In this episode Gina has a conversation with Pete and Patty Shambrook who after pastoring for over 20 years, found themselves unsettled with the stark contrast between “church” they were experiencing and the Church represented in the Bible. This launched them on a journey to encountering God’s presence, the power of prayer and what it means to walk in the Spirit.
Books mentioned:The Grace Outpouring & The Way of Blessing by Roy Godwin
Visit Cedarhouseoc.com for more about Cedar House, to schedule an appointment for prayer or make a donation.
Isn’t There More Than This?
Gina:
I had the privilege of interviewing friends of mine, Pete and Patty Shambrook. We go way back with them, 30 years plus. We have some history together. You’ll hear a little bit of that, but Pete and Patty are now on a new adventure with Jesus right now. They’ve started a ministry called Cedar House OC to be a prayer house, a place for people to encounter God’s presence, to be transformed and shaped and moved and healed and set free by Him. It’s a beautiful ministry.
Even more powerful is the journey to get here. It’s amazing how God speaks to us, how He prepares us, how He invites us into the things that He wants to do, into the things that He designed us for, into the things that He equipped us for. I hope that you’re inspired and encouraged and maybe challenged and maybe given some permission to step in and dream with God and say yes to the things that may seem risky, but in the end are so worth it.
Gina:
Welcome. Pete and Patty, we go back very far in life. We were babies. Pete, you were doing the CCM artist, up and coming thing, when we met. Norm and I were in the Horizon Praise Band, doing that thing. We used to go on the road together.
Pete:
We even played in some nightclubs in LA too. You guys were such a great support to us.
Gina:
It was so fun. Pete, you were an artist for a long time. In between then you were on staff at Rock Harbor church for years. Because we were in each other’s lives a ton and then we all went our separate ways. I would hear of you, “Pete’s on staff at rock Harbor.” I remember hearing that you were the pastor over pastoral care for the staff and the pastors.
I remember when I heard that, at that time, this was 2001. That was a revolutionary concept at the time. There was such a lack of awareness in the body of Christ that leaders don’t have all the answers and they need to be mentored and discipled and cared for as much as the people. I just remember being so thankful for that and so excited that of all people you were in standing in that place.
You did that for a lot of years. Now the two of you have a ministry called Cedar House, which is a prayer ministry and prayer house. I would love for the two of you to share your journey, your story of how you got here. “Between fish on the end of line.” which was a line of one of Pete’s songs.
Pete:
You give me such a hard time about that. Every time I saw a fish on the end of a line and she’d say with an Aussie accent as well.
Gina:
I tried. I would love for you guys to share your journey, your story “between fish at the end of the line” and Cedar House Prayer ministry. What brought you here and what were the things that the Lord called you to, the things He transformed in you so that you were willing to take the risk?
Before we started recording, we were talking a little bit about risk and saying yes. We talked about, in this stage of our lives, in our fifties, there’s nothing better than being willing to say yes and letting God meet you at your yes.
Pete:
Which is interesting because the majority of people who are in their fifties are looking forward to retirement. This is such an opportune time for us to say yes to something we’ve never said yes to before, maybe something that’s been stirring in us for a long time, but we’ve not willing or able to step into it. It’s a really interesting time.
I started pastoring at the Vineyard in Costa Mesa, called the Newport Vineyard. I was on staff there for about four years as the College Pastor. That’s when I was introduced to pastoring. We both fell in love with it. We loved having college kids in our home, loving on them, caring for them, getting in the Word, challenging them. And this opportunity came up.
I had a good friend of mine who said, “You’re made for this. This is a good thing. I’ll help you. He was a prophet at Biola. He came alongside me and helped me think through teaching and everything. It was such an amazing four years of being a College Career Pastor at the Vineyard. Patty and I did that together.
One of our kids, Sophie would be in her crib, as a baby, and the music’s just going off and we’re stumping through the walls. Dane and Connor were our two older ones, they were super young and it was just a really vibrant time for us, of ministry. Then we ended up leaving the Vineyard and went over to Rock Harbor, we started attending Rock Harbor.
