A Resume of Failure
My personal story of how I came to start this new venture.
There is a quote that my father is very fond of:
“Experience is the best teacher, but if you can get it second hand the tuition is cheaper.”
On any drive of more than a few minutes, his practice was to have myself or whichever one of my siblings was sitting in the front seat read a chapter from proverbs out of the little pocket Bible that lived in the glovebox. He would have us pause after each verse and discuss what it meant. This practice helped reinforce the idea that a wise person stands outside of a situation, and learns to avoid the most obvious pitfalls that others fall into. Regardless of this, my own life has not been free from failure; and if they have not been catastrophic to my life or my reputation, they have shaped me nonetheless.
“I will restore to you the years
that the swarming locust has eaten,”
Through some miraculous process, God is able to take our wasted years, our failed efforts, our greatest disappointments, and transform them. He weaves them into our story to reveal a pattern of beauty that could not exist without them.
It is because of this truth that I am stepping out to start something new. I’m not qualified because I have a great track record of success. I’m approaching this with a resume of failures. Why would I expect this to work out differently? Because my experience has shown me that God works best through broken vessels.
So here’s some of my story and how it led me to this ambitious attempt to change the world.
My parents both converted to evangelical christianity through a transformative experience with the gospel. This had a profound impact on their lives, and on the way that they raised their children.
The most central belief was that through the finished work of Jesus Christ, anyone can meet and have a relationship with the living God, wherever they are. This relationship not only puts an individual into direct communication with God, but also places them into a family - a brotherhood with all those who truly belong to the family of God. This brotherhood transcends credal and ecclesiastical boundaries, and allows the individual to form a deep bond with people whom they may not share any common interests with in the traditional sense.
Although the experience of my parents was conversionary, they did not put a high priority on allowing their children some “right to choose for themselves”. What was revealed through their experience was that the Bible is true, and it gives true answers to the problems of life. So, as a family there was a strong emphasis on learning what the Bible says. Not in a rigid and formalized way. Simply that many of the childrens books were stories from the bible. Not exclusively, but a majority. We read the bible often, such as those proverbs during car trips, and before bed. It filled the gap of boredom and empty space that existed prior to the endless scroll of social media. We prayed together. Our family conflicts were always resolved through talking, with prayer, and wisdom from the scriptures. We not only attended church, but were involved, and both of my parents volunteered regularly for various events and bible studies. Eventually, my father became an interim pastor at our church, and this role was formalized some time later. He served as a bi-vocational minister for over 25 years.
The church did not pay much, but they did have a home for us to live in, and through the blessing of that parsonage, our family was able to survive on less. His other job was that of an educator, and in that role he made many sacrifices that I didn’t recognize at the time. We lived in the state of Massachusetts, a center of classical liberalism that paid teachers quite well by national standards, and it was not uncommon that long tenured public school teachers were the highest paid employees of many small towns. My dad did not take advantage of that fact. Although he had an advanced degree, which was much less common at that time, he chose to work at both Protestant and Catholic private schools. To supplement this, he worked evenings and during the summer selling cars at a friend’s used car dealership. I think he won more people to Christ through that job that he sold cars. On top of that, he worked many jobs as a handyman for family and friends, and during summer vacation my siblings and I would accompany him on many of these jobs. Through the various activities of painting, plumbing, lawn care, and resealing driveways, my father integrated God’s word into whatever we were doing, not only in word, but in deed. My mother worked part-time, because as we got older, they were concerned about the influence of public school culture and curriculum. So when my older brother was about to enter highschool, they made the decision to homeschool us instead.
During these homeschool years, I slowly began to realize the sacrifice that my parents were making, and the conscious decisions behind it. It was around this time that I first had significant spiritual experiences of my own. It wasn’t a conversion, I had believed since I was a kid, but a personal understanding of the reality of Christ. The truths that I knew and had affirmed since my childhood became alive and embodied in my life. Not perfectly, but it was the first instance of something like a calling on my life.
Looking back, it was not the experience that truly made the difference in my life, but it helped me understand the motivation behind my parents choice. Many parents decide to homeschool their children because they have a desire to protect them, and others because they want to give their child the attention required to become exceptional. But my parents' actions revealed that their highest goal was that their children would love and obey God, and seek to do His will, regardless of what that meant in regards to career or education.
