Grace Lived Out...Even in Leadership

Here at the Abbey Church in Azle, Texas, we just finished four days of meetings with our new (but quickly gone deep) friend, Dr. Lynn Hiles. Dr. Hiles preaches grace--and by “grace”, he means the finished work of Christ, not a sweet but weak sentimental acceptance—in a way I have never experienced. My long held dream of erasing the Western demarcation between the “word” and the Spirit” comes true when I listen to Dr. Hiles preach—and by “preach”, I mean dispense a lifetime’s study of blazing truth from an inner spiritual assembly mechanism that seems to function somewhat like a catapult hurling blazing missiles at a fortress!

The universality of the Gospel—the sheer enormity of what Jesus did for us—was splashed across the canvas of my inner world while I listened to such a degree that I wanted to lay flat on the floor in complete surrender to the panorama of truth. I felt like the Queen of Sheba as she was described in the Bible when she saw the wealth and excellence of Solomon’s empire: it took her breath away. Simultaneously, however, I wanted to rise up stronger than ever in hot pursuit of my own particular flavor of Ephesians 2:10 “good works”—you know the kind, not the dreams of our own born out of our need to bolster insecurities, but the big dreams of God birthed in us—the ones that are finished in Him before they are even begun on earth!

So, I’m just saying….it was a great few days and my inner world is still reverberating. Sometimes we know the blazing truth, but have allowed it to be dosed with a fair measure of “reasonableness” and we don’t even realize that we are being lulled into less real living than is our portion! It sounds like this, “Well, of course, Jesus is everything, but, let’s be real…” In our hearts, we don’t reassess the absolute nature of salvation, but our experiences tend to sink down into the level of a distant hope of that salvation showing up, rather than a real-time reality!

I know that there are a thousand expressions of “church” showing up all over the planet and I fully believe in a God who is just as real and ready to speak and demonstrate at a Starbucks as He is from a pulpit, BUT, I have just been refreshed in the amazing effect of what the Bible calls “the foolishness of preaching”. Church is relational and it is NOT (never has been and never will be) just about sitting behinds on chairs while they listen to one man, BUT, GOD DOES USE THAT FORMAT TOO! When the man is actually emblazoned with revelation that he has interacted with for years such that even his communication of it has become pregnant with all the creativity that is God, then we’ve got something! Preaching is about washing the psyche with the truth so much so that our consciousness can’t for a little while come up for air and we are swimming in heaven—experientially reminded of the amazing potential for Kingdom that we carry every minute of every day!

There is a particular variety of “settling” I have discovered, however, that seems to require large doses of heaven to drown! It hides in the crevices of our ideas about church and is aided by the church’s tendency to forget that it is only a subset, a manifestation, an outcropping of the broader picture of reality: the Kingdom. (As Dr. Hiles points out the relationship, the rainbow around the throne declares for all to remember that the New Covenant is the constitution of the Kingdom of God.) The particular compromise I here seek to expose hides under the banner of words like “leadership” and “responsibility” and it looks like this: Church leaders who well know that all function in the Christian life must flow from a place of REST, end up creating for themselves only a parallel universe where striving is allowed! When it comes to salvation, they preach and believe that Jesus did it all and that the life he gives he maintains, but when it comes to building a church or leading a ministry or “getting results” in the corporate sense—beyond individual growth—they somehow subtly permission a reversion to the energies of the flesh. Christ plus nothing for righteousness, but Christ plus…..John Maxwell, marketing strategies, political promotion, hype, or the latest fad…when it comes to being a leader. Please understand me, I am NOT against all of these things (some of them I am against—I’ll let you guess which). What I am against is the dual system that implies that Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection on our behalf is big enough to reverse the entire polarity of our existence, extending to every area of life we encounter EXCEPT the areas that deal with leading people.

When we replace the rainbow around the throne with a list of considerations that don’t flow from rest and create for ourselves a modern-day litany of leadership requirements, our journey is headed toward resentment. We begin to feel the least able to access the grace that we preach. We are unable to offer to ourselves fully the freedom that we proclaim (or hopefully continue to proclaim) so freely! We are, to put it biblically, double-minded. And we ultimately go about like nervous little scavengers, vulnerably feeling that we must find the “key” or the “door” that will unlock our ministry, rather than trusting the One who holds the keys and said most plainly, “I am the door”. If He could unlock our eternal mess, certainly, he can unlock doors of opportunity—it’s that simple. There is only one operating system in the Kingdom—the finished work of Christ. Out of that place, not only our own personal and ever-emergent salvation appears, but also our CORPORATE EXPERIENCE OF MINISTRY OR CHURCH!

