The Storage Room Meltdown

http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2005/004/2.122.html

It was time to preach, but I had nothing to say.
by Rob Bell

I could feel my car keys in my pocket, and all I could think about was how far away I could be by 11 a.m. How much gas was in the tank? How fast could I drive?

Sitting on a chair in a storage room, I could hear the worship space filling up with people, and all I wanted to do was leave. What do you do when you're pastor of a church, it's Sunday morning, people are finding their seats, you're scheduled to preach, and you realize you have nothing to say?

How did it come to this? It started out so great …

One minute you have these ideas about how it could be, and the next minute you're leading this exploding church/event/monster.

My wife and I and several others started this church called Mars Hill in February 1999 with dreams of a revolutionary new kind of community. I was 28.

People who are starting churches, or want to someday, often ask me when I knew it was time to do it. And I actually have a coherent answer: I knew it was time when I no longer cared if it was "successful." I'm serious. I had this moment in October 1998 when I realized that if 13 people joined us, and that's all it ever was, that would be okay. This thing inside of me was so strong that I had to act on it. I felt if I didn't, I would be violating something … or somebody.

Better to try and fail … the worst thing would be to live wondering, What if?

The dream actually began years before when Kristen and I were living in Los Angeles. We visited a church called Christian Assembly, and what I saw changed everything for me. This community was exploding with creativity and life—it was like people woke up on Sunday morning and asked themselves, "What would I like to do today more than anything else? How about going to a church service?"

No amount of success can heal a person's soul. In fact, success makes it worse, because "Wherever you, there you are."

This concept was so fresh—people who gathered because they wanted to. There wasn't a trace of empty ritual or obligation anywhere in the place. It didn't matter how far away I had to park. The bond I had with the other people in the room. Not "I have to" but "I get to." Not obligation but celebration. Not duty but desire.

Kristen and I starting attending these services regularly, and then we'd go to Taco Bell and talk about what a church could be.

Desire.

Longing.

Come as you are.

Connection.

A group of people who can imagine nothing better than this.
And so several years, two internships, and a cross-country move later, we did it. We started a church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Now you have to understand that I started out playing in bands, back when alternative music was … alternative. I understood music to be this raw art form that comes from your guts. Do it yourself. Strip it down. Take away all the fluff and the hype.

This ethos heavily shaped my understanding of what a church should be like: strip everything away and get down to the most basic elements. A group of people desperate to experience God.
Please realize that to this day I have never read a book on church planting or church growth. I remember being told that a sign had been rented with the church name on it to go in front of the building where we were meeting. I was mortified and had them get rid of it. You can't put a sign out front, I argued; people have to want to find us. And so there were no advertisements, no promotions, and no signs.

The thought of the word church and the word marketing in the same sentence makes me sick.
We had these ideas and these dreams, and we went with them.

People would come in, there would be some singing, I would talk about God and Jesus and the Bible and life for about an hour, and then it would be over.

And the strangest thing happened: people came.

I remember that first Sunday like it was yesterday. Someone told me five minutes before the first service to look out the front windows. I was not prepared for what I saw. Cars everywhere. People were giving up trying to get through the traffic and just pulling over on the side of the road, parking, and walking the rest of the way. We ran out of chairs.

Chaos.

I loved it.

Unleashing a monster Now I am going to give you some numbers. I hesitate to do this because few things are more difficult to take than spiritual leaders who are always talking about how big their thing is. But it happened and it's true and it's part of my story.

There were over 1,000 people there the first Sunday. People in the aisles. People on the floor. I ended the message by inviting people to join us on this journey. I talked about the need to explore what a new kind of Christian faith looks like for the new world we find ourselves in. Whatever it was and wherever it led, we were going. "Join us."

The energy in the place was unreal.

The next morning I held a staff meeting. Which means I sat in my office and thought to myself, What have I gotten myself into? Followed closely by, Sunday's coming again.

More people came the next week.

Even more the following week.

