1997-1998
In November of 1997 John Wimber, leader of the Vineyard denomination, died. I attended the funeral at his Anaheim church on November 21. During the service, as I reflected on Wimber’s positive impact on my life, I had another Eureka! moment when this thought unexpectedly crossed my mind: “You should open up to pastoring again.” I knew this wasn’t my thought, because I had no desire to pastor again, just as I had no desire to coach the Bible Quiz team in 1978. Though I had worked through the emotional pain of shutting down the Tustin Vineyard, I was not feeling confident to be a pastor again. I was also enjoying working for Promise Keepers at the time. I asked the Lord, “Do you want me to quit Promise Keepers?” I received no answer, and started pondering how I could do both—pastoring while continuing to work full-time for Promise Keepers. The idea of interim pastoring crossed my mind: temporarily leading churches while they are between permanent pastors. To test this idea I met with Jim, the pastor of the American Baptist church that Sharon and I had been attending the past four years to support our teenage sons who were attending it due to my son Peter having shared a tent with three teenage boys from this church during Peter’s first Europe mission trip at the age of 13. After I told Pastor Jim about my sense from God that I should open up to interim pastoring, he said, “Funny you should ask about interim pastoring. We have a sister church in Torrance that is looking for an interim pastor. Let me call them for you”. He called, they interviewed me a few days later, and immediately hired me as their interim pastor. I served there for 13 months in 1998-99, and subsequently did nine more American Baptist interim pastorates within a 72 mile commute from our home in Tustin, until August, 2022.
Through interim pastoring, I continued to experience that God is real, and for the first time experienced personal fulfillment that had eluded me as a senior pastor in Loveland and Tustin. In the middle of my first interim pastorate at the Torrance First Baptist Church, I had a Eureka! moment one day: the thought crossed my ind that my role as an interim pastor was the fulfillment of a prophecy that had been spoken over me in 1989 at a southern California Vineyard pastors’ meeting when about 200 Vineyard pastors were seated before a panel of national “prophets”. One by one the pastors had stood before the panel and received encouraging words of prophecy, such as “You’re a battleship” and “You’re an aircraft carrier.” My turn came near the end of the event. One prophet spoke to me, “You’re a tugboat.” That wasn’t what I was hoping to hear! I wanted to be a heroic leader, a “success.” Being told I was a tugboat in a harbor full of battleships and aircraft carriers didn’t sound heroic or significant to me. It left me dismayed. My dismay became shame when I took the Tustin Vineyard church back to its mother church in Newport Beach two years later, in 1991. I then felt that as a pastor I was a failure.
During the next seven years when I was not pastoring, the Lord worked with me to sort it all out—my dismay at being told I was a tugboat, and my shame at having shut down the Tustin Vineyard church. A major step forward in my emotional health happened three years later, when I had a Eureka! moment in 1994: I received an insight into myself that explained my repeated pattern I had been pondering and praying about: In my churches in Loveland and Tustin, the longer I was there, the more frustrated and less effective I became. The insight I received was that my frustrations with being a senior pastor, including my initial periodic identity crisis at the Loveland church, were because I always had an agenda in my subconscious mind: to be a “success” in order to feel good about myself. I also realized for the first time that what had frustrated me when leading churches was that many people had their own agendas other than my success.
This 1994 Eureka! moment included an insight I received into the Lord’s Prayer where Jesus teaches us to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10) I was enabled to see intuitively that, like me, God also has an agenda, and that my concern should be for God’s success in achieving his agenda, not my own success in achieving my agenda: “Your (not my) kingdom come, your (not my) will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” It occurred to me that God is not a genie whose bottle I rub with the expectation that he will pop out and ask how he can serve me; I am to be like a genie whose bottle God rubs. I am to pop out and ask him, “How can I serve you?”
Until then I had always struggled to articulate a personal mission statement. But this 1994 Eureka! moment gave me further insight into what it means to let God be in charge of my life, and it empowered me define my life mission as “To help God succeed.” I remembered hearing John Wimber express this serving-God perspective: “I’m just small change in God’s pocket. He can spend me any way he wants.” Two other ways of expressing this concept came to my mind: 1. As a member of the AAA Club (Automobile Club of Southern California), I should start AAAA Club: “I’ll go Anywhere, Anytime, to do Anything God Asks me to do.” Later I expanded its name to the AAAAAA Club: “I’ll go Anywhere Anytime to Act on Anything the Almighty Asks me to do.” It also occurred to me to start each day by imagining my life as a blank check that I sign and give to God, for him to fill in the rest as he wishes to invest my life that day–for the success of his agenda.
After further reflection on what God’s agenda is, I created a second, longer version of my life mission: “To help God succeed in helping people succeed:” The success God is trying to help people achieve is success and personal fulfillment through walking closely with him daily, in love and obedience, so they can have the joy of discovering and achieving their destiny by growing and bearing fruit for him!