by John Creasey
The skills development I experience in teaching a weeknight Bible study, preaching twice each Sunday, and engaging in a building project from start to finish, molds and shapes me. Nonetheless it remains a hard season for Dixie as she comes to terms with the life she is in and the sacrifices that are hers to make as a pastor’s wife. And a lesson for me as I wrestle with priorities and purpose in life and ministry.
We speak often of the mission field during these years. We are invited by several missionaries to consider the lands and people they serve, specifically Thailand, Indonesia, and Guatemala. In each situation we open our hearts to God. We even discuss becoming Wycliffe missionaries. But there remains a hesitancy, not with regard to the physical difficulties that might ensue, but as to whether or not this is truly the direction our lives should take. We endeavor to be of one mind on the big decisions and so we cool natural enthusiasms of the moment in order to be clear about next steps.
After more than five years of doing our best to serve this church and its surrounding community, I am elected by pastors and church delegates from across Washington and northern Idaho to be the next denominational district youth and men’s ministries director. Back home in Forks, we are treated to a special farewell luncheon by community leaders, say a fond farewell to our church family, and soon we are on our way.
This next move takes us to the suburban city of Kirkland Washington, east of Lake Washington, near Seattle. At the time, this is the headquarters city for the Northwest District of the Assemblies of God and the new campus of Northwest College (now University), my alma mater. For the next four years, I am in youth ministry, while serving concurrently as district camping coordinator, Men’s Ministries director, Royal Ranger (scouting) director, and whatever other assignment is given me in the absence of formal leadership by anyone else.
It is an exciting time doing what we love, working with young people. One of the major events each year is the Northwest Youth Choir program. Young singers and musicians audition from churches across Washington and Northern Idaho. As many as one hundred fifty selected youth gather in Seattle over the Christmas holidays to work with recording artist, Bud Tutmarc, in creating a long-play record album. When the album is cut, these same young people make it available to family and friends in their churches and communities to help pay their way on one of two three-week concert tours in the following summers.
The larger groups are divided into two smaller traveling choirs ranging anywhere from 45–75 in number. Concerts take place across America, including Alaska and Hawaii, in churches and public auditoriums, denominational conferences and national parks, military installations including Fort Riley Kansas and the Air Force Academy Chapel. Dixie and I are on the road with these young people for six weeks every summer. It is an incredible experience for everyone. Many of these youth go on in vocational ministry or as professional Christian business leaders.
Then, one dark and stormy night while returning from having preached in Olympia Washington, I am involved in a serious auto accident that totals my Volkswagen and leaves me in the hospital with major surgery being performed on my face and right eye. It is one of those wake up calls reminding me that, once again, I am doing too much, going too fast, trying too hard.
A few months after this, I receive an invitation to consider becoming the AG National College Youth Director, a role that would necessitate a move back to the headquarters city of Springfield Missouri, where for a few short weeks we had begun our married life together.
At the same time, I am invited to become Director of Public Relations for Northwest University. And another “what if” decision is made. I take the post at NU with the proviso that I can resume my graduate education at nearby Seattle Pacific University’s School of Religion.
Dixie often declares this seven-year period, during which we make our home in Kirkland, as the best time in our lives. Once both the children are in school, she takes a position as administrative assistant to the NWAG District Secretary/Treasurer. The income helps make ends meet in our growing family and we purchase our first home. She eventually takes time out to be a full time mom, then later on, works part time as an assistant in the University bookstore. She does well emotionally and physically. The people pressure she had experienced in pastoral work is gone. She feels rested and alive and accepted. And she loves the new friends she makes with other youth workers and college faculty.
The one downside is that I travel so much in order to do the work. I am gone on most weekends and for weeks on end during summers in choir tours, youth camps and retreat events. She travels with me, joining three other couples who serve as adult chaperones on youth choir tours, and goes with me as I lead the Northwest University choir and orchestra on a musical ministry tour into Scandinavia. On many of these trips we take our son, Stephen, who loves traveling with the young people. Michele is much more interested in staying with Gramma and Grandpa Tanneberg and her cousins, while Mom and Dad are away.
Still, it is for me a restless season. With my studies at SPU nearing an end, I want to move out of promotional activities with the college. I love the people with whom I work. I just don’t love the work.
17
Success and Sadness
Don’t tell anyone you are starting a new church.
Just do it inside your head and in your heart.
~ Bill Yeager, former senior pastor
First Baptist Church (CrossPoint), Modesto CA
When a call comes from a small church in Dublin California, asking me to bring my family to the Bay Area to serve as pastor, I am unsure. This is not part of our dream for the future. I’m not interested in taking on another church, one even smaller than our first. But after prayerful consideration, in the autumn of 1971, we begin what will eventually be twenty-three years of pastoral ministry in that community.
