Confessions of a Troll

Lately there has been this awful train wreck on tv called Charlie Sheen.  Over and over he declares that he is “Winning”.  He brags of “tiger blood and Adonis dna”,but I don’t think he looks like a winner… but he thinks I’m a troll so what do I know.  According to his scorecard he is a winner.  He has two hot girls who meet his every want.  He has tons of money and cars and a big house and a million followers on twitter.  He has beaten his drug addiction by just closing his eyes and declaring it so.  He’s a winner and says that if your life doesn’t look like his then you are a troll. 

As stupid as all this sounds, I see the same thing taking place in the name of faith.  To be a winner is to have success—The Life of Blessing.  Winning in some churches means always having health, always having stuff, always being happy.  If you struggle with any of these, then something must be wrong with your faith.  Jesus is a winner and those who follow him win!  

No doubt, Jesus said that “I have come that you might have life and have it to the full”, but what does “having life to the full look like”?  To many teachers that means money, success, and health.  That is winning.  But what if your life doesn’t look like that?  Does that make you a “troll” in spiritual “Charlie” speak? 

Let me tell you about a “troll” I know.  She grew up in a home full of alcohol and dysfunction and as a preteen gave her life to Jesus and every Sunday took her younger brother and sister to church.  Her brother became a missionary so I guess that’s “winning”, but her sister died an alcoholic so that would be “losing”.  She married straight out of High School and had three kids.  Her husband was a mess, but she sought to raise her 3 kids to know the Jesus she knew. “Winning!”   She was patient, and loving and persevering in a marriage to a very selfish man.  She finally divorced him after 39 years of marriage, “not because he was unfaithful, but because he always lied about it and refused to get help”.  “Losing!” 

Today she lives alone with a dysfunctional dog (losing) and goes to a little church (losing) where she teaches other seniors and works with children on Sunday nights (winning).  Once or twice a year she travels abroad or goes on cruises (winning). 

Her life is not the “happy ever after” she dreamed it would be, but she is happy—she would say her “life is to the full”.  I know that because she is my mom.  Now many books and teachers and churches I hear about wouldn’t label her a winner.  She has struggled to survive breast cancer, a failed marriage and her bank account is adequately full only because of the inheritances from her mother and ex-husband.  She is a “troll”. 

But she’s a tolls troll in the Kingdom of Trolls!  Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies, it remains alone. But its death will produce many new kernels—a plentiful harvest of new lives.  Those who love their life in this world will lose it. Those who care nothing for their life in this world will keep it for eternity.”  

That is winning in the Kingdom of Trolls.  To live, you die, to win, you lose.  It’s counterintuitive.  My mom is one of the most giving trolls I know and there hasn’t been a lot of return on her giving in terms of what some people call blessings, but she is content in the knowledge that she has been a seed planted in the ground that has born much fruit.  She has kids and grandkids that have followed her example and sought to be like her.  I’m one of them and sometimes I still struggle with wanting success and stuff—I want to be a “winner”.  But I also know that to live I have to die.  The way of Jesus is difficult, but it’s what I want.  I want to be a troll. 

What's Ugly about the Bride

I need to get something off my chest and I hope you read this to the end.  There is something I never thought about until I became a Lead Pastor at age 48 and it’s this—I believe the great sin of the American Church is materialism.  The reason I even began to notice it a few years ago is because of the financial difficulties my church has experienced.  Up until that time I never worried about what other people gave, but when I had to reduce or delay MY paycheck I began to notice. 

I don’t know what specific people give in my church, but my treasurer has given me a breakdown that goes like this—Person 1 gives $400 per month, person 2 gives $800 per month, etc, etc.  We have around 30 families and my church is located among several nice subdivisions.  I would guess that most of the families make around what I do.  What makes me sad is only about 25% of the people who call Edgewater their church give 10% of their income to God’s Kingdom (Unless they are giving it somewhere else.).   Now I’m told that 25% is average for the average American church.  I think that’s sad.  I don’t want to Pastor an average American church. 