It is Western dualism once again seizing the opportunity presented by our “unrenewed” mind. But, I now have a new definition of the unrenewed mind. I have decided that an unrenewed mind is not so much a mind that thinks bad thoughts or doesn’t have Scripture at the ready, but rather the unrenewed mind is one that draws boundaries on the finished work of Christ, declaring that perhaps there are just places it might not extend and inspiring the creation of several “plan B’s” in people who would never offer any other plan for their eternal salvation! Am I making sense to you? If I am…..you might be a church leader! Appealing to our common sense, traces of law-based fear seduce us into creating systems of flesh, even while we are fully aware that the product we want to dispense is spirit, and the grandest of all ironies swirls within us!

Obviously, I could go on and on about this—it is a big topic, maybe even a best-selling book (smile)! But, the purpose of a blog is to get personal, and so now I will share with you what you may have already surmised. How am I able to describe this particular affliction common to church leaders with such passion? Is this the culmination of years of research, note-taking, interviews and case studies? Yes and no. Though I have seen it everywhere in the church, my deep understanding of the dysfunction was as close as my mirror and the case study was me! Years ago, the passage in I Samuel 13 where Saul “forced himself” to offer the sacrifice, rather than waiting on Samuel (a type of the Holy Spirit) to do the job on his behalf, was carved deep into my constitution. And one of my “life Scriptures” was, “And HE will make your righteousness be seen like the light AND….YOUR CAUSE like the shining of the sun!” (Psalm 37:6, combined translations, Emphasis on: YOU don’t have to produce it.)

The most difficult journey of my “hot responder” personality has been the journey of TRUST related to my own destiny. I have never breathed a moment without the biggest of dreams: I want to be the Christian answer to both Oprah and Chopra. I want to shout from the housetops to the chart-topping musicians all over the world as well as the wannabes alone in apartments, “I know what you’re singing about—I hear your cry!” I want to stand up in the middle of an Eat, Pray, Love generation and declare a God who could blow every Eastern mind in a second with spiritual reality so blinding it would make every knee bow to the One who both fulfills and transcends both East and West! I see all this potential but I don’t know how to produce it myself and I have heard the wise man say that the richest place on the planet is the graveyard, due of course to all that buried potential! That just can’t be me, so I must act! Right? Only partly….I must ACT from that place of REST, realizing that I am not posturing myself, but being positioned by Him. I do not have to be a slave of destiny at the expense of Kingdom provision! Destiny is simply my little corner of the Kingdom, and the Kingdom is HIM! How could I take my dreams to my grave if my life is enveloped in Him?

Recently, my friend April had a prophetic vision about my “ministry”. She said she saw me lying flat on the floor and people were digging around inside of me and taking what they needed—like an autopsy, she even said. What followed was a long, tearful, God-visited discussion with April and her husband, Jason, about my disappointment over being compared to a corpse and the reasons behind it. (The vision had aroused my greatest fear: that I would be “used” by others to build their “ministries” and left for dead in terms of my course to run! Don’t judge me: it was deeper than a conscious drive. ) Now, after a week of intense focus on the finished work of Christ, I see it differently. What people were taking from me was not my vitality, but my produce! I am a garden (as we all are) and the amazing economy of God is designed such that the things that grow in me to actually provide nutrients that other people need!

And that growth is not a strain, but rather a natural process of relationship that I share with all sojourners. Lying there flat need not be interpreted as corpse-like, but maybe instead as just RESTING. As I rest in the fact that He has a plan, not just for my spiritual growth but even for my MINISTRY, then the garden blooms and is ripe for picking. If the soil is rich, the produce might be varied—books, preaches, sure, but also conversation over dinner or coffee, Facebook status updates, or….blogs—but it is all just the fruit of the fact that I am connected to heaven. If my strong desire turned to straining can’t add a millimeter of stature to my natural height, it certainly can’t stretch the bounds of my reach, either, no matter how many leadership books I read or clever strategies I adopt. But conversely, if I just consider the lilies, how they grow and continue to do the same, then I believe by the working of the Holy Spirit, my energies will be funneled into creative channels that will feed a landscape the size of my Kingdom dreams!