Church
Covenant Stories: The Passion of Steven
Story #28 in the Covenant series
Before reading this story you should read “The Advent of Steven” from last week.
I don’t know how the Kramers found our church. We’re off the beaten path and we don’t advertise. Maybe it was God; I don’t know. Jennifer was only 19 and David was 20, but they already looked beaten, worn, and creased. They were rough in speech and manner. He worked construction and she worked off and on at the 7-11. David Jr. was three and little Stacy was 7 weeks old. It was like meeting the people you see on “COPS”. One night Jennifer punched her mother in the nose. David was outraged because she was holding the baby at the time. He felt that any decent mother would have put the child down first. David was having his own troubles as he maintained a shaky sobriety. The last time Jim Beam got the best of him, he fought the police officer who responded to the neighbor’s call. They had to pry David Jr. off his leg before they could take him away to jail.
About a month after the Kramers started coming to church we were gathered together for our Wednesday night meal. Everyone was sitting around the tables chatting after supper when we heard a terrible scream down the hall. The first thing I saw was Lyle and Cathy running toward JoAnn, one of our deacons, who was carrying Steven into the kitchen. Steven was screaming in pain, and there was something in the scream that made every parent stop talking. We knew it was something serious....
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Covenant Stories: The Advent of Steven
Story #27 in the Covenant series
So what did you do in the 90s?
A couple in our church, Lyle and Cathy, spent the 90s trying to have a baby. They blew an entire decade doing the infertility dance. You know the infertility dance, right? First you try to relax and “let it happen”. Then you pray to Jesus, who you know could help but is often busy doing other things. After that you give all your money to doctors and do all the weird stuff they recommend. Finally, you bow to your partner and offer up your credit cards.
This dance will flat take it out of you.
None of it worked for Lyle and Cathy. For them it was one disappointment after another...
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Parting Shots
It's always wonderful when a new family joins our church. It's easy for the congregation to feel that it's fulfilling its calling, and easy for me to think that I'm being a good pastor. Of course, people also leave churches. I confess that over the years there have been a few people whose departure was a relief to me, but for the most part it is very sad when someone leaves our church, particularly since we are a small congregation, and every person's absence is noted and deeply felt.
There are natural and inevitable reasons that people leave churches. People move away or die. Sometimes a marriage falls apart, and neither the husband nor the wife feels comfortable in the church community that they shared as a couple. These departures give us a chance for closure. On the last Sunday before a family moves away, we gather around the family members, lay hands on them and send them off with prayers of blessing. Even when a family falls apart and the tragedy leads to someone leaving the church, there is usually an opportunity for conversations and prayers.
Most of the time when people leave our church, however, they just disappear. We notice their repeated absence after some weeks have passed...
Click here to read the rest of this essay at The Christian Century.
Archive of Christian Century Articles by Gordon Atkinson
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Covenant Stories: 911
Story #26 in the Covenant series
There are defining tragedies for every generation, and those who live through them never forget what they were doing when the news broke. Pearl Harbor was like that, as was president Kennedy’s assassination. The people of this generation will never forget where they were when they heard that planes had flown into the World Trade Center towers.
Not only do we not forget where we were when a national tragedy happened, we never tire of telling the story. On the anniversary of these events, people tell each other what they were doing when they heard. It is a ritual that clearly helps us deal with the pain and grief.
On September 11, 2001, I was coming home from dropping off my oldest at school. I heard on the radio that a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center. By the time I...
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Covenant Stories: A Place to Be
Story #24 in the Covenant series
There are 23 Covenant stories behind us and more still to tell. But I’d like to stop for a moment and write something rather personal. A church is a living organism made up of the lives of the people who are a part of the community. And the life of a church is the sum total of all their experiences over time. Thousands of Sundays, Wednesdays, ceremonies, celebrations, and tragedies make up the story of a church. If someone tries to tell that church’s story, the best he or she can do is select a few moments, like snapshots, and try to communicate a sense of its reality. But you can’t really tell the story of a church. No one can. The only thing you can do is experience a church community by being a part of it.
So I’d like to tell you what Covenant Baptist Church has meant to me. Because I have been a part of this community for 20 years.
Jeanene and I came here fresh out of seminary in 1989, when the Baptist wars over the Bible were at their peak. I wanted to get a Ph.D. in New Testament and teach. I swore publicly that I would never be the pastor of a church – many people heard me say it. In hindsight, that was probably a mistake. It’s like double-dog-daring God. I’m not arrogant enough to claim that God would expend any divine energy just to teach me a lesson, but it is kind of funny if you think about it...