I have always given 10%.  My mom taught that.  My wife has always given 10%.  Her mom taught her that.  For the past several years we have even stepped it up to give beyond 10%.  I have a good friend who stepped it up each year to where he now gives 20%!  He gives 10 to his church and other 10 to other ministries God puts on his heart.  I want to be like that!

I have friends who argue that that kind of thinking is legalistic.  That 10% is Old Testament.  You may be thinking that right now.  (You may be thinking that I’m just writing this so I don’t have to work so many shifts at Caddyshack!  I pray I’m not.)  Here’s my answer to the, “We don’t have to give 10% because that’s Old Testament…

Jesus said clearly, “I haven’t come to abolish the law, but to fulfill the law.”  He never lowered the standard of the law, he raised it.  He said things like, “You have heard it said, ‘Don’t murder’, I say, if you have hate in your heart you are a murderer.”  Jesus is raising the bar.  He is teaching that just not killing people is not good enough. He is getting to the root of sin.  If you want to be sure to never murder, then start at the root—stop hating. 

God wants us to love Him with all our hearts and for most of us, money gets in the way of that.  It is our modern day idol.  We destroy this idol when we give to God.  It all belongs to God and 10% is a pretty low tip.  (As a server at Caddyshack, I’m pretty bummed out with 10%!) 

Most of my friends who admit their guilt in not giving 10% tell me they really want to obey God in this, but the budget won’t allow it.  They simply can’t find a way to do it.  But then I notice they have iphones with cell phone plans that exceed what they give to God and they have car payments that  exceed what they give to God.  If their wife told them, “I really want to have sex with you, but there just isn’t time.”  They would say, “If you really loved me you would make time!” 

Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell what he had and give it to the poor.  This is what it looks like to really be a follower of Jesus, but the church just doesn’t talk about that—too risky.  Better to keep a bunch of rich, materialistic people happy who tip God a couple hundred a month than run them off.  Just be sure to get a bunch of them and you can pay the bills!

I think the American Church has totally bought into this.  Churches compete with one another with moving lights, better slide shows, and amped up sound systems so they gather more and more rich people who toss a few dollars in the plate or box. (I define rich as owning a car since most of the world doesn’t and that’s pretty much most of us here in America.)   I have been guilty of this at my past and present churches.  We tap into the greed of American consumerism by providing church experiences that look like Disney World and justify it by saying we are only trying to reach a generation of people who want to be dazzled.  I would fear to think what it would look like if Jesus showed up at our (MY) church.  Would he rip down the screen and kick over the $400 sound monitors?  (BTW, $400 is cheap monitor.) 

I’m tired of this and I want to be the kind of Pastor that challenges the status quo, but it’s hard for me.  I don’t like talking about money.  I don’t want people to think that I’m trying to manipulate them into giving, so in the long run it benefits me.  But something has got to change.  I need to be bold in helping people see what I think is their biggest obstacle to knowing and loving God with all their hearts.  If one of my friends was cheating on their wife I wouldn’t hesitate to beg them to stop, so why am I hesitant to call them out on their love affair with materialism?   

I hope I haven’t come off pious or self-righteous.  I struggle with you.  I got a Kindle for Christmas and love it.  Although I can give you all these reasons why it will be such a great tool for sermon prep and save me money with half off books, etc, I still love getting a new gadget. 

If you are one of my friends who are not a follower of Jesus, I hope you don’t read this and think, “Glad I don’t go to church and have to hear guilt trips like this that try to just get my money!”  I didn’t write this for you.  This blog was intended for those who claim to love somone who died the worst kind of death so that we can know life.  We have found a love that far exceeds any love we have ever known.  Jesus calls us His Church—The Bride of Christ and I just want to see the Bride of Jesus loving Him the way we should.  I’m so glad He loves us—ugly as we are!

