1988-1989
During my first year as a half-time hospital chaplain, I was called in 1985 to be a half-time associate pastor in our Vineyard church in Fort Collins. Two years later, in 1987, I was asked to become full-time Associate Pastor of our church, so I resigned my half-time hospital chaplain position after three very meaningful years. Early in 1988 I also accepted a request to teach a course on Church History that coming fall for the Ministry Training School of the Vineyard church in Denver with whom I had gone to England in 1984. Three months later, on April 17, 1988 I was driving Sharon and our sons across rural North Dakota. We were returning to Colorado from a ministry conference our church had presented in Canada. As we drove across farm country, a Eureka! thought crossed my mind: “Get ready.” The thought was accompanied by an intuitive awareness of what the thought meant: God was going to be moving us to another church. The thought was suffused with empowering grace that enfolded me like when God spoke to me on the empty bus in 1978, “I want you to lead the Quiz team.” I embraced the thought, turned to Sharon, and said, “I think God just spoke to me.” She was accepting when I shared the two words that had crossed my mind, “Get ready” and what I sensed that they meant.
To “get ready” I needed to end some involvements I had going outside our church, which included a weekly column I wrote for the local Fort Collins daily newspaper, The Coloradoan. One commitment I didn’t feel comfortable backing out of was the Church History course I had promised a few months earlier to teach that fall in Denver. So I went on with that commitment. Halfway through that Church History course, on October 17, another Eureka! thought went through my mind as I drove into Denver to teach my Monday night class: “When this course is done, I have something new for you.” I had been waiting for further guidance since April 17, when God had said to me, “Get Ready,” and I was excited when God told me this exactly six months later, on October 17.
Four weeks later I gave my Church History final exam on Monday evening, November 14. Afterward, I drove 60 miles home, went to bed, and awakened the next morning to hear my wife Sharon exclaiming, “I had an awesome dream! I think it is from God!” She then told me the dream, in which she was looking at a four-scene play on a stage in front of her. In scene one, she saw herself seated alone on the stage. A large person she thought was an angel walked across the stage to her, and handed a baby boy to her. The angel said, “You are supposed to adopt this baby.” Then the scene ended with the curtain coming down. Scene two began with the curtain going up again. Sharon, holding the baby, walked back across the stage to the angel and asked, “What’s the baby’s name?” The angel responded, “Elijah.” Sharon immediately felt a surge of power go through her when the name was spoken by the angel. She felt excited about being given “my own power baby!”, recalling the powerful prophet Elijah in the Old Testament. The curtain came down, ending scene two. Scene three started when the curtain went up again. Sharon was again seated on the stage, trying to breast-feed the baby. But the baby wouldn’t eat, and wouldn’t bond with her despite her efforts in the dream. The curtain came down and the scene ended. The final scene began with the curtain going up. Sharon, holding the baby, walked back across the stage to the angel and asked, “Should I quit my job?” (She was serving as the Executive secretary of our Fort Collins Vineyard church.) The angel said, “Wait and see.” The dream ended, leaving Sharon excited and convinced that this dream was from God.
On that Tuesday morning, November 15, Sharon told our staff about this dream she had just had, during our weekly staff meeting. Nobody could figure out what it meant. We all returned to our busy ministries. One day later, a phone call came to Sharon at our church from John Wimber’s Vineyard church in Anaheim, California—the headquarters church of the denomination. Sharon was informed that the 35 year old senior pastor of a Vineyard church in southern California had died unexpectedly, two days before, on Monday, November 14. We were asked to pray for his church and the pastor’s family. Neither Sharon nor I initially connected this phone call to her dream the night after that death.
Eleven days later, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, our senior pastor and his family were packed and ready to drive to John Wimber’s church in Anaheim after our morning worship service, to attend the Vineyard denomination’s yearly Board and pastoral leadership meetings. Our senior pastor, Rick, who had come from California six years earlier to start our Vineyard church in Fort Collins, was now the supervisor of all Vineyard churches in the Rocky Mountain region, and was a member of the denomination’s national Board of Directors. That Sunday, after our worship service ended around noon, Pastor Rick and I sat alone in the empty auditorium, going over our list of bills. One of my responsibilities was the church’s budget. Two years earlier, our church—then four years old—had moved from an elementary school where we met on Sundays, to our own 26,000 square-foot industrial building that we had leased. Two years later we were struggling to pay our bills. Our church’s income was not growing fast enough for the higher overhead we had taken on when we leased this building. (Today, 33 years later, the church is still located there, but now owns that facility). In the weeks leading up to this Sunday after Thanksgiving, Pastor Rick and I had been thinking we might have to reduce our pastoral staff by one person to bring expenses in line with income. (I had not connected this staff-reduction need to the “get ready” directive from seven months earlier—that we would be going to another church.) In that empty auditorium, Rick and I discussed which bills to pay that next week while he was in California. When our conversation ended, Rick joined his family in their van and drove away, leaving me alone in the building, to make sure all the exterior doors were locked before I went home. As I walked around the empty, quiet, dark building, I had another Eureka! moment when a thought crossed my mind: “I’m sending you to the church where the pastor died.” I was deeply moved, and this thought immediately crossed my mind: “That solves our budget problem—I’m the pastor who is leaving!”