I remember telling people we had no more chairs and if they wanted to bring their friends, they would need to buy chairs for them.

By September of that first year, we had to hold three services, pushing things to over 4,000 people.

A problem developed in the parking lot because people were losing their tempers when they had to wait so long to exit. I heard stories of harsh words being exchanged and people giving each other the finger.

So I stood up on Sunday and said, "If you are here and you aren't a Christian, we are thrilled to have you in our midst. We want you to feel right at home. But if you are here and you're a Christian and you can't even be a Christian in the parking lot, please don't go out into the world and tell people you're a Christian. You'll screw it up for the rest of us. And by the way, we could use your seat."

People cheered. The more honest, the more raw, the more people loved it.

We had no five-year plan. No vision statement. No "demographic."

All we cared about was trying to teach and live the way of Jesus. It's still all we care about it.

Around this time we were having problems with too many kids in the classrooms—there wasn't enough oxygen. And then the fire marshal showed up. Not good. Legal, but not good. He said we were over code, and we would have to start turning people away. We literally had to post people at the doors, and when the room was full, they had to tell people they weren't legally allowed into the service.

So we bought a mall. Actually, somebody gave us a mall, and we bought the parking lots surrounding it. We blew out the walls of the anchor store to make a room big enough to meet in and then turned the other stores into classrooms for kids. A guy came to one of the first services in the mall-turned-church, and said, "Hey, I used to shoplift in this exact spot."

We were growing. House churches were springing up, partnerships were beginning with other churches around the world, and people who had never been a part of a church were finding a home. Two years into it, around 10,000 people were coming to the three gatherings on Sundays.

In the middle of all this chaos was me, superpastor, doing weddings and funerals and giving spiritual direction and going to meetings and teaching and dealing with crises and visiting people in prison and at the hospital.

It was happening so fast. One minute you have these ideas about how it could be, and the next minute you are leading this exploding church/event/monster.

I tell you all this because there's a dark side. It's one thing to be an intern with dreams about how church should be. It's another thing to be the 30-year-old pastor of a massive church. And that is why I was sitting there thinking about how far I could be by 11 a.m. I escaped to the storage closet to be alone. I was moments away from leaving the whole thing. I just couldn't do it anymore.

People were asking me to write books on how to grow a progressive young church, and I wasn't even sure I was a Christian anymore. I didn't know if I wanted to be a Christian anymore.
I was exhausted. Full of doubt. I had nothing more to say.

And so I sat there with my keys in my hand, turning them over and over, hearing the room getting louder and louder and more and more full. At that moment I made some decisions.
Because without pain, we don't change, do we?

I could talk about the dangers of megachurches and what is wrong with Church Incorporated, but I realized that day that things were wrong with the whole way I was living my life. If I didn't change, I was not going to make it. In that abyss I broke and got help … because it's only when you hit bottom and are desperate enough that things start to get better.

This breakdown, of course, left me with difficult decisions to make. Mars Hill was alive and people were being transformed. Who would leave all that? I decided to be honest about my journey, and if people wanted to come along, great. But I was still going to have to take a new path. And a new journey began, one that has been very, very painful. And very, very freeing.

It was during this period that I learned that I have a soul.

Shalom The tzitzit (seet-see) first appear in Numbers 15 when God says to Moses, "Throughout the generations to come you are to make tassels on the corners of your garments, with a blue cord on each tassel. You will have these tassels to look at and so you will remember all the commands of the Lord, that you may obey them and not prostitute yourselves by chasing after the lusts of your own hearts and eyes. Then you will remember to obey all my commands."

God tells his people to attach tassels to the corners of their garments so they will be constantly visually reminded to live as he created them to live.

The word in Hebrew here for "corners" is kanaf. The word for "tassel" (or "fringe") is tzitzit.To this day, many Jews wear a prayer shawl to obey this text. The prayer shawl is also in a lot of interesting places throughout the Bible. One of the most significant is in the prophet Malachi's prediction about the coming Messiah: "The sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings." The word Malachi uses for wings is kanaf—the same word in Numbers that refers to the edge of a garment, to which the tassels were attached.

