Disqualified!

Reflections on 2004 – 2006 and Beyond

I am from a broken home.  Divorce in the 60’s wasn’t as commonplace as it is today and as a kid and a teenager I walked around feeling inferior and disqualified … from honor, respect, hope.  I married a respectable woman who lived in a respectable family.  I wanted to absorb some of their respectability.  I became a Christian and experienced love and grace for the first time in my life.  Not too long afterwards, I sensed a call into the ministry and began the long road to realizing a dream.  With two kids Chris and I moved to Winfield, Kansas and went to Junior College – along the way having two children.  Then to Fort Wayne, Indiana for Senior College … graduating with a bachelor’s degree and a pre-ministerial degree.  Pretty respectable, don’t you think?  Then on to 4 more years of Seminary in St. Louis.  I was declared qualified to be a pastor.  So 6 years as an Associate Pastor in Waterloo, Ia and three more children.  6 years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as a Senior Pastor.  I earned my doctorate of ministry during those years.  Then moving to Spokane to assume the job of Senior Pastor some 20 years ago today!  I experienced the success of building churches and serving as pastor for twenty years.  Respectability abounds.  Successful pastor.  Successful family.  Anyone looking from the outside with say without question … qualified for honor, respect, hope.

But I dragged that disqualified teenager estranged from his father through my whole life.  Understanding the theory of grace but not owning it.  I fell!  It’s an interesting term we use for Pastors failing … they fell!  Fell from the pedestal?  We respectably call it “moral failure” in the church.  It was discovered by the elders in my church at Southside Christian Church … and my world fell apart – publicly.  Disqualified!  Lost my job.  Lost my dignity.  Lost respect.  Public humiliation.  Not to mention having to look my wife in the face and admit the utter failure I was.  Not to mention having to look my children in the face and confess that the image they had of their father wasn’t quite accurate.  He is way more flawed than they imagined.  Disqualified … to be a husband, to be a father, to be a grandfather, to be a pastor.  DISQUALIFIED!

The word on the street was that I would move … run and hide.  That’s what most pastors do when this happens.  But I was bothered by something.  In my brokenness … brokenness that I can’t even describe; in my shame … shame I can’t even describe; in my self-loathing … so deep there are no words to describe … I saw something different in the Word of God.

David in the Old Testament became my best friend.  The King of Israel … placed there by God and he committed adultery.  Then he went one step further and committed murder to cover up the sin.  And yet … in the end, the Bible says that David was a man after God’s own heart.  Somehow David’s sin didn’t disqualify him from a redeemed future.

The Prodigal Son became a focus for me.  A son who was so self –centered that he wanted the Father’s inheritance before the Father had even died.  He took the money and then squandered it on loose living.  He blew it in so many ways that surely he was disqualified from honor, respect and hope.

But as you read the story, the emphasis is not on the sinfulness of the son but on the generosity of the Father. The son found himself penniless and friendless.  He found himself at the bottom.  He longed for forgiveness.  He longed to be received back by the Father. The son had his speech carefully rehearsed. It was an elegant, polished statement of sorrow. But the old man didn’t let him finish. The son had barely arrived on the scene when suddenly, a fine new robe was thrown over his shoulders. He hears music, the fatted calf is being carried into the parlor, and he didn’t even have a chance to say to his father, “I’m sorry.”

The witness of the Word of God is that God wants us back even more than we could possibly want to be back. We don’t have to go into great detail about our sorrow All we have to do, the parable says, is appear on the scene, and before we get a chance to run away again, the Father grabs us and pulls us into the banquet so we can’t get away

Then again, there is a fascinating passage in chapter 8 of John’s Gospel about the woman caught in sin. Remember how the crowd dragged her before Jesus and asked, “What do we do about her? She was caught in adultery. Moses says we should stone her but the Romans won’t let us stone people. What do you think?”

Jesus ignores them and begins to write in the sand. Then he looks up and says, “Well, let the one here who hasn’t committed any sin throw the first rock.” One by one they drift away. Then Jesus says to the woman: “Is there no one here to condemn you?” She says, “No one, Lord.” He says “Okay, go, and don’t commit this sin anymore.”

