As a caveat for all you casual readers out there, this post will probably not be entertaining. There probably won’t be very many sarcastic, pithy turns of phrase. There definitely won’t be any long-winded, profanity-laden half-thought-out rants. What there will be is a narrative of my history of involvement with various churches so that those that want to know me better will have more of an idea where I’m coming from. Also, there is a chance that this will be more than a little disorganized and that you will have to do some work to really see the narrative, but if I don’t write it all know, I’ll never get around to it. Also, I’m warning you that it is very long, over 4,000 words actually, so I don’t really expect you to read it all. Think of it as a reference for when you are wondering where in the world I’m coming from. So read on if this sounds interesting. If not, just wait until tomorrow. Or maybe later today, I’m not sure yet if any of my other thoughts will be half cooked by this afternoon.
I was born and raised in a church named Tieton Drive Bible Chapel in Yakima, Washington. I spent the first 18 years of my church life there, as well as several additional summers during college. I guess it would best be described as a sort of Plymouth Brethren style congregation. There was no pastor, or any paid staff for that matter. There still isn’t, as far as I know. Instead, the church was led by a group of 4 to 5 men: the Elders. There was also (and I keep using the past tense because for me it is in the past. I assume that much of what I am saying still holds true.) a team of Deacons who were responsible for more of the day-to-day issues of running a church, like the maintenance, the sound production on Sundays, that sort of thing.
I hate to say that it was a traditional church because I don’t think I know enough of “tradition” to make that claim, but I’ll say it anyway. To me, it was a traditional protestant-style non-liturgical church. We had three meetings every week. The first one was called “Breaking of Bread,” otherwise known as communion or eucharist or whatever. I still love the fact that we had communion every week (thought my family didn’t attend this meeting for the first few years of my life. Too many kids.) and have always looked for that in other churches I have attended. It was a relatively short meeting at which, for the first 30 minutes or so, any man in the congregation could stand up (or not) and say something. Maybe a prayer, maybe a mini sermon, maybe a prayer request, maybe a song request, which we would all then sing (out of the black book, or the red book, though at this meeting, it was primarily the black book, don’t ask me why). When “about that time” was reached, one of the men would say a prayer that would begin the communion time. After the prayer, the Head Usher would get up and start to distribute the bread. I never reached the status of head usher, but I did get to be assistant usher (the guy that hands the bread plates from pew to pew) starting at about age 15. We’d do the same thing for the grape juice and finish up with the offering. One thing I really like about the way we did our offering at TDBC (when I look back on it) was that we did it only at the “members only” service. That way, at our main service (I’ll get to it, hold on) any newcomers didn’t feel obligated to put some money into the velvet bags. I’m not saying that visitors weren’t welcome at the first meeting, they always were, it’s just that they rarely came. The Breaking of Bread meeting served more as a congregational time of togetherness, which I also like.
Hmm. I’ve only described one meeting from one of the churches I attended and I’m already at 500+ words. This could be a long post.
Anyway, the second meeting was your pretty standard Sunday School time. The kids went downstairs, sang some songs and then had short classes divided up by age. We would also have wicked awesome flannelboard stories. I don’t really remember much about Sunday School, to be honest. I remember more about the parties we would have at the end of the quarters. Those were always fun. In high school, we didn’t call it Sunday School anymore, but it still was. My parents taught that class for awhile, which was actually pretty cool. They let us paint our various high school logos on the wall and our names next to them, sort of a documentation of our time there. Now that I’m thinking about it, there’s not much at that church that my parents haven’t done. They are like the go-to people there. Back to the point, there are also adult Sunday School classes. I don’t know much about them because I never attended very often. After high school, I went off to college and during the summers I worked in the agricultural industry which means you work Sundays, so I don’t think I ever managed to attend an entire quarters worth of classes. There were usually two or three to choose from (yes, my parents were involved in teaching these too, though my mother was not allowed to teach a class with men in it).