Then they went through a really difficult time in 2001. I was asked to come on staff to help them through that. They said, “We can only commit to a year. We really don’t know you very well. We can commit to a year and that’s about it.” We’re like, “Okay.” It was an opportune time. I was brought on to help pastor the teams and. I learned a lot there, it was really good time for me.
We ended up being at Rock Harbor for 17 years overseeing all the pastoral ministries there and pastoring the pastors, the elders. As you were saying, Gina, you don’t hear about that very much. I’m not sure they knew what to do with me. Todd Proctor’s (Lead Pastor) response was, “Would you come on and help us get through this? We don’t have a position, let’s create something around who you are and what God made you to be.” That’s what it ended up being.
Gina:
So much of the Western Evangelical world has this presumed career path in ministry. There’s these positions that one should, or shouldn’t try to attain, based on what they believe they’re supposed to do. I think the tragedy is that so many pastors are weighted down with things that don’t fit their gift set, but it’s the assumed next step.
I was at a church and a pastor burned out because he was a teacher and liked discipleship, but he was in the senior pastor role. The weight of everything that was expected of him was so great. How we placed these things on people, it’s just really nuts.
Pete:
That’s a trail we could go down, I could talk about that for ages. The majority of pastors live in pretense, because of the weight that’s on them. They’re putting forward a facade that they’re not struggling. But they’re in a dark place, sometimes. I’m not saying all of them are.
But when you find yourself in a dark place, as a pastor you put the blinders on and you just keep pushing through it, rather than actually saying, “Hey guys, time out here. I’ve got stuff going on in my soul and my heart right now that needs to be worked on.”
Gina:
Most of them believe, and for many it’s true, that there isn’t even a safe place to do that. Because, “If I do say that, then it’s over. It’s going to blow everything up.” They’re not going to be cared for.
Pete:
They have a good reason to think that way, because that’s often what happens.
Gina:
Part of what I do right now is I work with a ministry called Soul Shepherding. It’s just amazing, the need. That’s why it was so interesting to me, because you were really one of the first people I’d ever seen a church be willing to do that and they couldn’t define it.
It was the Lord, Todd’s willingness to say, “We need something.” then let the Holy Spirit define it as you stepped into that. I’m sure it was messy and it could have been prettier than it was, but that was a really significant thing.
Pete:
It was. I ended up being at Rock Harbor for, as I said, 17 years. But during that time, I stopped dreaming about things. I found myself in this place where, I’m a nine on the enneagram, so I have the ability to lose myself.
In a lot of ways I lost myself, but I was working on stuff at the same time. It was a mess, interiorly, in a lot of ways. God’s done amazing healing. I feel in me, even in the last year. It’s been incredible. We found ourselves in this place of going, “There has to be more than this.”
Patty:
Pete always was a pastor, it was who he was. When he was saying “I stopped dreaming”, he had the box that he was in. For the first time we’re empty nesters. We had sold our house. Our youngest daughter, we took to Australia, she went to Hillsong. At 18 she’s living in another country. Our boys had moved out. We just found some of the things we’ve been contending for in our family, we were growing weary. It was difficult.
When you’re talking about that safe place, we loved the church and I loved our church, but I didn’t feel safe where I could talk about the things that I was going through. It was definitely a really lonely, difficult time, probably more so for me than Pete. We’d just walk and pray and cry out to the Lord. I’d say, “Is there anything else you can do with your life? Do you need to be a pastor?”
Gina:
Isn’t it ironic that you were placed in a position to be the safe place for others, but then where’s the safe place for you? That mountain’s going to keep getting higher.
Patty:
But at this point too, he had started pastoring on a campus. We were at Rock Harbor in Orange County and leading in a lot of roles at that point. We just came to a place where you just start asking questions, “Isn’t there more? What we’re reading in the Word and how our lives look, just don’t feel aligned.”