During the first three years it appears as though we are failing, faster and with greater certainty than anything I’ve ever done before. I am sure I’ve made a huge mistake. After seven months, only seventeen of the forty-five people who voted for us to come still remain. I am depressed. Dixie is hanging in. The children are struggling in their new schools. Outside of the few who make up the church, we are strangers in a foreign land. In the Northwest, we had a sterling reputation with lots of future upside. Here we have a struggling church with a Christian elementary school in its second year. We have people being transferred by their companies or simply leaving because we have no formal youth ministry. We have difficulty meeting the basic budget.
It’s at this point the church board decides we should meet together early on Tuesdays to pray about the situation. I don’t want to pray. I want to go back home to the Northwest where life was a whole lot easier. But how do you tell your deacon board you don’t want to pray? And so we gather. The first Tuesday there are two others with me. The second Tuesday there is one other and me. The third Tuesday, a dreary foggy morning, there is just me.
Frustrated and angry, I pour out my heart to God. And since no one else is around, I tell it like it I think it is. I dump a huge weight off my shoulders and onto God’s. I say things to God that remain between only the two of us to this day. It isn’t a pretty picture. Finally, after a long period of complaining and dumping, I stop, breathing heavily and exhausted. It is silent for a long time as I remain there on my knees, face buried in the front pew of the auditorium.
I cannot say I hear an audible voice. But I can say I hear the voice of God as clear as though someone is right beside me, speaking. And the conversation goes like this:
“Are you done yet?”
“What?”
“Are you done yet. Is this the best you’ve got? Is there anything else you’d like to say to me?”
“Well . . . no . . . no, I think I’ve pretty well summed it up.”
“Then let me ask you a question.”
“Okay.”
“Who are you trying to impress?”
“What?”
“Who are you trying to impress?”
I had to stop and think about this for a long moment.
“Well, I guess it isn’t the people who asked me to come here in the first place. Most of them are already gone. There are a few hangers on, but look for yourself. I’m failing, and I don’t know what to do. Can I just go now?”
“No. Listen. You are not going anywhere. This is what you are to do. I want you to open your heart to whoever comes through that door (I remember looking up at the main entrance door leading into the sanctuary). It doesn’t matter who they are or what their religious background is, or if they even have one. I want you to be open to everyone.”
“But what if they don’t believe in our church doctrines? What if they disagree with some of the things we hold to be tenets of the faith?”
“It doesn’t matter. Just do it. Keep an open mind and an open heart toward everyone and let the Bible be your guide. You preach the Word. I’ll do the rest.”
I cannot adequately express how profound a moment this is for me. I return home to tell Dixie what has just happened. I think she is grateful. If this really is God, at least he knows we are here. She had not wanted to come to California in the first place. But if he really is with us, well, let’s give it our best shot.
Things do not change overnight, but it is different. I am different! God has spoken to my heart in such a clear way. Then one day a pastor I have known for just a few minutes gives me another word of wisdom. He is the senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Modesto California. We are at a conference and he and I are talking about my situation in Dublin when he says to me, “Why don’t you just start a new church?”
I say, “Are you serious? I can’t even keep the one going I have now.”
“No, that’s not what I mean,” he responds with a chuckle. “Don’t tell anyone you are starting a new church. Just do it inside your head and in your heart. Begin building the congregation you believe God wants you to grow. New people will join with you in your new church. Others already there will do one of two things. They will either drift away, which will happen sooner or later anyway. Or they will see how exciting things are in your new church and become a vital part of it with you.”
It sounded a lot like what I had heard on a cold and foggy Tuesday morning while kneeling in the chapel. And so I did. And soon we did.
The years at Valley Christian Center are a wonderful time of spiritual and numerical growth. The church soon outgrows the Little Chapel, and for seven years we rent auditorium space in the Dublin High School. We also rent space in various buildings nearby for our children’s ministries and office space for our growing ministry team. More classroom space for our Christian school, by this time preschool through grade 8, also needs to be rented.
One day, as we drive along the Interstate north toward Walnut Creek, I glance at Dixie in the passenger seat. She is looking out over the rooftops of houses on the right side of the freeway and her lips are moving, but no words are coming.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“I’m praying that God will somehow let us bring the gospel of Jesus into everyone of these homes.”
“Wow,” I said, “that’s a great big prayer.”
Eventually we seek and receive licensed access to a public television channel that covers the five-city area we serve. Her prayer is answered in an amazing way. We are actually invited into every home that has a television set, broadcasting the Good News twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year.
5 Dixie went fishing once - the only fish she ever caught - 115 lbs!
We have many grand times in our family as the church continues its new upward spiral.
Like the infamous bicycle trip.
It all starts while joking with Mom about taking a bicycle vacation as a family. We can go down scenic Highway 1. We’ll have a great time together. After much teasing, since we are certain she will never do it, one day she says, “Okay, I’m in!” The kids and I are stunned, especially me. But the gauntlet has been thrown down and once that happens in our family there is no turning back.