And they really meant it. I did not feel in any way compelled to pursue a particular career trajectory at all. This was perhaps a bit short sighted on their part, and I certainly had some aimless years as a result. But my parents' trust in the sovereignty of God has ultimately led to a place we are all grateful to be, and there is no doubt that it was His will and His handiwork at work.
Returning to my highschool career, one pivotal moment was experiencing the first pangs of romance. Believe it or not, among the weekly homeschool co-op there was quite a bit of teenage romance going on, mostly without the approval or consultation of the parents. There were a few girls I really developed strong feelings for, but had little success (none) with turning it into anything more than friendship. At a certain point, I began praying and reading and decided that the methods that my friends and I were employing would not prove very effective in what I knew that I ultimately desired - a healthy marriage to a godly woman. When I fully articulated my frustrations with what I perceived to be going on, I presented it to my peers as a final project for our public speaking class. My speech was titled “Dating with Integrity”, and despite receiving an A+ from the teacher, it was not popular with my peers. More than a few of my classmates had been introduced through their parents to books such as “I kissed dating goodbye”, and the “purity culture” that has been revealed as toxic in recent years. I realized there were some real problems with that movement, but at least it tried to provide an answer (if not a sufficient one) to some real problems that were beginning to manifest in our society. Now, some 20+ years later, that structure has been torn down, the problems it addressed have gotten worse, and nothing better has taken its place. The lack of consideration to the ideas I was proposing was one of the earliest divinely appointed failures in my life.
Around this same time, I began to attend a youth group at a local church just down the road from my father’s church. Here I encountered youths who, like myself, had come to understand and participate in their own relationship with God, and were not simply relying on the faith of their parents. This church was larger and more institutionally developed than my parents' church. Whereas my parents had decided to homeschool my siblings and I to guide and protect us from undue influence, the pastor of this church and his wife had instead decided to start a Christian school, so that not only their family would benefit, but the families of those in their church and local community as well. As far as long term results, I don’t know if this was a better solution than homeschooling, much of the success or failure of these students still seemed to come down to their parents. This contrast began my consideration of the pros and cons of these different models of education.
When I graduated highschool, I did not immediately enroll in college; partly because I did not seem to have a clear vocational goal in mind. I worked a retail job while I explored some options and took a course at a community college. Eventually, through the connections I made at the larger church down the street, I ended up attending a discipleship training program at a large church in Illinois; with about 5,000 people attending. This program was essentially an internship at a megachurch. There was a strong emphasis on evangelism and personal development. Every day began with an hour devoted to prayer and reading the bible, followed by worship music and classes. The afternoons were usually spent doing tasks relating to the various ministries of the church. This program, and many others like it, are often pitched to potential students in a variety of ways. This may be some combination of:
Personal development; a gap year program to help directionless people find their way
Spiritual growth - this was often a way it was pitched to young people who had recently converted to christianity.
Ministry training - potentially, for those who desired to stay beyond the 1 year for 2 or 3, a ministerial title could be granted within that particular denomination.
This could be worthwhile for many individuals. It was of some benefit to myself, and I ended up staying for 2 years. The drawbacks were that it did not leave me with any skills that were directly marketable to any employer other than churches, and very little of that. It did not leave me with any college credit (although some of the experience was convertible to credits at colleges within the denomination.) There was also a serious attrition rate of students who decided that they no longer had any desire to have a meaningful relationship with God after the program ended, although my particular class seemed to do fairly well.
Many of those who went to this program ended up having to spend a full four years in college to get a career, and although they probably benefited by having greater discipline and study habits than those who went straight out of highschool, it still placed them a year behind.
My next failure was an attempt to conquer the world through music. I returned home to start a band with some of my friends, and we were sure that this was God’s plan for us to win the culture back for Jesus.
In reality this was the means through which God had me leave the program and return home. I became a serious volunteer at my church, but was unable to convert my experience into a meaningful vocation. Eventually, I ended up attending an abbreviated program at a local Bible College. Here, I learned some very interesting things. Firstly, the bible study tools provided by the discipleship program were seriously lacking. Their intentions were good, but they did not provide the students with a sufficient depth of knowledge to seriously be effective teachers of the Bible; for this reason I was not at all surprised to look back and recall that more than a few graduates crashed and burned rather quickly after being hired as pastors by local churches. However, to contrast this distinction, I realized that the bible college was seriously lacking in models of personal development and discipleship. At the church program, there was a strong emphasis on third year students looking out for the spiritual health and well being of the second year students, and the second year students doing the same for the first year students. This was both a formal and informal part of the program, with everyone receiving a minimum amount of attention in this regard during structured times of “discipleship”, and others giving and receiving more of this attention during free time because it came naturally to them.
