plant and run

tell me about your team [part one - alf] | August 25, 2009

[This post is about Alf Nelson. One of my team-mates who will be one of the co-pastors of the church. I hope to write posts about other members of the team soon. Alf just moved back to New Orleans and is renovating a house in Gentilly to live in. He was just interviewed by one of local news stations as part of a report on the rebuilding of Gentilly. You can watch the interview here.]

Do you remember being in high school or college and saying to some of your friends, “wouldn’t it be awesome if we could go out and do ________ together one day?” I do. There are certain people in my life that I am bound to in a unique way. We are fastened together by common values, experiences and passions. We have fought, laughed and bled together.

For me, one of those guys is Alf Nelson. I first met Alf when I was a young high schooler. He was a new kid in my youth group, an upperclassman who seemed to fit right into the group right away. Alf  quickly made many friends in our youth group.

I still remember the day that Alf left for college. I remember getting emotional. I remember crying in the foyer at church. I remember being caught off guard with how saddened I was. We were friends, but not best friends. As I reflect back on it now, I think there was something unique about our connection that I wouldn’t have been able to put into words at that time.

We had a lot in common: backgrounds in broken homes, a craving to grow and lead in our faith and [the best part] a biting, sarcastic sense of humor. Alongside of many of our peers, we were thrown into amazing ministry situations in our church, in the Projects and on mission trips around the country. Youth Group was formative for both of us. Through the experiences we had there, we both felt called to full-time ministry. Alf was a couple of years older than me, and I think in him I saw someone walking the same path a couple of steps ahead of me.

Over the next couple of years, Alf and I experienced college and seminary together. We grappled over theological puzzles and dreamed about what the church could be. We both fell in love and got married. Our wives became best friends. By the time we graduated and entered full-time ministry, we could have completed each other’s sentences. We knew each other so well and we had been influenced by so many common mentors and models.

But God did not keep us together. In fact, when it came time to take jobs in churches, our callings couldn’t have been much more different. I felt called to come home. I wanted to be in New Orleans for the rest of my days. Alf, on the other hand, needed some distance between himself and New Orleans. He needed to start fresh somewhere else. So I ended up at our home church and Alf was in the hills of Tennessee.

Then Katrina hit. It was a turning point for the life of every native New Orleanian, whether you still lived in New Orleans or not. I became one of the coordiatators of Hurricane Recovery efforts at Berean. Alf became the point man in his church’s efforts to help from a distance. God reconnected us as Alf took trips down to the city to bring down supplies, resources and people to assist in Recovery efforts [in fact here is a post on the old Katrina blog where you can see some pics of some of the initial equipment donated by Alf's church to get our ministry up and running.]

God used Katrina to woo Alf home. He found himself drawn to somehow be part of ministry down here full-time. He didn’t know what that looked like. He actually dreamed about planting a church. So when God opened the door to church plant through Fellowship Associates, both Alf and I knew what it meant. We were supposed to do this together.

God was allowing our paths to intersect again.

In fact, maybe all of that prior history was orchestrated for this moment…