On the Back Side of Nowhere: Stories of Grace from a Desert Rest Stop

Copyright © 2014 DANE E. MILLER.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-4934-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-4935-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-4933-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014915428

WestBow Press rev. date: 09/29/2014

Contents

Foreword

Getting Started

The Broken

Big Changes, but Not Enough

Joshua’s Ongoing Trek

The Dying

Suspenders and Pre-conceived Notions

Trailer Mice

Doc and Fluffy

The Hurting

Bunts and Losses

Motorcycles, Arthritis and Book Shelves

Redeemed Tears

The Strange

Sideways Trucks, Laughing Children, Full Bellies

Sister Gleaner

The Different

Playing the Spoons in Worship

Nathan

African Sojourners

And the Beat Goes On

Rings and Long, Flowing Hair

Stories Inside and Outside the Oasis

Dirty Feet and Plastic Bowls

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Traveling Men

Strange Visitors

Lutheran Architects

Living in the Rest Stop—Life and Ministry at the End of the Day

School Houses and Storage Sheds—Getting to the Beginning from the Back Side

Appendix

Sources

With deep love these words are dedicated to my wife, Mary C. and her best friend, Jesus. Both of them have shown me incomparable grace, mercy and love.

FOREWORD

Be warned, if you read this book, it is about faith in Jesus; a faith unplugged from comfortable pews and denominational pride. American church life often feels so scripted as to feel plastic, devoid of real flesh. But in reading On the Back Side of Nowhere, a mini-portrait of a church called The Rest Stop, one meets life head on, life that could be described as theology with calluses. It is unscripted, off-key, and covered with spiritual warts. It is pastor/shepherd and a flock of unruly sheep at their most honest.

I heard a mega-church pastor boast not long ago that he had never been required to be in the home of one of his church members. Dane Miller demonstrates that such distance-loving is ludicrous and non-biblical. He, Mary C. and their children model personal ministry measured by real people touched, healed, and, often lost. This is not a church evaluated by the numbers of pews filled while leaving the service unnamed and unchanged. This is a confessional about people slowly being transformed into the likeness of Jesus with openly acknowledged hiccups at each turn in the road.

Reading across the pages of this book I laughed and cried as its true-life characters took on flesh, made me smile and often broke my heart. The Rest Stop represents life-on-life with a Jesus-centered love that demands accountability. Hear the heart of a true shepherd as Miller calls each of God’s oft broken sheep by name. He knows their life stories. He knows their sins. He sees their potential. He celebrates their conversions and changes, yet he also grieves over chances missed and lives re-broken. I read again and again in these intoxicating pages how the New Testament love of Jesus Christ was being lived out in the virtual Old Testament setting of Three Points, Arizona. Here are both Cain and Abel, David and Goliath. Inside these pages is a Simon Peter who, at times, seems to be Satan’s voice, yet soon is to become a rock upon which the kingdom would turn. Here the forbidden fruit of real life is both consumed and, in real community, resisted.

The Rest Stop is about belonging. It is about broken pieces coming together to make a Body, an ensemble, a symphony. The Rest Stop has not simply been a ministry for the Millers; it has been their home. It has been the place to raise their children and work out their calling. It has been such an intimate part of the essence of who they are that I cannot imagine what the Millers will do without these wonderfully broken pieces of pottery who make up the Body of Jesus at the Rest Stop in the desert.

Nik Ripken and his family have lived most of the last thirty years overseas. He is the author of The Insanity of God and The Insanity of Obedience.

He wants Peter to feed his sheep and care for them, not as ‘professionals’ who know their clients’ problems and take care of them, but as vulnerable brothers and sisters who know and are known, who care and are cared for, who forgive and are being forgiven, who love and are being loved….Somehow we have come to believe that good leadership requires a safe distance from those we are called to lead….But how can we lay down our life for those with whom we are not even allowed to enter into a deep personal relationship?

Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus, p. 61

GETTING STARTED

Just to get it out of my head was the initial response to the question about why I wanted to write down what follows. For a very long time stories of life in ministry at Serenity Baptist Church had peppered teaching of seminary students and speaking to other churches. Laughter and some amazement usually met those stories, and many of the students in particular suggested that those narratives should be made available to others. For me, however, these images simply haunted my experience as a local church pastor, usually in ways reminding me of God’s remarkable grace, sometimes in ways confronting.

This began, then, as a way for me to explain to myself ministry in a small, out of the way place, where the style of living and the life of faith do not mesh well with the multiple models of growth that are sometimes foisted upon pastors in lost corners of the world. We are often regaled in seminary classes or where expectant pastors gather for rejuvenation and continuing training with models carrying names like Growth Spirals or Willow Creek or Saddleback. Those moments when we remember the two or ten dozen folks we will face on Sunday after leaving the conference and realize that this will not be the feeding of the 5000 often cause flinches of guilt and uncertainty. Church growth seminars and classes in divinity schools present models to us that raise expectations of just doing it right and living in the overflow of the successful implementation of the program. When we find ourselves back in Pumpkin Seed, Tennessee or Chicken Bristle, Kentucky where life is small in numbers and honed to a fine and unchanging edge, or in some suburban church setting in Phoenix or Seattle where resistance to the good news is the most usual reaction to our presence, those programs foster layers of pastoral guilt and a What am I doing wrong here? internal gnashing of teeth for many young and old shepherds. For those hundreds of thousands of pastors already at work and for hundreds more being trained, there must be something else to explain life in the backwaters of spiritual life. The stories from a place like the Robles Rest Stop, a fond nickname for Serenity Baptist Church, where life is affected deeply by cultural hardness and constant mobility, may offer hope that God hasn’t forgotten us, indeed is thrilled to be present in our lives and the lives of those who seek him in very unusual ways.

