You Are There

Restoring Churches, People, and Places

Campbell

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498221023
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

You are There: Restoring Churches, People, and Places is a pastoral conversation about creation care. It is a pastoral voice shepherding Christian people in Christian churches towards discipleship that is all the way down to the dirt. In it you will find a pastor with time to talk with you and walk with you so that the fruit of the redemption earned by Jesus' life, death, and resurrection will make a real and substantial difference in your very own backyard. This book is not actually about you; it's about us as local churches. Each local church should care about its place because the church is where God uses the gospel to restore people, and God's restored people restore both people and places. This is what we mean by creation care. You, church, are a gathering of people defined by your faith in Jesus and the dirt you walk on. You are a people sent to that place. This is why it is good news that you are there.

Chapter 1

The Cute Little Nightmare

“This whole town could fit in my church!”

That is how I reacted to my first visit to Santa Margarita. It’s nearly true. The town is home to 1,259 residents within the village reserve, 1 elementary school, and 2 churches—1 Catholic, 1 Protestant. The church I came from could comfortably seat 1,000 on a Sunday in a brand-new facility. The old Community Church building in Santa Margarita could fit on its platform, three times over.

Was this where I was to be the pastor? Was I to lead the people of God in this place?

As my wife Julie and I drove from suburban Southern California into town for the first time to meet the committee who was seeking a new pastor, we were both excited and terrified. We were excited about the new possibilities for us, for our family, and for the work of God that we might take part in. We were terrified because all the people we knew and loved were behind us. The people who knew us, loved us, who noticed in our eyes when something was wrong and left flowers on our doorstep just to say, “I love you.”

Every pastor goes through this experience, at least once in their ministry lifetime, and it is as awkward as it sounds. Think a blind date, but with a hundred people at one time. Think going to bed with Rachel after a night of celebrating only to wake up next to Leah! Sound like fun? Actually, it sounds impossible, but that’s the way we do it. The Evangelical Free Church of America, the denomination that has meant so much to us for over twenty years, has a “placement process” that matches churches looking for a pastor with pastors looking, or at least willing to consider, a new church ministry. When the Free Church “Yenta” asked to take Julie and me for coffee, we knew what that meant. Dennis knew us, loved us, and took such a personal concern for our family that when he said, “I think you need to look at Santa Margarita,” that we listened.

We drove into town, and then right out of town before we even knew we had arrived. You’ve heard stories about towns so small you’d miss them if you blinked, and it’s true. Santa Margarita has one exit off Interstate 101 without another off-ramp for five miles in either direction. It’s either Exit 211 or it’s nothing. This was not quite what we expected. I had met the previous pastor, who faithfully served this church and town for nearly seventeen years. He told me stories of the place that had me envisioning some mix between the Mitford of Jan Karon novels and a Eugene Peterson book. At first I thought, “He lied!” A few years later, I’m convinced he was toning it down to not incite any pastoral jealousy in a brother.

That first visit didn’t actually go very well. First visits often don’t. The time with the people was amazing; the time with the place was difficult. Dave, the smiling, soft-spoken committee chairman, met us with a warm welcome and prayed for us. Dave always prayed for us. During that time in life we talked and met with several churches about serving as their pastor and only Dave prayed for us, with us, out loud, every time we talked. Dave prayed with us and then drove to our first visit in his blue diesel Volkswagen Jetta, just the three of us.

Now, a seasoned rural minister had warned me that every small church has a power broker in it. So, I figured this is it. Who else would be the first visit? Pulling into the driveway of the simple little bungalow, built to house railroad workers at the turn of the century, we could see an older woman sitting in the corner window that I have since learned she sits in nearly every day, reading the newspaper and keeping watch over her town. We entered through a side door without knocking—the suburban dweller inside of me was already uncomfortable with this. When we got inside, ninety-year-old Miss Hazel was playing the piano with her back to us, playing like only a seasoned professional could do. Julie stopped, grabbed my arm, and choked back some tears. The blue carpet, paneled walls, and gray hair at the piano felt like walking into her Nana’s house. Actually, we were walking into the house of the town grandma. If this was the power broker, we could learn to love her.

On the first night in town with the search committee members and their spouses we ate barbecue hamburgers, played a game of Apples to Apples, and told stories about our lives. I don’t remember if anyone drank wine, but in a wine region it seems to be par for the course. The formal questions and interviews followed later, but it all began like this: good people, enjoying each other. Those few days with the pastoral search committee were wonderful, absolutely wonderful. I could have stayed right there, laughing with these new friends, forever.

