Associate Pastor of Music

I told you earlier that when the tornado hit, we did a lot of soul searching and rethinking as a church and particularly as a staff. We had time to think about what we were going to do when we got our newly reconstructed building with twice the space as before. We evaluated our strengths and looked honestly at the potential that was there.
Finally we decided that one of our strengths was our great staff relations and the talent that was contained therein. Phil, Darryl, and I were at times the three musketeers, the three tenors, or the three stooges, depending upon with whom you talked. We evaluated our strengths individually and collectively and looked at the giftings of the congregation as a whole. As a result we decided to do some restructuring.
We decided to change our titles to reflect a more unified and balanced pastoral approach. Darryl and I would both be associate pastors. And we decided to play to our individual strengths. Mine was music. And the giftings of the church as a whole included an incredible amount of musical talent. So I became the Associate Pastor of Music, and I took over the entire music program.
Darryl was the Associate Pastor of Students. And we let Phil keep his title as Senior Pastor.
Eventually we added Mike Atkinson to play the straight man. Not that he wasn’t really quick, really smart, and really funny. He was. And is. It’s just that we needed someone who could handle the business side. The three choleric sanguines needed a melancholy to balance us out. He became the Associate Pastor of Administration.
I really didn’t ponder it for very long, but I did wonder if I had been demoted. I decided quickly that it didn’t really matter. I was having a blast. I enjoyed the new challenge of a stellar music ministry. So I just put my head down and broke into a full sprint.
We had so much talent. In fact, while we were still at VBI, the orchestra would rehearse on Sunday afternoons. I had nearly 30 instrumentalists. One day the music guy from Victory came by to sit in on our rehearsal. We were a church of 500 people with an all volunteer orchestra of nearly 30 by then. While he had a handful of musicians in a church of 10,000. He was flabbergasted.
I could have been satisfied to stay there for a long time to come. But then came that Earl Creps guy and another tornado. Not a wind of destruction this time, but a wind of change.

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!