What’s the first thing we have to do? Get in shape? No, the first thing we have to do is buy some bicycles. Only Stephen has a bicycle and it will never stand up to this kind of trip. The rest of us haven’t been on bicycles in years. At first we decide to pedal as far as San Simeon, the highlight being a visit to Hearst’s Castle. That will be educational, right? Then we can pedal back.
I’m not saying who came up with the next idea, but someone, while checking out a Coastal map says, “Look, we’re half way down the coast at San Simeon. If we just keep on pedaling, we can go all the way to Mexico! We can visit the zoo and Sea World in San Diego and when we are done, we can take the train back. Just look at the map. Going south it’s downhill all the way.”
And that’s how it begins.
When my Rotary Club hears about it they decide to raise money for a project, posting so much per mile, thinking we will not get any further than Santa Cruz. It becomes a front-page story in the daily newspaper and results in a lifelong spiritual friendship with the editor who writes the piece.
Dixie and I train every Monday for six weeks. On our final outing we do forty-five miles on a Class-A-rated bicycle route. Breathless upon our arrival back home, we look at one another and ask, “Are we really going to do this?”
But early the next summer Monday morning, our executive pastor drives us to Half Moon Bay, just south of San Francisco, drops us off with our bicycles and our packs, waves goodbye and drives away. And here we are. All alone. Looking down the highway at a first day trek of sixty miles to Santa Cruz.
I give my best words of family wisdom to all within earshot; to my beloved wife who cannot believe she has allowed this to happen to her, as well as to our two eager children, Michele, age 16, and Stephen, who turns 13 on the trip. “Okay everyone. This is going to be great fun. Michele, you take the lead. Stephen, you’re next. Then Mom. I’ll bring up the rear. That way if anyone gets hit by a car, I will be the first to go. Okay? Oh, and one more thing. We are not going to have a cross word from anyone. Agreed? No yelling, no fighting, only positivity. All right? Everybody happy? Okay.”
And off we go.
Before we have gone two miles, Stephen is busy touching Michele’s rear tire with his front tire. Michele is yelling at him to stop it. Stephen is laughing and still touching. Soon they are both off their bikes and in the ditch. Michele is ready to destroy her brother and Stephen can’t stop laughing. I am alongside, yelling at them both. And Mom sits astride her bicycle with an I-told-you-so-smirk that finally has us all in stitches!
The sixty miles that day takes an extra ninety minutes over my estimated time of arrival. Stephen and I jump into the motel pool while the girls shower. We are sore in places no one ever told us existed. I hire a cab to take us to a nice restaurant. No sense suggesting we could ride there on our bicycles. Not if I want to sleep inside tonight.
The next day we are on our bicycles again, albeit almost too sore to sit, off on the next leg of our journey, this time to Carmel. Fifteen days and way too many funny stories later we have pedaled 726 miles all the way to and through Greater Los Angeles and San Diego until we arrive at the Mexico border. We ride home on the train.
In spite of the logistic dilemmas caused by the growth in numbers, God continues to bless our work. Then comes the acquisition of 49-acres overlooking the Tri-Valley area of Dublin, Pleasanton, Livermore, San Ramon and Danville. There follows a complicated property development and several building programs, and the opening of Valley Christian High School.
In responding to an appeal for spiritual leadership and training made by the growing number of Valley Christian Center women, Dixie is asked by the church board to consider leaving a job she loves as office manager at TJKM Engineering, to become pastor to women and minister of adult Christian educ
ation. It is a huge decision for her. She enumerates all the natural reasons why she should not accept, her reluctance wrapped in great feelings of inadequacy and humility.
Still, she is urged to think about what she could do if she would reconsider. It is only after becoming certain in her heart, and with the affirmation of the congregation, that she agrees to accept this very important transition on her sacred journey. In the final word, it is not a call by the church board that elicits her yes. It is the call from her Father.
These years, however, also have a dark side. My dad is the first to leave us. I miss him greatly. He was always such a solid and loving man, greatly respected in the community, a real leader. I often find myself measuring my own life by his, wondering if he will approve of my making this decision or that. He became a follower of Jesus at age seventy-five, just three years before his passing.
We visit my parents during Dad’s final days in his battle with cancer. I ask if he would like to go out to the farm again and he says he would. I help him into the car and we make our last trip together. We drive the eleven miles to the farm and park in the dirt driveway. I turn off the motor and watch while he gazes at the old house we had once lived in, the work shed with its tools and farm implements scattered about. Then he points to the two fuel tanks mounted on a wooden platform, about a hundred feet away. “Would you mind turning off that valve?” he asks. “Someone left it on and it’s leaking fuel.”
I look to where he is pointing and cannot see anything out of the ordinary. But I learned long ago to do what Dad tells me and, sure enough, it is exactly as he says. I twist the handle to off, still not sure how he saw it.