Old Wounds Opened

I was rereading the journal entry I wrote yesterday in my blog. It got me to thinking about some things in the past that I have never spoken about. Here it goes.

In 2002, my former pastor decided to open up tuition based school at the church. He asked me and one of our associate ministers to be apart of the school. We both agreed.

You would think that every member of the church with children, or at least 50% of them would enroll their children into a school run by their home church, but no, they didn't want to. We had three members enroll their children.

There were numerous complaints about the pastor's business ventures going belly up. So, the members didn't want to pull their children from their established schools and put them in a school that was more than likely going to close soon after it was opened. A former member of the church enrolled his child in the school.

(Many of the pastor's business ventures had gone belly up. In all fairness to the pastor, he had a short attention span. It was hard for him to stay with anything that he thought was moving slowly and wasn't producing like he thought it should produce.)

Well, we did the school for the whole year of 2002 with 5 students and 2 teachers. As of now, we still have parents who owe money to the school, even though it has been 5 years since the school was opened.

In the 2002 school year, only one family paid their child's whole tuition. One family paid one-third of their tuition. One family, with two children enrolled, paid two or three payments.

Those five students, 3 kindergarteners, a third grader, and a sixth grader, gave the minister (the principal and teacher of 3rd and 6th graders) and I (kindergarten) fits. It didn't help that there were parents who acted a fool for no reason whatsoever.

For lunch, we had to use whatever lunch money the students brought for that day to go buy groceries because we did not have a lunch staff or a stash of food for the school. I had to stay with those five kids by myself for over an hour while the principal went to buy the food and then cook it. Of course, with only one adult there, they acted crazy.

I was the kindergarten teacher and the school secretary. The minister was the principal and the cook. It was crazy.

We barely got paid because the pastor had to take money from the church fund and put it in the school fund. (We could not get support from the church family because they were expecting the school to fail as was the pattern with our pastor. Many people told me this with their own mouths, so this is not second hand knowledge.)

It's Fall 2003. The former member who had enrolled their child wanted to remove their child from the school because the tuition hadn't been paid and they couldn't pay the tuition. Those people were members of a church where the pastor of that church was a "rival" of our pastor. (Another story for another time.)

The student was learning like crazy and the parents were bragging on the school at the "rival" church. Our pastor told the parents that they could keep their child at the school even though they couldn't pay the tuition. (Mind you, this is a tuition based school and my salary was supposed to be coming from the tuition.)

Our pastor wanted the girl to stay @ the school so that he "have bragging" rights and something to hold over his "rival's" head. (Every chance the pastor got to mention his "rival," he did. He got on my nerves with that mess.) That about did it for me and the principal of the school, we were heated. How is the pastor gonna let someone who owes us all kinds of money stay at the school, especially after they themselves have said that they can't pay their bills? We stayed with it though for the children.

This time, we had five students, the two who didn't pay much tuition left and the two that replaced them actually paid there tuition, praise God.

We went through the fall semester pretty much the same way that we went through 2002. Not enough money, not enough support from the church, and no support from the pastor regarding trying to get us money from the parents or more "paying" students. He even refused to accept students who would have used vouchers.

We had to close the school. There was nothing else to do because we had no money coming in and it was a waste of our time trying to run the school with no money and no support.

Many people from the church came to me and said, "See, I told you that it was going to fail."

The minister and I were blamed for the school failing, though it wasn't our fault. We tried to do everything that we could to get the school up and running. We tried to suggest several ideas to the pastor. He shot all of them down because they weren't "HIS" ideas.

The fact that the church didn't support the school hurt me a lot because when the principal and I tried to talk to people about what we (the principal and I) were trying to accomplish, people always went back to… "I know it's going to fail because pastor's business ventures always fail." The principal and I could get no support for us and these were people who said they were our friends. That hurt more than anyone will ever know.

The minister that I worked with left the church a few months after the school closed. He was talked about like a dog from the pulpit by the pastor. Most of what was said about him was not true.

I left the minister a year after the minister did. My reason for leaving will take forever to explain. Some ungodly things have been said about me and my husband since we left.

I was so hurt by all of this, as was the minister. We have yet to receive any kind of apology, acknowledgment, or anything from the pastor. I doubt that we ever will.

I have forgiven everyone involved.

I heard that you will receive some of your worst wounds in the church.