King's Church

This new section of our website will highlight what God is doing in and through our church family and community. I'd like to begin by sharing my own story, how God has been working and is working in my life. God has been teaching me much over the past 6 years of ministry. In 2005 my wife and I moved to Long Beach to start a church. I had big dreams about the church, the lives changed and the difference we would make in Long Beach. Little did I know that the biggest story of change would be in my own heart.

I’ve always been "the good kid," the kind that had perfect attendance in high school and always wanted to please those in authority. For me, an act of rebellion was watching MTV or eating a second piece of cake when no one was looking. I walked the straight and narrow, at least outwardly, and unknowingly I thrived on my identity as a mature, trustworthy, and competent young man.

When we decided to move to Long Beach I experienced significant fear because I knew starting a church was the first project I had ever attempted where I could seriously fail. I knew that my gifts and abilities were not enough to make the church grow and I began to understand my utter dependence upon God...at least that's what I told people.

As I look back I see that my heart was a mixed bag (isn't that always true?) and my motives were springing from multiple sources; a desire to please God, my wife, my mentors, complete strangers. I knew God was in control and that the church was his but I struggled to hand it over to him completely. My identity and self-worth was often tied to how many people came to our church events, whether a Bible study, a service project, or a worship service. One week I was riding high and the next I crashed and burned. I prayed for God to free me from this roller coaster and to find my self-worth in Christ, not my performance, but that continues to be a fight.

Things began to pile up in 2006 when we began our first worship services. My wife and I had just had our first child, who was born with seizures and spent the first two and a half weeks of his life in the UCLA NICU. We didn’t know it at the time but our son would eventually be seizure free and completely healthy. However, as we stared at our son in the NICU, covered in tubes and wires, my wife and I were faced with the prospect of losing him. We were scared, we were overwhelmed, and we clung to God and one another as best as we could. The thought went through my head: "God, what are you doing? Look what I’ve done for you! I've been so good! I'm a pastor, a church planter! Why would you let this happen to me?" I was like the older brother in Jesus' parable about the Prodigal Son, I was angry with my father because he wasn't giving me what I thought I deserved.

As our son got better those thoughts and feelings subsided but what I didn't realize was that through that experience, along with all the church activities and my wife finishing graduate school, I had slowly and systematically numbed my heart from feeling much of anything. Life as a first time father and church planter began to consume me. I lost the ability to care for and pursue my wife. In fact, in my mind she was part of the problem. She wasn't doing enough to support my ministry and she was always criticizing me (these things weren’t true but were the lies I was telling myself). It wasn't until my wife sat me down one day and told me how she felt alone. She told me that my heart was cold towards her and that I wasn't there for her. This was a blow to my self-perceived identity as the "good guy." I didn't respond immediately but her words stayed with me during the following months.

Eventually, after things continued to worsen, we decided we needed help. We began a mentoring program called Sonship through World Harvest that is focused on connecting the truth of the gospel with the reality of life, the good and the bad. This experience changed us and our marriage, as we began to see, over the period of a year, the source of our loneliness, frustration, fear, and depression. I began to see my own self-righteousness and how I stood in judgment over my wife. I was always disappointed in her performance and demanding more from her. I didn't always express those feelings, in fact I usually didn't. Instead I let them inwardly boil over into bitterness and self-pity. As I look back I'm more and more convinced that Satan is real and he is always trying to pit me against those who love me, like my wife and Jesus. Today, I realize I can't trust myself, I lie to myself too easily, telling my heart that I'm basically a good guy who deserves better. I also realize that the best thing I can do for my family and the church is to die to my idol of people pleasing and rest in the love that Jesus has for me.

These are just some of the things God has done in my life over the past six years and the exciting thing is that he continues to show me more and more of my brokenness and selfishness while at the same time reminding me that he is infinitely pleased with me. In fact, there's nothing I can do to make him love me any more than he already does. Jesus has earned that approval for me and it’s not in my power to improve on Jesus’ performance (praise God for that!).

Not everybody wants a pastor who struggles with things like this. I realize that for many a pastor should be above the temptations that effect "ordinary" people. But the reality is that I am a work in progress and God is showing me that the path to life truly leads to death; death to my pride, my reputation, my own selfish needs and desires because those things will leave me empty and dissatisfied. I'll never conquer these things until I pass into the next life or Jesus comes back. Ultimately, I’m OK with that because I'm discovering that my weakness and failures are the very things that draw me to Christ. My experiences echo the words of Paul: "I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me."

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