To King’s Cross Church,
Grace, mercy (hesed), and peace. How are we supposed to process the events of the past several months? We all respond differently in stressful situations like this. Some of us are uneasy with conflict and strong emotions. Others respond with confident indifference, trying not to feel anything by busying ourselves with actions and planning. Most of us likely employ a mix of feelings that don’t always seem compatible, but nonetheless, they’re in us, and here we are. We will be processing for some time to come.
This letter is by no means intended to rush you along, nor am I asking you to process like I do. At the very least I hope this may be a conversation partner for those who are already processing. And for others who feel lost, may this letter serve as an aid in making sense of our situation.
I don’t expect this to be brief.
The situation is heavy, the hurts are deep, and the task before us in healing seems overwhelming. I suspect that all of us have had days where we’ve found ourselves lost in the complexity of the situation; we’ve processed in starts and stops. I write to you all to share where I am at the moment in making sense of what has happened to us and between us in our church community. This is my attempt to make sense of my scattered thoughts and emotions in hopes that it may be a help to our church at large as we deal with our fractured thoughts and feelings around the departure of our senior pastor. I expect, as I continue to meet with you all, that some of my thoughts will change and be shaped by what you all share from your experiences. We are complex and no one has definitive knowledge of our hearts — except our Lord who knows us better than we know ourselves. May that be our comfort in all of this.
Take courage in this season of change not in our processing of the situation, but in the steadfast hesed love of Jesus that holds us together. His wondrous love will never let us go.
About Rob…
The first thing I want to say is that I miss him. I grieved and will continue to grieve the sudden loss of him in my regular weekly rhythm. I miss having a coworker who can easily talk about biblical hermeneutics and Star Wars in the same breath. I miss our late night chats that often turned into Flushing neighborhood walks where we would run into many late night characters that Rob has befriended over the years. Rob had this drive to know people — people that I would typically pass by on the street were familiars to him on those late night walks. I miss having opportunities to see the compassion and love he displayed to strangers; it was always a challenge to me in my own life.
I appreciated that Rob was not like me. For the three of us on pastoral staff, I took great pride in the fact that we were all very different. If it wasn’t clear from our sermons, we approached life, culture, scripture — everything really — very differently. I miss his particular angle on scripture that was unique to him, and I grieve that I will never get to hear it in person anymore.
I miss our inside jokes and intentional mixing of American idioms to frustrate other members of staff. But Rob also used very peculiar vocabulary that many of us on staff had to abruptly stop our meetings and ask, “What are you saying, Rob?!” I miss his quirks that I got to experience on a regular basis. He had what I called a food demon: Something would always be wrong with his meal when we ate together. Over time, I think he learned not to express his disappointment with his meals as openly, but I would always read his face when his food arrived; there was always a flash of resignation when he examined his meal.
Strangely enough, I also miss the things about Rob that annoyed me — similar to how you might miss your parents telling you to clean your room during your first year of dorm life in university. I miss his aversion to planning; he never liked being tied to a particular plan. We would plan sermon series together for hours making sure everyone knew which weeks we had and which passages we would preach from. Then, as soon as we started the series on Sunday, he would unilaterally change everything on the spot. Super annoying and frustrating. But I also recognized it to be part of Rob’s drive. For some aspects of our friendship and work, this drive was integral to his function and I realized I couldn’t surgically separate the gift from the frustrations of his being.
I miss Rob and the future we had envisioned together for King’s Cross. Sometimes I wonder if my kids will remember him when they get older. Maybe they’ll remember the “bread bandit” game he created out of thin air at last year’s congregational retreat, but would they remember him? I hope they do. I will still grieve this loss for some time to come because it was taken away so suddenly. And it’s my love for Rob that underscores my frustration with the way he left us.
The sudden exit
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: Rob’s exit was bad. Even if the reasons for his departure were based on what he initially told us, it would still be bad. When Rob took his “sabbatical,” he communicated to us that he felt unsettled in himself. He shared with us this image of a tree with two diverging branches of his self and he told us of his urgent need to reconcile and make sense of these two emerging identities: one that embodies life as he’s known it and one that has been altered by the revelation of his story with his birth family in Korea.