I went home with a feeling of being embraced by grace, confident that I had received the guidance that was promised as I drove into Denver five weeks earlier on October 17: “When this course is over, I have something new for you.” Sharon and I were entertaining our church leaders for lunch that Sunday afternoon. Our house was full of people when I arrived. I found Sharon alone at the kitchen sink, came to her, and whispered, “I think the Lord might have spoken to me after church.” She looked at me wide-eyed, and wanted to know what I sensed. I said, “I think the Lord said to me, ‘I’m sending you to the church where the pastor died.’” She got a horrified look on her face and said, “No!” I walked away and prayed, “Lord, if that was you, you’ll take it from here. I’m not pushing it.” A few minutes later Sharon rushed up to me when I was alone in the dining room, and exclaimed, “My dream! Do you think this is about my dream?” We agreed to pray, wait, and see what God would do, since our senior pastor Rick would be with the denomination’s leaders in southern California where the pastor had died, starting the next day.
Sure enough, two days later Pastor Rick called from California and said, “The leaders here want to hear about Sharon’s dream.” He reported that he had been in a leaders’ meeting that day, sitting next to Pastor Fred from Denver. Fred had been an Evangelical Free senior pastor in Longmont, Colorado when I was the senior pastor of the Evangelical Free Church 17 miles away in Loveland, Colorado. Fred left the EV Free denomination about two years before I did, and became the intern pastor at the Denver Vineyard church where I taught Church History in 1988, and had become the senior pastor of another Vineyard church in Denver in 1988. Fred had been the intern pastor at the Denver Vineyard church in 1984, whose decision to remain the intern for another year derailed our plan to move back to Denver in order to fill that intern position. Instead, we had remained in Loveland, resulting in my very meaningful years as a hospital chaplain and as Associate Pastor of the Vineyard church of Fort Collins–demonstrating the truth of a well-known New Testament verse’s promise about good things that God will cause to result from our trials and tribulations: “In all things, God works for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28, NIV)
During that call to us, Pastor Rick stated that at one point during this Vineyard meeting of national leaders, John Wimber brought up the nearby Orange County church where the pastor had died three weeks earlier, and asked the assembled leaders, “Who should take over this church?” Pastor Fred turned to Pastor Rick and said, “What about Paul?” Rick responded, “No!” He didn’t want to lose both his Associate Pastor and his Executive Secretary at the same time. Seated behind Rick and Fred was Pastor John, the senior pastor of a large Vineyard church in Newport Beach, whose 33 year-old Assistant Pastor had left his staff two years earlier, started a Vineyard church in nearby Tustin, and had suddenly died three weeks earlier on November 14–the day I gave my final Church History exam which was followed that night by Sharon’s dream.
Pastor John was the regional overseer for all Vineyard churches in Southern California. Hearing Fred ask Rick, “What about Paul?”, Pastor John leaned forward and said to Rick and Fred, “Who is Paul?” Pastor Rick explained who I was and then said, “You know, his wife did have a dream two weeks ago. We can’t figure out what it means. I wonder if it is related.” Pastor John said, “I want to hear this dream.” So Rick called us and made a phone appointment for Pastor John to call us two evenings later.
When Pastor John called, Sharon and I were on separate phone extensions. I listened as she narrated her dream. Pastor John was interactive until she told the scene about the Angel saying the baby’s name is Elijah. Then there was silence for about 30 seconds. I commented to Sharon, “I think we lost him.” Then John spoke, “You don’t know, do you?” I asked, “Know what?” He responded, “The name of the pastor who died was Joshua Elijah Stewart. I think the baby boy in this dream is the church that he planted two years ago. God must have given it Josh’s middle name. I think you are supposed to adopt this church and be its next pastor!” We agreed to come and spend a week at the church as its candidate for senior pastor.
30 days later we flew out of Denver with our sons on New Year’s Eve, a Saturday. I gave the sermon at the Vineyard church of Tustin the next morning, January 1, 1989. When I stood up to speak, I had an unexpected experience: I started weeping! Trust me: That wasn’t in my sermon plan! I initially felt embarrassed. Then I saw many in the congregation crying with me. I then sensed that I was expressing their grief over the death of their founding pastor, 46 days earlier. He had gone out jogging before breakfast, as usual. Upon his return, he kissed his wife in the kitchen, then collapsed and died of a heart attack. He had always been a man in a hurry because of a life-long congenital heart condition that he had expected to shorten his life.
When my weeping subsided, I presented my sermon. Sharon and I spent the next week meeting with the congregation’s staff and congregation, and I spoke again the following Sunday. After that morning worship service on January 8, the congregation voted unanimously to call me as their new pastor. We accepted the call and said we would return home to Colorado, sell our home, and be back in three weeks to start our ministry on Sunday, January 29, 1989. Upon arriving home, we started packing while continuing to work full-time at the church. A Sunday evening farewell service for us was scheduled for January 22 at our Fort Collins Vineyard church, and the movers were scheduled to come a few days later on January 26.
I had a lot of books to pack, and must have inhaled too much dust from them. A few days later I got sick with Walking Pneumonia. My doctor said I had to stay in bed for a week, which I did. I was up and packing again on Friday, January 20 when a thought crossed my mind, “I forgot to put our house up for sale!” The movers were coming in less than a week, the housing market was still soft after the “oil bust” of 1986 in Colorado, and we didn’t want to be landlords from a thousand miles away. So we prayed for God’s help. I then called the local newspaper I used to write a weekly column in and I put a want-ad in the local newspaper for our house, too late to run the next day (Saturday). Its first day in the newspaper was Sunday, January 22. That afternoon, at about 3:00 pm, there was a knock on our front door. I opened it to a couple I recognized from our church. “Is this your house?” they asked. “We want to buy it!” And so they did, on the spot, thanks to a mortgage that allowed us to simply sign it over to another buyer. We had bought the house two years earlier. The market was flat during those two years, and the house had not increased in value. So the couple from our church bought the house from us through simple “quit claim” paperwork that enabled them to take over the mortgage. Three hours later we attended our church’s farewell celebration for us. Four days later our moving company emptied our house onto a moving truck and we left Colorado for California.