A lifelong journey of prayer and action (part 2)

How would you answer the following question?:

In your partnership with God, how has the balance of your role/God’s role and prayer/action changed over the years?

Yesterday I began recalling some of my own story as a response to that question. Part one covered roughly five years of full time paid ministry. Part two stretches across the next eight years:

Slowly, gently, using many other people along the way, God wooed me and challenged me to seek intimacy with Him as a priority and give more time to prayer.

 I started by giving up one day a month to join with a friend at a retreat house. We both knew we should pray more and both knew we wouldn’t do it unless we booked it in advance, with each other so that one of us cancelling meant letting the other down.

 A couple of years later, my church kicked me into an empty room two days a week. They knew God was calling me to spend two days a week in prayer, but that I would never do it unless they got involved. For a while I justified giving up so much valuable time by praying for my church and the town I lived in. Until God clearly, patiently, told me to stop that. I was to seek intimacy with Him alone. This was my priority.

 As I look back now, this was probably a tipping point. There was no going back. The importance of prayer found new weight and carried more influence in my diary. I would book prayer into my diary up to eight weeks in advance, so that any pressing matters did not squeeze out prayer, but instead slotted in around it. In learning to spend time with my Father I became a much better version of myself. My experience of prayer and my experience of ministry, alongside what I read in the Bible, came together to signal the way forward.

 My experience of ministry was starting to show me that however fresh and innovative the programmes and strategies I was adopting may have been, there really were no shortcuts or magic answers, and that the teasing theory of a church with exponential growth (if you just got the right conditions and right strategy) was just a lie. However many conversations I could have with people that would change their impressions of God, Christianity, or Church, I was simply going to have to leave most of the work to the Holy Spirit and the individuals on their own journey.

 My experience of prayer was that it was like breathing…. I couldn’t live without it. I simply could no longer operate as a man, a father, a husband and a pastor without responding to God’s call to spend time with him.

 What I read in the Bible was things that Jesus said like “My sheep hear my voice”, “I only do what I see the Father doing,” “You can do nothing apart from me” and, as above, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light”.

 God called me further. He asked me to forget all my ideas of how I would do ministry, all my plans for how to plant and grow churches. He called me out to the wild places, to spend time alone with him and to simply offer grace to those who came to find me and the path I was following. Of course, this led me onto a direct collision course with so many fellow believers.  Prayer was important, they would tell me, but I was taking it too far. Yes, prayer is the work, prayer produces fruit… but when are you going to show us the fruit? When are you going to start reaping this harvest you have sown?

 This is when the balance of God’s role and my role really began to change. Slowly, painfully, I let go of all defence, all rational argument, of trying to preserve my reputation, my credibility as a planter and a pastor, my church, my ministry, my employment, my home, my future. Because God had asked me to, and for no other reason at all, I surrendered everything.

I was left with no job, no income, no ministry, no home, no idea about my future, and to be honest, no idea what God wanted me to do next. My wife and I, with our four children, spent three months without a home or money to find one, driving around staying with friends and family, desperately trying to hear God on where our future lay.

 Sorry if I’m labouring the point here, but it is important to say that I had no role and no action left. I felt so lost and confused and stupid, and a failure as a father. All because I’d tried to follow God.

But…

We’d done it. We’d stopped trying to preserve our own ministry, our own reputation, our church, our reputation and credibility…. it had all gone. Maybe with my role and my action gone, there would be more space for God’s.

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