The Ecclesia Network

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spiritual formation

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What Do You REALLY Want?

An interesting thing happened to me on the way to church planting: I got offered a 70k a year job out of the blue.

In 2003, before we felt drawn (or pushed… pushed probably fits better!) to plant a new community in Portland, OR. I had been sending out a lot of resumes. I knew it was time to get out of the media job I had been doing at a large church and back into pastoral ministry, and to that end I was putting out the feelers far and wide. But… I kept being number 2. It came down time and again to me and someone else, and yet in the end- always someone else.

At about that time, God really grabbed my attention. I was told my media job would be ending, and I’d have 3 months to figure out what came next. We had just bought a house, gotten pregnant… mild panic began to set in. 

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Why the Disciplines Matter

While acknowledging no community is perfectly mature, I often think that the reason more communities are not more spiritually mature is because their leaders are not more spiritually mature.

Why aren’t they? As Dallas Willard points out in The Spirit of the Disciplines, while we want to react as Christ would react, behave as Christ would behave and lead as Christ would lead, we are unwilling to do the things and practice the disciplines that enabled him to react, behave and lead as he did.

Willard writes,

“We must learn to follow His preparations, the disciplines for life in God’s rule that enabled him to receive His Father’s constant and effective support while doing His will.”

Programs and teaching series will not do half as much good in a community as elders who transparently live their lives and their practices before a watching community.

Disciplines for God

Many times I have sat with both pastors and elders who spoke of being spiritually dry. What I hear over and over again is that it’s difficult to find or make the time for reading Scripture; it’s hard to pray in a disciplined and consistent manner; and it’s nearly impossible to set aside time simply to sit and be present to God in the midst of the busyness and rigors of life, work and ministry.

When I was a youth pastor, one day I sat at my desk, staring down at my open Bible and wondering, Would I do this if I thought no one would ever ask me if I had? At the time, my truthful answer was no. It was then I realized I needed a major paradigm shift in how I related to God.

Leadership demanded that I engage with the spiritual disciplines, but leadership was not sufficient to make those practices vital and real in my life. What I needed was to fall in love with God again—to see in him a loveliness and a value apart from how he contributed to my position in church leadership. Leadership will “call the question” in your life: do you love God for God, or God as a means to an end? To put it another way, are you in love with Him or are you seeing relationship with Him as a necessary means to maintaining leadership and your reputation?

Disciplines for others

One of the main reasons leaders find it so hard to be disciplined in spending time in God’s Word, solitude and stillness, prayer, meditation and fasting is that they feel they are so busy with life, so busy in doing good, so busy serving God and the community that they neglect the care of their own souls. As Richard Baxter, the 17th century Puritan wrote, they are busy preparing meals for others even while they themselves are starving. You simply can’t feed anyone without having been fed yourself. What you offer to others will be of little nutritional value to them unless it flows from a vital, connected, disciplined relationship with God.

This can be particularly difficult for leaders who are bi-vocational or not in paid ministry. There is a temptation to see serving the church in leadership, attending meetings and fulfilling all the obligations of an elder as, if not sufficient for our spiritual lives, all that we really have the bandwidth to do.

When talking with pastors and other ministry leaders, I urge them to see their own spiritual formation as a way of not simply growing in relationship with the God who loves them, but also of loving others around them. My wife, my children and the people in my church need me to be in prayer and in Scripture regularly, in solitude and silence often. They need me to be grounded spiritually and growing, because that’s the only way I’ll ever be able to discharge my responsibilities to them faithfully. Seeing what we do publicly as loving service to our community is only half the story. Seeing what we do privately as we care for our souls also as loving service to others is the rest.

Disciplines for ourselves

The late-night phone calls, the inevitable conflicts, the difficulty of seeing others make wrong choices—all of these have an impact. Practicing the disciplines helps shape that impact for our good.

Implementing the spiritual disciplines in our lives also helps us minimize our anxious reactivity and choose a more constructive response instead. For example, the practice of studying the Scriptures brings the cognitive perspective to an emotionally-laden situation. We are reminded by the words on the page to love our enemy when our natural reaction is to lash out in anger. As we pray for our enemy, we open ourselves up to consider compassion and mercy. As we confess our sins, we face our sinfulness and avoid over-focusing on the sinfulness of the other. Gradually, we experience transformation, becoming the kind of people who are actually capable of forgiving an enemy.

How do some handle the stress of leadership and life so they grow from it while others feel more and more like burned-out husks, stumbling through another meeting, dealing with another crisis? I would venture to say it comes down to how they view themselves and those stresses. Spending time with God reminds us of His presence, even in the most difficult parts of life and church leadership. It grounds us in the character of Christ and informs our reactions. It enables us to choose loving responses rather than react or be defensive. And it reminds us that even in the hardest parts of leading a church community, God wants to use what we go through and our responses to it to form and shape us and our communities.

This post is adapted from Eldership and the Mission of God- Equipping Teams for Faithful Church Leadership, by J.R. Briggs and Bob Hyatt

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What I Learned After Almost Pretending to Faint Just to Get Out of Preaching

I remember pretty vividly the morning when, as a 27 year old associate pastor getting ready to preach for the first time in my new church, I briefly contemplated pretending to faint.

Sitting in the front row of the church, I was feeling completely unprepared to speak the Gospel to a group of people I hardly knew, and to a larger crowd than I had ever spoken to before. Sure, I had dealt with nervousness before, but this was definitely a notch up from what I normally felt. Sick to my stomach, head in hands, I thought to myself “If I just fall over to the floor and don’t get up, what will they do? They can’t MAKE me preach… can they?”

