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 Clearing Your VisionThe most compelling reason I have for going away to pray is to find what God is saying to our congregation in the context of the larger church.
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When I first came to my present pastorate, I wanted a vision à la ("Where there is no vision, the people perish"). I wondered, What does God have in mind for our church? For several months, though, I concentrated on building relationships, establishing credibility, and hearing the leaders' ideas about the church. Before long my days were spent in disjointed attempts to repair programs or solve people-problems. I became bogged down in routine. My hope of finding a vision, a long-term goal for the church, never materialized. I looked to the elders for leadership, but they spent all their time, like me, solving problems instead of providing vision. In the midst of my frustration, however, I had two hit-yourself-in-the-head realizations. First, in 20 years of ministry I had never seen a committee receive a vision. Committees had offered wonderful methods to accomplish a vision or reach a goal. They had confirmed and refined an individual's insights. But I had never seen vision originate in group process—not in the Bible, not in the church. Second, the problem was not my inability to discover and articulate a vision. My problem was more basic: interruptions and distractions hindered me from seeing where God was leading. These distractions were good and necessary elements of ministry—daily devotions, sermon research, pastoral care, and administration. But they hindered me from discovering God's larger purpose for this church. The itch I sensed in me and my congregation was twofold: (1) we wanted a long-term goal larger than our routine, and (2) we wanted our purpose to go beyond our local church. Unspoken PleaThough they may not be able to articulate it, church members sense a need for long-range planning. Like the second law of thermodynamics, congregations tend to unwind and break down. The most compelling reason I have for going away to pray is to find what God is saying to our congregation in the context of the larger church. Local church projects are fine, but they often don't fulfill our highest priorities. New church program emphases are good, but so often they lack a sense of the eternal. Even emergency projects leave laypeople wondering, Is there a broader point to all this? After five years as pastor here, I still hear questions such as: "Where are we going? What vision do the leaders see for our church?" Such specific questions cannot be answered by our mission statement: "The mission of Northland Community Church is to bring people to maturity in Christ." We have to offer more than that, because people need specific answers to these questions before they are willing to fully commit themselves to the congregation. The immediate frustrated my attempts to find the eternal. Until I learned to get away, I struggled to reconcile the immediate needs with a larger vision. I decided to simply get away from the church and its routine, even if only for a few days, to do what I—and no one else in the congregation—am called to: gaining vision for the future. |             |
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