So a legend grew that when the Messiah came, there would be special healing powers in his kanaf, in the tassels of his prayer shawl.

Fast-forward to the time of Jesus: A woman has had an illness for twelve years and no one can cure her. She pushes her way through a crowd to get to Jesus, and when she gets close to him, she grabs the edge of his cloak. Jesus, a Torah—observant Jewish rabbi who keeps the Scripture commandments word for word, including passages like Numbers 15, would have been wearing a prayer shawl.

So when the woman grabs the edge of his cloak, she is demonstrating that she believes Jesus' tassels have healing powers. She believes that Jesus is who Malachi was talking about.

She touches his tassels and is healed, just like Malachi said.

But I don't think the physical healing is Jesus' point here. I think it is what Jesus says to her as they part ways. He says to her, "Go in peace." Shalom.

Shalom is an important word in the Bible, and it is not completely accurate to translate it simply as "peace." For many of us, we understand peace to be the absence of conflict. But the Hebraic understanding of shalom is far more. Shalom is the presence of the goodness of God. It's the presence of wholeness, completeness.

So when Jesus tells the woman to go in peace, he is placing the blessing of God on all of her. Not just her physical body. He is blessing her with God's presence on her entire being. For Jesus, being saved or reconciled to God involves far more than just the saving of your physical body or your soul—it involves all of you, living in harmony with him—body, soul, spirit, mind, emotions—every inch of our being.

Restoration There are many dimensions to living in harmony with God. In one sense, salvation is a legal transaction.

Humans are guilty because of our sin, and God is the judge who has to deal with our sin because he is holy and any act of sin goes against his core nature. He has to deal with it. Enter Jesus, who dies on the cross in our place. Jesus gets what we deserve; we get what Jesus deserved.

For Jesus, however, salvation is far more. It includes this understanding, but it is far more comprehensive—it is a way of life. To be saved or redeemed is to enter into a totally new way of living in harmony with God. The rabbis called harmony with God olam haba, which translates "life in the world to come." Salvation is living more and more in harmony with God, a process that will go on forever.

When we understand salvation from a legal-transaction perspective, then the point of the cross becomes what it has done for us. There is the once-and-for-all work of Jesus dying on the cross for our sins and saying, "It is finished."

Nothing more to be offered and nothing more to be sacrificed. We claim this truth as Christians. All has been forgiven. But let's also use a slightly different phrase: the work of the cross in us. The ongoing work of the cross in our hearts and minds and souls and lives. The ongoing need to return to the cross to be reminded of our brokenness and dependence on God. There is the healing we need from the cross every single day.

The point of the cross isn't just forgiveness. Forgiveness leads to something much bigger: restoration. It is not just the removal of what's being held against us; God wants to make us into the people we were originally created to be.

This restoration is why Jesus always orients his message around becoming the kind of people who are generous and loving and compassionate. The goal here isn't simply to not sin. Our purpose is to increase the shalom in this world. It is one thing to be forgiven; it is another thing to become more and more and more and more the person God made you to be. Not just for the life to come. But for now.

For Jesus, salvation is now.

I need a God for now.

I need healing now.

Yes, even greater things will happen someday.

But salvation is now.

This now leads to another danger of embracing only one dimension of salvation.

When faith is defined solely in legal terms, the dominant idea often becomes "inviting Jesus into my heart," a phrase that is not found in the Bible. That doesn't mean it is not legitimate; the problems come when salvation becomes all about me. Me being saved. Me being reconciled to God. The Bible paints a much larger picture of salvation. It describes all of creation being restored. The author of Ephesians writes that all things will be brought together under Jesus. Salvation is the entire universe being brought back into harmony with its maker.

