Chapter 3: Anything But A Pastor

I ended up becoming a pastor.

That was certainly not the plan as I began my faith journey. When I look back on my life today, I realize that I ended up going through two distinct conversion moments. The first conversion was to Jesus—being born again, raised to new life. My other conversion was to the work of the local church. When I started my walk with Christ, I didn’t want to be a pastor.

Some of my reasons were shallow. My impression of pastors was that they were a very serious group of people. I’ve always had a sense of humor; I did not see my sense of humor fitting into the mold of a ‘proper’ pastor. People have specific expectations for how a pastor should present themselves, expectations that I did not think I could fulfill. That’s something I experienced even after I became a pastor.

One Sunday morning about a month into my pastoral career, I was standing with a group of men in the foyer of our church, laughing at a joke, when a little lady named Lillian motioned for me to come over and talk to her.

She reached up, grabbed my tie, pulled me down to her eye level, and said, “Pastor Scott, you can’t be one of the boys.”

I thanked her for her wise counsel, but thought to myself, “That’s going to be a problem.” I liked being one of the boys.

In those days, as it is still today, there seemed to be much concern among pastors about maintaining separation between the ‘shepherd’ and their ‘sheep’. But Jesus said in Matthew 23:8-9, “But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven.” Jesus knew that future leaders in the church would make the mistake of taking themselves too seriously, creating an unhealthy separation between themselves and the people they were called to lead.

That was not the case with me. I had way too much ‘sheep’ in me to be a shepherd. I believed I was called to be anything but a pastor.

A Household of New Faith 

By the time I arrived home from the Naval Academy, my parents were attending a local evangelical church. This was 1973, right in the middle of the ‘Jesus Movement’ in Southern California. But the Jesus Movement did not originate in nor promote the local church. I went a weeknight Bible study that wasn’t part of any church—it was led by a guy whose day job was cleaning pools.

I would invite my friends to come with me because it felt relevant to their lives, but I wouldn’t invite these same friends to come with me to church on Sunday morning. Why? Every Sunday, the service ended with an altar call. It felt like people were being pressured to come forward and make a decision on the spot in front of a crowd. I didn’t like being pressured, and I didn’t want that for my friends either.

So, I would invite my friends to another place instead in the hope that they would encounter Jesus there—my home, where the Lord was doing something in my own family.

While I was going through my crisis of faith, my dad was going through one of his own. When Keith and I both decided to leave the Naval Academy and our relationship with him became even more strained, my dad was faced with his own need for redemption and gave his life to Christ. And I learned much later how much of his, and our family’s, transformation was because of my mom; she had become a Christian before any of us and had begun to pray for us.

No Friends, Only Family

My mom and dad loved one another, and they loved us deeply as well. They wanted to be part of our lives and realized that to do so, they needed to love our friends too. So, they accepted our friends exactly where they were. My parents never tried to be cool or hip—they were just themselves, and who they were was fun and inviting. There was always an extra bed and a place at the table at the McKinney house.

I had no idea how impactful that kind of household was until my brother Keith died in 1997. Many of our friends from Rialto, friends who had been around our house in the ‘70s, came to his funeral to mourn with my family. Throughout the service, they approached my parents to offer their condolences, to show them love, and to tell them how much being in their home all those years ago had changed their lives.

One of them stood up in front of everyone and said to my mom and dad, “You McKinney’s didn’t have friends—you only had family.”

In the last chapter, I quoted this line from Paul in 1 Timothy: “God’s household, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth.” The church, the family of God supports the truth by making the truth look true. Bill and Gina McKinney built a household that made the truth look true, a household where everyone who entered was family. Today as a pastor I realize that one of the most important roles of the church is that it makes the truth look true. It does so when we love Jesus and love one another.

Brother McKinney’s Traveling Salvation Show

Even though I did not want to be a pastor, I went to seminary anyway because I wanted to prepare myself to do whatever God called me to do. But before I could go to seminary, I needed to find a way to pay for it. After graduating from Cal State San Bernardino, I got a job as a deckhand on a tugboat from my uncle, the superintendent of a river construction company in Louisiana.

One Sunday, I wandered into a church in a small town called Simmesport on the Red River. It was the Sunday school hour, and the man who seemed to be in charge asked me if I would open in prayer. “Sure, why not?” So, I prayed.

He then took me aside and told me that the Sunday school teacher had failed to show and asked if I would be willing to fill in and teach. I said, “Sure, why not?” So, he handed me the lesson and I taught the class.