Not that we were living in sin, but we were not seeing the power of God in the church. We didn’t see Him moving in those ways. We were seeing people healed. Why are so many people anxious and depressed? We just started asking those questions and really crying out to the Lord.
Finding More
Pete:
As Patty was saying, she was feeling it in ways that I wasn’t. I was saying, “This is my calling as a pastor, but my calling and my job are two entirely different things.” My vocation is as a lover of God. That’s my vocation. That’s all of our vocation first and foremost. Out of that comes the things that He made us for.
Regardless of whether I ever retire from my job that I do, which may be the same thing as my vocation, or helping me to live out my vocation. I will always, to the end of my days, live out who God’s made me to be. I don’t ever retire from that. We were in this place of discovering the richness of God.
Patty was leading in ways that I couldn’t lead in, because I wasn’t there yet. A lot of it has to do with what she was seeing, and she would bring it to me and we would pray about it and I would push back on it and go, “I don’t know about that.” Patty was saying, “But there has to be more.”
At one point it hit me, “There has to be more than what we’re experiencing in the church right now.” So we just found avenues to grow. Some of that had to do with a crew from south county that we hung out with for a couple of years and are still our friends to this day. We just jumped in with them and we learned to walk in the Spirit.
Some of the giftings that came out when we were at Vineyard were experienced in a more robust way, but in a normal way. I remember JP Moore, who was a cessationist, meaning he used to think that the gifts of the Spirit stopped at the book of Acts.
At a staff meeting at Rock Harbor years and years ago, he said, “Hey, find normal people that are walking in the power of the spirit and hang out with him.” I’ll never forget it. That was my heart to see that. So we found normal people walking in the power of the Holy Spirit and we hung out with them.
Patty:
That was almost five years ago. At this group they invited us to come down to our staff and just said, “We want to prophesy over you.” We went just like, “All right, we’ll step into this.” We were so hungry and desperate for more.
We went and and were just laughing our heads off, because they read our mail. And they were so normal like Pete was saying. They were so beautiful, and loving, and they just breathed life into us with their words. We walked away from that and went, “Okay. This is who God is.”
Gina:
This is what spiritual community is. There’s a couple of things that you guys shared that I think are so significant. One of those is your partnership in your marriage. I see a lot of young couples get married with a really big misunderstanding of what that actually means.
As you discover and pray through your calling and the two of you together choose to say, “yes.” You’re something together that you aren’t a part. I love how that played out for you Pete, where you weren’t able to see all those things at the beginning, but she was, and you were able to receive from Patty.
And the questions you had, the two of you could wrestle through that together. Then the two of you could choose to take the next step.That’s such a significant picture of what marriage can and should be.
Pete:
Well, there’s two things in that story. The first one is the marriage element for sure. But I think the second piece is that we believe that the church had been missing the woman’s voice . For so long there wasn’t space for Patty to step into leadership, with a voice and with authority that is led by the Holy Spirit, and actually find an outlet for that.
Like any marriage, we’ve had our ups and downs in marriage and I’m working out my crap and Patty’s working out hers. In the midst of it you’re right, we want to be together in this. This was the first time for us, me working at a couple of different churches to some degree, Patty was able to engage in that, especially I think when we’re at Vineyard more so, but we found this space where it was like, we actually get to do this together, And it’s this submitting one to another.
Patty has giftings that I just do not have, and her voice has been so important for me. But I wasn’t fully attuned to it before either, I was stuck in my box as well. But, man, once you get outside that box and you realize the giftings that people have, regardless of their gender, their voice has to be heard and the church cannot be the same and will not be what it’s meant to be if both those voices are not heard.
Gina:
Absolutely. I think it’s because of the distorted understanding of women, and their authority and their gifting and their leadership. The church in general has trickled into a distorted image of men and women in their partnership and marriage. So the church and many Christian marriages are missing the totality of what is available and the opportunity that is there.
When in the church can recognize the authority and the mantle and the giftings that women have, and give them a platform and give them a voice in a marriage, when the man recognizes the gifts and authority that his wife has and gives room for that, but also for the women to have confidence and not live in that place of insecurity of thinking, “I’m just going to be dragged behind the speed boat, and not step into everything that God created you to be.”
