[the following is reposted from The Burner, a great blog sponsored by Fuller Seminary]

A Prayer for Pastors

Dr. Jay Phelan is president and dean at North Park Seminary in Chicago. In February 2010 he offered this prayer to a gathering of Evangelical Covenant pastors at the Covenant’s Midwinter Conference held in Denver.

It has been good to be here Lord.  It has been good to see colleagues and friends.  It has been good to renew acquaintances, recall the old stories and reclaim the old commitments.  It has been good to celebrate the new life in Christ, to settle under the yoke of the kingdom once more, and to refresh our identity in Christ.  It has been good to sing and shout and praise.  For many of us it has simply been good to rest or stroll the 16^th Avenue mall or read a book or sit with a spiritual director.  But we cannot stay.  Someone else may be preaching on Sunday, but a flurry of activity awaits us.  The demands of ministry press upon us even now as we contemplate our flights or long drives home.  We pause to give thanks for one another, to pray for one another—to love one another as you love us.

In one sense the church we planted was organic (it started with a bunch of people in my living room), but we made no attempt to start a new church every time we filled the living room (which for most observers means we didn’t stay organic).  Our reasons for not going organic parallel Hofmeister’s in a number of ways, but there are three primary reasons we opted to plant a smaller (but not house-sized) congregation:

Uno - Teaching/preaching/worship.  I was a church-based college pastor for a handful of years, and as such had frequent interactions with campus pastors from different parachurch groups.  A few of these got connected to a nearby network of house churches and became organic church pastors as well.  One day I was with a few of them and asked, “Why do you do your church meetings on Wednesday or Thursday nights?  Is there a reason none of you do Sundays?”  Nervous laughter followed, and then they said, “The truth is, our people love what we’re doing, but most of them like to be able to sneak off once a month or so to one of the nearby megachurches and worship there.  Meeting midweek allows them that option.”

A friend of mine who is big into the organic/simple/house church movement was really disappointed when we started Life that we didn’t choose to go that route.  “We are able to really focus on community, discipleship, and 100% of our money can go to mission.  What’s not to like about that?”  I still get this question a lot as I interact with potential church planters who are trying to figure out their model of ministry.

There are a lot of things about organic churches that appeal to me (who, after all, in vegetable or in church life doesn’t want to be “organic”), and I applaud those who go this route every bit as much as those who plant more typical churches.  But there are some drawbacks too that I saw as I hung around with those who were planting in this way.  Check out Brian Hofmeister’s article in Leadership sharing his organic church experience.  In many ways it parallels the reasons why I didn’t go that direction.

I recently read a great book called Incarnate Leadership: 5 Leadership Lessons from the Life of Jesus by Bill Robinson (how’s this for an endorsement: in the foreword Eugene Peterson says this is the only book on leadership you need to read – dang).  The book is remarkably simple, and bases its five leadership lessons on a single verse from the first chapter of John’s gospel: “The Word became flesh and dwelled among us; and we beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

From this simple summary of Jesus’ life and leadership, Dr. Robinson draws out these critical lessons:

If Protestants had patron saints, mine would be Dallas Willard.  Some challenging thoughts from him in an interview with Out of Ur about the church’s effectiveness at making disciples.  Challenging thoughts, yet encouraging too.  Christian faith is not primarily about the afterlife – it’s about knowing Jesus in this life and the next, and being transformed into his image as we follow him.  This is what we are striving for at Life Covenant and advocating for in Embodying Our Faith.  This isn’t the easiest road for a church to take, but really, would we want to be pursuing something different than this?  Couple of excerpts from Dallas:

Many churches are measuring the wrong things. We measure things like attendance and giving, but we should be looking at more fundamental things like anger, contempt, honesty, and the degree to which people are under the thumb of their lusts. Those things can be counted, but not as easily as offerings.

Big thanks to John Alexander of At the Garage for taking time to blog about Embodying Our Faith!  Thanks for your generous words John, and for taking time to share the book with others.  Lord bless you as you serve him in Vegas… 

If we are to live deeply into our calling there comes a point where we have to act.  In the midst of uncertainties, setbacks, failures and self-doubt, we have to risk it all and step out if we are to see anything happen.

And what is it that enables us to do so?  To push back our own fears of failure, insecurities, and doubts about whether or not we have what it takes?  At the end of the day it can only be this: a bedrock trust that God is with me, and that if he is calling me to something it is because that is enough.

This idea is captured for me in one final image from the life of Moses.  In the midst of Moses’ barrage of questions and doubts God turns the tables and asks him a question: “What is in your hand?” (4:1).  Moses replies, “A staff.”  It’s not much as equipment goes, but it turns out this simple tool is enough for God to work with.  As the story progresses, this staff accompanies Moses into Egypt where it is used by God to convince the Israelite elders that God is with Moses.  It is used in Pharaoh's court to convince them that God is real and means business.  This staff goes with Moses as he leads the people to and through the Red Sea, the years in the desert, battles fought and won.   What in the beginning of chapter 4 is merely a stick is rightly referred to as The Staff of God by the time the chapter ends.