I’m sorry. Maybe I should have named this blog Ranting Out Loud. But telling Mark’s story yesterday reminded me of Sherry’s story and I find I can’t not record it here online for someone to learn from. Of course names have been changed.
East Grove Neighborhood Church was serious about church growth. The new building was the pride and joy of everyone but especially Ron and Yvonne. Ron was on every committee and every board. Ron’s contracting company had worked hard to bring the new state-of-the-art auditorium project to completion on time, and did so within a day of the announced date for the first service.
Yvonne was as excited about the new church as her husband, but really wasn’t a people person. She had her friends in the church to be sure, and wanted to see all the new programs and outreach succeed, but she couldn’t hide her lack of interest in getting to know some of those she perceived as the ‘lesser’ people at the church, such as Sherry.
It’s funny because if you had asked Yvonne, she would have told you how much she believed in the ministry plans of the church, but her actions just couldn’t always line up perfectly with her “on paper” ideals. Sherry got in the crossfire of that disconnect.
That’s really too bad. We knew Sherry. We still keep in touch. She is a really giving person. An asset to any church, any place, any time. The kind of person you want to keep excited about big-picture vision. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn she’s a 30% tither to God’s Kingdom; and with a job that makes that percentage meaningful, although, you wouldn’t know it by appearances.
Yvonne just never spoke to Sherry, wasn’t too responsive when Sherry spoke to her; and Sherry, for all her wonderful qualities is human after all and over a couple of years allowed it to get to her. Around that time we got to know her, and shortly after she admitted to us that she wasn’t attending that church anymore.
Both Sherry’s story and Mark’s story from yesterday could be easily dismissed by readers as simply being the tales of two people who were oversensitive. “These people just need to suck it up;” is what I can hear some of you saying.
But you don’t expect to be ignored when you’re part of a family. Not for a minute. The church shouldn’t work that way. We should demonstrate that we belong to Christ by the love that we have for each other. Visitors will see that. Early church history documents that this is how we began.
So East Grove lost Sherry, but of course they kept Ron and Yvonne, whose contracting business hit a downturn about five years ago — two large clients couldn’t pay — and is now a shadow of its former self. Ron got into a major depression over this and resigned from every committee and stopped a bunch of other church-related activities.
Sherry never invested herself completely in another local church after this, though she remains involved in at least a dozen ministry projects. Her job requires she works some weekends, and a parachurch ministry that she is involved with requires her — like ourselves — to be somewhat nomadic some Sunday mornings. But she continues to love and serve God with everything she’s got; and she really does have a lot to give.
Well, that’s the story. And yesterday you heard a lot of our story, too as well as Mark’s. In every one of these cases I can’t help but wish things had turned out a little different. In our own case I wonder what it would be like to have been able to invest twenty years in serving alongside a single faith family. I wonder if a dynamic youth program might have helped Mark’s boys. I wonder what all East Grove could have gained from keeping Sherry joyfully serving as part of that church family. I wonder…
No animals were wounded in the making of today’s blog post, but a number of church attenders were left frustrated, hurt or wounded.