This has huge implications for how people present the message of Jesus. Yes, Jesus can come into our hearts. But we join a movement that is as wide and deep and big as the universe itself. Rocks and trees and birds and swamps and ecosystems. God's desire is to restore all of it.

The point is not me; it's God.

It is possible to be "saved" and not be a healthy, whole, life-giving person. It is possible for the cross to have done something for a person but not in them.

My soul That's what happened to me. I realized I believed in Jesus and thought of myself as "saved" and "reborn," yet massive areas of my life were unaffected. I learned that salvation is for all of me. And for Jesus to heal my soul, I had to stare my junk right in the face.

It has only just begun for me, but a few things have become quite clear.

First, no amount of success can heal a person's soul. In fact, success makes it worse. I started a church and lots of people were coming to hear me speak, but I had things I had never dealt with and they were still there. There is a great saying in the recovery movement: "Wherever you go, there you are." Success doesn't fix our problems and compulsions and addictions.

I started going to counseling to discover and address them. Part of my crash came from my failure to identify these forces until recently. I had been pushing myself and going and going and achieving and not even really knowing why. It is easier to keep going than to stop, face the pain, and begin diving into the root causes.

It is scary to hit the wall because you don't know what's going to happen. And you might get hurt.

But that's what happened to me in that storage room between the 9 and 11 a.m. services, and it was the best thing that could have happened. I couldn't go on. Usually, we can go on. And that's the problem.

We put on the mask, suck it up, and keep going, like it's no big deal.

But it is a big deal.

It's a sign that we are barely hanging on. And it is only when something deep within us snaps that we are ready to start over and get help. We have to let the game stop.

I realize this is not groundbreaking news, but when we get desperate and realize we cannot keep living this way, then we have to change. As I let all this come spewing forth the first time in my therapist's office, he interrupted me. I was making lists of all the people I was working to keep happy. He said it was clear that there were significant numbers of people I was working to please and that my issue was a simple one.

I was anticipating something quite profound as I got out my pen.

He said this: "Sin."

And then he said, in what has become a pivotal moment in my journey, "Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God has made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it."

The relentless pursuit of who God made me to be.

I started identifying how much of my life was about making sure the right people were pleased with me. And as this became more and more clear, I realized how less and less pleased I was with myself. I'd become so heavily oriented around the expectations of others that I was becoming more and more like them and less and less the person God made me to be.

I was split.

As the lights were turned on, I saw much of my pain was because I wasn't measuring up to the images in my head.

I am not superpastor. I don't do well in an office nine to five. I am institutionally challenged. But I am not defined by what I am not. And understanding this truth is a huge part of becoming whole. I had to stop living in reaction and start letting a vision for what lies ahead pull me forward.

I began to sort out with those around me what God did make me to do. What kept coming up was that my life work is fundamentally creative in nature. And creating has its own rhythms, its own pace. Inspiration comes because of discipline. And discipline comes when you organize your life in specific, intentional ways. And then sticking to it.

I had this false guilt and subsequent shame because I believed that I just wasn't working hard enough. I wasn't superpastor.

I went to the leaders of our church and shared with them my journey as it was unfolding. I told them that if they needed to release me and find superpastor, I understood. If we don't know who we are or where we're trying to go, we put the people around us in an uncomfortable position.

Healing I can't begin to tell you how much better my life is today than it was several years ago. I continue to dig things up and process new insights and learn about my insides. The journey continues.

I'm learning that very few people actually live from their heart. Very few live connected with their soul. And those few who do the difficult work, who stare their junk in the face, who get counsel, who let Jesus into all of the rooms in their soul that no one ever goes in, they make a difference. They are so different; they're coming from such a different place that their voices inevitably get heard above the others. They are pursuing wholeness and shalom, and it's contagious. They inspire me to keep going.

I was sitting in the storage room last week at Mars Hill. The room was filling up for the service at 11 a.m. And I couldn't wait for it to start.

Because Jesus is healing my soul.

Copyright 2005 by Rob Bell. Used by permission of The Zondervan Corporation.