Fortunately for everyone involved, that moment passed. I preached that morning and it was fine. Since then, I’ve felt twangs of stage fright occasionally, but thankfully, never to that extent. In fact, over the years, the nervousness has subsided, but it’s mostly what I’ve learned about preaching that has made me increasingly comfortable in the pulpit.

Here’s what I’ve realized.

First, preaching is a marathon, not a sprint. I think we overestimate what can happen to modern audiences in one morning, and completely underestimate what can happen in a community through years of faithful preaching. Ask a regular church goer what the best sermon they ever heard was. Now ask them for their second favorite. Then their third. This is about where things get fuzzy for most people, not because preaching doesn’t matter, but because it does its best work in the aggregate. It’s not what people hear on any given Sunday that is likely to change them, but what they hear in a year of Sundays that is likely to provide a catalyst for change.

It’s not what people hear on any given Sunday that is likely to change them, but what they hear in a year of Sundays that is likely to provide a catalyst for change. Click To Tweet

For the individual preacher on a particular Sunday, that means focusing on the long game. Today is important, just not as important as we are likely to believe. Few people will remember what we preach today, but that doesn’t mean it’s not working- slowly but surely watering the seeds of change that the Holy Spirit is working in the lives of our hearers. This takes a lot of pressure off the time I spend in the pulpit, and puts it were it perhaps better belongs: planning, preparing and preaching. I now focus less on what I am going to say to my community this Sunday, and more on what I sense God wants us to say to the community this season, this year.

Second, I’ve realized it’s not about me. And if it seems like it’s becoming about me, I should change that. The real reason we become nervous is because we’ve become focused on ourselves. Our performance, our image, our job… We want to know we’re liked and are doing a good enough job that someone will keep paying us to do it. Fair enough.

But that’s not what preaching is about and we know it. We just need to remind ourselves that it’s not about us. Unfortunately, a generation of celebrity preachers- funny, charismatic, and engaging- have made us think that maybe it is about us, at least, a little bit. We love to listen to them. We want people to feel about us the way we and countless others feel about them, and hang on our words the way so many hang on theirs.

A generation of celebrity preachers- funny, charismatic, and engaging- have made us think that maybe it is about us, at least, a little bit. Click To Tweet

When I first realized this about myself, I knew I had to get off that particular hamster wheel of approval. I’m a decent preacher, but I’ll never be (fill in your favorite big name preacher here).

And neither will you. The vast majority of us are not called to speak before ever larger crowds, get book deals off our sermon series and get called on to speak at large conferences. We just aren’t. And the quicker we realize that, and let go of the fantasy version of our career trajectory, the quicker we’ll be able to get about being the man or woman God has called us to be in our own individual, mundane contexts, speaking to people who, though they number not in the thousands, still matter immensely to God. When I realize that this sermon I’m about to preach is more about Jesus and the people He loves than it is about what people think of me, about honing my skills, increasing my platform or anything other than cooperating with the Holy Spirit in moving the ball incrementally forward in the lives of the people sitting before me, the pressure falls away. And, if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor, I don’t need to hit a home run every Sunday. Singles and doubles with the occasional triple are just fine. I just need to keep things moving. No pressure to knock it out of the park.

But even in that, I can feel some pressure, so it’s good that I realized it’s less about what I do or fail to do, and more about what the Spirit chooses to do.

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The Spiritual Formation of Leaders: Mid-Atlantic Regional Event October 22, 2016

 

The Spiritual Formation of Leaders:
Mid-Atlantic Regional Event
October 22, 2016
@ Horizon Church 

14 E. Chatsworth Ave
Reisterstown MD 21136
A day long session for your community’s leaders which focuses on helping them gain an understanding of how God forms us, see the strengths they already have, view the challenges in their individual and corporate life through the grid of formation and the skills God would like to build through those challenges, and finally the new strengths/Christlikeness God is working to lead them towards.

We start with some formational prayer, move on to stages of formation as envisioned by Richard Rohr, the difference between the managed life and the forming life and then finally to individual and then corporate strengths/skills assessments as we discover together what God is up to in our midst.

Emphasis on both individual and corporate formation.

“What I appreciated most was having a trusted, objective leader speak into the challenges and opportunities facing our community. Many of the things you shared about spiritual formation fit perfectly with what we’ve been teaching for years, but hearing it from a fresh outside voice lent credibility and weight to the centrality of formation and discipleship in our mission. It was also very affirming to hear someone tell us that our challenges are “good challenges” and to be encouraged that we’re struggling with the right things.”

“Our day of Spiritual Formation with Bob helped our leadership dig some deep wells of character and calling that has generated great discussion and formative practices for us as a community.”

“We appreciated the assistance in instigating a conversation on Friday night about our struggle with transience.  You gave us an outside perspective on our problems and it was useful to know that we are not the only community that struggles with this issue.

On Saturday, I found the tools you introduced to be useful for introspection and to provide a lens for better understanding my own spiritual journey.  Overall, it was just concretely useful; for instance, I have heard several folks in our community repeat the “forming life” question as they process a difficult experience.”

Facilitator: Dr. Bob Hyatt :: Portland, OR

Bob is the founding pastor of The Evergreen Community in Portland, Or. He did his Master’s at Western Seminary and DMin at George Fox Seminary. Bob serves as the Director of Equipping and Spiritual Formation for the Ecclesia Network and is also the co-author (with J.R. Briggs) of Eldership and the Mission of God: Equipping Teams for Faithful Church Leadership and Ministry Mantras: Language for Cultivating Kingdom Culture and the author of A Month with Richard Baxter: Walking with a Puritan Pastor of Pastors Through the Spiritual Formation of Ministry

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