On the contrary, these are good men that mean well and I only hope for the rich blessings of God in their lives. There were many times in the last 2 years where I have felt a deep bitterness and resentment towards these people and institutions. That is honestly not where I am today. I will try to tell this story without trying to flame anyone involved, but I will also be completely honest about my perspective of the events in our lives.

It seems that I still do have some deep bitterness. It is really hard in that I am realizing that I cannot have reconcilliation with these men. It is hard to reconcile when those who wounded you so deeply ignore you. I guess I’m still not sure how to handle it. Hand it over to God? What the hell does that really mean anyway?

My “plan”: I was going to leverage my learning from Budapest, the expertise I had developed from both missions and consumer research, and launch my own consulting firm. The aim- provide strategic research that would empower the church to truly and relevantly minister to its own community.

I was really excited about starting “Clarity Research”. The company was actually a bit of a shared vision between my former boss, a good friend involved in church consulting, and myself. We all had complimentary talents that could provide full service to ministry clientele: leadership, finance, and research.

By the time I had returned to America my boss had already found pretty good work with a foundation and the other friend went back onto a staff position with a local church. No time for Clarity for them. I was to have to go it alone- which is actually fine. I like being an entrepreneur. I like to run things my own way.

Too bad it all turned to shit.

I had begun to lay the ground work for Clarity in the months before returning to the US. I had produced two white papers for my home church on a new research method / strategy. I had created a website, I had registered the LLC, and I had worked out a realistic business plan and budget where I could retain roughly the same salary I had in Budapest.

As I had mentioned, before returning to America my home church had told me that I had nothing to offer them. So I returned to the US with one strike against me. I met with the director who had told me I was worthless (it was all I could do not to punch him in the face honestly) in a stupid attempt to lay the foundation for possible work. I discovered early in our conversation that he had just hired another research consulting group. He actually shared this with me as though I should be happy.

What a jackass.

It was still just two weeks since we learned of Hope’s death. He seemed pretty nonchalant about it… but he did assure me that he had our names on a prayer card and that he prayed for us regularly. It would have been nice if he had ever bothered to get off of his ass and simply call us. He can go fuck himself with his damn prayer card.

<deep breaths… oooom…. ooom>

Anyway. Stike one. Nothing else to say about that.

So, in July my article hit the press. I had a great little piece on research in the Luassanne World Pulse. I had a little sidebar on Clarity Research. I had already been emailing with some key missions leaders and sent them the article directly with personal notes. The wave was cresting… time to “hang ten”.

So my next immediate sales call was the church where I grew up. My old youth group leader had risen through the ranks of this mega church (and mega is an understatement… more than 17,000 members and more than $500,000 in offerings WEEKLY) to be the #2 man. I had a great meeting with him at his office. He was nice, jovial, and we caught up on old times. But he was also pretty slick. He deftly steered the conversation around anything I could offer the megachurch. He referred me to a “great” staff member who I had tried to work with before whose function was obviously to be a wall and not a gate. I had high hopes. Deep pockets but my connection really wasn’t good enough.

Steeeeeeerike two!

So by this time I’m starting to feel really discouraged. My period of unemployment was stretching into September. I had begun to interview for “normal jobs” and getting “normal rejection”. I then scored an appointment at Bethel Temple in Evansville where we were living.

(Yep. I’m naming them because if any church has figured out community ministry in America, it’s Bethel Temple. If you happen to be in the church business and want to learn how to actually and truly care about a community check them out. You might not have heard about them because they’re not very mega, but they really do give a damn about the place they live and make an obvious sacrifice in not serving their own people as much as they could in order to truly serve the non-churched around them. Enough gushing though…)

I met with their #2 guy who was really a true leader in the church’s direction of ministry. We talked about the need for community research and he was excited about my ideas. We began to sketch out the skeletons of some great research plans. Community surveys, focus groups, about 3 man months of relevant and significant research. And then he says,

“… and we could probably pull together $500 maybe $1000 for this from our budget.”

Awkward silence.  Strike three.

I think he realized the big issue. $500 - $1000 for 3 months of work. Can a family live off of that? Is that a fair wage? But it was all of the wiggle room in his budget. We both felt awkward and a little embarrassed.

