1989-1991
Sharon and I started our new ministry at the Tustin Vineyard on January 29, 1989, as I had promised. 11 months later I had another Eureka! moment. During the week between Christmas and New Year, Sharon and I took our church’s youth group to a Missions conference for teenagers at Azuza Pacific University. Several mission organizations were represented with booths. One night I was “window shopping” the mission organizations, going from booth to booth, in order to identify one for our church’s youth group to be involved with. One missions group, Royal Servants of Minneapolis, had a video presentation for inquirers. I was seated, watching this video, when an unexpected and surprising thought crossed my mind: “I want Peter to go to this.” Peter was my 13 year-old son, who was in eighth grade. I responded, “Really? But he’s only 13.” I was thinking that Peter was too young to travel alone. A second thought immediately crossed my mind, “I want others to go with him.” This thought, like others I have mentioned in previous chapters, was accompanied by a sense of empowerment that imparted confidence to me that God would help make it happen. I responded, “OK.” Six months later our church sent ten teenagers, including Peter, and two adults on an eight-week summer missions trip to Europe. Peter was the only participant from our church to go back a second time one year later, during the summer of 1991. He continued going on these missions trips for five straight summers, including the summer after he graduated from high school. Over five summers he went to Europe every summer, three times to Russia, and one time to China, India, Israel, Egypt, Thailand and the Philippines. I had no thought about such missions involvement for Peter when he was 13, but God did!
When we started at the Tustin Vineyard on January 29, 1989, the wife of the deceased founding pastor returned to Pastor John’s Vineyard church in Newport Beach, ten miles away, to her former secretarial job—Administrative Assistant of the Senior Pastor. When she left, most of the inner core of lay leaders from our church left with her to return to their former church. That made our task of leading our grieving church more difficult. We were exhausted after two years, in part because the people who remained in our church found it difficult to bond with us due to their continuing grief for the previous pastor. This fulfilled the scene in Sharon’s dream in which the baby she was trying to nurse, Elijah, wouldn’t bond with her.
The founding pastor Joshua Elijah Stewart had died the morning after the church’s first worship service in a leased industrial site. After our first two years, the church’s five-year building lease had escalated to its highest payment level, but our church hadn’t grown in number. We decided the church needed to relocate to a less expensive facility such as a school. We polled the church about it, and it was clear that the group who had remained couldn’t start over in a new location. One survey comment was telling: “If we leave this building, Josh will have died in vain.” In consultation with the denomination’s leadership, we accepted Pastor John’s invitation to bring our congregation back to his church, the mother church. So we did. I was on staff there for five months to help our people transition, then I left the staff of that church, per the decision of Pastor John that he could not afford for me to remain on their staff. So I became unemployed.
It then took me seven years to overcome the feeling that I had failed as a leader. It seemed to me that since God had so clearly led us to the Tustin Vineyard church, it should have ended in “success.” A few years later, I heard that John Wimber, the founder and head of the Vineyard denomination, had expected our church to die, because church plants are dependent on positive momentum. When it started in 1987, our Tustin Vineyard church had grown to 250 people after two years. But after the founding pastor died, 25% of the church was gone by the time we arrived to candidate as his replacement, just 7 weeks after his death. We inherited negative church planting momentum, and couldn’t overcome it. I blamed myself for this for several years until Sharon and I came to the realization that in sending us to Tustin from Colorado, it was as if God had called us to bring a malfunctioning airplane in for a smooth landing–in order to prevent it from crashing but not to keep it flying.