The Dream God Renewed

Long before I was a pastor, I dreamed of being a pastor. I had given many years to ministry already, full time and as a volunteer, and I had a picture in my head of what the dream looked like.

It looked like me, up front, using the gifting God gave me. Preaching His Word to a church that loved to hear it. Correcting gently in private. Encouraging. Weeping with people, laughing with people. Being, in every way I could imagine, a good and faithful pastor.

Then God began to change it. Not the calling, but the shape of the dream I had built around it.

It is the kind of conviction that looks like pure faithfulness from the outside, so I understand if it simply sounds like a beautiful dream that needs no changing. No one sat me down to correct my theology of church; it happened quietly, as I gave myself to God's Word, to prayer, and to fasting, until something I had never asked to change slowly began to shift.

I began to see that in my dream, I was always the one at the centre. I was the gifted one people came to hear. I was needed. The church gathered around what I could do.

And I could have done that beautifully for the rest of my life, and people could have enjoyed it for the rest of their lives, and we would never once have become what God actually called us to be.

Because God renewed that picture by making me less central. He showed me out of Ephesians 4 that I was not called mainly to minister to people. I was called to equip them. To build them for the mission He has given every one of us.

And that is a smaller place for me to stand. It means I decrease. It means the church is not organised around my gifting anymore. It means the win is not people enjoying my sermon. The win is people Spirit-filled, the Word of God dwelling richly in them, sent out on mission as a rhythm of their ordinary lives.

That cost me something. It cost me the version of ministry where I was the hero.

So when I say we are a Word and Spirit, Great Commission church, that we exist to win people for Christ, to build and equip them, and to send them into the mission field, understand that this is a conviction God changed in me when I finally got quiet enough to let Him.

He spoke to me, not just through me. And He has been renewing my mind ever since.