But then there’s the issue. The church budget of the 21st century has room to pay pastors, assistant pastors, music ministers, youth group leaders, junior high ministers, elderly ministers, singles ministers, IT people, missions directors, HR directors, nursery coordinators, ad infinatum. Oh, and a secretary for each one of them. The church has room in it’s budget to run AC through the 5 or 6 days a week that most of a building isn’t used, to buy vans, pews, podiums, monitors, lots of paper for throw away bulletins, and office furniture for each staff member to match the furniture in a VP level office at Kimberly-Clark. But direct research? Practical information that could help guide ministry? Very few churches will pay for this.

So should research be paid for? Why do we pay other forms of ministry and not research? Why do we expect the church researchers to provide a premium service for free? Is it really any wonder that most ministries treat the research itself with such low regard? They pay money for toilet paper.. in other words, they pay more to wipe their ass than they do for research on their own ministries and communities.

1) I hoped to move back to America to be closer to family. We would live in Louisville Kentucky.

2) I hoped to use the valuable experience I had gained in Hungary to serve the Church. Even though I had been thoroughly dissed by the staff of my own department at my own church, I was still hoping that I could use my skills that I had learned in Budapest:  directing research for the ASCP, being part of founding a research network for an entire continent, and consulting for Campus Crusade.

3) Now, when I say “serve” my hope was that I would serve much the same way a church staff person would “serve”- getting a regular salary proportionate to the quality and quantity of my work. Specifically, I had become very disillusioned with the entire support based model for the type of work I was doing. I was being paid by people in America to provide a service (research) to churches in Europe. A frustration that I and other researchers had begun to notice over the last few years in Europe was that our work seemed to be rarely used and under valued. In retrospect the problem seems obvious: by giving away research we had assigned a zero value to it. It was no big deal for churches and ministries to disregard it since in cost them nothing. (This is a big glaring mistake in the system by the way and you should expect many more blog posts in the future on this issue.) So, I had hoped to return to America as a research consultant to help the church with strategic and useful research and to be directly compensated for the quality and quantity of my work at a wage that I now know is well below market value.

4) To have our baby girl, Hope Gabriella Friderich, in November 2006. We had learned that we were expecting our third during a visit with friends in Kiev. At first I didn’t believe it. Could you really trust a Ukrainian pregnancy test? It had to be a scam. We tried the test again and then confirmed (3rd time’s a charm) with a more reliable Hungarian test when we returned home. We were gonna have a baby.

So let me relate how all each of these four hopes were completely undone over the next few posts. I’ll start at the bottom of the list…

After the horrible phone call with my church I was feeling very panicked. Could I really make my own way as a researcher for the church when my own church told me I was useless to them? It was very depressing, but I held on dearly to this ridiculous little fantasy: we would get through this transition and by Christmas we will have increased the joy of our household by adding another beautiful child to the family.

On Friday May 19 we had finished up the packing of our flat and the four of us went out to celebrate at a nearby Hungarian restaurant. Near the end of the meal, Dena began to feel cramps and then noticed bleeding. She was terrified. I honestly thought it was typical spotting, but we called our OBGYN to be sure. He told us to immediately meet him at his office that evening.

Though I was outwardly showing appropriate concern for Dena, I inwardly thought that everything would be fine. Hungarian doctors are notoriously cautious. Our doctor was just being safe. So we went to the office and our doctor did an ultrasound. That’s when we saw it…

Nothing.

Where I had in the past seen our little ones in the womb of my darling wife there was nothing. A big black emptiness where there was supposed to be life.

Our doctor explained that our little one had probably passed away about two weeks earlier. We had to spend our last Saturday in Hungary at the hospital getting a D&C and Sunday recovering before leaving Budapest that Monday.

On Saturday I informed my landlord of our loss. He told me that Dena miscarried because of the stress I brought on my family by deciding to leave Budapest.

Asshole.

He had been resenting that he was losing a steady renter and he couldn’t resist this last jab at the expense of my dead daughter. I reminded silent on my end of the phone line. I repeatedly punched the wall. My knuckles bled. I still have some pain in my right wrist today. I don’t want it fixed, though. It reminds me of her, my loss, and the cruelty of God.

Yep. I just dropped that bomb. Please hang in there. I will return to the awful cruelty of the God that I still worship today later in this story.

So we left Hungary in a daze that Monday. We had placed so much hope for joy in the arrival of this child. Hope was literally the only tangible thing we had to look forward to when we returned to America. Everything else was really up in the air and God decided to rob us of the only joyful thing that we could anticipate in all of this change.

This was the beginning of my atheism.

I bought Elena her first journal this Saturday. That evening I explained how to “use” a journal-don’t skip pages, put a date on top, use it to record feelings, stories, etc. She’s already an avid writer at age six and I was curious to see if she would be ready for journaling at some rudimentary level.

