So what did I do? I did what anybody else would do in these circumstances: I decided to teach through the book of Leviticus for the first year. Leviticus is one of the first books in the Bible, and it deals with all sorts of ancient ceremonial and sacrificial rites. There are detailed descriptions of what to do with the blood of an animal you have just slaughtered and how to clean yourself after sexual intercourse and how much of your crop needs to be given to the priests. Good stuff.
Around this time we were having problems with too many kids in the classrooms—there wasn’t enough oxygen.
And then, several months into it, the fire marshal showed up. Not good. Legal, but not good.
He said we were over code and illegal, and we would have to start turning people away at the doors. We literally had to post people at the doors, and when the room was full, they had to stand there and tell people they weren’t legally allowed to go into the service.
I have a friend who couldn’t get in the first three times he came.
So we bought a mall. Actually, somebody gave us a mall, and we bought the parking lots surrounding it.
Yes, a mall.
We blew out the walls of the anchor store to make a room big enough to meet in and then turned the other stores into classrooms for kids. A guy came to one of the first services in the mall-turned-church, sat down in a chair, and said, “Hey, I used to shoplift in this exact spot.”
So a couple of years into it, Mars Hill is still growing. There were stretches of time when a new staff member was hired every week. House churches were springing up all over the area, partnerships were beginning with other churches around the world, and people who had never been a part of a church were finding a home.
Once again I am going to give you some numbers, and I hesitate to do so, but it is part of the story and it helps to explain the rest. Two years into it, there were around 10,000 people coming to the three gatherings on Sundays.
In the middle of all this growth and chaos was me, superpastor. I was doing weddings and funerals and giving spiritual direction and going to meetings and teaching and dealing with crises and visiting people in prison and at the hospital—the pace and the workload were unreal.
I can’t begin to describe what it was like because it was happening so fast. One minute you have these ideas about how it could be and the next minute you are leading this exploding church/event/monster. All of a sudden there are all of these people who know who you are and want something from you and think you’re a big deal, and you are the same person you’ve always been. Everything has changed and yet it hasn’t. It’s hard to explain, but I found myself asking, “Where is the training manual?”
I think of people who never before cared if I existed who suddenly wanted to be my friends. And that’s why I tell you all of this. Because there’s a dark side.
It’s one thing to be an intern with dreams about how church should be. It’s another thing to be the thirty-year-old pastor of a massive church.
And that is why I was sitting there in the closet thinking about how far I could be by 11 A.M. The next service was starting, I had just finished the 9:00 service, and I was done. I escaped to the storage closet where I could be alone and collect myself and figure out what to do next.
I was moments away from leaving the whole thing.
I just couldn’t do it anymore.
People were asking me to write articles and books on how to grow a progressive young church, and I wasn’t even sure I was a Christian anymore.
I didn’t even know if I wanted to be a Christian anymore.
What do you do when you can hear the room filling up with thousands of people who are expecting you to give them words from God, and you don’t even know if it is true anymore?
I was exhausted.
I was burned out.
I was full of doubt.
I was done.
I had nothing more to say.
And so I sat there with my keys in my hand, turning them over and over, listening to them clink against each other, hearing the room getting louder and louder and more and more full.
And it was at that moment that I made some decisions.
Because without pain, we don’t change, do we?
I could talk about the dangers of megachurches and life in the spotlight. I could write pages about what is wrong with Church Incorporated and the flaws of institutional Christianity, but I realized that day that things were wrong with the whole way I was living my life.
And if I didn’t change, I was not going to make it.
It was in that abyss that I broke and got help . . . because it’s only when you hit bottom and are desperate enough that things start to get better. This breakdown, of course, left me with all sorts of difficult decisions to make about Mars Hill. The church was alive and people were being transformed and the stories never stopped coming. Who would leave all that? I decided to be honest about my journey, and if people wanted to come along, great. But I was still going to have to go. And a new journey began, one that has been very, very painful.
And very, very freeing.
It was during this period that I learned that I have a soul.
Shalom
The tzitzit (seet-see) first appear in Numbers 15 when God says to Moses, “Throughout the generations to come you are to make tassels on the corners of your garments, with a blue cord on each tassel. You will have these tassels to look at and so you will remember all the commands of the Lord, that you may obey them and not prostitute yourselves by chasing after the lusts of your own hearts and eyes. Then you will remember to obey all my commands.”1
God tells his people to attach tassels to the corners of their garments so they will be constantly visually reminded to live as he created them to live.
The word in Hebrew here for “corners” is kanaf.
The word for “tassel” (or “fringe”) is tzitzit.
To this day, many Jews wear a prayer shawl to obey this text. The prayer shawl is also in a lot of interesting places throughout the Bible.2 One of the most significant is in the prophet Malachi’s prediction about the coming Messiah: “The sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings.”3
The word Malachi uses for wings is kanaf—the same word in Numbers that refers to the edge of a garment, to which the tassels were attached. So a legend grew that when the Messiah came, there would be special healing powers in his kanaf, in the tassels of his prayer shawl.
Fast-forward to the time of Jesus: A woman has had an illness for twelve years and no one can cure her.4 She pushes her way through a crowd to get to Jesus, and when she gets close to him, she grabs his