How Willy became Wild

So how did a guy who was a Worship Pastor in Nebraska become a Church Planter in Florida?  It started with good friends from a previous church in Georgia who had moved to St Augustine.  They were frustrated with the local churches and their lack of enthusiasm for reaching the unreached.  The majority of the churches where they lived bragged they were “hymn singing, King James only, good old gospel preaching, no drinking allowed” kind of churches.  For about a year my friends asked me to pray and consider moving to Florida and join them in starting a church.  Praying was easier during the minus 9 degree Nebraska winters, but more difficult when the Huskers were winning! 

After 3 visits and much prayer I knew what God had called me to do, but I had no idea how.  There would be little financial support.  My home church in NE promised $2,000 per month for 5 months and there was a possibility of support coming from a Florida Missions group (though they wondered why they should support a guy from Nebraska when hundreds of Pastors in Florida wanted support).  In August of 2005 we moved here with a guaranteed income of less than half what I had enjoyed and two kids left behind at the University of Nebraska. 

To support myself I got a full time job as a server at Murray Bros Caddyshack.  All lot of the other employees didn’t know what to think of a Pastor working in an environment that is much like “Hell’s Kitchen”.  In the first hour of training one of the other servers put me to the test by getting in my face and saying, “I hope you don’t mind me saying f***, I love to say f***, f*** is my favorite word, f*** this and f***that is what I talk about all the time.  You don’t mind, right.”  I said, “Being a good Christian boy I have never heard that word, please explain what it means.”  Okay, that’s not what I said, but I made it clear to her that any words she used would not be anything that I haven’t heard before or maybe even let slip from my own tongue. 

Caddyshack was a very difficult place to work for the first few weeks.  For whatever reason there were some who took it on themselves to haze me.  To their credit, maybe it had nothing to do with me being a Pastor/Christian, but a terrible server.  I had never waited on tables and I made mistakes like crazy.  The head line cook was always mad at me for having to remake Turkey Clubs because I forgot to ask the customer what kind of bread they wanted and the other servers got tired of me asking them questions like, “What’s Dewars?”  But I survived and eventually won most of the skeptics over.

After settling in for 8 months and building a small core of 5 families we were ready to launch Edgewater Church to the public.  God blessed us with a place to meet at the Comfort Suites in March of 2006 and I was excited to preach my first Easter message that April.  I decided I wanted it to be about how Jesus changed Peter’s name from Simon to Peter.  Peter’s new name meant rock and Peter was not exactly a rock.  He was mess, who always seemed to be saying and doing the wrong thing, but Jesus saw something “rocky” in him and wanted transform him into the Rock that He knew Peter could be.  I pointed out that when Jesus rose from the grave he appeared to three women who had been His followers and told them to go tell the disciples AND PETER that he was alive.  It was significant that he wanted Peter to know that he was alive because Peter had denied he knew Jesus when Jesus needed him most.  The point I wanted to drive home was Jesus calling him Peter—The Rock.  Many times when Peter messed up, Jesus called him by his old name Cephas, but after Peter’s biggest failure Jesus was calling him Peter.  I wanted everyone at our new church to know that God is all about taking you as you are, flaws and all, and making something powerful for His Kingdom. 

A couple of weeks before Easter I had been thinking and meditating on this idea of our “new name” and how our name represents who God wants us to be.  I was driving to Caddyshack to wait tables for a pm shift and I was praying asking God, “What is my new name?”  Right after asking that question, the most amazing thing happened.  It was almost as if Jesus himself got into my car and spoke out loud.  (He didn’t, but what I heard in my heart was just as clear as anything anyone has ever said to me.)  This is what I heard, “Bill, I’ve already given you your new name.  Your boss at Caddyshack calls you by it every time he sees you at work.” 

