Hope, part 4 - passion

You don’t have to go far from our church’s building to see hopelessness and brokenness.

Our little community abounds with frustrations, disappointments, addictions, broken relationships, loss, hurt, pain, abandonment, abuse, neglect and sorrow. In many ways, our church had seasons where the church itself reflected that as well. Fear and sorrow mixed with the nostalgia of a better time to produce a palpable hopelessness. The very first week I was in our community, I asked someone what their hope was for the community and the church. The response pierced me: “I don’t hope for us anymore.” The brutal honesty of this response was a wake-up call to what we were committing ourselves to.

The end result of this hopelessness is death. A slow, listless decay that wears and eats at the members of the glorious body of Christ in a way that breaks the heart of anyone who loves the church. But, when passion about the right things comes in to the picture, something changes. In fact, everything changes. If prayer is the vehicle through which hope travels, and preaching is the means by which hope is poured into the hearts of the people, passion is the undergirding of those things. If hurting, scared people and churches need anything, it is a clear, informed tangible passion from those they are trusting to lead them. But it needs to be passion about the right things, done in the right ways. What are the things a revitalizer/replanter ought to be passionate about? I can think of at least three:

1. The Gospel: plain and simple, every pastor should continually cultivate a passion in his own soul and in the souls of the people of the church a passion for the Gospel. This is the starting point for seeing a church change for so many reasons. The Gospel is the central thing. It’s the sun around which the church ought to orbit. But in a dying church, there are so many other little suns. In a desperate attempt to relive the great days of the church, or to grab a hold of something that may possibly lead to growth again, or to stake a claim in one’s own personal kingdom, many focus passion wrongly on things that are infinitely less important than the Gospel. When the leaders become passionate about the Gospel things start to change. There is no substitute for a passion for the Gospel.

2. The people: after Gospel passion is people passion. You simply must be passionate about people. Not just the people you wish you had, or the people someone else had, or the people the other guy has; you must be passionate about the people you have and the people you ought to be reaching. For our community, that meant two things. First, it meant caring for the people who had faithfully prayed for and committed to our little congregation, even in the really dark, really hard times. Second, it meant going after the hurting, the broken, the poor in our community. Interestingly enough, it still means these two things. In fact, you could argue that a passion for the Gospel will lead to a passion for the people, both the ones who have been faithful and the ones who are far from God.

3. The work: this one is especially relevant for the replanting/revitalizing pastor. The reality is that revitalization and replanting is gaining traction as a trendy sort of ministry. I would argue that the day is rapidly approaching (if it isn’t already here) in which all pastors are either church planters, church replanters, or church revitalizers. But this is hard work. It’s frustrating work. Sometimes, it’s thankless and lonely and discouraging. Mind you, that’s not all the time. In fact, I would contend that many of my days doing this work have been the total opposite of that. But still, if you are going to stick in this work, you simply have to be passionate about it. You have to be totally committed. You have to be all in. The church has had way too many guys who come into a church thinking about their own upward mobility, who use and abuse the people of the small rural church so that they can gain the experience they need to go to the places they really wanted to go. Don’t be that guy. Be passionate about the work in the place you are in. And then watch others follow you.

I bet you don’t have to go far from your building either. I bet hopelessness and brokenness are all around. For some, it may be sitting in the pew every Sunday. There are many faithful people who went to their Sunday gatherings this Sunday, and will go again next Sunday, and the Sunday after that, and so on and so forth. But they are hopeless, or they are hoping in the wrong things. When God calls a man to go and lead in a dying church, he calls us to be brokers of clear, informed passion about the things that really matter. The Gospel matters. The people matter. The work matters. If you are passionate about those things, if you can communicate with a contagious, infectious passion, then others will do the same. But it starts with leaders with a solid faith; not that they are the answer, or that even that the church won’t die. Faith that the Gospel is worth living for. That the power of God is effective to change lives and churches and communities. That the work of ministry is worth the strain, even when there is no fruit. Real passion leads to real change.

Pastor, I’m praying for you. Any of us in this work will struggle with losing passion. Any of us will question whether it’s really worth it. Any of us will find ourselves longing for an easier life sometimes, or will just wish for one person who is as passionate about what we are doing as we are. I don’t have sage advice here; no magic bullets or quick solutions to this. But I do know this: rest is essential. Take a day and disappear with a Bible and a notebook. Turn your phone off, and listen to the world around you while you listen to the Word in front of you. There are few better ways to get your passion back than to go have sweet communion with the Master. I will confess to you that I need to do that far more than I do. Don’t be afraid to get away. And then, when you get back, don’t be afraid to be passionate about what you are doing.

But this is true for all of us, not just pastors. God has called us all to be passionate. And if you aren’t a pastor, there is no single way to be more consistently encouraging to your leaders than to convey a passion for the Gospel, the people, and the work. Nothing is more refreshing than knowing others catch the vision. So buy in, and watch your pastor grow. He needs you in order to flourish.

And then, we take that passion and hope into our communities, and we see the power of the Gospel wage holy war against hopelessness and brokenness. That, my friends, is a mission worth living for.