I was there when Rob first shared this in-person with the elders and pastors; we understood that the situation must be dire if he was making such a request for space. We saw our friend and pastor in distress and, despite our shock and confusion, we wanted him to have the space he requested to work this out within himself. Even now, I do not regret this act to extend grace to Rob at that moment. If we did not respond to his expressed pain with compassion, what would that say about us as people who claim to follow a gracious and merciful God? We could not have done otherwise, for our response toward him reflected our faith, our love for Rob, and our desire for him to be at rest.
In the moment we saw no option but to take on this burden brought upon us by Rob’s sudden exit. We were not prepared. It was unfair. It was irresponsible. None of us were ready. Every pastor and elder was in the middle of their own crisis: a move, a newborn child, a planned sabbatical, a new school year. We did it anyway. Yes, advanced notice should have been given and a plan should have been put in place for a gradual transition, but the nature and the urgency of Rob’s request (which we understood as a demand) did not give us a better alternative. In the immediate weeks after Rob shared with the church, I spent many evenings vacillating between feelings of frustration and compassion. I would say to myself, “I love this brother, but this… this is so messed up.” This was further complicated by Rob’s explicit request to limit communication so he could have a neutral space to work out his identity without having to put on his “pastor hat” to engage with us as church members.
In hindsight, we would have done things differently, but our present knowledge was not available to us then. How I wish that we knew! for both Rob and our community’s sake! Because what was revealed in the days leading to the congregational meeting required us to revisit the past months of confusion with a new lens. It required us to reframe the whole narrative that we were given and contend with our resultant anger, frustration, and sense of betrayal, as well as our sadness and lament for the way sin and shame had infiltrated the very heart of our community.
The great reframing
The new revelation that our church learned about in the four to five days leading up to the congregational meeting and vote to dissolve our pastoral relationship was this: Rob and Sara’s marriage was unraveling. The reason for Rob’s sudden departure was not primarily about his adoption/trafficking story, but about the brokenness in his marriage with Sara.
This part is complicated.
To make sense of this, I’ve had to process this from two primary perspectives. The first is simply as myself, a part of the church community who was directly impacted by Rob’s actions. But the second is this: I had to sympathize with Rob. I needed to imagine what Rob may have been going through and try to make sense of why he would do what he did. The former comes more quickly and naturally, but the second is also necessary.
If I process only through the former, I risk letting the felt hurt, anger, and betrayal fester into a hardness of heart in myself and demonization of Rob; this would do Rob, myself, and our community a great disservice in a time when we need to muster all of our humanity, compassion, and grace to lead us to wholeness rather than bitterness. I should add that while I’m attempting to articulate my thoughts here in an orderly manner, I am far from orderly in myself. There were times when I found it difficult to sympathize with Rob. I was hurting and I wanted him to feel some of the pain I was feeling. I didn’t want to sympathize because it felt like I was justifying his actions; I had to remind myself that sympathizing with Rob does not require me to condone his actions. And I learned and am continually learning that holding onto my own hurt from Rob while attempting to sympathize with Rob — even an imagined Rob — is an exercise in compassion. It is training me in Christlikeness.
The hurt and betrayal
After my initial lament and sadness for the story that Rob shared with us, I had to come to terms with the fact that Rob lied to us.
Because in the beginning, I saw my efforts to fill in for Rob at church as a voluntary sacrifice to help a friend in need. Rob said he needed space, and whatever I could do to give him that space, I gave. But not only me; my family gave. Stephanie carried additional burdens with regard to her responsibilities with church. My children also had to deal with my absence (mentally, emotionally, and physically) as the number of meetings grew substantially in the immediate aftermath of his sudden exit. There was a lot of hurt and confusion to attend to. Like many other leaders in our church who were trying to hold our church together during this time, I was tired and spent. But when it became clear that we were misled about why Rob needed space, I was angry.
