Happy Quindecennial

I’d never heard the word quindecinnial before I just looked it up. It’s the word for a 15-year anniversary.

Today marks 15 years since I began at the church. When I started, my oldest daughter was 2. This year she’s graduating from high school.

I’ve said many times I never envisioned being a pastor and while this may scare some people, after 15 years I’m still not sure what it means to be one, other than to do what I said I would do 15 years ago and that’s consistently and courageously point us to Jesus no matter the cost.

And there has been cost. The church we are today is not the church we were when I first started. While many people have joined us, many people have left us.

I never meant for any of that to happen. My first two years on the job felt I was living in someone else’s house. For the most part I just did my best to be a good roommate. But something happened in year three that changed things for me. I began preaching through the Bible, one book at a time, and I was shocked by the reaction I got to ideas and perspectives that are not only central to orthodox Christian belief (like Jesus, not the Bible, is God’s self-revelation) but are also almost universally accepted by scholars and theologians (like based on the fact that no one was there to write down what was happening when it was happening, Genesis 1-2 cannot be literal historical accounts of creation).

Many people in our church at the time reacted as if these ideas (and others) were existentially threatening. They shouldn’t have been, but they were.

And I made the decision—right, wrong, or otherwise—to begin dealing with that.

Actually, I must have anticipated this would be an issue. In the very first sermon I gave in 2011 I focused on the topic of flexibility. In words that now sound prophetic, I used Jesus’ parable of the wineskins to talk about how the people who rejected Jesus did so because they lacked spiritual flexibility. Their faith had become rigid so they could not accommodate new or challenging information, like the kind Jesus’s life and teaching was constantly throwing in their face. In the end, they just couldn’t handle it, and they got rid of him.

I made the point that following Jesus is dynamic and consequently we must always be spiritually pliable enough to learn new things from him. If faith becomes a matter of establishing and then protecting certain facts, we may end up protecting them from Jesus himself.

And from my perspective, that’s what began to happen when I started teaching through the Bible. I began to realize that people had placed their faith more in a particular way of understanding the Bible (which was incoherent and unworkable) rather than in the person of Jesus, so that when their view of the Bible was challenged their faith began to feel like it was falling apart.

I have a better appreciation now for how scary that must have felt to them and I don’t begrudge them leaving for other churches, but even after all of these years I’m not sure I could have avoided it. The fact of the matter is that to grow in your faith you have to be challenged. There’s simply no other way around it.

I suppose that challenge does not have to come from the pulpit on a Sunday morning. But if not there, where it can be accompanied by follow-up discussions and incubated in safe relationships, it will likely come through an unexpected or unwelcomed life experience where you may lack the safety nets and community to engage the questions that get raised.

Challenging people from the pulpit felt at the time like the best thing I could do for them as a pastor trying to help them live God-honoring lives. Some people embraced it. Some did not.

But somehow by God’s grace we’ve become a community where the kind of spiritual flexibility I intuited all those years ago would be critical for a healthy, growing faith family has become something of a trademark at WCC, and we’re better for it.

Jesus is our center and goal. Love is our metric. Scripture and church tradition are indispensable resources for the journey. We are not perfect, but we are perfectable. Faith is not something to build and protect. It is a path to walk, one we make in part by walking…together.

Choosing to come to WCC was one of the best decisions of my life. God willing, we have at least 15 more years together.