She’s written in it every day using the rules I had explained.

Tonight she left her journal on the coffee table and Elise got a hold of it and scribbled on the last several pages. Elena was pretty hurt by this. Something she had come to value so much was mindlessly defaced by her little sister. So Dena handled disciplining Elise while I explained to Elena that it isn’t completely ruined and that we need to be sure to keep it in places that her four year old sister can’t get to.

So, Elise comes and apologizes to Elena for scribbling in the journal (with much coaching of course).

Elena responds, “That’s OK Elise, because now I have something in my journal to remember you.”

Our jaws dropped. Our little daughter had learned to take a hurt and synthesize it into a blessing and encouragement.

And so I look at what has happened to us: how people and institutions have mindlessly defaced parts of our lives in a permanent ink that can never be removed. My hope and challenge is to approach this like Elena and take this injury and synthesize it into blessing and encouragement.

(And so back to the story…)

During the spring when dissolution was happening (2005) I was beginning to lay the groundwork for what I thought would be a new career in research consulting. A big part of this was designing and implementing a continent-wide research study to estimate the number of Christians in Europe. Something like this is difficult to do well without any funding, but possible with some creativity. I was able to pull from my previous experience in customer research and put together a systematic survey. While, I confess that it is not the best executed piece of research, I can confidently say that nothing like it had been tried before and it appears that no one else has been willing to take the risk to do it again.

(Yeah, that last bit sounds pretty cocky, but it’s true as far as I know. The reasons that no one seems to want to repeat this measure is probably two fold: a) the people close to me saw how much personal pain and controversy this caused and b) the results contradicted a lot of pre-suppositions that many evangelical Americans in Europe will refuse to give up.)

So I launched the study in September, monitored it through the next few months, and spent the month of December in very deep analysis missing much of Christmas with my family to do so. I then put the top line results out on a mass email in January and posted on the project website.

Within hours I was notified by an acquaintance that I was creating quite a stir on a British Christian web forum called Ship of Fools (http://www.ship-of-fools.com/). The study was being thoroughly skewered. I was given all sorts of derogatory labels and because of my very low estimate of the number of Christians in Europe (about 4%) I was declared a typical American evangelical pseudo-missionary. I was pretty shaken. I recall retreating into a bathtub and crying for about an hour. I don’t think I had ever had so many personal attacks from strangers in such a short amount of time.

But the deepest wounds came from my own “camp”.
 
Over the next few months, many evangelical American missionaries began to dismiss my study as having no integrity. It was conventional wisdom that there are less than 1% Christians in Europe. It was their opinion that my study was false and should be ignored. I was even informed of an email sent by a “friend” behind my back stating that the study was dangerous because it would negatively affect funding.
 
Well, there it is. The very very ugly truth. Many American evangelicals use low numbers and fear videos (See this cute little European girl? Did you know she’s going straight to hell, so please donate to my ministry) to raise money. I have a lot of empathy for this as it is easier to squeeze wine from stones than to get an American church to donate to something outside of its own interests. Furthermore, it is nearly impossible to compete with other missions initiatives that are able to pull at our Anglo-American heart strings with images of brown and yellow faces living in huts. Missions in Europe is desperate for support, but the truth is the truth. Fear is a shameful way to raise funds. So many in the rank and file distanced themselves from my work. I should have known better. Another research colleague had surveyed numerous secondary sources and came up with almost exactly the same number as my direct research. His results were ignored and the agency went with a SWAG of less than 1% instead of using his hard work. He stopped helping missions research after that experience.
 
And then there was the official press. Many main stream evangelical publications received the study well and it was even cited in a few secular European newspapers. But something awkward happened. They didn’t connect the work to me, but to either the research network or to my colleague who was currently leading the network. This was very discouraging on so many levels. First, all of my hard work was being attributed to someone else. Second, this someone else was a very good friend who had done nothing to try to steal the spotlight. It just happened and he was feeling a bit awkward about it himself. And finally, I really needed to get some positive personal press since I was looking into turning this into a living. The penultimate diss came from my own church when I received an email from a staff member at my church asking if I had seen this new research study on Christians in Europe as it would help me do my job. It was my study and the link he sent was to my own website… and that URL even has my name in it.

Ouch.

That really should have been another red flag but when you’re in love (with the church in this case) you trust deeply and overlook a lot. In other words you behave like a fucking idiot until it’s too late.