The news of his dual full-time employment made it even harder. I knew he was looking for part-time work, but I thought it was just to help clear his mind; jobs like working in a candle store or in retail or in food service. I understand that sometimes the space we need comes through a “distraction” to occupy an otherwise preoccupied mind. But the full-time gig was something else. And while I know Rob told us that he was never looking for full-time work, and that this position practically landed on his lap, his willingness to take it or even interview for it without recognizing his obligation to inform our church was wrong and plainly unethical; it communicated to me that this period where he was supposed to be discerning whether he would continue being the pastor of our church was false — he was buying time. He already knew he wouldn’t be our pastor before he shared with the church about his “sabbatical.” We became accessories to Rob’s need to hide.
I felt used.
I felt like Rob took advantage of our goodwill to continue hiding. I looked back at the tiresome months of sacrifice with a lot of pain.
You used us to make a getaway without having to face us, Rob.
Why did you do this? Did you think we would be angry with you if you told us you were struggling?
Have you not been preaching grace and vulnerability all these years?
Did you even believe in what you were teaching us?
There were so many Why’s that came out of my pain and hurt. I don’t like being made a fool, but that’s how I felt, and this elicited a kind of shame and anger within me. I didn’t know what to do with myself for a while. But when I finally made space to assess my own heart, I had to repent; I had to turn away from my own desire to make things right in my own eyes and by my own strength. I had to pause and consider how the Lord sees us in our pain.
“Hurt people hurt people.”
That’s the refrain I heard over and over in recent months and a saying I knew to be true in my own life. When I consider Rob, I have to ask, “Did he want to hurt us?” And as much as I wanted to direct all my anger and frustration at Rob for his actions, I knew enough about Rob to know that he never wanted to hurt us. He did hurt us and there’s no justification for his actions! In no way do I want to minimize or bypass the hurt that we feel. But all these years serving with him and praying with him for our church and our community, I knew that he cared for us.
But Rob was hurting. And he’s been hurting for a long time. And I realized that in this prolonged pain, his consuming concern was for his own protection. He didn’t want to hurt anymore. His actions to keep us in the dark about his pain was an outcome of his need to protect himself, and he’s been doing this for so long that it became a permanent fixture in his life. And that was the tragedy: to protect himself from more pain, he also protected himself from the very thing that he needed to begin healing: the love of friends and community.
He felt trapped. The limited choices he thought he had — that he shared with us at the congregational meeting — were to either share about his marital struggle and thus injure Sara in the process or keep it to himself and try to work it out alone. He was convinced that sharing would only result in judgment and condemnation — he needed to protect himself — so in Rob’s view the latter was the only workable option; and he felt justified in his decision saying, “I apologize but I don’t apologize.” His prolonged suffering produced a kind of tunnel vision where he could not see any other alternative.
I can understand why Rob did the things he did; there’s an internal consistency about it when I consider his need to guard himself from more pain. But it was wrong. “Hurt people hurt people.” And that is certainly the case here.
In between cultures
In the immediate aftermath of Rob’s sharing I started to worry that members of our church would listen to his story and that our love for him would keep us from critiquing some of the things he was sharing with us. Rob was captive to a particular view of leadership and the pastoral identity that required him to maintain a put-together image. I feared that Rob’s story would give any one of us justification to hide our struggles and less presentable aspects of our lives from one another.
When I shared these concerns with some leaders in the church, they helped me put my fears in perspective. They helped me see that our church has already been doing the work of countering the need to hide and the power of shame. While Rob may have been captive in his own story — something that can truly happen to any of us — this was not what we have been teaching and seeking to practice in our church. These leaders and friends reminded me that our church has been open about mental health struggles and has provided pathways to receive therapy and counseling. We’ve shared in both large and small settings about marriage struggles, anger issues, family brokenness. We’ve been modeling and encouraging our members toward actions and practices that would have been unspeakable in the communities of our upbringings.