Finally, we had our hour-long Family Bible Hour. This involved about 30 minutes of worship singing, which could be hymns or praise songs depending on who was leading it, and various other things. The mission moment (I’m sorry Mr. Nelson, but that was always my dedicated space-out time), announcements (done by my father for as long as I can remember) and other things as needed. Then, one of a relatively small group of men would get up and give a sermon about a bible passage. We usually structured the sermon series around books of the bible, almost like a bible study. There was no set preaching team (as far as I know) but it was usually the same 5 or 6 guys (many of whom were also Elders, my dad included) that talked. And I don’t mean to sound ungenerous, but some of them had no concept of relevance, pace, timing or theatre. Maybe their spiritual gifts had been misdiagnosed and they weren’t actually teachers. My dad, on the other hand, always ended on time and always held everybody’s attention. I know it sounds like I think my dad was, like, the best guy there, and to be honest, I pretty much do. He is one of two or three men that I would like to grow up to be like.
So, what else can I say about the church of my youth? Well, I guess I’ll try to describe it a little more in general. And the reason I’m spending so much time talking about this church is because I think it has had the most profound effect on my life of any of the churches I have attended.
Here’s TDBC in their own words.
We Are....
....Christians who believe the Bible to be inspired by God, the standard for faith and practice; that the Lord Jesus Christ, as the Son of God, came into the world, died a sacrificial death for our sins, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven and will return again to earth; that upon a personal acceptance of Him by faith one receives forgiveness of sins and eternal life; that there is one Church of which the Lord Jesus Christ is the Head and all who believe in Him are members.
So there you have it. Basically it’s a traditional Bible Church. A little bit Calvin, a little be Anabaptist, a little bit Reformed, a little bit Quaker and a little bit American. Fundamentalist, you might ask? Yes, and no. Yes in the sense that they are relatively strict about some things, particularly women in ministry, but no in the sense that it is definitely not a personality driven church. It’s actually pretty communal and loving, just from a Fundamental framework. It’s not a church from which you will be ostracized if you decide to leave. They encourage young people to attend Bible Colleges, but none of my siblings or I did, and my dad’s still an elder and one of the most respected men in the church. They hold to a pretty much strict Protestant individual, personal salvation model, you know, the bottom line being getting people’s butts into heaven. I made a primitive declaration of faith when I was, what, about 4? I don’t remember much other than that it was spring and I was outside with my mom. But, being the worrisome kid that I was (still am) I must have prayed that classic “salvation prayer” hundreds of times growing up, each time convinced that last time hadn’t really done it, that I would be going to hell unless I prayed it again. I guess that’s just how most kids understand things. But the good thing about this individualized, sola scriptura attitude is that it fosters a better than average knowledge of the Bible. Memorization and bible reading were always very important, and looking back, I really appreciate how much this has done for me over the years.
When I was growing up, the church was, well, old. Lots of old people calling the shots, you know how it is. And while I think that old people can be a great asset (something missing from our current church) it can also be a problem in terms of momentum, if you know what I mean. Nowadays, the church is growing (there is no official membership or anything, just a weekly count of people. It’s up to probably 150 or so now) and is pretty healthy. They’re getting lots of young people, lots of new babies and seem to be doing lots of good work in the world. So they must be doing something right!
But, on the other side of the coin, I don’t think that I would want to go back to TDBC as a home church if we sometime returned to Yakima. I mean, it’ll always be my home church in the sense that I will always be accepted and welcomed there (as is everyone pretty much, at least in theory) and that it was the church I grew up in. It’s just that my spiritual journey has taken me in a slightly different direction. I guess the biggest thing for me about TDBC is that women aren’t allowed in general ministry. As a kid, and even as a high school kid, I was convinced that this was the right way to do things, I mean, that’s what Paul says, right? But I guess I had an epiphany of sorts when I realized that I was dating a wonderful, brilliant woman who would never be allowed to stand up and say something that might help the congregation, while at the same time, a 13 year-old boy, could. This didn’t feel right to me, and it still doesn’t. Actually, let me backtrack about 9 years from that point. My mom worked/volunteered for a long time at the local Crisis Pregnancy Center. There was one point where she was going to give a brief talk about something related to the CPC (I don’t remember what) during our Family Bible Hour. I distinctly remember wondering why it would cause a controversy to do this. I mean, she’s my mom! She’s smart, she knows what she’s talking about, why shouldn’t she be allowed to say something about it? She knows more than anyone else? Eventually she did get up and say it, but what I most remember about the episode is how it didn’t seem to make sense that it was such a big deal. I guess from an early age I already started to see something strange about it. But I’m not going to condemn them for it because it DOES feel right for a lot of people. And like I said, the church is healthy so they’re doing something right.