It must have gone well enough because that same man asked if I would come back on Wednesday night and give a talk. I said, “Sure, why not?” I was expecting a handful of people at most. When I showed up on Wednesday night, the place was standing room only.

What had I gotten myself into?

I stood up, gave my talk, and before I could begin some ladies in the front row asked me to sing a ‘special’.

“No,” I said, “I think that’s where I’m going to draw the line.” They were displeased, to put it mildly.

What had started as a request to pray a few days earlier had grown to them expecting “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show”—a full blown Louisiana revival service led by me, an evangelist from California. I didn’t want any of that. The disconnect between me and the crowd that night, it was brutal. Thankfully, a few days after this public humiliation, our boat moved on down the river.

This experience seemed to confirm for me that I was not cut out to be a pastor. Nevertheless, I still wanted to be prepared to do whatever God might call me to do, so I went to seminary at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University.

In my last year at Talbot, I was registered for a class called Pastoral Ministry that was all about performing funerals and conducting weddings. I went to the Dean of the seminary and asked if I could register for a different class since I wasn’t training for a pastoral role. Having observed me for three years, he thought that would be a good idea too. I graduated from seminary in 1980 without knowing what I was doing next. 

The most important thing that happened to me in seminary was meeting Sara Netland. Sara was raised in Japan, where her parents had been lifelong missionaries.  She was in the nursing program at Biola, and it didn’t take long before we fell in love and I proposed. She said “yes,” even though I didn’t have any real clear direction in my life.

Everything but a Pastor

What I did know is that I needed a job. I had a friend that was teaching at Capistrano Valley Christian School in San Juan Capistrano. They needed a football coach, so I applied and got the job. Football had been an important part of my life; I loved the game and I loved coaching. The problem at a small school is that there were so many other things to do.

Within the first year, I became the vice-principal for the entire K-12 school. Over time, I handled discipline for a thousand kids, ran the high school, served as athletic director, taught history and Bible, and continued to coach football. Everything but be a pastor.

After seven years at the school, I became unsettled by some aspects of the school’s culture. I loved coaching and teaching, but I began to wonder what we were trying to accomplish as a Christian school. One of the things that motivated people to send their kids to a Christian school was to protect them from a culture that could undermine their faith. Sometimes, it seemed like we were giving kids just enough Christianity to inoculate them from the real thing. I began to wonder, “Do I really want to spend the rest of my life doing this?”

I was on a walk one day, praying about the future when these words came to my mind: “You are a pastor.”

My immediate response: “Oh no!”

I didn’t want to be a pastor, but I realized that’s what God had prepared me to be. I enjoyed leading and teaching and casting vision, and on that walk, I realized where those passions lead.

At the end of the 1986 school year, I resigned from my position at the school and started looking for pastoral positions. It was scary. We had three kids at the time and there did not seem to be a lot of available opportunities.

I Would Love to be a Pastor in Utah

I didn’t do myself many favors when I met with Wally Norling, the Southwest District Superintendent of the Evangelical Free Church, whose job it was to find pastors for churches in the American southwest.

In the conversation, Wally asked me, “If you could do anything, what would it be?”

I answered, “What I would love to do is be a pastor in Utah.”

The moment I said those words, I wondered where they came from—I had never even been to Utah. Wally, who was known to be a straight shooter, said, “You’re crazy. Churches in Utah don’t grow.”

One thing that had piqued my interest in Utah was meeting a conservative Baptist missionary named Dave Rowe when he visited my parent’s Baptist church in Rialto. Dave lived and ministered in Salt Lake City. Even though Dave has no memory of this conversation, even today, I was fascinated as I listened to his stories of what it was like in Utah. I had started reading all that I could find on the theology, history, and culture of the LDS Church. 

I didn’t go to Utah immediately. First, I became the associate pastor at Cypress Evangelical Free Church in North Orange County. It was a great church with great people, and I learned a lot about ministry from Steve Highfill, the senior pastor there.

I mentioned earlier that I had a sense of humor that did not fit in with the pastors I knew. That needed to be addressed. Although I liked to think of myself as “authentic and real,” I was actually more “cynical and sarcastic.” After about a month at Cypress, Steve said something to me that changed my life.

He had listened to me enough to pick up on my manner of speech and my attitude and he said to me, “Do you realize how critical and negative you sound?”

At first, I wanted to defend myself, but I soon realized that there was no defense. I was a shepherd. I was called to love the sheep and care for them, and I couldn’t do that while being cynical and sarcastic about them. Yes, I have reverted to that way of speaking and thinking on occasion, but that rebuke changed me forever. God was using my time at Cypress to prepare me for something different.