I needed this reminder, and I’m grateful that the gospel has taken shape in this way in our congregation. I’m grateful that we are recognizing that the culture of perfectionism and put togetherness of our upbringings has had really harmful effects on us, our families, and our communities. And that the gospel calls us not to be good by our own efforts, but by the grace we receive in Christ. But this is the ongoing struggle in all of us. The patterns of behavior and models of being that we received in our upbringings do not go away just because we want to live differently. Those patterns are deep in us. In my own life, I am constantly learning about patterns I need to unlearn. And I know that in moments of stress and hurt I instinctually revert back to what is familiar.
All of us live between cultures. We are seeking to live in the new culture founded on grace as followers of Christ, but we come from a deeply ingrained culture where we seek to perfect ourselves by our own efforts. The invitation before us as we grow together in community is to repent of our ingrained strategies to save ourselves and live into the grace that Christ offers us. But this is more than just how we see ourselves; it also extends to how we understand others and what we expect from them. I think it would be too easy to say that Rob did this to himself by trying to save himself through hiding, but we are more connected than we realize.
Above reproach
As one of the pastors in our church, this connectedness impacts me in a particular and personal way. In conversations with Joshua, we shared about what it means to be “above reproach,” a qualification for elders and leaders in the church. Some days we feel like imposters. We recognize that both of us fall short in so many ways. Who then could be a pastor?
I regularly listen to the charge that was given to me by a dear friend and mentor on the day of my ordination when I became a pastor at King’s Cross Church. He said to me,
Confess your own sins. You will save yourself and your congregation by confessing your own sins. We all confess sins; it’s whose sins we confess. When we don’t confess our own sins, we become very good at confessing other people’s sins. And pastors often don’t confess their own sins because we think that people need a model — that they need a model to follow. I remind you that they already have a model to follow.
As pastors, we often confuse ourselves with Jesus. They don’t need us to be the model. Now what people do need us to model is confession and our deep need for Jesus. And who will teach them that? If we hide our sins, we will teach our people to hide their sins, denying them an opportunity to reconcile with God. But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
I am reminded that as pastors and elders, we are called to be above reproach; called to holiness and integrity. But the very foundation of that calling rests on Christ. We pastors will fail to live up to holiness. We have our own vices and triggers. What marriage is completely without strife? Or what parent has never lost their temper with their child? Who has ever looked at the wealthy without envy of their affluence and comfort? What disqualifies us from leadership is not that we fall to these things, but that we lack repentance to turn from them and turn to Christ. The “mystery of godliness” that Joshua recently shared with our church is that it is Christ and his work that presents us holy and blameless and above reproach.
In this I am reminded of the psalmist’s honest admission: “If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” No one. But he quickly follows that up with “But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared [revered / honored].” In the end, it is not our ability to be above reproach, but our Lord who is glorified.
Some closing words (finally!)
I want to first thank you if you’ve made it this far. This has not been an easy process and it has been challenging to put all this in writing. Thank you for engaging with my thoughts, my frustrations, and my hopes regarding our church. I long for our church to continue to grow in grace, and I trust that our capacity to love and bear with one another will be stretched and strengthened in these trying moments as the Spirit does his work in us.
I lament that many pastors find themselves in spaces where the demands of our calling lead us to patterns of living and working that deny our personhood. I lament that many churches think this is normal and continue to push their pastors to meet impossible standards. Pastors will never escape being human. The call to be above reproach should not lead us to act as if we were not people in need of community, friendship, and grace. If anything, God’s call to holiness, to be above reproach, should lead us to be more human. We are all — pastors included — made with “God-shaped holes” as Blaise Pascal once wrote, and we become more fully ourselves when we recognize in the absolute depths of our being that we need Jesus.
I am still working through the contours of the pastoral identity and seeking the Spirit’s guidance as I love and care for you all. Many of you may only know me from the pulpit or from behind a guitar. I hope that as we grow together as a community of broken people, we will get to know one another — and ourselves! — beyond our functions in the church, and I pray that we will see with more depth and clarity how Jesus is renewing our community and our lives.
Norman