I Saw Them Coming for Dad
The warning he didn't want to hear
May 2002. West Kilimanjaro, Tanzania.
My wife had scarpered on New Years Eve just five months earlier. I was still managing the cropping farm, slogging through the season growing beans and wheat. Dad had flown out from New Zealand to visit me. It mattered way more than either of us said out loud.
After he’d settled in a few days; got the lay of the land and my daily schedule, he started filling me in on what had been building back home in our home church in the two and a half years since I’d last seen him.
Dad had been an elder in the same congregation since he was ordained at age forty. Twenty four years. He took his role seriously; a way too many elders don’t.
Before every three-monthly communion service he’d spend two weeks of evenings after dinner out visiting the families under his pastoral care. Proper sit down visits, finding out how people were actually going, what they might need help carrying.
I know this because growing up, my own elder would leave it to the last day or two. One time he appeared at my door just as I was heading out for the actual church communion service! Three rushed minutes of awkward conversation later his visit Andrew box was ticked.
Dad’s folk each got an evening of his genuine attention. I can remember a conversation with my two younger siblings where they wished out loud that another man like Dad would join our church, and be ordained elder, so we could have the chance to experience what decent pastoral care was like.
I’d guess his work showed the others up and they didn’t appreciate that. Another long running issue was Dad taking Matthew 18, where Jesus laid out a clear process for what to do when relationships inside the church break down, super seriously. You go talk to the person. If that fails, you bring a third party. If that fails multiple third parties. If that fails? Then the church leadership acts to protect it’s members from such a toxic person.
Dad believed this was a command, not a suggestion. He’d followed it faithfully, and seen it work, even in cases where it looked like it didn’t it still did. Jesus hadn’t promised a happy resolution every single time. People were always free to refuse multiple offers of reconciliation if they chose to.
The other elders wouldn’t trust such outcomes to God. When a member dug their heels in, by refusing to listen to the way of Jesus, they would let the process quietly stall. They didn’t want to risk upsetting someone who might draw attention to a conflict which might risk them appearing mean. Easier to be an elder if everyone in the church believes all is well even when it’s not.
Except Dad knew unresolved conflicts fester. They shape the future of who will trust who and who won’t. Which conversations will happen and which won’t, ensuring real fellowship quietly rots beneath a deceptively calm surface. Peace, peace, where there is no peace.
Dad saw this clearly and wasn’t shy saying so. Seemed to me like some other elders and the pastor had, over the years, accumulated a significant amount of resentment toward him for it.
That history plus a couple of more recent political footballs they were kicking around meant that by May 2002 they wanted him gone. The eldership was sinking due to internal relationship cracks but no-one was willing to perform a Matthew 18 intervention and they refused to ask for outside help.
He told me this without self-pity, like a man reporting facts he found genuinely puzzling. In his mind resigning was not an option. Eldership is lifetime tenure in the church of my childhood. You serve until you die or you leave because you’re selling up to live somewhere else in the country. He hadn’t done anything requiring discipline. “They can’t remove me” he said.
I listened. Then told him what my intuition fed me directly, although I didn’t say that. More like, this is what I think will happen, as if I’d been analysing it cognitively for weeks.
“They want you gone and will get creative if that’s what it takes. Two years, three at the absolute most, until you’re forced out. They’ll invent a way to get it done.”
He didn’t appreciate that, tried to scoff it away as impossible. I didn’t push it.
I did ask why he was fighting to stay in a situation where he was basically ineffective now because everyone was agin him no matter what logic, reasoning, or facts he had on his side? You’ve got grandchildren scattered across the country who’d love to see more of you. What a huge ministry you could blow up even more! Massive life long lasting results from spending more time with them. You like visiting people, you could spend more time doing that as a free agent. You’re burning energy on men who’ve already written you off. That energy could go where it will produce more and better fruit.
He disagreed. I left it there as I could see he was emotionally wrung out by the attacks of the last few years coming from men who he’d always considered to be good friends.
When I arrived back in New Zealand just over two years later Dad had been forced out a few months earlier.
As best I could piece it together, the eldership itself had been dissolved and replaced with a new structure: a church council. How they wrangled the dissolution of the traditional eldership structure without violating church rules I have no idea. Whether above board or not, he was out with no recourse. Two years after my prediction.
Dad was gutted. Forty four years in that congregation. Twenty four serving as elder. A significant chunk of his life. He’d taken it seriously, never a man going through the motions.
Mum left. The elders wives she’d considered to be proper friends, over decades, turned out to be much less when it counted. Their betrayal was tough. She started going to the church my oldest sister had been attending for two decades. Worshipping alongside a faithful daughter and grandkids was the preferred option and I didn’t fault her for choosing it. It was six months before Dad started going with her occasionally, and more than a year before he finally moved for keeps.
Sad painfulled business. No joy being right.
I’d called it two years earlier. Dad had come to visit me, but couldn’t see what was coming to visit him.