Now at this point I need to give you some background.  My boss Jimmy is the guy who hired me.  He was a good friend of my friends who had asked me to help them start a church.  He was not exactly a church goer, but he liked me and thought it was funny to have this “Pastor dude” working alongside a pretty rough crowd.  He came up with a name he loved to call me—Wild Willy.  Actually, when I walked into work he would bellow, “Willlllllllllllllllld Willy!”  (I think he told me he got the name from a Rolling Stones song or some other band.)  Now Jimmy didn’t call me this because I was wild, but because as a preacher who had never been drunk, had premarital sex or smoked dope I was the opposite of Wild Willy. 

But now here in my car the Spirit of God was speaking into my heart my new name, Wild Willy.  You see, for most of my life fear has been my theme.  As a kid growing up I was afraid and I carried that into my adulthood.  I had always played it safe in almost every decision I had ever made.  But now at age 48 I heard a call to risk it all, move to Florida and start a church that would reach the broken and bruised.  I would no longer be Mild Bill, but I would be Wild Willy. 

I love that name!  I don’t always live up to it.  Many days I feel afraid and the Evil One whispers in my ear to give up and go back to just plain old Bill, but I don’t want to.  I want to live out of my new name and new nature. 

Do you have a new name?  Tell me about it.  If you don’t, ask your Father and He’ll tell you. 

"Happy" for the Holidays

Psalm 13:3-6

³ Turn and answer me, O Lord my God!
      Restore the sparkle to my eyes, or I will die.
 ⁴ Don’t let my enemies gloat, saying, “We have defeated him!”
      Don’t let them rejoice at my downfall.

 ⁵ But I trust in your unfailing love.
      I will rejoice because you have rescued me.
 ⁶ I will sing to the Lord
      because he is good to me.

In my last blog I shared about my church’s difficult financial situation.  I thought by this point I would have to take a major pay cut and start working more shifts at Caddyshack—but I haven’t.  God has supplied my church’s need!

In November an unexpected check for nearly $3,000 came in to cover where we were going to be short.  It was out of the blue, something I never could have imagined!  God is so creative in how he wants to bless his children. 

Then this past Sunday a check was found in our giving box for
$5,000!  I’m told it was given by someone who hasn’t attended in several months and wasn’t even in the service this week.  How did they slip in unnoticed to give us this enormous gift?  Why did they do it?  Did they know we are hurting?  Did they feel “lead” to do it?  Did an angel take out their checkbook and write the check for them?! 

I fear I will become addicted to these kinds of miracles.  I want to simply trust that God will meet my need no matter what.  What if next month the big check doesn’t show up and I have to make up the difference with tips at Caddyshack?  Will I keep “trusting in His unfailing love?”  Will I still “sing because he is good to me?” 

That has been the struggle entering year six of “Bill’s excellent church planting adventure”.  At the beginning I was filled with hope and determined that God was going to do amazing things.  More than anything I believed that He was going to use me to shine light in a restaurant where people needed hope.  Five plus years into it, my zeal and joy and have waned.  I started to notice this a couple of years ago.  I found myself depressed and in survival mode.  About a year ago I determined that I needed to find my joy and get back to being “Wild Willy”.  (More on “Wild Willy” in future blogs!)  I needed to figure out how to be happy doing hard things.

This has always been my struggle—when life is hard I quit and just do something else and think that the “new thing” will bring happiness.  Sometimes it does for a short while, but soon the new thing has its struggles too.  I want to be like Paul who said, “I’ve learned to be content in whatever state I am in.”  He wasn’t talking about Florida, Georgia, New Mexico or Nebraska—he was talking about prison and ship wrecks and making tents to scrape by. 

All three of my kids are home now and life feels really good!  This is how I want life to always “feel”, but it doesn’t and I want to learn how to be happy no matter what.  To find joy no matter what situation God has placed me is my new quest.

Who I am and how it's going.

For 5+ years I have been the church planter of Edgewater Church and server at Murray Brothers Caddyshack in St Augustine, FL.  It has been the most oxymoronic experience of my life, filled with joy and pain, tears and laughter.