At the bible college, I noticed a handful of professors who tended to take students under their wing in this way, but they were limited in their attention. Much less happened from the older students towards the younger. As a much older freshman, I noticed some of my floundering classmates and tried to help them out as much as I could.
The discipleship program had instilled in me a realization that direct discipleship and personal attention were a vital part of any successful ministry, yet Bible College had made me realize how important a good structure of hermeneutics and exegesis were to understanding and benefiting from the study of the BIble.
This realization led me to seek employment opportunities at the sort of discipleship program that I had attended, with the specific desire to integrate some of the lessons I had learned through practical ministry and my more formal education.
After searching online, I ended up connecting with a similar program to the one I had attended, this time out of San Diego. The church it was connected to was much smaller, though still quite large at about 800 people, but the discipleship program was tiny. The director and his wife, two third year students, one second year student, and the incoming class . I had a very good rapport with the director, and he invited me to come on as a 3rd year student (typically the final year in such a program), with an opportunity to earn a place on staff the following year. Knowing the ropes a bit more at this point, I was confident that I could exceed his expectations, and began immediately by spending $27 to mail the application overnight. He had only one 19-year-old second year student returning to the men’s dorm, and five young men coming in, most of them fresh out of highschool. He was very glad to have me there, and it was very clear to both of us that this was a divine answer to prayers.
The director was a very good mentor to me; while I was very confident that I knew the path to success in a program such as this, he found many areas to stretch me to grow and confront areas of weakness. The smaller size of the program meant that responsibility was spread more broadly. This was definitely a benefit; in the huge program I had come from previously, there just wasn’t enough opportunity for everyone to succeed (even in a church of 5,000 people, with 120+ interns some of them end up doing meaningless busy work.) That year bore as many blessings as challenges, and some very interesting experiences. At one point, a local church hosted a worship workshop with some up and coming musicians from a large church in Redding, California. I was not particularly familiar with them, (though they are quite well known now), and while the music was very moving, the most memorable experience of the night was when some of the leaders prayed for me and told me that God had called me to be a leader to young men. I’m not super into the “woo-woo” experiences, but what do I do with an experience like that? I spoke no words to them, yet they affirmed the very thing that I had felt God call me to before, which I happened to be doubting a bit at that very moment.
Overall, that year's experience was very beneficial for me, and I was very proud to say that at the end of the year, I was offered a job to come on staff. Unfortunately, shortly after my return the next fall, due in large to some concerns about the financial impact of the events happening in 2008, the senior pastor of the church, (who had only been there for a short time) decided that the program was not part of his vision for what the church should be doing, and everyone was sacked.
When I returned home to New England, I was lost and aimless. I returned to a monotonous job at a call center, and began volunteering again at the church down the street. Fortunately, my life trajectory did improve, and eventually I began working part time at the christian school, and part time at a thrift store that the church had opened up. I wouldn’t say that I had found my calling, but I knew that what I was doing was “meaningful” and “important”, and this helped me to direct my effort. Teaching Science and History to a captive audience who did not necessarily like to learn was not a thrilling experience. While I liked much of the material, classroom management was not something that came naturally to me. Still, I persevered, and in time greater opportunities arose.
For many years, those high-school graduates who seemed inclined towards a life devoted to ministry, or perhaps who were simply a bit aimless, were often encouraged to attend a discipleship program such as the one I had attended. However, at some point it seemed to make sense to our local church that rather than sending these students away to go work for some other church (where many students ended up staying permanently), it would be more beneficial to start such a program locally. I was ecstatic to be asked to participate, and had the opportunity to lead the bible study portion of the program.
