get so upset when I hear about people who have been mistreated by pastors.

There is a scene toward the end of Little Hope Was Arson in which the pastor of one of the burned churches says to the two young men who set the fire: “We are sorry. Please forgive us.”

How powerful is that?

There are some pastors who do unbelievable damage to lots and lots of people, and when they are confronted about it, they defend themselves by saying, “I’m under attack by Satan,” or “I’m being persecuted by Atheists” (this has also been Kirk Cameron’s explanation for why his new movie is the lowest rated film on IMDB’s website). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen pastors do enormous amounts of damage to people and then completely fail to take responsibility for the wounds they have inflicted.

That’s why it’s so powerful when a pastor looks at the two young men who burned his church to the ground and says, “Please forgive us”—because this kind of humility is not in our nature.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, I have failed people, and I will certainly fail people again. I am human, and there are lots of moments every day when I feel like I have no idea what I am doing. I am trying to learn and improve and serve the people of my church as best I can, but sometimes I am just going to fail. I only hope I have the courage that this pastor in the film had when he said, “Please forgive us.”

Little Hope Was Arson is currently available On Demand and in theaters in select cities

 Click here to learn more about the film

One Week

One week.

That's how long we have until Collective Church is officially born into existence--becoming a church that gathers for services every week; a church where people come to ask their questions, heal from their wounds, and engage in conversation. 

This is not the path I thought I was on.

I thought I was on a path of very little resistance--a path on which I had comfort and security; a path on which very little was required of me. I thought I was on a path of working for large churches, writing sermons for other preachers, and ghostwriting the occasional book. 

However, after five months without a church home, my path (and my family's path) is about to change forever, and I could not be more excited.

When the path that you're on changes--with or without your consent--it can be terrifying. It forces you to question your calling and your function in the world. However, it can also be liberating, because perhaps the new path is the thing you were born to do.

The path I was on was filled with other people who constantly were asking questions about how big a church can get, how much money a church can raise, and how many campuses a church can have. I don't begrudge anyone that path, but it certainly is not a path I was meant to travel.

I'm much more interested in creating space for people who want to engage in conversation. I'm interested in doing something that I love and that I believe in.

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how many people will respond to what we're doing at Collective Church. This could be something big, but in all likelihood, it will probably be something that remains somewhat small, and I am fine with that. I would rather have ten people who are engaging in the conversation than a thousand who don't care. I would rather be part of a small community where people are free to travel their own journeys than a large community that expects everyone to agree with everyone else.

Regardless of its eventual size or shape, Collective Church starts one week from today--Sunday, February 16.

So I will spend this week preparing--working on my sermon, ordering lots of donuts, and praying. Lots and lots of praying.

Thanks for reading. I will look forward to sharing what happens next, whatever that may be.

Grace and peace.

The Rare Benefits of Food Poisoning

Yesterday was Collective Church’s preview service—and I almost missed the whole thing.

For the past two weeks, I have prayed every day that God would spare me of getting the flu until after January 19, the date of the aforementioned preview service. I have been absolutely terrified that I would catch the flu just in time to miss the service, and everybody seemed to be getting it. So I have been desperately praying, “God, please don’t let me get the flu.”

And I suppose my prayer was answered… technically.

Friday night at midnight, I woke up with a terrible pain in my stomach and nauseated in a way that only means trouble ahead. Two hours (and several trips to the bathroom) later, I drove myself to the Emergency Room. The whole time, I had two thoughts running through my head: 1) Don’t throw up, and 2) What am I going to do about the preview service?

Once I was checked into the Emergency Room, my nurse gave me something to tame the nausea (for which I will always be grateful) as well as the relentless pain. I was  practically immobilized, but at least I wasn’t hunched over in the bathroom, praying for sweet, merciful death. They ran blood tests and an abdominal scan, and the doctor said it looked like I had eaten something that was seeking hostile revenge.

“Have you been traveling lately?” He asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I was in Southern California earlier this week.”

“Ah,” he said. “Did you eat a lot of tacos?”

“….Yeah.”

“Well, one of them doesn’t like you very much.”

Well said, Doc. Well said.

At least it wasn’t the flu, right?

After the meds had worn off, I was released and drove myself home to suffer in private. All the while, I was obsessing over the preview service—now nearly 24 hours away. It all seemed to be falling apart, all because of a bad taco.

I texted my friend, Phil, and asked if he could preach if I was unable to make it. He said he could. I then deputized my wife and our friend Jackie to basically run the whole service in my absence. I contacted our children’s coordinator, Michelle, and let her know that she may have to run the whole kids’ area without me there to offer whatever support she may need. I posted on a couple private Facebook pages and pleaded for prayer.

Several people from those groups contacted my wife to ask if they could help. All of a sudden, lots of people rose to an immediate and unexpected challenge. The service was going to happen with or without me.

Of course, I still wanted to be there. I’ve been working for months on this project, and I really was not excited about having to miss it because of a bad taco (or whatever it was). All day Saturday, in my moments of consciousness I prayed that God would cure me of this awful, awful sickness.

As late as 3:00am on Sunday, I really didn’t think I was going to make it. When my alarm went off only a few hours later, I took some medicine that had been prescribed at the hospital, and I left my house, hoping that the medicine would stand its ground until noon.

While I was weak, shaky, and light-headed, I didn’t feel sick once all morning. I preached two services, and I think it went alright. So apparently prayer works after all.

But the real story here is how everybody else responded. That is to say, everybody who was contacted on Saturday was determined to make the service happen. While I may have needed to be there for my own emotional well-being, they certainly didn’t need me in order to have church. All of the responsibilities that were delegated the day before remained delegated, and it all went fine. I learned what these people are capable of, and I am so grateful to have them on my team.

We often have this idea of church as a show—this fragile thing that could fall apart if the wrong person can’t make it or if the electricity goes out. We count on the “production elements” being exactly what they have to be—the music leader is sufficiently prepared, and the preacher has his or her message perfectly memorized, three application points and all. The right people have to be “on the stage” lest the whole thing goes down in flames.

But that’s not what I saw this weekend. I saw people who so deeply wanted church that they were willing to create it themselves. I saw people say, “If Rob can’t do this, we will do it ourselves.”

It was beautiful and profound and all the things I have wished church could be.

And I never would have known any of this if I hadn’t eaten that taco.

I am so grateful to be starting this journey of faith, hope, and love with some of the most dedicated people I have ever had the privilege to know. I am grateful to these people who are willing to say, “We want church, so we will do whatever is necessary to have church.”

So to the people of Collective Church: Thank you for being my community.

Thank you for your love for what we are doing and this Jesus for whom we do it.

Thank you for being unstoppable, even when I have been sufficiently stopped.

Thank you for being stronger than a bad taco.

I can’t wait to see you all again on February 16.