I now Pastor a church of about 100 people the majority of which are brand new to the Kingdom of God.  I cannot describe how much pain and brokenness is contained in my church.   There are marriages on the brink and teenagers in turmoil and some who struggle with substance abuse and others who battle mental meltdowns.   I often joke that I dreamed of starting a church filled with beaten up, broken people and to my horror God answered my prayers. 

In the past week I have learned of 3 marriages that are really, really struggling.  I just add them to the list of others I pray for. 

Right now we are in a major financial crisis.  I honestly worry if we will weather this storm.  A few weeks back we lost a family that was very generous in their giving.  They struggled to fit in and find community and finally they left.  Then two weeks later an outside supporter shared that he would no longer be giving.  His giving represented 20% of our budget!   So, in just two weeks time we had lost 30% of our giving.  There are basically two ways to try and compensate for this loss.  One is to relocate.  We spend about 20 % of our budget on renting a very nice school.  It costs $2,200 per month to rent.  It’s a little outrageous to spend $500+ to rent a building for 3 hours each Sunday, but it’s all we have.  There are no other building choices.

The other option is for the worship pastor and me to take pay cuts.  Big pay cuts!  50% pay cuts!   In a week our Leadership Team will be meeting to decide what to do.  In the meantime I pray that God will do a miracle.  He’s done it before and He can do it again.  It’s what gives me hope.

Last January we were in this same situation.  We were very much in the red budget wise.  The only solution was to cut my pay.  I took a 35% pay decrease and began working as many serving shifts as my restaurant would give me.  For two months God did amazing things.  I still don’t even know how we did it, but all the bills were paid and the pantry was filled.  For two months my tips were nearly double what I normally got and random checks came our way through people who knew and didn’t know about our plight.

Finally, at the end of February came the miracle.  My daughter called to tell me of a college friend of hers in Orlando who wanted to make a contribution to our church.  She had never been to Edgewater, but loved the stories my daughter Mandy told her about our church.  After getting her phone number I gave her a call hoping it might be some amazing gift like $300 or even maybe $500!  She was just a college student with a part time job, but my struggling church needed help and I was hoping that she would help us catch up a little. 

She told me that she had been in a car accident a year or so ago and that she had now reached a settlement.  She said she could easily give the money to the church she attended, but felt they didn’t really need the money and felt like God was telling her to give it to Edgewater.  Finally she told me the amount.  SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS!  I was immediately reduced to tears.  God was amazing!  Only God could think up a story like that.  To have a young woman with little financial means rescue a church in a town 90 miles away and fill a discouraged pastor with hope. 

So for six months we have rocked along and all has been well financially.  My salary was bumped back up 20% and I was able to cut back a few shifts at Caddy and then two emails came to put us back in crisis mode. 

But I hold onto hope and so do the elders of my church.  We are waiting and praying believing that God will step in again. 

The interesting thing is right before financial crisis number 2 happened I had been having my daily Bible readings in Zechariah.  Every day I would underline and copy verses that jumped out and would soon speak to my present situation.  Here’s a few of them….

"All this may seem impossible to you now, a small and discouraged remnant of God's people.  But do you think this is impossible for me, the Lord Almighty?"  Zechariah 8:6

"...I will rescue you and make you both a symbol and source of blessing."  Zech 8:13

"I promise this very day I will repay you two mercies for each of your woes!"  Zech 9:12

"When that day arrives the Lord their God will rescue his people, just as a shepherd rescues his sheep.  They will sparkle in his land like jewels in a crown."  Zech 9:16

"Ask the Lord for rain in the spring and he will give it"  Zechariah 10:1

"He will make them strong and glorious, like a proud warhorse in battle."  Zech 10:3

"I will reestablish them because I love them."  Zech 10:6

"I will make my people strong in my power, and they will go wherever they wish by my authority.  I, the Lord, have spoken."  Zech 10:12

So this is what I pray for everyday.  I hold onto hope and believe that God will rescue me and my little church!  Let me know how I can pray for you too!