Now, get the picture. Jesus didn’t ask her if she was sorry.  He didn’t demand a firm purpose of amendment. He didn’t seem too concerned that she might dash back into the arms of her lover. She just stood there and Jesus gave her absolution before she asked for it.

The nature of God’s love for us is outrageous. Why doesn’t this God of ours display some taste and discretion in dealing with us? Why doesn’t He show more restraint? To be blunt about it, couldn’t God arrange to have a little more dig­nity? Wow!

Now, if we were in His position, we’d know perfectly well how to behave. That prodigal son would have recited his speech down to the very last word. And when he got finished we would have said, “DISQUALIFIED!  You go away, prodigal son, and I’ll think about this a couple of weeks. Then you’ll be informed by parcel post whether I’ve decided to let you back on the farm or not.”

I don’t think anyone reading this would have approved of throwing rocks at the poor woman in adultery, but we would have made sure she presented a detailed act of contrition and was firm in her purpose of amendment. Because if we let her off without saying she was sorry, wouldn’t she be back into adultery before sunset?

But God doesn’t act that way.  He gives us what we need … not what we deserve.  He is a God of second chances.  He’s a God that, when we run to Him, he throws His arms around us and offers us forgiveness, hope and a future!  What the world says is Disqualified, he qualifies as worthy of honor, respect and hope.

My wife responded to my failure with Godly grace and forgiveness.  Each one of my kids responded to my failure with Godly grace and forgiveness.  They all didn’t disqualify me … even though I had disqualified myself.

Many Church folk didn’t however.  To many I am disqualified from ever ministering again.  Chris and I went to San Diego for intensive counseling to try and discover what drove me to act in a way that was so foreign to who I wanted to be and professed to be. While there, the counselors extended me a wonderful piece of Grace.  After hearing the details of my call into ministry, they responded by saying “what you have done doesn’t DISQUALIFY you from ministry in the future.

But many church folk had declared me DISQUALIFIED.  And I was confused because the church I read about in the Bible is a place where we do life together … and it isn’t all victories.  There are defeats.  The church is a place of forgiveness because their God is a God of forgiveness. The church is filled with people who say they believe that “all sin and fall short of the glory of God,” but somehow we have trouble accepting the fact that it’s really true.  And it leads people to hide.  Hide the fact that they yell ferociously at their kids day in and day out.  Hide the fact that they are struggling in their job and may lose it.  Hide the fact that they have temptations that sometime overwhelm them.  Hide the fact that, even though things appear to be great on the outside, there is a deep emptiness on the inside.  Hide the fact that they are less than honest and cordial at work.

And Dietrich Bonhoeffer sums it up best when he says this:

“He who is alone with his sins is utterly alone. It may be that Christians, not withstanding corporate worship, common prayer, and all their fellowship in service, may still be left to their loneliness. The final breakthrough to fellowship does not occur because, though they have fellowship with one another as believers and as devout people, they do not have fellowship as the undevout, as sinners. The pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner. So everyone must conceal his sin from himself and from their fellowship. We dare not be sinners. Many Christians are unthinkably horrified when a real sinner is suddenly discovered among the righteous. So we remain alone with our sin, living in lies and hypocrisy. The fact is that we are sinners!

We all have shadows and skeletons in our backgrounds. I did.  But after months and months of quiet solitude and immersion in the word, I discovered there is something bigger in this world than we are and that something bigger is full of grace and mercy, patience and ingenuity. The moment the focus of your life shifts from your badness to his goodness and the question becomes not `What have I done?’ but `What can he do?’ release from remorse can happen; miracle of miracles, you can forgive yourself because you are forgiven, accept yourself because you are accepted, and begin to start building up the very places you once tore down. There is grace to help in every time of trouble. That grace is the secret to being able to forgive ourselves. Trust it.”

That revelation transformed my life and birthed a dream to embark on a grand experiment.  Could there be a church that exists where grace is more than a word, it’s a lifestyle?  Could a church really exist that receives the grace of God through Jesus Christ but also lives it?

Beyond Grace Fellowship became that experiment!