Story #24 in the Covenant series
There are 23 Covenant stories behind us and more still to tell. But I’d like to stop for a moment and write something rather personal. A church is a living organism made up of the lives of the people who are a part of the community. And the life of a church is the sum total of all their experiences over time. Thousands of Sundays, Wednesdays, ceremonies, celebrations, and tragedies make up the story of a church. If someone tries to tell that church’s story, the best he or she can do is select a few moments, like snapshots, and try to communicate a sense of its reality. But you can’t really tell the story of a church. No one can. The only thing you can do is experience a church community by being a part of it.
So I’d like to tell you what Covenant Baptist Church has meant to me. Because I have been a part of this community for 20 years.
Jeanene and I came here fresh out of seminary in 1989, when the Baptist wars over the Bible were at their peak. I wanted to get a Ph.D. in New Testament and teach. I swore publicly that I would never be the pastor of a church – many people heard me say it. In hindsight, that was probably a mistake. It’s like double-dog-daring God. I’m not arrogant enough to claim that God would expend any divine energy just to teach me a lesson, but it is kind of funny if you think about it.
20 years is a long time in human reckoning, particular for a 47-year-old man. There are a number of ways you could think about this:
1. I’m about to finish 5 decades of living, and 2 of them were in the service of this church.
2. My first 2 decades were childhood and adolescence, mostly. The 3rd was education. 4 and 5 belong to Covenant.
3. If I stay here for 5 more years, I will have been at Covenant Baptist Church for half of my life.
4. If a healthy adult in our culture has 4 decades of highly productive time to work, half of my work life has been given to Covenant.
You see what I mean? I’ve been here a long time. And I want to say up front that I’m fairly sure there are some downsides to this, both for me and for Covenant. One of our central Christian ideas is that we are sinners. That means we’re a little warped, so even when we do good things there is usually a downside. Covenant has likely been influenced too heavily by my personality. I don’t feel bad about that because I don’t know what we could have done about it. But it’s true. And here I am, a 47-year-old pastor who has no experience leading a traditional kind of church organization. I’ve never had a secretary or administrative assistant. I’m scared of them. Once the church tried to hire a woman to help me with administrative things. Whenever I saw her coming I’d panic and avoid her because I knew I should be giving her something to do. But in that moment, my mind always went blank and I couldn’t think of anything to tell her. Ben Chappell said I should write things down and give notes to her. That was a good idea, and I did write some things down. I still swear, to this very day, that they were in the front pocket of my backpack. I know I put them there.
What I’m saying is that if Covenant is a little organizationally unbalanced because of my tenure as pastor, I’m equally unbalanced in that regard. Good communicator. Not always sure what month it is. Most churches expect senior ministers to know the month and be able to talk to the administrative assistants, so I haven’t exactly developed a very marketable skill set at Covenant.
When we arrived at Covenant, Jeanene and I had passionate and strong opinions about what a church should be and what a church should be doing. Over the last 20 years, I’ve spent a lot of mental and emotional energy trying to determine if we at Covenant were doing the right things and being the right kind of church. Our leaders and I have asked ourselves many times over the years if we should have done things differently. Our lack of growth has always been suspicious to me. Sometimes I think it is indicative of some deep issues we have with welcoming people. Other times I think it is the inevitable result of being a somewhat counter-cultural church. The truth is likely somewhere in between.
I know that people who were at Covenant for shorter periods of time might read these stories and say, “Hey, I was at that church from 1999 to 2002, and that’s not how I remember it.” But I never know what to say to people who don’t stay at a church for very long. A church has a lifetime that is somewhat analogous to a human life. Some people are cute kids, troublesome adolescents, and wonderful adults. You can’t really assess the life of a person if you haven’t been in relationship with that person over a long stretch of time. So as the years have passed, I’ve stopped thinking of Covenant Baptist Church in terms of rights and wrongs or “should haves” and “shouldn’t haves.” Covenant has been our church, for better or for worse. It has been a place for us to be and become. While we’ve been here, slowly turning from 27-year-old passionate and energetic Christians to 47-year-old slightly wiser and slower Christians, Covenant has been changing and becoming as well.
Here’s the bottom line: If you read these Covenant stories, you should keep in mind that the only way to have experienced them was to be here. And if you drop in and out of churches, always looking for the perfect church, you’re never going to see the whole story of any one church. If you want to be a part of a community, you must settle down and be there for a significant amount of time. I know that sometimes people must leave churches for legitimate reasons. I know that. But in our culture, I think that people leave churches far too quickly and easily.
I believe that most of the time the whole story of a spiritual community, with all of its good and bad chapters, is a better thing to have experienced than any two or three years you might experience at a church, no matter how perfect that church seemed at the time. I think that God works best to perfect and mature us spiritually in the context of a serious, long-term commitment to a community of faith. Covenant Baptist Church has been spiritually meaningful to my family because we’ve been here to see the stories and be a part of them.
When it comes to Church, there really are no shortcuts and no substitutions for being there.
Gordon Atkinson
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
made me thing about it a bit – we were at our last church for 13 years – thats nearly one and a half decades also – and while we really struggled with the idea of leaving where we had worshiped our entire married life (at that time) and raised our kids once we made the decision it was very easy.
looking back at that time i completely agree that the community web that is woven through all the things that happen in that time is what develops a patina that stains your view of it. from inside it is hard to observe dispassionately about the place. once outside though the memories might fade but the experience will be there for ever
I had to idea you wanted to be a professor!
I’m sure you would make a very good one! Though I am also sure that God has placed you where he wants you right now.
I would have loved to be a student in your New Testament survey class though, where that ever to have happened
And by “I had TO idea…”
I meant “I had ‘NO’ idea…”
Huh. I guess I’ve been at my church for more than half my life. Funny to think about that. I guess I like the place.
“When it comes to Church, there really are no shortcuts and no substitutions for being there.”
true words.
This is an interesting installment for me, because I’ve been struggling over whether to leave my church for the past year, and just cannot quite do it. Part of it is that realization you have by the time you get to your fifties that if you go somewhere else, you’ll just end up doing it all over again–tentatively reaching out to folks, finding a program to plug into, getting excited about it, pouring yourself into it, suddenly bumping up against somebody else’s equally strong but opposite conviction, getting upset and hurt . . . . Who has the energy to replay all of that?
I’d like to think that by staying the course I grow to appreciate this particular church community more, as Gordon seems to suggest should happen. Can’t say I’m there yet, although there are certain individuals I’ve come to cherish more. But right now I’m kind of feeling what the poet Frost described as the quandary of the person who wonders “what to make of a diminished thing” . . . .
It’s always interesting to me when you bring up growth, or lack of growth. To my way of thinking, you have created something great that seems like it would be impossible: a church small enough to really function as a community and a very, very large audience for your teaching, through RLP.
And to know that you did it without having to know what month it is, is personally very encouraging to me.
Gordon,
You and Covenant seem well suited to each other. When you do eventually leave, whoever succeeds you needs to be prepared to be an “unintentional interim.” When you have a whole generation who has grown up in a church under one pastor–particularly when the church is unusual anyway–that’s what church *is,* in their minds, and adjusting to a new pastor and a new style is really hard. I think it’s often true that the person who succeeds a long-term pastor is not there more than a few years. By round two, they’ve settled a bit and learned that change does not mean death. Meanwhile, you’ve had a great twenty years together. Here’s to more!
Carrie