Getting Back on the Horse

I guess some wise person said somewhere back in the annals of time that the best thing you can you can do if you fall off a horse is to get right back on. It sounds like good advice - face your fears, refuse to be defeated, and all that stuff, but really I think the guy who said it was a moron, or more likely a Baptist preacher.

Anyway, here's what's going on in my life. Up until very recently I was a youth pastor at a local SBC church. Things were going well, life was good, but then I began to really try to critically evaluate the way I've always accepted that ministry is done and what we pass off to people as the gospel. The more I studied the more sure I became that most church-work is nothing more than an exercise in vanity and a drawn-out, glorified self-help seminar. I became particularly convicted by statistics that showed that students were graduating from high school and leaving the Church (universal) in staggering numbers, more than half and quickly approaching three-fourths. These students are leaving and they're not coming back. As I saw it, it didn't matter how great of a time kids had during their six years in our ministry or how great it was; if it wasn't impacting their lives for the long-haul then it didn't matter. We weren't really accomplishing our stated purpose. In light of that I set out to change the way we do youth ministry at my church. I'll be the first to tell you that I had no idea if those things would work but I thought that anything was worth a shot if it meant we could have a lasting impact on our students. Surely what we were doing and had been doing wasn't working. Well we changed some things, tried to become more others-focused instead of self-focused. We tried to move the focus from flashy services to small groups where real discipleship, prayer, and accountability could take place. It was all met with mixed reviews.

Anyway, while all this was going on I felt more and more isolated and alienated from the rest of the staff. Their vision for ministry was far different from the one that was shaping up inside of me. I don't think I'm right and they're wrong or vice-versa...it just seemed like we were going two different directions. In August it all came to an end. I lost/gave up my job and decided to end my membership there. It was my first turn at full-time ministry and the effects were devastating to say the least.

All of that to say my wife and I are currently "church-shopping." We've been visiting our local mega-church-mall - Lifechurch. Its fine there, the worship is nice and the teaching is sound, even if a little shallow. But we know we need something more than the 1 hour a week that's available there. We know we need people around to encourage us and hold us accountable. We know we need some sort of small group, the very thing that was always missing for us while we were too busy "ministering." But we're just having a hard time getting back on the horse. It's hard to get excited about finding a church and investing your energy and emotions there. Especially when you come from a place that you believed in so much and it crashed so hard.

So...anyone who takes the time to read this, if you wouldn't mind just dropping a prayer for us, that we would get connected and really begin to recover, I would really appreciate it.