I had also been trying to lay the groundwork for providing research to the church in America. I had prepared a white paper that summer and sent it to my church. No reply. I made a longer and shorter version and re-sent to several people in the outreach departments. No reply. I called and emailed by bosses in America asking if I had a place or role in the church anymore. No reply. When I finally worked a back channel to notify the elder board that I was being ignored by staff I got an irate reply that they weren’t aware of my communications and that it was wrong for me to work back channels. This was bullshit. I’m not an idiot. I used email notification settings to confirm receiving and reading of the messages.
 
Finally that Spring- the same time I’m getting critiqued by both the evangelical and traditional church communities- I got a hold of the uber boss by phone. I was feeling very alone and I really needed to be needed by the church that I had loved and defended and for which I had sacrificed career, finances, and family. The “Big Cheese” was on his way to check up on one of the church missionaries in China (a perconal friend of his). I asked directly if I had a role at the church anymore.

“No. I don’t think you can provide anything for the church.”
 
I hung up. I drank about 1/3 of a bottle of gin, cried for three hours, and listened to Cold Play’s “Fix You” on a repeating loop. It had finally begun to dawn on me. The church didn’t give two shits about me or my family. Looking back, this activity seems puerile, because things were about to get even worse in the months ahead..
This was a major setback in much that I was hoping for. So I guess the next chain in the story is to explain what my hopes and expectations were.

Next Part: “What I had hoped for and the death of Hope”

During this time I began to fall more and more in love with the church. I loved its founding premises. I loved its vision. I was embracing all of its theology- even the bits and pieces that were outside of my upbringing and comfort zone. This was really as much a function of desire to fully belong to what appeared to be a loving community as much as intellectual conviction.

After a few years, I was invited into leadership and went through leadership training with Dena. It was an amazing 10 weeks of digging into deep theology and understanding of this church. After completing this course, I was commissioned as an elder.

My former church had many elders as it holds to a strong (and I believe appropriate) theology of leaders focusing on shepherding the members. I loved interviewing people for membership, I loved praying over people who were sick, and I especially loved serving communion. I felt a deep sense of joy watching people worship in the church on those Sundays when I served the Lord’s Supper. There was a sort of sublime happiness watching children worship the Father. Looking back, I don’t think I ever felt like a shepherd, but more like a sheepdog: the frolicking joy of running round the heard as they listen to the voice of the Good Shepherd.

But that was also the beginning of many disappointments. Many of my fellow elders didn’t seem to share this perspective. Very few elders would show up for Saturday morning prayer for the sick while nearly everyone would show up for the monthly free meal and meetings. I had a sense that the typical American sense of church elder being a power position was strong in many of these men.

I also need to confess that at that time- and still a bit now- there is some self-righteousness in this perspective. I don’t know the hearts of these men. Furthermore, my own heart is full of many flaws. Who am I to judge? Nevertheless, I feel compelled to share these feelings and observations and disappointment.

The penultimate event in becoming more intimately involved in the church was the baptism of my daughters. I was raised as a Baptist and as such I had believed that baptism was a sign that accompanied a point of personal salvation. In the process of coming into leadership at the church, this shifted. Baptism was a sign and symbol of joining the People of God- becoming a member of the local community of Christians. This was all new to me as I was not raised with this perspective. As such, this new (and I will add very appropriate) view of baptism was very special to me.

I vividly remember the day of Elena’s baptism. We stood before the congregation vowing to be godly parents and, in turn, the church vowed to care of our daughters as needed. Our church was especially missional and worked the aspect of being missionaries into the standard vows. This was particularly special to our family as we were about to move overseas as missionaries for the church.

So then this all ties together in that we had chosen to be specifically sent by the church instead of an agency. Members of the missions board laid out convincing arguments that this was the most appropriate way to be sent. Furthermore, my experiences with the church to this point were leading me to this same conclusion. In my heart our family was completely and totally betrothed to this church at a deep spiritual and emotional level. It was frightening to place so much emotional trust and faith in the church, but it seems that it was what one should do. I mean if you can’t trust the church…

And so I had high expectations of the church. Yes, there were some early indications of disappointment, but I was truly in love and committed to this church as if it were a spouse… and I was foolish and gullible enough to believe that they were as spiritually and as emotionally committed to me and our family as we were to them.

Expectations are the beginning of disappointment.

(Next- Part 4, “Scott who?”)

