Interactions with God #112

There was a time when I was well liked in church. Leadership, did after all ask me to lead a church plant…twice! With that in mind, it was hard to understand what happened at the Scottsdale and Anthem Vineyard churches. When the same thing happened in the Rowlett, TX Vineyard, it was almost too much to handle.

Look, I am a sales guy. I can talk to anyone. When I have a good job, I get paid a rather large salary to do so. Why then did I continually have trouble building any type of relationship with church people? It made absolutely no sense. 

When we moved to Royse City, we began to attend the nearest Vineyard Church. We had been in leadership with the Association of Vineyard Churches for years. I knew several board members of the AVC. Brian, our pastor at the North Phoenix Vineyard, was one of them and also the Regional Overseer for the west. That area included this little church in Rowlett. Yet, we were not welcomed as though we were family. Rather we were met with skeptical looks and that same distance that we got from the Anthem church. 

We tried too. I took leadership classes, even though I could have taught them. We went through all the hoops and motions any good Christian should do. Yet, no one really wanted to spend much time with us. People would walk away when I walked up or look elsewhere while I was talking, consistently. I didn’t even let loose my full personality. I could walk up to three people talking and say nothing and they would still all walk away because of my presence. Yes, I did this on purpose as an experiment, just to make sure it wasn’t because of something I said. It wasn’t.  

I don’t like church hopping and I would not recommend it to anyone, but that was our response. Mostly because I was starting to believe that God didn’t want us to be part of the Vineyard anymore. You know, that God closes a door thing… 

We probably stayed at the Rowlett Vineyard for about 6 months, then we started attending a small Independent Baptist church in Royse City. We got the same thing there. After about six months we left there and started attending a rather large church called Lakeshore. There we attended small groups and even went through leadership classes. Again, no one wanted to spend any time with us outside of a church event. We invited! In fact, several times people did accept an invitation to dinner, yet they would either cancel last minute or just not show up. Yes, and this, was in the “bible belt”. 

I knew it was God’s doing. I didn’t understand it, but it also made me really mad. Yes, God is in control, but people were jerks and I am putting it as nicely as possible. Don’t agree? Consider the scripture regarding the sheep and the goats. Surely, I and my family would qualify as “the least” of His brothers here. Sorry, it still makes me mad.

While still at Lakeshore, I realized that this church was just not working either. One night, as I thinking that it was time to find another church, I got an email from a woman named Natalie. She was from the Rowlett Vineyard. In her email, she apologized for them not reaching out to us more and invited us back. The timing was too close to be random. I figured it was God’s hand, so we went back to the Vineyard church in Rowlett, TX, sometime in 2007, about a year after we left.

It wasn’t until we went back that it occurred to me what was happening. In Interactions with God #81, I wrote about an experience with John Paul Jackson. In early 2000, he had given me a prophetic word that I would have a problem with the occult from within the church and if I kept close to God, He would get me through it. At the time, I had assumed that the prophetic word had something to do with the Cave Creek church plant. I was wrong. Since the church plant failed, I had run into this strange dislike, distance and straight up meanness from “Christians” in church. The word “occult” biblically equates to rebellion. These who despised me and my family were not rebelling against us, they were rebelling against God. 

Sheep and Goats. Sheep follow the shepherd. Goats always want to be in the highest place. If you put a box in the middle of a herd of goats, they will all climb the box and push all others off. Goats have to be at the top. They will climb to the top by pushing others down.

Climbing to the top...reminds me of a scripture:

'I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God, And I will sit on the mount of assembly In the recesses of the north.” Isaiah 14:13b

Is this not the very heart of rebellion?