“The key to successful spiritual leadership has much more to do with the leader’s internal life than with the leader’s expertise, gifts, or experience. “ What a concept. It reminds me that you can have all the money in the world and still not be happy….you can have all the experience and gifting, but still not be a successful spiritual leader. It’s interesting to think about that because people really don’t seem to account for the internal life. You don’t put it on your resume. People care about experience and gifts, God cares about the inside…the heart, the emotions, the complete you.
This chapter talked a lot about the background of Peter and Geri. How they came to be in the ministry and when Geri (the pastor’s wife) decided she’d had enough and was going to quit the church. She no longer respected Peter and said he didn’t have the guts to lead, to confront the people who need confronting. She told her husband that “the church is no longer life for me. It’ is death”. I would be heartbroken to hear that from anyone, let alone my spouse. Imagine being the Pastor and hearing not only that you weren’t a good leader, but that the very thing you’ve been hoping was going to be the hope to the people, was killing the person closest to you. The amazing thing is that she had the guts and wisdom to actually communicate that to him. It took lots of years, but she could’ve let it change her entire opinion of church. She chose to speak life into a dead situation. She was forcing the situation to change!
Peter talked about how he put so much into the church and their people that he had little energy left to parent, enjoy his children or his wife. “Even when I was physically present, such as at a soccer game for one of our daughters, my mind was usually focused on something related to the church. Am I supposed to be living so miserably and so pressured in order that other people can experience joy in God?”
“We mistakenly thought that dying to ourselves for the sake of the Gospel meant dying to self-care, to feelings of sadness, to anger, to grief, to doubt, to struggles, to our healthy dreams and desires, and to passions we had enjoyed before our marriage.”
“We were busy for God”
“We were gaining the whole world by doing a great work for God while at the same time losing our souls.”
The breakthrough finally came when at an attempt to get their marriage back on track, Geri and Peter went to a week long marriage retreat. They felt like it was a safe enough atmosphere to truly share their hearts. At 2 in the morning, Geri jumped up on the bed and let Peter have it. It was an extremely liberating experience for both of them. She had stripped off the heavy spiritual veneer of “being good” that kept her from looking directly at the truth about our marriage and lives. They talked…they talked about their parents and their lives and marriages and realized that, “We left them when we got married, but somehow they were still shaping our lives. Jesus had penetrated only superficially onto the depth of our persons –even though we had been Christians for almost twenty years.”
After this breakthrough, Peter saw God through a whole new set of eyes. “I saw Jesus was able to express his emotion with unashamed, unembarrassed freedom. Jesus was anything but an emotionally frozen Messiah. At the same time, I observed how Jesus was able to separate himself from the expectations of the crowds, his family, and his disciples. His relationship with his Father freed him from the pressures of those around him. He was not afraid to live out his own unique life and mission, regardless of other people’s agenda for his life.”
Their new goal was not to change the church but to allow God to change them.
“God was clearly speaking to me through the GIFT of depression, an unhappy spouse, and a life that would periodically spin out of control. My only response to these painful realities was: “God, please remove them as quickly as possible so I can go on with your work.” The only problem was I was not open to God speaking or moving in my life in those ways. My paradigm included God speaking through Scripture, prayer (an inner voice), sermons, a prophetic word, and sometimes circumstances – but surely not this.” How often do we try to ask God to take something away or make it better without realizing the potentially gift he’s given us. God can speak to us through anything and often does if we are willing to allow him.
Peter writes, “For the first time, I understood what it meant to minister out of who you are, not what you do.”
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