The board of directors was planning on the dissolution of the partnership where I worked about the same time that I was coming to the conclusion that I was in “bad soil”. My “uber-boss” (my immediate boss’s boss’s boss… the head of the outreach department for the church where I was on staff (yep, I was that far down the food chain)) was a key member of the board. He wasn’t the chairman, but he represented my former church which was by far the largest single donor and contributor to the partnership. He had come to the conclusion that it would be more efficient for each of the individual contributors to the partnership to do ministry independently and rely on personal networks instead of putting money and people into a formal network that required a team, a location, and an infrastructure.

I honestly believe that he was right. The 13 years of the partnership had laid a pretty solid foundation for individual members to form their own networks to accomplish their ministry goals. There really wasn’t much of a need to pour resources into our team in Budapest anymore.

Our team had several days of meetings away from our team leader (my boss and essentially a board member) to discuss the dissolution. The rest of the team was pretty much pissed off at the decision. They felt betrayed and abandoned and that the board had not heard their concerns. (Little did I realize that this was some serious foreshadowing for my own life!) I was the lone apologist in these meetings for the board: trying to reconcile the pain of the other team members to what I felt was a sound decision by the board. I wasn’t asked by the board to defend their decision. I was simply acting out of a conviction that a) this was the right thing to do and b) I loved my church and this was a decision largely driven by the desires and needs of my own church.

And this second reason was very important to me. Before these meetings I had often found myself as defender of my church’s ministries when they came under criticism from my teammates. I really loved my church deeply and profoundly and it’s important at this point to step back further and provide some background on how I fell in love with this church.

But through this time I should have been a little more thoughtful. I had already determined that I was in “Bad Soil”. What happens to someone who is immiscible in the process of dissolution?

im•mis•ci•ble   –adjective
not miscible; incapable of being mixed.

(Next Part – Falling in love with the church part 1)

Leading up to this retreat I had already been feeling like an organizational misfit. I was the youngest member on our team and I believe the youngest active person in our entire partnership. From my perspective, my opinions and work were disregarded by my teammates. As one teammate told me once “charts and graphs don’t plant churches- people plant churches.”

Square peg looking for new team…

So, at this retreat the facilitator leads us through an exercise known as a Lecto Divina (http://wiki.lordmattandyou.com/index.php/Lecto_Divina). During this exercise we were lead through the parable of the soils found in Matthew 13. This is one I had heard dozens of times and I usually get caught up in the tension between the Word of God and my Calvinism (it sure sounds like Jesus is talking about people losing their salvation and every attempt to make it seem otherwise too often feels like isogesis to me). But this time I really personalized the parable and looked at it through the lens of my ministry: God’s work in me as the seed and the soil as my context. And that’s when it hit me: I was in thorny ground.

I had begun my work in organizing and working with emRG around this time. While my immediate team had little interest in this work, the folks in emRG were highly enthusiastic. Furthermore, the people in these other networks embraced my skills and ministry- me really- more than my own team. These other people were good soil for me and my current team just wasn’t.

So, the action plan? I needed to get out of the thorns and into good soil. I needed to find a place where my ministry and who God is calling to me was embraced. This just wasn’t happening with my team in Budapest.

I really kept these thoughts to myself for about two months while I ruminated on them during a November home leave. When I shared my desire to leave the team (and of course this was done very gently and in a non-confrontational style) they really understood my perspective. But at this same time, the entire team in Budapest was undergoing a major change as well…

(next part – dissolution)

Part 2- Cute Animals?: So Monday we decide to force ourselves to stay awake the whole day so we can be fresh for work on Tuesday so we visit the Botanical gardens. I didn’t really expect to see any of the cute indigenous animals there such as wombats, kangaroos, and koala bears. But I certainly did not expect the bats: thousands of bats hanging from trees everywhere in broad day light. Now, get the image of winged mice out of your head. We’re talking winged foxes. Seriously. The bodes of these “bats” were all about the size of my forearm. Then there were the spiders: At ground level thousands of fist sized spiders weaving webs all over the place. Sydney = Halloween town?

Part 3- Ouch: I am so burned… God save the freaking Queen I am so half baked! We debriefed our first evening of interviews out at Manly Beach (best name for a beach in the entire world!) and I did put a little sun block on but didn’t think much of it since Sydney is at 33 degrees south and Atlanta is at 33 degrees north, so what’s the fuss? I was laying on my side during our market strategy session (yep… working at the beach) so when I got back to the hotel I realized that the back left side of my body is lobster red while the rest remains  milky white. It’s like I stripped down to my boxers while there was a nuclear blast somewhere behind me and to the left… because… you know… you’d want to strip down to your boxers when the bomb goes off… ummm… never mind.