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Covenant Stories: Roberto's Mark
Story #23 in the Covenant series
In the summer of 1999 construction began on our church building. A few days before the foundation was poured, on a whim, I retrieved 15 or 20 small rocks from the ground directly beneath what would be our fireplace. I wanted a building as much as anyone, but I also knew that once we poured the foundation, things would never be the same. Some of the wildness of our land would be gone. A part of it would be tamed. It may sound silly, but I felt like I was rescuing these rocks. I didn’t want them spending the next century or two covered in concrete. I hoped the rocks would help me remember that there was a time when our land was completely wild with nothing on it designed by humans.
It was our idea to be as gentle as possible with our construction, minimizing the impact the building had upon the land. If that is your desire, you should know that you will have to watch the construction workers closely. People in the construction business are often forced to think about saving money and time, so they can be a little insensitive about flora and fauna. One can hardly blame them since their clients complain the most about money and schedules.
My first lesson in this reality was a painful one...
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Covenant Stories: Main's Folly
Story #21 in the Covenant series
If you go down the road on the right side of our property, past the building and past the storage shed we had to buy because someone kept stealing our lawnmower, all the way to the back and beyond the labyrinth, then just beyond the cactus patch where JoAnn Chappell saw the big snake that one year, you’ll see a patch of healthy and thriving cactus. It is all that remains of something we used to call “Main’s Folly.”
While we were clearing the land for the building back in 1999, we made quite a few piles of brush and wood at the back of the property. Someone had to burn those piles, and that job fell to Michael Main and me...
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Covenant Stories: No Right Answers
Story #18 in the Covenant series
The next chapter in our story is one I tell with fear and trembling. It is one of the lowest moments in our church history - at least for me. My fear is not of telling the story but of being the only one to tell the story. I’m sure everyone who was involved remembers it in their own way and with their own spin. At the time I felt trapped in the middle, trying to hold the church together, trying to keep everyone happy, and trying to do the right thing. In the end several families left our church and others were very angry with me. It was one of the few times in my life when no amount of good intentions or careful negotiation could prevent a painful outcome. There seemed to be no right answers.
It was 1998 and we were still meeting at Rolling Oaks Christian Church. We had just formalized our agreement with Trinity Baptist Church to move forward with our plans for a building of our own. With their financial backing and help, for the first time I felt confident that our church would survive and put a building on our land. It all began with a phone call from a nervous-sounding woman. She was cautious in speaking to me but very clear and straightforward.
“My name is Mary.* I’m an ordained Baptist minister and a chaplain at a hospital here in town. I’m in a long-term, monogamous relationship with a woman. Her name is Karen...
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Covenant Stories: Upside Down and Backwards
Story #17 in the Covenant series
I’d like to leave the narrative of Covenant Baptist Church for a moment and talk about something rather odd that I’ve noticed about our church. At Covenant, everything seems to be upside down and backwards. We’re not trying to be different. We’ve never called ourselves an “alternative church.” We do things that seem right to us, but they seem to be the opposite of what most churches do.
Now before I write this, I want to state very clearly and carefully that I am NOT suggesting that any other church ought to do things the way we do them. There is certainly no shortage of “how to do church” books out there, with Dr. This or Reverend That revealing the deep, spiritual truths he has discovered that will increase your fold, or foster real intimacy, or kick-start your small group ministry, or blah blah blah in a postmodern blah.
If I wrote a book it would be called, “How to take a church from 14 families to 40 families in only 10 years of bivocational ministry.” Just kidding, though that title would be accurate. My “how to” church book would be a single index card. Written on it in pencil would be this:...
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Covenant Stories: Lillian's Eyes
Story #16 in the Covenant series
My third daughter was born on the last day of 1996. Having had two children already, we were feeling very relaxed and at ease, so we named her Lillian. We were thinking of the famous passage in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus urged his followers not to be consumed with worry.
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. Matthew 6:28-29
I’ve often felt it was a blessing that we named her Lillian, because within two months of her birth it was obvious something was wrong with her eyes. The doctor told us she had Strabismus, a condition that was once called “lazy eye.” There is a small window of time, early in life, where our eyes learn to work together. For whatever reason, Lillian missed that window of opportunity. Surgery and glasses might help her look straight ahead, but her eyes would never work in together to produce a three-dimensional view of the world.
About that same time Jeanene and I had become convinced that Covenant Baptist Church was never going to grow large enough to be able to afford a building. We loved Covenant, but we simply didn’t have enough people to pay for something like that. We were in a bind. People in our culture are accustomed to attending churches that have a permanent home. Right or wrong, that is the expectation. Without a building it can be hard to attract people. But without people, you can’t pay for a building...
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