Derek and I had an interesting experience in ministry straight out of the marriage gate. We got married and less than two weeks later we were moving to Arizona to be youth pastors/ pastors assistants at a church. The denomination is not all that important, but let's just say that the church was a Pentecostal one.
That summer we had contacted the pastor about moving to Phoenix to work at his church. He couldn't pay us anything but would help us find jobs and a place to live. Things started out promising. He was planning on having us assist with Youth and other areas as well. We stayed with him and his wife for a few weeks until we were able to find our own place to stay. We should have known something was wrong when we felt uncomfortable enough to move out quite a bit before we had planned to. He also made no effort to help us find a job or a place to live, by the way.
The church was a fairly common one. Things were "ok" until on a Sunday morning we heard the pastor say that Jesus was not divine until after the Temptation. Now this is obviously not a statement that fits with orthodox Christian belief. We weren't positive we had heard right. This seems rather radical and out there. We decided at our weekly meeting with the pastor that we would bring it up and make sure that we had heard him correctly. Derek hesitantly brought it up at our weekly meeting. The pastor FLIPPED out. Saying that we never have the right to question a pastor. Saying that people who go to bible college think they know everything and are arrogant etc. Also, that we were to never come to his church again ever.
We left in a daze because we had never had a pastor scream and yell at us quite the way this man chose to. We went home and started to evaluate what to do next. We decided to call the district supervisor because we, naively, believed that he would want to know what was happening within his district. He told me that the pastor would never have said that about Jesus' divinity that we must be mistaken. He then informed us where the nearest church of the same denomination was...
Things went downhill pretty quickly after that. We were unable to find jobs and ended up living with Derek's parents for almost a year...and so ends that saga.
