Church Trouble

 Although my family didn’t want to be in Charlotte, it offered a lot of great things to do that we really enjoyed together as a family. Our neighborhood community center was fantastic with the pool, gym and sports complex. The neighborhood was also still being built so there were some good spots to explore.

The Charlotte area is also more hilly than the flat part of Virginia we had come from. That means they have flowing water in the creeks. One of my boyhood enjoyments was trying to build dams. So I took the opportunity to take my son, Thomas on what I called dam dates.

We enjoyed the Charlotte’s area’s greenways, which are paved trails beside rivers where one can ride bikes or walk. They also have large parks to explore and a small mountain called Crowder’s Mountain nearby we hiked a few times.

I have always enjoyed riding horses, which also interested my daughter, Courtney. We found a couple of opportunities. The only problem is that they were just trail rides where you had to stay in a line on a path. I prefer more free-style riding across fields like I had done in New Zealand when I was younger. We also took the opportunity to go up into the North Carolina mountains to go skiing/snow boarding.

We were trying to gel with our new church. We were making friends and trying out care groups, serving each other and going to events. It was a good group of people and I loved the pastor, Brent Detweiler. It wasn’t the same as our church back in Virginia where we had been for sixteen years but we were making an effort.

Laura kept saying that she believed that our friend and pastor, Eric Hughes would be her pastor again one day. A friend from our church in Virginia also said he believed we would move back there. I took it all with a grain of salt. All I knew is that God had opened up a job for me and it was in Charlotte.

One day when we returned to Charlotte from a visit to Chesapeake, I got some very troubling news. That Sunday at church, people from Sovereign Grace Ministries (SGC) had come in and announced that our pastor, Brent was going to undergo an evaluation to see if he was fit for ministry. Apparently, there had been tension between SGC and Brent for some time but they had let him plant a new church anyway. Now it was coming to a head.

I was disturbed. I loved and supported Brent but I also respected the ministry we had been a part of for so many years. I trusted they would figure it all out to the right outcome. After a series of meetings over several weeks, they asked Brent to resign. Technically, he could have kept the church but he didn’t want a power struggle to tear it apart.

After the decision, Brent asked George and I to meet with him. I was wary because I didn’t want to get involved in any kind of gossip or slander. I told him so and he assured me that was not what it would be about. We met and I could tell he wanted to discuss the events but I held that conversation at bay.

They had to decide what they were going to do with the church plant. If we didn’t get a new pastor we would disband. They brought in guest speakers until they made a decision. In the end, they did decide to disband, with the invitation to join the larger Sovereign Grace Church in Charlotte.

We tried the larger church but didn’t love it. We searched around a little to see if there was anything else. It felt weird after being in a Sovereign Grace Church for so long. We didn’t find anything that really captured us so we stayed. At least we knew we trusted the theology and style and organization. We ended up going to a Care Group run by one of our former pastors from Chesapeake, so that was familiar.



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