Saving Sova

 One of those great things about marriage is you get to help your spouse have new experiences they might not have had much opportunity to do without you. On my part, that meant eating meat again, for one. Such is my great love for my wife.  On her part, that meant moving. Five times. In five years. Such is her mostly unwavering confidence in the sovereignty of God. She left Ottawa and joined me in Maryland for a few months. Then together we moved to Wake Forest to a town house on campus. Then we moved to a single-family home off campus. Then we moved to a single-family home in Lawrenceville, VA. Now we live in a different home just down the road in Brodnax, VA. She's moved more times in our 5 years of marriage than she had in her entire life before combined (a whopping zero). 

I learn a lot from my wife. All the time. Mostly when she doesn't think she's teaching me anything. It's when she's just being herself. I learned what a "Proverbs 31" woman is by marrying one. I've learned to appreciate God's intentions to meticulously blessing the labors of a godly, homemaking women with eternal joys. I've learned what it looks like to move forward in humble, trusting submission while carrying honest and wise doubts. I've learned women have a greater tolerance for unusually-colored and scented bodily fluids. The list goes on. It's that moving forward in submission thing I want to focus on, though.

Bethany married me knowing I was moving forward having submitted my life to God for the cause of the unreached. I was learning Mandarin. I wanted to make disciples in a Mandarin-speaking context. Bethany, for her part, DID NOT. But she was going to go with me wherever I went because she had entrusted her life to God through me. This inspired me to spend time during my MDiv thinking about the role of the wife in a church-planting team, and the conclusions I came to went against the current, so to speak, that I was encountering in my program. If we were to go with the IMB, I would be asked to try to avoid having children during our first couple years as missionaries because they would be a distraction from language learning, and my wife would be asked to understand, support, and be involved in a church-planting vision for the future (whatever that means).

Near the end of my studies, I had, I suppose, what amounts to a theological mid-life crisis. I had given my life to God for the cause of the unreached, but I was experiencing a growing almost...need...to be in pastoral ministry here in the States that would not be quieted. I was looking over my left shoulder at the foreign mission field and seeing the draw of the Macedonians, while also looking over my right shoulder at the draw of the state of my own people. It was a very difficult time. I was struggling with the words of American missiologist and theologian Dr. Timothy Tennet, "[If God allows you to preach the gospel 100 times, and you spend 99 times preaching it in one place, I hope you'll use that last opportunity somewhere else]".  He's basically saying "America has light already, go shine somewhere dark." But I was also struggling with all this filthy darkness I was seeing all over America. There is a major spiritual battle happening for the soul of the Puritans' overseas vision we call the USA, and it grieved me to consider leaving my post in this fight to go fight elsewhere.

Plus, I had handed over my life to God for the cause of the unreached. It was almost like an unwritten contract I had signed. I remember it like it was yesterday. I heard the statistics on just how unreached the world was, and it shattered my ignorant assumptions that the task of spreading the news of the risen King to the ends of the world was nearly finished. I was crushed. I was angry. I was desperate. And I made the commitment before God that if no one else was gonna "do something" about it, then I would. But ultimately, I came to terms with two things: 1) the fact that handing my life over to God for the cause of the unreached is wildly arrogant. I don't, on the one hand, get to "hand my life over to God" and then at the same time on the other hand tell him precisely how he's allowed to use it. What I had done that night driving a company vehicle through Norfolk, VA when I supposed to give my life to God for this one purpose was actually just a surrendering of my own dreams. I had to be open-handed toward God and his will, and not suppose that my sense of urgency was in any way an indication of his will for me. 2) I also had to come to terms with the fact that perhaps the single best way for me to have a global impact in my ministry was to stay. What if I could do more for the unreached leading a congregation with a vision for missions than I could going? What if?

