Child Ownership Fail (Nice Car!)

Once upon a time, a father bought his one and only newborn daughter a shiny new car. Cars were his passion. And since she was his only child, he wanted her to share his zeal for automobiles. He knew that she wouldn’t be driving it for some time, but he wanted her to be exposed to it from the very first week of her life. He was determined to have her to take ownership and drive it when the time came, but in the meantime he would keep it clean and ready for the day she would take it over.

From the time she was able to read, she didn’t go to regular schools; he took her to schools where they taught her all about cars. She took classes on driving, traffic laws, safety, and car maintenance. By the time she was twelve years old, she had memorized the interstate system, nationwide. She could take apart a transmission, replace the worn parts, and put it all back together again. And she could tell you everything there was to know about Henry Ford and the history of auto manufacturing in the United States.

When she turned 16, her school sponsors took her to Japan and South Korea to help her understand the durability and reliability of the well-made cars there. The next year they took her to Germany and all over Europe to meet the engineers and to see the great automobile plants of such legendary cars as Mercedes, BMW, Rolls Royce, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bugatti, and several others you have never heard of.

In all this time, Dad kept the car clean and ready, but she had never driven it once.

On the morning of her eighteenth birthday, the day finally arrived. She had spent her whole life preparing for this day. She knew everything there was to know about cars. Today, she would get to drive one for the first time. After breakfast, her dad handed her the keys and said, “Now you are ready.”

Perhaps you can anticipate what is about to happen. Before she got out of town, she was killed in a tragic auto accident. She had studied her whole life, but she had never once been given the opportunity to drive. She knew everything about cars, but she had never been behind the wheel.

This is the story of the American church and its children. We have given them knowledge, instruction, and pizza by the ton, but we have not let them get behind the wheel. We have failed our kids by withholding ownership of the gospel. Instead we have kept it clean and shiny for them and just out of reach. Instead of handing them the keys as early as possible and sitting next to them for the wild ride, we have kept the keys in our pocket.

We have tried so hard to keep them in the insulated church bubble and isolated from the real world, because we feared they might fail. We just couldn’t let them doubt or question or find their own answers. That was too dangerous. We can’t bring ourselves to let them go there; not on our watch. And by refusing to let them fail, we have also kept them from taking faith deep into their souls.

And here’s some real irony. If they did fail in spite of our efforts, we did not know what to do with them. We did not know how to show them love, forgiveness, and compassion without making it appear that we condone their actions. God will gladly take them back, but we won’t. Our church culture doesn’t allow it.

So instead of admitting that the failure of the best people in the scriptures as well as in real life is as common as rain, we have to pretend to be appalled and disappointed. And if they are leaders in the group, instead of finding ways to restore them and make them examples of God’s forgiveness and love, we make them examples of shame and humility, and we set them aside to show the other kids where sin will get you.

Thirdly, we have failed our kids by withholding the keys to ownership of the faith entrusted to us. And in so doing we can predict the car wreck that inevitably comes when they finally come face-to-face with the real world.

Who Will Go with Us?

