It was hard to go to my most recent Pastoral Leadership Institute training (PLI) with my seven year old son, Jonah, still in the long process of recovering from his recent illness. Yet since this was my last of 4 major conferences, I wanted to make sure I completed what I started. PLI basically runs the same themes each year, so I could have waited until next year’s conference to catch up on what I missed, but I didn’t like the thought of attending a conference without my group of 5 other pastors that I have grown so close to in the last 3 years. Only after my parents agreed to come up did I feel comfortable going and leaving Beth with the demanding task of caring for Jonah during his recovery.
Everywhere I went in my four days at the conference I was approached by people who told me they had been praying for Jonah. Some of them I knew and some I didn’t. The word had gotten out in the PLI email network. I was showered with love and further commitments to prayer.
My nightly phone conversations with Beth uplifted, as she told me about some way Jonah was progressing each day. It was the first of the four major conferences that we hadn’t done together, and I missed her greatly. I had no idea how much I would miss her, but we had always processed the things we had learned during our down times and it just wasn’t the same without her. On Friday afternoon, I was waiting outside the hotel with my friend Tim Blau, a pastor from Arizona, to go play golf. PLI used to have an official golf outing at their conferences, but they found that in most cases men would go out to play and their wives would do something else. They decided to discontinue the golf outing for that reason. (For the record, Beth and I played in the golf outing together. What a great wife I have!) Anyway, as we were waiting with our golf clubs in tow, other pastors eyed us enviously as they walked past with their wives. I told them they had it much better since they were sharing the experience with their wives, and I meant it 100%. (But as long as I was there, I wasn’t going to turn down golf.)
This year’s training had to do with transforming your church into a movement for God’s kingdom. To illustrate his point, Rev. Steve Wagner, the PLI leader, showed a short video of blackbirds and geese. The geese flew in perfect formation. They had a definite leader, direction and mission, and did not veer to the right or left. The blackbirds swarmed all over the place, seemingly responding to dozens of leaders. At first we all thought that emulating the geese was the way to go since they were structured, organized and focused. The blackbirds seemed way to haphazard. But then we realized the blackbirds were probably not moving without any purpose. Perhaps they were responding quickly to their environment, chasing a swarm of insects or changing directions quickly to elude or confuse predators. While the geese certainly were focused on the goal and moving toward it in an organized fashion, the blackbirds represented a church that is able to be led quickly and effectively by a variety of leaders, released, hopefully, by their pastor to be ministers however the Holy Spirit leads them. Both the structured organized movements represented by the geese and the quick, multifaceted movements of the blackbirds have a place in the church. We need structure and focus, but we also need the flexibility and the multi-faceted leadership to see needs and hurts in the world and respond to them quickly.
As I reflected on this, I was thankful that I could think of a lot of examples of people at Prince of Peace who are involved in movements of God’s work without having official positions of leadership or specific prompting from me or someone else in an “official” capacity. If you see a need, a hurt, and/or another opportunity to serve, I hope you feel comfortable and confident to act on it without specific permission. Look for the Holy Spirit’s leading through prayer and a daily connection to God’s Word. His is the only permission you need.
Through Jonah’s illness, our whole family has seen a tremendous ability to serve and love at Prince of Peace. What an impact we can have within our congregation and out into the community as we become the movement of God to show love to our Farmington Hills community.
Blessed to be serving with you!
Pastor Tom Lange
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Pastoral Leadership Institute is a 4 year training program to nurture pastors in their leadership abilities. As part of our training, we learn how to identify our personal mission and purpose and how to lead our congregations to do the same. We learn how to facilitate change in healthy and appropriate ways, and how to establish and grow healthy teams in our churches. We also spend some time talking about issues like stewardship, funding ministries, church organizational structures etc. The teachings described above take place in the four annual conferences attended by all PLI pastors and their wives.
Each pastor in PLI is assigned into “collegial groups” of 6 pastors. During the 4 years of PLI, pastors in those small groups get to know each other very well. We are encouraged to be open and transparent with each other, and to hold each other accountable for ministry goals as well as maintaining a godly life, especially in the areas of personal devotion and prayer.
Each year, we go on two trips with our collegial groups. Most of these trips are visits to PLI “mentor churches” that are doing some unique ministry that we can come along side and learn from over the course of a long weekend. Our travels so far have taken us to Orlando, FL; Houston, TX; Carmel, IN; and Denver, CO. This coming year we have trips scheduled to the Atlanta and Orlando areas. During each of those trips, ample time is also scheduled in for us to share with one another and pray for each other. We have shed some tears, laughed a lot, confessed our sins, and prayed for courage and perseverance during those sessions. They have been of inestimable value for me.
We have also made two other trips – one to Phoenix, AZ, for a spiritual growth retreat (my personal favorite event) and one to New York, NY, for a cross-cultural ministries gathering. As a group we will go on one final trip together (this one includes the wives – the smaller trips do not). We’ll be making a mission trip to Kenya in the fall of 2008. The purpose of this variety of experiences is to have a larger understanding of God’s kingdom work both locally and internationally, and truly grasp the scope of God’s great commission to us – to go and make disciples of all nations.
The purpose of PLI is “connect people to Jesus.” Over the last 3 years I’ve personally observed a lot of ways that can happen, and have a treasure trove of ideas, hopes and dreams. It is my goal to implement the ones that apply to our context at Prince of Peace so that we can be more effective in connecting people to Jesus, or as we like to put it, Knowing Jesus Christ and Making Him Known. |