The timing was pretty good. Very, very shortly after graduation I had come to the conclusion that the urge to preach and shepherd a flock was both God's nodding to my desire to enter the mission field and at the same time saying no to it. I think it was Spurgeon who said something like, "If you can be happy doing anything besides being a pastor, do it." I couldn't be happy doing anything else. I immediately changed gears and began to think about ecclesiology instead of missiology. I began thinking more about Greek and Hebrew and less about Mandarin. I began saying out loud how I would communicate certain truths in sermon format when I thought I was alone. I was moving forward in it, feeling no shame that I wouldn't be entering the mission field (at least not yet), and still incredibly grateful I studied missiology in seminary rather than pastoral ministry. I concluded missiology would make me a better pastor than the alternative. I applied and was offered the position as pastor at a small, beautiful "Baptist" church in Lawrenceville, VA. And so, my wife got to display her confidence in God's sovereignty as we moved yet again.

A few months in to my pastorate an opportunity to own a new, gorgeous home nearby opened up and we bought a house in Brodnax where we lived when our sweet baby boy, Caefa (kay-fuh) was born. This is that amazing and severe mercy of God I talked about in my last blog post. As I write this, he is five and a half months old. I can hear him playing with a rattle in the other room. Little stinker is supposed to be asleep.

I am so grateful for God's kindness to us. I began to see over time just how dire the need was for gospel ministry in Southern Virginia (Sova). The community seems all in all to be dying. High schoolers graduate and go to colleges elsewhere and never come back. The average town in Mecklenburg County is a crumbling testimony to a lively history still longed for in its forgotten elderly.  

Even Lawrenceville itself (though in neighboring Brunswick County) could not escape the degradation of society and religion, bosting of itself that there were good times had here. Ask anyone. Pull anyone aside and you'll get an ear full of stories about what "used to be there" or "what people used to do there", followed by some form of lamentation about the future.

And they should lament. The dereliction of their buildings and encroachment of mother nature as she slowly overtakes and reclaims house after house and road after road in Sova is as much a sign of the conditions of their souls as it is their economies. These handless and footless statues of Dagon are being humbled by God because the people here have a form of godliness, but they deny its power. Sova is Galilee of the gentiles, and the shadow of death looms heavily overhead.

Indeed is our Lord sovereign. I became a pastor, and yet, was in a foreign mission field after all. I resigned as pastor in Lawrenceville in October of this year. The churches in Sova bear the same sickness, longing for a spiritual reawakening to the old forms of religion and church life that once thrived in this area, but also nearly single-handedly caused its downfall. I prayed and wept over that church asking God to either grant it repentance or close its doors. I thought I had begun to see signs that perhaps God was granting it repentance, but it all came to a head in September, and the illusion was shattered. I came to the conclusion that the people I was leading were mostly goats in sheep's clothing, which meant the organization wasn't a church, which meant I wasn't a pastor. I know that is deeply politically incorrect to say, and that doesn't bother me. The phase of my life where I coddle sinners and try to make them like me is over. A community of people who looks their pastor in the face and says "We're never going to change, even if you can prove to us from scripture that we should" will have to make an account for that on judgement day before him who has already threatened to say "Depart from me. I never knew you."

My family has since joined another local congregation that was formed out of a purifying fire at another similar church in the area, and it has been the single most healthy, beautiful, and powerful church experience of my life. God has brought godly, like-minded men and women to Sova, and somehow we met each other, and have committed to do life with one another for the sake of the gospel in our area. We call ourselves Trinity Church Southside. I am so grateful for God's supernatural superintending of my life in bringing us to this place, in this time. I don't "regret" any of the decisions I've made that brought me here. I had significant blind spots and wore rose-colored glasses, and God used it to get us to a place where I am honored to raise my children and confident my family would be cared for were God to call me Home. And I'm hoping I only drag my wife through one more move, one day soon, when I buy some acreage and build a house that we can spend the rest of our lives in and hand off to Caefa one day when it is time for us to pass and leave all our worldly possessions in his care.

May the Lord be pleased to grant a revival, a true, biblical revival, in Sova. May tomorrow's theologians and leaders be birthed here. May the songs we write be sung by churches around the world. May our men and women be unashamedly men and women in all their glorious dichotomy. May our future generations be pleased to say "Jesus saved Sova".