Now, here's a picture of a squirrel waterskiing in case you were getting bored. Ha ha, look at him go!!
This leads me to my next stage. Actually, it doesn’t yet involve another church. I started dating Maggie our senior year of high school, and ever since that time she has been a huge factor in my spiritual growth. (Not to say that she has led me along my path. All along it has been more of a joint journey, each leading the other when we need to, growing together in our faith. At least that’s how I see it. I like to think that we have had profound and good effects on each other. I won’t speak for Maggie, but I hope she’ll agree.) First, there was what I mentioned above. Then there was the fact that she was Catholic (capital C). At times in my home church, Catholics could end up on the wrong side of the us-them divide. In particularly bad points they could be downright demonized. And, being the impressionable youth that all young people are, I bought it, not out of personal knowledge, but out of respect for my elders. Imagine what a shock it was for me to learn that, really, Catholics weren’t all that different from me! They didn’t sacrifice their young to Mary, they weren’t hell-bent on bringing about popery and world domination. In general, the Catholics that I met were concerned with the same things that my church was: helping others, loving God, doing good, loving justice and mercy, walking humbly etc. And their Mass, at least the Life Teen Mass at St. Paul’s was not all that different from our Family Bible Hour, except that eucharist was included. Now, I must mention here that I wasn’t comfortable with everything Catholic. I still can’t take communion at Mass because I refuse to believe in transubstantiation and I feel that it would be dishonest to take communion at Mass not believing it. But I don’t resent them for that fact. So really, Maggie was the beginning of my experience seeing things outside the structure of my little home church. Overall, I think the theme of seeing and understanding other traditions and being able to appreciate them is pretty important to my story.
Oh yes, I forgot to mention the brief time in high school when I tried to stop liking “secular” music. This would have been in about 1997. I was planning to get rid of all of my rock and/or roll CD’s and replace them with Christian Music. Now, I wasn’t in to the whole Amy Grant/MW Smith thing. And this was in ’97. So guess what that meant? That’s right! SKA! I think there is actually a passage in Jeremiah somewhere that foretells the fact that all Christian “alternative” teenagers are required to like ska music. Seems pretty true. I actually only ended up getting rid of maybe two CDs, though I did go to a lot of Christian concerts. I even got to hang out with POD before they became big, back when they were just playing little church shows. I guess you could say that this time was the beginning of my realization that a lot of the Church was pretty much completely irrelevant to our culture. Anyway, more on that later. Maybe.
So, in fall of 1998, Maggie and I went off to the big city (Seattle) for college. We pretty quickly fell in with the default church for those coming from TDBC: Hope Bible Fellowship. It was here that we met another of the more important role models in my life, Mike Vederoff. He was Hope’s paid worker. He didn’t go by the name “pastor” because he was just one of the elders (this church was set up almost identically to the one in Yakima) but he also handled all the administration and spiritual guidance for the church. He is a really great guy, and it makes me kind of sad that we haven’t seen him in so long. Anyway, everyone at the church was really friendly and all, but right from the start something felt a little weird. We started going in January of 1999 and within two weeks, we had been invited over to the Dickerson’s for lunch after church. This all seemed nice and normal until Maggie got invited into the kitchen (gender roles were pretty strictly enforced at this point at Hope) and I was in the living room with Terry, a pretty great guy. Then he started grilling me. He wanted to know all about whether we were Christians or not, what did we believe, etc. etc. I was kind of put off by it and didn’t know how to react to it, so I didn’t. We just kept going to Hope.
Now all of this was happening during college which meant that church was not the number one thing on my priority list, even if it should have been. I was more worried about getting good grades. Often, especially after we got married and were living together, we had to talk ourselves into getting up for Church. Actually, shortly after we got married, Maggie and I started to think that maybe Hope wasn’t for us. Maybe we wanted something different. So we talked to Mr. Vederoff about this, and he understood. Actually, he was pretty sure what we were going to say as soon as we told him we wanted to talk to him. We’d spent a lot of time talking to him before our wedding since he did our pre-marriage counseling, so we were really comfortable talking to him about big stuff. Anyway, what he told us has stuck with me and maybe affected how I look at church more than anything anyone else has ever said. I know that’s a big statement, but I think it’s true. He said that he understood, but that we might want to think about the fact that maybe church isn’t just something you show up to once a week. Maybe it would be good to get more involved, to be more active. And he was right. This was the genesis of my current view of church, that it’s not just something to be consumed once a week. It’s so much more meaningful when you participate. That conversation led to Maggie and I taking over leadership of the Children’s Church program from Michael’s wife Evangelina. This was really my first involvement in any kind of church administrative position. Oh, wait, I was also on the money counting team, so that was two things.