It was the smallness of the town and especially the smallness of the church that caused the terror in us. On a full day, the old split-level church could seat ninety-three if you folded the people in carefully. We affectionately named it “the cute little nightmare.” It was an amazingly cute, small-town chapel, but was insufficient for the day’s ministry and was approaching need of repair. The county government would not permit improvements without opening up the door to expensive modern retrofitting.

We walked down the turning and leaning staircase where the children gathered in rooms with bare concrete floors because, in a wet year, water could seep up through the concrete and flood the nursery. Jokes about how often the story of Noah had been told in that church seemed to be carefully scripted to go along with the tour, though we were assured that it never lasted for 150 days and that no soul had been lost yet. We could picture our young children, in a basement, singing Veggie Tales songs about Noah in hip waders. We returned home more than a little discouraged, not knowing how these people and this place would go together for us.

The debrief with our friends and counselors was difficult. We couldn’t quite translate our experience.

“That’s the church!” one of our friends exclaimed with not a little laughter as we showed off the pictures of our trip.

“Yep, there’s the front . . . and there’s the back, you’re looking at the whole darn thing.” I said in response, feeling somewhat defensive of this people and place that I had only just met.

“But you teach more people than that in a Bible study,” another added, suggesting that maybe this move would not be the right direction on the ladder. At that kind of moment, friends must find it difficult to not become Job’s counselors. If they say, “looks like a great opportunity,” then we would be leaving them.

A couple of wise counselors for us, who were themselves not quite at home in suburbia, spoke with a different tone. “Looks like a community that could fit you well, Robert,” they said. And that got us thinking.

Maybe the trouble was actually inside of us. Maybe this church was really a healthy body looking to raise up a new generation of Christians in that place. Maybe our experience was blinding us to something wonderful. Small church had been a bad experience for us in the past. Small church meant long hours and late phone calls. Small church meant high expectations and low pay. Small church meant the 20 percent of the people who do 80 percent of the work is actually under 20 people. For us, small church had meant exhaustion, underappreciation, personal failure, guilt, and outright pain. But did that mean it was true for this church?

Now began the long process of discerning with God the difference between our fear and reality. We didn’t put out any fleeces, since sheep are not readily available in suburbia. We’d probably use a goat now; every neighbor has a goat or two for weeding. Personally, I’ve never considered Gideon an example to follow. I would never want to encourage anyone to disobey a few times before obeying. I can imagine God saying, “You’ve got until the count of three.” This was more about examining our hearts. We needed to seek guidance in asking some difficult questions: What part of our fearful response has to do with Margarita and what part is our own past? What is something to go back to them and talk about? Is it appropriate to go and honestly ask, “Is one hundred people a good core or a dying church?” Can we ask about the absence of a youth program? How well have children done who grew up in this church? Can we ask more about the history of the people in the church, so we can learn their stories and feel the stability of three and four generations serving in one place? That is what we decided to do. We went back and asked a million questions, mixed in among times to play, eat, and laugh, which you just have to do in a place like this.

In this way, the people and place of Santa Margarita had already began to help the Campbell family grow in our walk with Jesus long before we arrived in town. They pushed us to set aside our fear and to trust Jesus. They invited us to walk with them and give up the control that comes from fear and risk a little bit on a people and a place in God’s great reconciliation program, the local church. The lessons they have taught me about restoring people continue everyday. There is something small town people know about Christian living on a human scale that most of us don’t. By scale, I mean that size, numerically or geographically, at which caring for people and place becomes inevitably impersonal, unneighborly. There is something that Christian ranchers know about a daily, absolutely true walk with Jesus that happens with actual people in an actual place. Their faith is lived out in the dirt that they nurture and the animals they feed. There is something about the people of God that I have only really understood after living in this parish. I have learned, hands on, the biblical truth that people an...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Cute Little Nightmare
• Chapter 2: And a Train Runs Through It
• Chapter 3: You Are the Bread and the Wine
• Chapter 4: I Walk in My Garden in the Cool of the Day
• Chapter 5: Going to Seed
• Chapter 6: Manure is Compost, Not Fertilizer
• Chapter 7: The Root of the Problem
• Chapter 8: Redeeming and Recycling
• Chapter 9: Just Plant Onions
• Chapter 10: You Are There
• Appendix
• Bibliography