Why I Suck As A Person : Part 4

Ashley and I started attending the church and found that we knew the youth pastor and his wife. Seeing them helped distract us from the guy leading the worship on stage with his extremely loud, rainbow shirt on. I will never forget the first Sunday because of that shirt! Everyone was very friendly and nice.

I became very involved with the youth ministry. Helping out in any way I could. I LOVED IT! I loved everything about it. So when my friend the Youth Pastor was going to be moving on to a new church (more money, bigger budget), I wanted his job. Years before I left paid ministry swearing that I would never go back, only to find out that I needed to stop swearing.

So after a couple of interviews and burritos at Chipotle, I was hired as the new Youth Pastor.

I was so excited about starting this new adventure in ministry. I was still young and very eager to learn. Since the old youth pastor and lead pastor had difficulties communicating, I requested weekly meetings. The first meeting was not exactly what I expected. I was told that I should not have gotten the job and that I was under qualified. Wow. Maybe I was under qualified. But who is qualified? Jesus chose some pretty unqualified people to represent him! Okay, okay. I digress. It just did not seem like the right or needed motivation that was necessary for our first meeting. He did give some advice though. He told me that if he taught the former youth pastor anything, it was this: “Always have some thing to write with.” Wow. Enough said.

We had our weekly meetings every week for at least the first month. Then as if almost orchestrated, our weekly meeting started to dwindle away. The pastor always had something else he had to do. I stressed how important it was for me to meet with him. He agreed but rarely followed through. We did have our yearly performance review meetings though. I learned quickly, knowing exactly what he wanted to hear … NUMBERS = SUCCESS.

It was hard for me not being able to meet with the pastor as often as I wanted to, so I confided in a volunteer. This volunteer would listen to me for hours. He would give me new, creative ideas and help build and critique my own. I loved our freindship. He owned his own business and worked out of the church office because he did TONS of free work for the church. So he was easy to bother and talk to over coffee.

A couple years later, that volunteer joined the pastoral staff full-time at the church. Maybe business was slow; maybe it truly was a calling from God. It isn’t mine to judge. I do know one thing; the church ruined their very best volunteer. Now that he was a “pastor”, our relationship totally changed. Our conversations changed. Everything seemed so fake and newly fabricated. It was like he was a different person.

I started to feel like I was catching a glimpse of Tyler Durden in my own Fight Club movie. It was as if I was starting to fade in and out of a new personality, a new Josh. I began to see the guy behind the curtain and notice the pink elephant in the room.

Things in the church started to become a little … stupid.

To be continued …