In spite of our assurance that we had to do this, we still felt a lot of apprehension about how to proceed. We had read a couple of books on planting churches, but we had never done it before nor had we been a part of a plant. So, wouldn’t that be like reading a driver’s manual and then jumping right into a car and assuming that I can drive? I knew one thing: we would have to have help.
First of all, Pastor Phil had given us permission to present our vision to the entire church and to invite anyone who shared the vision to go with us. Not only was this a gracious gesture, it was nearly unheard of within the circles in which we ran. But before we were even ready for that we still had some work to do. We had to figure out what this new community would look like and why. We needed more training. And we needed some people we loved and trusted to help us dream and plan and to go with us to help.
It didn’t take us very long to deliberate as to whom we would ask to come alongside us. Two couples immediately came to mind, and once we had Pastor’s permission, we asked them to pray and to consider taking this leap with us.
I have to say that I don’t know what I would have done if either of them had said no. I was so convinced that they were the ones that I probably would have had to rethink the whole thing if either of them had said no. Thankfully, neither of them did.
David and Iva Gilliam had been friends of ours for more than a dozen years. We had been through a lot together and had served together in two different churches. David has a Christian Education degree as well as a Masters of Divinity diploma. Iva is an extremely talented musician and singer and one of the kindest, most capable people I know. Besides, we really love them. And you want to share this kind of experience with people you love and with which you like spending a lot of time.
Inexplicably, Dave and Iva said yes.
Now the Gilliams are pretty close to being our age. That’s not a bad thing. It’s just that we also felt that we needed a younger influence from the very beginning of this journey. If we were going to relate to the emerging generations we needed some of the indigenous on our team. So, the next couple we were compelled to invite was much younger.
Michael and Candace Marshall were leaders in the young adult department at Carbondale. I had gotten to know Mike in the ministerial training program that we had helped to start. Like the Gilliams, Mike and Candace had a definite call upon their lives and had demonstrated their abilities and their love for people. Now we were six.
Having these four people in the boat with us made the terror of it all minimally tolerable. Their yeses gave us impetus. But now we had to prepare to tell the church family about our plans, and see if anyone else would consider going with us.
O, wait! What was the plan?

Coming Home

By the time my plane landed in Tulsa on Wednesday evening, a temporary home for our church had already been established. Pastor Billy Joe Daugherty of Tulsa’s Victory Christian Center had shown up at Pastor Phil’s house early on Tuesday and offered the use of Victory Bible Institute (VBI) for the duration of our banishment. The insurance man and a builder or two were also there that morning. Everyone decided that it could be as many as 18 months before the destruction could be reversed. (It would take 20.) But, Pastor Daugherty didn’t flinch.
Vicki and the girls picked me up at the airport and drove us directly to VBI, our new, albeit temporary, locale. When we arrived, the regular Wednesday night service was already in progress. Of course there was nothing regular about it. Everyone—adults, youth, children, and babies—was gathered in the large auditorium. Pastor was in the middle of giving comforting words and a preliminary explanation of how we were going to proceed in the days to come. We had been abruptly evicted from our home. And as appreciative as we were to have a place to meet less than 48 hours after the storm, this was not home.
As Vicki, the girls, and I walked hand-in-hand into the meeting, the congregation stood and applauded. Having done nothing to deserve such a greeting, we understood the ovation as a show of support, not just for us, but also for the men who had remained behind to complete the job in the Dominican Republic. It was like that moment on Thanksgiving Day when your cousins that you haven’t seen in a while finally show up at Grandma’s house. We were all just glad to be together.
That night and in the first few days afterward, everyone put up a tough, positive, unified front. But inside all of us were scared. Our world had been shaken. And none of us had any idea how this would play out. Personally, I had no clue that this was only the beginning for me.
The next morning I had the opportunity to see what was left in the tornado’s wake. In spite of the descriptions I had heard, I could not possibly have imagined the devastation that remained where our building had once stood. It was horrifying. The second floor was without ceiling or walls. The nursery sported a new open air skylight, and the property was strewn with piles of twisted metal and broken glass. Only the sanctuary and the gymnasium survived.
In addition to the church building, thousands of dollars of damage had been done to our home which was on the same property. My family spent the first few nights after the tornado in a hotel room while repairs were begun. Even though the house had avoided a direct hit, there was significant work to be done. For example, pressure from the tornado’s proximity caused damage to my aluminum garage door that looked like a baby elephant had been trapped inside and had repeatedly crashed into it trying to get out. As a result, one of our cars was trapped in the garage while the other one received a $10,000 pounding from the storm.
The next few days we tried to salvage our personal possessions and whatever documents and equipment we would need in order to carry on. That may sound easy. It wasn’t. With only days to ponder our future, we had to prioritize what we got out of a rapidly deteriorating building. Then a disaster restoration company came in to rescue everything that was salvageable. But anything they took to inventory and store would not be available again until we rebuilt.
What a mess!