The simplicity of that approach, however, is sometimes not readily apparent nor easily accepted even by those who live through the movements of grace. When I first offered the basic idea of Oasis-style ministry to a chosen group of leaders at Serenity Baptist Church, one couple offered an immediately negative opinion, This is just an excuse for not doing good. That evaluation of short funds and small numbers constantly in flux reflects the predominant evangelical response to small church life, it seems. If we are not dramatically increasing in numbers and keeping those folks, we are doing something wrong. That may be absolutely true in some arenas. This is not to suggest that a constant re-examination of who we are and how we do ministry is not needed. It is rather a response to the characteristic evaluation that if continuous numerical growth is not occurring, then something surely must be unfinished or poorly done.

Our particular state denominational growth department sent out a lovely four-color evaluation in graphs and numbers a few years ago to all of the plateaued churches in the state. We were identified as such. That is partly due to the way we refuse to keep folks on our membership list after they move to other environs or simply quit being involved in the life of the church. Despite continued baptisms and new families in the church, our numbers reflected a status quo in membership. Our local leader, our Director of Evangelism and Missions, was forwarded the numbers and offered to meet with all of us who had been labeled as stuck. I agreed to meet with him and after presenting the information about our church family and community at large, his pronouncement was like a sweet melody to my ears, Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you are a plateaued church. I thought to myself, Finally, someone with insight and perspective not driven by programmatic Christian faith. I was radically refreshed by his words and his support, and I wondered how many other pastors needed to hear those same words of encouragement.

Being trained in the ways of the first covenant, the Old Testament, much of my reaction to life in the Body of Christ in all places is the effect and effectiveness of telling the stories of grace. That God is alive in the words of the Book is actual; that he is also radically present in the remembering and telling of stories of others who have more recently walked in faith has become critical to me in recognizing his presence among us. So, what comes next are written memories of the people who have heard the good news about life and grace in Jesus. Ministry in one community for a long time is perilous and rich at the same time. It is perilous, because it is easy to get lost in the humdrum, the habitual, and to forget to have open eyes to the things of God in the everyday. It remains rich, because the lives of those surrounding us change and move in the mysterious shadow of God’s Spirit, and we are invited all the time into that mystery. My remembering of these events may be somewhat clouded in all of the details. After all, I have become gray-haired in the time these narratives have unfolded. For the shading of the details and some not too accurate memories, those who have lived out these stories have my profoundest apology for not doing full justice to their lives. You must know that even with fuzzy details the track of your lives has decisively molded and mended my faith and influenced the lives of others with hope and hunger for God.

If you are reading these words and are a pastor in practice or a pastor in preparation, the portrayals here may offer points of hope and grace for you in whatever place you find yourself. Some of the narratives of these brothers and sisters remembered may conflict with particular models of ministry that you are trying desperately to trust. My guess is that even within those approaches built around programs and goals will be people’s stories that echo some of the ones who have wandered through the Rest Stop. I encourage you to encounter those lives through the storyteller’s eyes. Listening to and seeing the movement of grace among those lives may help lift the burden when your own special growth spiral seems to turn into blind alleys of no return. Telling those stories may offer a rejuvenating exercise for your own soul as well as for others seeking for a touch of God’s grace.

These stories have been read by a trusted few in the Rest Stop. Some of them have been around for a large part of the history of the church; others are new to our community. Most would be considered lay people—not professional Christians as an old mentor of mine described those of us who get paid to do what God calls us to. As they have read the pages a certain expectation and realization has been experienced by them. The realization of the ongoing presence of God in a small community has invited them to want to know more of the depth of shared lives. That invitation has then ignited the expectation of seeing God at work and being involved in what is happening as a result of the presence of his Spirit.

Hope and encouragement are huge necessities in the life of ministry and in the community of faith. Too often we founder because no one helps hold up our arms in the middle of the battle. For all who read these stories, may you hear echoes of the whispering breath of God bringing new life in the middle of the humdrum and stale, and may you find courage to be sojourners in faith wherever you are, especially when the battle rages around you!

The account of life at Serenity Baptist Church that follows is presented in sections of loosely linked stories, particularly of people’s lives, but also some shorter pictures of the unexpected. I have changed some of the names of the people behind the stories, but I assure you that the accounts of life and grace are real. The stories unfold in no particular order from Alpha to Omega, for life rarely comes at us that way. They are, however, offered as a reaction to a phone call from someone impacted by the life of the church. The ideas that phone call ignited in me form the basis for each of the sections. The more complete version of that phone conversation is contained in the Appendix. It is preceded by the story of how we began in this place told from a perspective formed more towards the end of the story. Wherever you travel in God’s grace, may you have eyes to see and ears to hear what he is doing all around you!

THE BROKEN

Many people need a Zacchaeus type of revelation. A moment when they recognized that God himself has looked at them, has seen all their blemishes, and still wants to live in their home, being identified as their guest.

Paul Brand, The Forever Feast, p 171.

In the context of a compassionate embrace, our brokenness may appear beautiful, but our brokenness has no other beauty but the beauty that comes from the compassion that surrounds it.

Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal, p 35.

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.

Psalm 147: 3 (NIV)

BIG CHANGES, BUT NOT ENOUGH

Bullies and mean guys are a pain, and they have always created places of fear for me. Growing up I was little, affected by childhood asthma, but I had learned to run really fast to stay out of the way of guys who incessantly picked on me!

In Three Points there are lots of tough and mean men—and a few women of equal character! In almost thirty years of ministry here some of them have been