This past Sunday, was Vision Sunday. If you have not watched or listened to the message, I strongly encourage you to stop reading this, and check it out first! (You can find the link below in the newsletter.) This year we will be talking a lot about “life change is a way of life” which is one of our values. Transformation is essential, whether that is in the lives of individuals or for a whole community.
A significant change that is happening for our community of faith is the launching of a second campus (seriously, you should watch the Vision Sunday message if you have no idea what I am talking about). In a lot of ways this will pull us out of what is familiar. New opportunities to serve and make relationships will be abundant. God will most certainly show us where we find it difficult to trust him and where we sometimes misplace our hope. These things may make us uncomfortable, but God will use them to continue to transform us (Rom. 12:2).
As I shared on Sunday, God has been making changes in me over the last few years in preparation of this launch. As we were coming out of the pandemic in 2021, my wife and I were considering our next steps as missionaries. Our time in Uganda had been fruitful and transformational in its own right. Our boys, however, were getting to an age where they needed us to intentionally walk them into adulthood. While we could have done that in Uganda, we had witnessed many families who struggled through that season in a developing country and their kids cratered when they left the roost. Wary of that, and still feeling drawn to international missions, we looked for other opportunities that would allow us to serve and help provide a higher level of support to our growing kids. That led us to consider positions in Kenya and Germany.
At the time I was sensing God’s leading for me to be a pastor. I figured that meant internationally since that was our current context and something that we love. I was hoping that either Kenya or Germany would give me a chance to serve as a pastor within the structure of their mission. Both organizations were excited to bring us on board and made invitations for us to join their teams. The problem was neither of them had a pastoral role available.
I found myself in the Psalms, seeking out God’s direction. There I bumped into a familiar verse, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart (Ps. 37:4).” I knew that this was not a license to bombard the Lord with my self-serving requests. Nor was it a promise of riches or comfort. It was the Lord’s invitation for me to allow him to align my heart with his by delighting in him. I accepted his invite gladly as I was confused about his calling and what my own desires were. For the next three weeks I spent as much time as I could with him. I did not ask for anything, I only delighted.
It was through this time of delighting that he changed my heart to choose something that I had previously refused to consider. Moving back to America. My heart had been a tangled mess of desire to help my boys, live internationally, and follow my sense of God’s leading into the pastorate. Two of those were aligned with God’s heart, continuing to live abroad was not. Giving up that vision for my own life was difficult, but the Lord was gracious with me. He planted in my heart a new vision of returning to America and coming back to Fellowship. Although I had no idea what the future would hold, I was enthusiastic about the prospect of learning from a group of pastors and leaders that I love and respect.
I have been serving Fellowship for more than 18 months as a pastoral resident. There was no promise of a job at the church that came with my residency. The only thing I knew for sure was that I would be able to grow and become better equipped for wherever the Lord planted my family and me. I was open to anything at the start of the residency. I could church plant. I could pastor a church in need of revitalization. I could pastor a church that was thriving. But, over that first year the Lord started drawing me to help start something new. As it turns out, the elders at Fellowship were sensing the Lord’s leading for the church to launch a new campus. The Lord had us all on parallel paths and it soon became evident that those paths were to merge.
There is a reason I am telling this story. As we head into a new ministry year and we begin discussing change, both personal and community wide, there may be some discomfort. Change can often feel like it came out of nowhere. It simply invaded our life without any notice. However, change never sneaks up on God. He knows when change is coming and he has plans to use it in our lives to transform us. And he is preparing us for it even when we are unaware of it. As we experience change this year, both personally and corporately, we can be confident that not only is God fully aware of every detail, he also has been working in us in advance. The greatest part of our changing circumstances is the transformation that God does in our heart.