The Decision to Leave Jamestown (1)

You really can’t look back and second guess your decisions.    I made the decision to leave Jamestown in 1969.  Not all of my motives were pure, and as I look back on it, I think it gives insight to the convoluted way we often reach our decisions.  

 I would say that the noblest part of my decision was the feeling that the church needed a leadership transfer.  I was the first worker to come on the scene with the intention of planning the church.  My two co-workers joined me shortly thereafter.  I thought people were looking to me as the primary decision maker and I didn’t think that was healthy.   I didn’t think they would make progress in leadership until I was no longer present.

But motives are sometimes mixed, and I’ll have to admit that I was having trouble managing conflict within the church.   Any time people band together for any purpose, they enter into a relationship of potential conflict. You need to know that going in.  We can’t chose to make conflict go away, but we do choose our response to it. 

 Ann and I have different conflict management styles.  My style could be described as, “Don’t rock the boat.”   Her style is, “Let’s turn it over and find out who knows how to swim.”   The “don’t rock the boat” approach wasn’t helping the church, and the “turn the boat over” approach just didn’t work for me. As we have progressed through the years, we’ve managed to blend our styles with each other, and I think that’s a healthier way of relating to conflict, but I wasn’t there at that time.

Throughout most of my ministry career I’ve worked closely with elders.  One of the blessings of working with elders is the ability to drop sticky problems into their lap.  Eventually I would become an elder, and I would find out what it was like to have sticky problems laid in my lap.  I didn’t like it, but I realized I couldn’t punt.   Back in 1969, I was looking for a church leadership model that would allow me to punt.   To me the way to handle that problem was to work with a church that had elders.

All of us would like to “baptize” our motives, so we try to convince ourselves that we’re being led by God.  

I would have to say that my motives were so poor at this time that that I don’t think I would be honest with God if I accused him of making that decision for me.  It would be more accurate to say I wanted to leave Jamestown, and I was looking for a way to have God approve my desires.   There would be a price to pay for that, but whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, I chose to leave Jamestown.

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