One of the incredible turning points in Israel’s journey of faith was how those unique individuals known as the prophets responded to the shattering of Israel’s dream as a nation. The journey of God’s people from Abram through the formation of a nation was a bumpy but relatively successful journey of progress. With the defeat first of Israel to the North and eventually of Judah to the South, everything came to a screeching halt. What type of God cannot protect God’s own people and allows the most sacred spot on earth, the temple, to be desecrated without any response. The miracle of the prophet’s faith was that instead of falling into despair, they reconstructed their understanding of God to a universal God who was Lord of the whole world.
That is theological background to the third step I would offer you as you respond to the shattering of your dream of ministry on the rock of church reality. In short, like Israel, when your faith is challenged by your experience, it is time to reconstruct your understanding of the God who has called you to ministry. If God is real, and God has called you to ministry, then what type of new understanding of God must you forge in order to respond to God’s call. This is not an easy task, nor one without much pain, but the result can be life giving.
Let me suggest a couple of methods of exploring this task.
First, I would return you to the list of ten exercise. Being honest about your painful disillusionment about ministry, yet acting on a belief that it is your understanding rather than God’s call that needs to be reshaped, make ten statements of how your new understanding of ministry might look. What does God’s call to an imperfect church in an imperfect world look like? What does church, imperfect and flailing, look like? What does God expect from those God calls in such an imperfect world? Why would God continue to love such a church?
Second, as you are working on those ten statements, keep looking for biblical examples of how God works through real people and communities with all their frailties, to effect God’s purpose.
This isn’t an easy nor a quick solution but it is throwing you back to where you began with looking at your world through theological eyes.