To be honest, the program was not a success. It involved a handful of students, and lasted for a couple of years. I believe that the church still has internships available for a few individuals, but the attempt to launch a formal program was unsuccessful. I am responsible for my own failures in that regard; my class was regarded by the students as the most boring. While the importance of proper hermeneutics and exegesis had become quite apparent to me, I had not developed the ability to communicate that importance to others in a way that grabbed their attention. I thought that formality of rules and procedure would guarantee success, but it created a rigid and tedious process instead. I failed to communicate what it was that I truly loved about the word of God to my students. This was similar to my failure as a science and history teacher, both subjects that I loved, but I was unable to communicate that passion.
In reflection, I learned the path to overcoming this problem through teaching something else - music lessons. There were two brothers I gave lessons to. First, the older brother, who wanted to learn how to play the bass. Importantly, he realized that what he really liked about the worship music in our church was how I played the bass. He liked the feel and the rhythm of it. How did I learn how to play? By ear. By listening to music and correlating it with the movements of my fingers. However, when I became an “official” music teacher, I thought it was important to teach him how to read music - even though that was not how I learned, and I really didn’t understand it myself! It was a failure, and poor Philip does not know how to play the bass to this day. When I had the opportunity to teach his younger brother Peter how to play the guitar, I did not make the same mistake. We discussed what music he liked. Classic rock - especially Led Zeppelin. So I said, put your fingers here and here, listen to the sound - do you recognize it? Congratulations! You are playing Led Zep. I can barely take credit for teaching him much at all. He had the experience of playing music for himself, and took it from there. Practice became easy because it was fun. I took the shortest route to him being able to do “something” useful on his own and he has been playing excellently for years now.
Eventually, my career shifted away from teaching, and I ended up spending more time working at the thrift store. I had the space, time, and opportunity to experiment with fixing broken furniture, then modifying outdated pieces into more appealing and useful ones, and eventually building from scratch. I learned a lot from youtube, revisiting old episodes of the New Yankee Workshop with Norm Abram. Much of this stuff I had learned from my dad, during those summer vacations, and weekends in his basement workshop, but perhaps the most important thing I learned from him was the resourcefulness to repurpose and reuse discarded objects in clever ways - what we called “Yankee ingenuity”. If you don’t have money to buy the perfect material or a great new tool, you would have to use your head to find a different way to get things done. I learned that formality of rules do not guarantee success; that in “real life” situations, the outcome is more important than the procedure, and that no one cares about your credentials if they are pleased with your results.
It was during this period that I also got married; in this process I learned many of the same lessons. Since my speech in highschool, I set about writing a code of conduct that would guarantee success in the area of dating. While I said that I criticized Harris’ book “I kissed dating goodbye”, it wasn’t because I really understood the underlying problems with his philosophy - I simply didn’t like all of his particular rules that he had developed. I fell into the exact same trap; I believed that an infallible set of rules would eliminate the chances for error. In prior attempts to secure a romantic relationship, I felt that God owed me for my faithfulness and obedience to Him. In reality, I did very little to make myself desirable to women, and found fault in them for not appreciating my obvious godliness and piety. Eventually, God exposed the idolatrous nature of my desire; I wanted a relationship, and saw God Himself as a means to that end. When the error of my ways was revealed to me, I realized that God needed to become the object of my desire, and seek whatever He decided was in my best interest - even a life of singleness. When I had fully integrated this truth, God actually revealed to me that singleness was not His desire for me; He desired for me to become the husband of a longtime friend. When she asked me why I was pursuing her, I told her what God had revealed to me - life is about serving others, and she was someone that God wanted me to serve.
In my current career, I spend a fair bit of time teaching and training young men the skills of carpentry. I’ve taken hold of the lessons I’ve learned about approaching the topic from what they already understand, what makes them excited, and what they want to accomplish through their work. One of the biggest lessons is helping them learn to cope with failure - because it’s inevitable - but it’s also the source of our greatest opportunities. A costly mistake can become a valuable investment in a person’s life - and most people don’t make the same mistakes twice.
So what have I learned from these various failures? God cares more about shaping people into the disciples He desires them to be, than He cares about numbers or finances. The things we create, including the things that we ruin, shape us more than we shape them. Moses and David would not be who they were without their time in the wilderness. I can’t teach others what I don’t truly understand, and that goes beyond facts and propositions. I hope God will continue to use me to teach others. He can use any kind of person for His purposes. But the places where He is most visible in my life, are the cracks and holes caused by my biggest failures. That’s why they remain on my resume.