And for her to have the confidence to start going, “Wait, there’s gotta be more.” To start that unrest, not just pushing it down or letting it come out in some other way, but actually start to vocalize it, actually start to say that to your husband. Then the two of you actually start to wrestle with that.
Pete:
Well, nothing should make us happier as men and as husbands than to see our wives like thriving.
There Is No Going Back
Patty:
And like Pete was saying at the Vineyard, we did that completely together and it was so much fun, and there was so much fruit out of it. But it wasn’t the case at Rock Harbor, so I was doing my thing and I went back to school. I’m a marriage and family therapist now. so I was doing that track and Pete was pastoring.
Of course we were doing a lot in the church together, but for us, it was one of the most beautiful times in our marriage, but one of the darkest times too. The things we are contending for our family, for our kids, and our sons were not walking with the Lord. There was just a lot of struggle, so it came out of a dark time.
It came out of a very difficult time, but I’m so grateful that we definitely had done a lot of work in our marriage over the years. Sp we turned toward each other during that time and it was really special.
Pete:
We lived in a little, 450 square foot back house. So if we get in an argument, and I go in the bedroom, that would only be two steps away.
Patty:
But it was so great. It was this in between stage and when we had just become empty nesters and before we bought another house, we had left Costa Mesa moved up to orange and so everything was different. We had nothing familiar, and our stuff was in storage. Our kids were not in our home and we just slowed everything down and focused on the Lord. It was just this really sweet time, but it was a hard time too.
Gina:
Because it’s an exposing time. You start to remove all the things that were occupying your attention and your time and then you’re just faced with yourself, each other, and Jesus. And then you have a choice. What are you going to do there? And that’s really powerful.
Pete:
Well, I remember us looking at each other at one point, like we’re both experiencing the Spirit at this point and we’re walking in the Spirit and that simply means, living a life of submission to the Holy Spirit in our lives. That’s it, you know, we’re not talking about going off trying to do crazy stuff. But the Holy Spirit will do crazy stuff at times.
But I remember when we started to really experience God’s presence, it was wonderfully overwhelming and experiencing the Holy Spirit moving. I remember we looked at each other at one point and I think Patty said, “There’s no going back.” Here I am in a job that I’ve had for probably 16 years and I’m feeling this tension, but this affirmation of, “I can’t go back to the way it was.”
Once you’ve experienced the presence of God and the Holy Spirit moving, you just can’t go back. Now, what does it look like to move forward? Which led us into making some decisions, even with Rock Harbor that we had to make to actually step into what God was putting on our heart to do.
Gina:
I love that. When you were talking about finding normal people who were filled of the Holy Spirit, one of the things I say in my class is that we just want to know what “Biblical normal” is. It doesn’t have to be crazy. It’s dependence, and it’s abiding, it’s John 17. It’s being with Jesus, and not just doing everything for him. It’s just yielding to Him.
When you start to discover those things, then you start understanding Bible Verses like “pray without ceasing.” You know, things that we think are reserved for somebody sitting on a mountaintop somewhere who is a holy person. But no, pray without ceasing means that He’s in everything, and He’s with you.
When Jesus says, “I only do what I see the Father doing, like there’s that intimate and connected dependence in the most mundane of things. And He brings the miraculous to the mundane, it’s not always these crazy stuff. And yes, He will do crazy stuff, but when we’re constantly looking for the big, the crazy, or the programmed, or the what it should be, then we’re missing the miracle.
We’re missing the man. We’re missing the things that are right here right now. The invitations that are countless throughout the day. When you start to see that and when you start to experience that, it’s like those videos of someone who’s colorblind putting on the color glasses for the first time and they respond like, “Wow! What?! This has always been here?” It’s powerful.
Check out the rest of this conversation: The Journey Into More
For more about Cedar House: Visit Cedarhouseoc.com to schedule an appointment or make a donation.
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