Our Decade Prayer: Where we Pray God takes us and the Obstacles to Overcome

Kneeling at the altar in the Temple, so grieved that the priest thought she was drunk, Hannah hadn’t seen anything change from the last time she’d asked God for a son. It was an act of faith just to come and ask again, as she had the year before, and the year before. 

But she didn’t just ask for a son, she promised to “give him to the Lord all the days of his life.”[1] If God gave her a son, she promised, she would give him back. How sweet to hear Eli the priest tell her, “Go in peace, and the God of Israel grant your petition.”[2] A few years later she would drop her young son off at the Temple, giving him back to the Lord to live as a Nazarite–and go home to bear five more children. 

In a few ways, Hannah’s prayer summarizes the things I want for our church, the things I hope you’ll join me in praying for. 

Since long before I became part of Calvary, we’ve knocked on God’s door with a desire to fill our building with worshipers, fill our classrooms with Bible students, and fill our baptistry with new Christians. For us, filling the building is like Hannah bearing a child. It should have been happening. All the pieces were there. Why wasn’t it happening? But God is the one who gives new life. 

Then, In my first year, we saw some signs that God intended to do just that. But after two years of “we think this is the last one” Covid waves, one might wonder if God will ever revive us again. Much like Hannah asked year after year and wondered if God would ever answer. 

Like her, we ask, we do our part, and we wait for God to answer. While we do, I want to look farther ahead and ask, “what if God answers us?” If Covid ends and God grows us again, how would we give that growth back to him? In this post, I want to give as clear an answer to that as I can and also outline some obstacles it would take to get there. 

In short, if God gives us more people than we know what to do with, we want to build them into faithful leaders and send them somewhere else. We don’t want to build a bigger building to hold all these people, we want to send them somewhere where they’re badly needed. So this is a shift from a “fill and build” vision to a “fill and send” vision. We want to one day be regularly getting rid of our best people. 

So our decade prayer is that we would be full and healthy enough to send teams of leaders and key members to struggling nearby churches and to church plants anywhere.

To get there, we have several hurdles to overcome. Here are the obstacles as I see them, and our best effort to clear them.

Overcoming our Debt. Once a staggering seven figures (and it didn’t start with a 1!), only 3 ½ years of payments now remain on our building loan. Though I pray every day that the Lord would pay it off by miracle today, our goal is to pay it off in 3 years flat. Until we do, it will continue to define our finances and limit ministry potential. With the money we are paying to our mortgage, we could make a part-time employee full-time, hire another full-time pastor, and send a missionary almost anywhere in the world. Until we do, it will remain difficult to attain the institutional health we need to multiply and grow. 

Duplicating our Leaders. To send teams of leaders to other churches, we will need a deep bench of ministry, pastoral, and committee leaders. We can’t send someone a finance guy if we don’t have an extra finance guy. We also need to build now the leaders who will take your place when, in the next ten years, some of you retire or move away. So we have to ramp up our efforts to teach each other how to lead things like building committees, senior ministries, choirs. To help with this, I’m putting a goal in front of every committee chair and ministry leader: to identify someone you’re teaching to do your job by the end of this year and have them trained by the end of next year. We’re also working to expand our leadership intern program and build a pipeline for rising leaders called the Young Leaders Cohort.

Foundational Documents and Leadership Structure. Behind the scenes, we’ve been updating our governing documents like the Staff Policy Manual and Church Covenant. Soon, the big one will come: the Constitution and Bylaws. But we can’t do that until we decide whether to change leadership models to a “plurality of pastors” model. 

If you know me well, you know I’m convinced that having more than one pastor–and allowing trusted members to become pastors alongside vocational pastors–is not only biblical but beneficial to the church. We could use the stability, accountability, and collective wisdom of a group of men shepherding us. I know some of you are catching on to that vision, while others of you have questions. Before we rewrite our constitution, we’ll have to unite the group around one model or the other.  

To help decide where to go, I’m forming a small study group called the Polity Advisory Council. This group of Jerry Mann, Walter Howard, Don Lauer, Pastor Paul, and me will be tasked with three questions: 1- If the Bible gives an ideal model of church government, what is it? 2- If we need to change leadership models, is now the time? and 3- If we did, what would it look like? We’re hoping this group of trusted men can unite together and find satisfying answers to everyone’s questions. If they succeed, we’ll look at a new constitution in 2023. 

Bringing in More Visitors. It’s so encouraging how many of the people who come through our doors wind up sticking around. But on the flip side, the number of visitors we have each week is dust on the scales of the 30,000 people who drive by every day. Why do so many drive by without coming in the doors?

We all have our theories, but I want to get some firm answers by asking our neighbors themselves. So later this year, I hope to form a Community Survey Team whose job will be to design and administer an in-person survey to learn how people in Greenwood view us. They’ll write up the questions, walk around to ask them, and see if they can identify any particular things we’re doing that are keeping people away. 

As God allows us, we plan to start our evening prayer meeting again soon. When we do, it will be with a day of prayer and fasting for this very vision. Lord Jesus, would you bring so many newcomers and new converts to us that we can build them up and send them somewhere else, giving them back to you. We have work to do, but the God who gives new life goes before us. 

Whatever happens, your pastors and your God love you very much. 

[1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), 1 Sa 1:11.

[2] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), 1 Sa 1:17.