Spirit-empowered ministry
From a talk at Exponential 2024 - One Eighty: The Return To Disciple Making
Sarah Jackson, CEO, Revitalise Trust UK spoke at a conference about her experience of spirit-empowered ministry. Here are some extracts:
Maybe like some of you, I didn't grow up in a Christian family. I had two amazing parents, three older sisters, and we grew up in London.
It wasn't until my early teens that we hit a major crossroads in our life. My dad, who I adored, disclosed a secret life we didn't know about and it absolutely wrecked our family. It wrecked me. And it didn't become a safe place. It was volatile. It was painful. And very sadly, my father tried to commit suicide. And then he disappeared.
It meant that we could never live together again as a family. We had to move schools and I suppose for me, I lost my compass. If the thing that I really trusted was so untrustworthy, what was this life about? And I sunk down into a deep, deep pit. My mum wasn't a Christian but she said to me, "Sarah, you've got so many questions about life. Why don't you find a church and go and ask the questions?"
So I looked up a church and came across Holy Trinity Brompton. And I arrived on this course of 30 people called Alpha. I encountered two things I never expected. First of all, I encountered the overwhelming love of Jesus. For someone like me, who had so many barriers, I was filled with the Holy Spirit. It was like liquid filling me and it was like, 'welcome home'. I knew I was free. I knew I belonged. There was personal transformation. And the second thing that I didn't expect to encounter was this church and this leadership, who were experiencing Spirit empowered ministry due to the visits of the Vineyard pastor, John Wimber.
He was the first person to talk about church planting and giving away your best leaders. I remember him saying, if you're going to talk about the power of the Holy Spirit, you need three things. You need a theology, you need a model, and then came the third one. You need practice. He said, "So we'll do the stuff after coffee." All I can tell you is we were in shock.
When we went back in after coffee, he had what was called a word of knowledge that God had given him for somebody in our very small group. We all knew each other. There was no way that he would know something we didn't know about anybody, especially as the word was about infertility. We thought there's absolutely nobody in this room, he's got it wrong. To our shock, our friend Sarah stepped forward saying, "That's me." The team came and laid hands on her. Ten months later, she produced her first baby. During that time, I saw, as a teenager, extraordinary miracles, for example the complete healing of a cleft palette.
There was only one thing that's going to move the dial in our ministries, in our church. And we know it's not brilliant strategy. It's not our first class theology degrees. It's not even our ability to train outstanding teams, as important as they all are. There's something much deeper, more powerful. Jesus knew it, and he lived by it. The power and the life of the Holy Spirit.
He modelled a Spirit empowered ministry, and he asked us to do the same. So how can the Holy Spirit transform our ministry? I just want to focus on four things:
1. The Holy Spirit brings God's presence in the midst of our weakness.
I don't know what it is the context that you live in, but I can tell you in London, we desperately need the Holy Spirit. The other day I got into one of our black cabs. The cabbies are national treasures, you'll hear the latest about politics, you will know what's going on in society. This is how the conversation went. He said, "I have no hope for the future. Nation is going down the drain. You will think me mad. But the problem with our society as I see it love, as an atheist, is that we've abandoned God." The cabbie tells me, the pastor, the problem.
We wonder, has the Holy Spirit left us? Has he given up on us? Where is he? And it reminds me of the story of Ezekiel 37 - the valley of dry bones. I was recently in a meeting with a very senior figure in the national Church, and he was talking to us as pastors, and he said this, "Your job is to manage the decline of the Church." However, have you noticed that the Holy Spirit is with Ezekiel in the midst of despair and failure and death. The Holy Spirit hasn't left.
If your outlook is bleak, you think the glory days are gone. I want to remind you of some very, very good news. It is the very point of our powerlessness, where the Holy Spirit brings new power. It is the point of our weakness where the Holy Spirit brings new strength. It is the point of our failure when the Holy Spirit brings new hope, new life. It's not on mountain peaks that he meets us but in our valleys, in our despair, in our weakness. Our only hope can only be in the power of the Holy Spirit flowing through our ministry, in our churches.
2. The Holy Spirit transforms our perspective.
Can you imagine Ezekiel surrounded by death and decay? God asks us the same faith-provoking, perspective transforming question, "Son of Man, can these bones live?" Where are the things you think are dead and can never be resurrected? The promises that are deeply buried? Even when you and I are surrounded by disappointment and failure and betrayal and hurt and pain? Do you still believe that these bones can live again? Do you still believe that God can bring new things out of ashes?
Maybe the Holy Spirit is provoking us, daring us to reopen the eyes of our heart to stoke the embers of faith again. As Ezekiel knows, like you and me, we can't bring anything back to life. Yet maybe God's asking us to see things differently. God doesn't say to Ezekiel, "I can do it. Now watch this." He says, "You do it Ezekiel - you prophesy. You say to the bones, 'Come back'. You activate your faith." What a privilege that he chooses to work through us, with us, in us.
3. The Holy Spirit is invisibly at work
Every time we plant a church, we start at Ground Zero. There is no building, no leader, no team, no finances. The Holy Spirit is invisibly at work.
We were invited to plant into Liverpool and we looked at our team and I said to Alex, "Are you interested in planting it in Liverpool by any chance?" And he's like, "You can't believe it. The reason I learned the guitar is I'm mad about the Beatles. Where's the church?" We said, "Well, it's Penny Lane - where Paul McCartney was a choir boy." Alex has gone, he has planted, he's seeing young people come to a music night in the community. Since he was a boy, the Holy Spirit has been preparing him for this moment.
4. The Holy Spirit reactivates dormant potential
God is on the move. And he's always creating new life. We need an army - the rattle of resurrected bones coming together. And in the UK, we are starting to see young men and women from diverse backgrounds who would normally be excluded from church leadership come forward. Poor economic background, drug addicts, been in prison. We're starting to call them Peters. We need the academic Pauls, but we have got 100 Peters going through our theological seminary at the moment and they are going to change the the Church. And we're going to the over-65 year olds, because they've got 20 more years of ministry in them and we're calling them the Calebs. Is this the sound and the rattle of an army?
He wants to fill you. He's your source. He's the power that's going to transform our ministries. I don't know where you're at, but he does. He knows you intimately. He knows what's keeping you awake at night. He knows what you're going back to that you're slightly dreading and he wants to fill you and it is a gift. Come the Holy Spirit.
If you set up a free account, you can watch the 30 minute talk here - S4: From Striving to Thriving—Spirit-Empowered Ministry.
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From a talk at Exponential 2024 - One Eighty: The , 03/09/2024