And that’s how we spent our last year and a half or so at Hope, getting more and more involved until we moved. I should also mention that we had a pretty good college-age bible study group going on at the time at the Vederoffs’ house. The only part I really remember was a long series we did on the Sermon on the Mount and the Kingdom of God. It was the first time I ever started to look at the words of Jesus in a different light than what I had always used.
We had a great time at Hope, in general. I would actually say that Hope played a big part in our growth out of the more conservative circles in which I grew up, and I feel like that has been a good thing for us. I hear that Hope now even allows women to talk at the meetings, and I would love to get the chance to go back and visit. Maybe soon.
For the next two years, nothing much changed. We spent 6 months traveling around the country and thus not attending church. When we moved to Moses Lake, Washington in January of 2003, we found ourselves in the middle of Mormon country. To give you an idea of what this means, there were 4 large Mormon churches in a town of 15,000 and 1 non-Mormon church that wasn’t about to die. Guess which one we ended up at? That’s right, one of the Mormon churches! Just Kidding!!!! Yeah, we ended up at the big one, Moses Lake Alliance church. We tried some others around town, first. For example, we went to a little Methodist church with the nicest pastor you good ever hope to meet, just a real stand up guy. Unfortunately, the church was dead. About 20 people were there and there was no energy, nothing was being changed to bring more life (probably because as part of an international denomination, not much
could be changed). We went to a small Church of Christ and it was really weird. It was like they hadn’t had a visitor in months and the head guy actually lectured the attendees about being more excited and doing a better job. He didn’t say that it was because we were there, but….it was because we were there. Plus they didn’t have any musical instruments, and singing without musical instruments is weird. So we didn’t go back. We also tried an Episcopal church, which was actually kind of cool. I’m not sure why we didn’t go back there. Anyway, the bottom line is that we became anonymous faces in the crowd at what passed for a mega-church in Moses Lake, maybe 800 attendees per week. Their MO was lite-rock praise songs followed by a nicely put together smarmy sermon preached by a fired up pastor just trying to do his job and fill his coffers. We did try to get involved with the nursery there and had some success in that department, but the whole time we were in Moses Lake we struggled with the anonymity and the lack of community afforded by such a large church. Of course, if we were that concerned about it, we would have switched churches, but with a newborn on our hands, I’m not even sure we wanted anything other than anonymity and no commitment.
From this point on, I’ve basically told the story
before. Remember? Way back in the beginning days of this blog? But since the time I wrote that post, Maggie and I have joined the design team at Mars Hill, which has allowed us a freedom we’ve never known before. Sure, our interpretations of scripture are different know, we’re questioning some of the things we thought we knew. But we’re also more excited to be living as followers of Christ than we ever have been before. Again, I’m speaking just for myself, but I think that Maggie would agree. Also, I’d like to give a shout out to
Mike Stavlund, who I have to say is quickly becoming the third mentor/friend that I would put in the same category as my dad and Mike Vederoff. Two Mikes, that’s weird.
I’ve grown a lot on this journey, and for that I’m very happy. Am I a different person because of it? That’s hard to say. I don’t think so, but I will admit that I have changed the way I look at the world along the way. Some things that used to matter so much have faded into the background. Some things I used to think were stupid have become very prominent in my faith. But through it all I’ve held fast to the concept of Christ as our one and only savior. It’s beautiful to think that this one idea will always be a constant in my life no matter where I end up.
So what’s the moral of the story? I guess I would have to say the moral is that I have been on a pretty continuous journey for my whole life really, my adult life in particular. I’ve never had a hard break with my past as have a lot of people at Mars Hill. I’ve never had to look back at my history with regret, and I feel lucky for that. I feel like God has always led us to the right place at the right time. I’m thankful that I’ve never had to go through a process of violent and relationship breaking upheaval. And I’m curious to see where God leads us next. Will he keep us here, with our new family at Mars Hill? Will he take us somewhere else completely unexpected? We’ll see.
If you've got any questions about any of this, or want any clarification, just ask. I'm more than happy to share it with you.
