SEEK SIGNIFICANT GOD-ENCOUNTER

KIM: I grew up in a large congregation in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania. Ours was a healthy, vibrant church and a great place to be a kid! Once the church held some kind of spiritual renewal weekend. One night after all the folks had gone home, both of our pastors (Fred and Jacob) experienced a numinous encounter with God and a revelation about their ministry. Fred and Jacob, each excited over what they believed to be a unique and special message from God, went looking for the other throughout the building. Turning out lights as they went, suddenly they ran into each other in the dark, literally, at the bottom of some steps. Pastor Fred was of medium height, but Pastor Jacob was significantly taller, so he needed to help his colleague off the floor! In sharing what they believed God had told them, they discovered they had each received the same message!

This happened a long time ago, and I was a teenager, so I don't remember the specific message that came to these guys. But I do remember that it changed the way that they worked together. They became a team, working in union to bring God's dreams to life through our church. Everything was different from that night forward. And it happened because they were both listening and open for God's message for their congregation.

PAUL: You know, Kim, around a quarter century after Jacob and Fred crashed into a common vision, something like that happened in the church where I served on the northwest Florida coast. Our church was growing steadily, far beyond what our five-acre campus could sustain. We had been negotiating with the owners of an adjacent acre to pay an astronomical sum to acquire a small addition of land, when suddenly they stopped talking to us. There may have been some personal history between the owners and the man negotiating for us—but whatever the case, the deal was suddenly dead, and the owners swore they would never ever sell to us. It knocked us back, and we felt a wave of terrible discouragement. Yet, once that door was closed, we were freed to think more broadly and to let God show us a better plan.

Two weeks after the purchase fell through, seven of us experienced a Pentecost-style aha moment in a little upstairs room of a waterfront café. It was some of the most exhilarating two hours of my life. One week more and we had purchased thirteen acres for the price we were prepared to pay for the one, eight miles to our east—and the Soundside campus of Gulf Breeze Church was born. The Soundside campus would carry us much further in ministry to our community than anything we could have possibly achieved at the original site.

KIM: We live in an era when many books have been written on ministry principles and church-growth tricks. It is tempting to begin thinking of ministry as a business like any other. Yet this is not just a business. It is a surprising movement of God's Spirit, with the purpose of transforming our world with the love and grace of Jesus Christ!

PAUL: And until we collide with God's Spirit, or we hit the limits of what we can do simply from a human angle—until then, we mostly just tinker around the edges of what is truly possible.

Jesus led a spiritual movement that was world altering in its effect. Can you imagine Jesus effective in leading such a thing without a significant God-encounter? It took thirty years of intense spiritual formation to produce three productive years as a leader.

KIM: Even during those three years, Jesus took significant opportunity to connect with God. It seems to me he was often looking for a chance to escape the crowds and be with his Father.

God made us with a variety of personalities and gifts. God-encounters will look different from one of us to the next. While I crave my alone time with God and Scripture, others crave different pathways to God.

PAUL: And we come from a variety of theological personalities and traditions as well. In my work with the Readiness 360 congregational inventory (www.readiness360.org) in diverse churches across the United States, people report God-encounters in radically different ways.

KIM: So it should be no surprise that there are many ways that folks experience a living relationship with Christ. I have a friend who literally prays in a dark closet as Jesus suggested, but dark closets don't work for me, except to store things. Others like getting up early to spend time with God, and some folks end the day with God.

PAUL: Some folks pray with great freedom, creativity, and spontaneity. Others depend on structure. Some gather morning and evening as intentional communities to observe a set liturgy together that marks the spiritual rhythm of their days ... and they listen for God. Some of our taxi drivers in DC have little rugs rolled up in the trunk, which they roll out five times a day, somewhere alongside the road. To pray.

KIM: There seem to be almost as many ways to pray as there are people in the world. But however we get at it, the disciplines of prayer, meditation, study, Scripture reading, fasting, and even rest, all provide opportunities to run into God.

PAUL: ... and for God to crash into us! Annie Dillard is probably over-quoted for her observation that if we really understood the One we were dealing with when we come to worship God, we would all wear crash helmets! (Annie Dillard has said other things I like, but that's like the John 3:16 of Annie Dillard. Find this reference in Teaching a Stone to Talk [New York: Perennial Library, 1988], 52.)

KIM: Over the years I've observed a correlation between how much time a group of leaders spends in prayer and how effective their congregation is in reaching new people and providing vital ministry to their community. Praying congregations realize they can offer a redemptive presence in a place only when they stay connected to their Redeemer.

PAUL: I hear that, and I agree with it—and yet I know that some of the folks who read this will assume that we are talking about only very pietistic churches. I think we have to doubly underline your earlier point that prayerfulness looks different in each place. Spiritual discernment and watchfulness look different in a Louisiana Pentecostal church on the one hand and a New England Episcopal church on the other. But there can be spiritual collision in either place.

KIM: Definitely! One clue as to the spiritual grounding of almost any faith community—left, right, urban, or rural—is the relative absence of fear. The opposite of living in a vital relationship with Christ is living in fear. When I hear fear expressed as the first emotion in a change situation, I pay close attention. We are afraid of hurting someone's feelings, we are afraid of financial situations, or we are afraid that someone will leave our church or that the "wrong" people...