Dear Hillsiders (and other blog readers/eavesdroppers!),

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Today I’m reminded that serendipity can be a funny thing. Here’s why:

This past week, when I haven’t been working or praying for our church, I’ve been reading the required texts for my first D.min course. The entire doctoral program focuses on transformational leadership (read: how to help lead churches into new and vibrant ways of living out the gospel), so it shouldn’t have surprised me so much…but the texts apply DIRECTLY to the type of work we are doing at Hillside through these 40 days of prayer.

Since that has been the case, and since my hope is that this doctoral program will be of direct benefit to our church, let me take a moment or two to share what I’ve learned in that reading this week (what I’ve learned in prayer I’ll share first with my assigned prayer group!):

Right now I’m studying what it takes to lead through a period of adaptive change. Now, that sounds seriously academic – but there’s a simple way to break it down. Think about the role of a doctor. If you break a bone through a basic accident, you go to the doctor and it is her job to “fix it”. Using her medical expertise, she prescribes a treatment and, barring any complications, you come through the experience as good as new. That’s her job, to restore your health.

But think about a different type of health problem for a moment. If you went to the same doctor because of persistent heart trouble or type 2 diabetes, her response wouldn’t be so cut and dried. In fact, to deal with this problem she’d have to take an entirely different approach because she’s no longer dealing with a situation she can fix/heal/treat on her own. To fix this problem YOU have to do the work of changing your lifestyle, your eating habits, your exercise regimen, etc. If you don’t make these changes, you will likely become more and more ill, even to the point of death. All the medical expertise in the world doesn’t change the fact that she can’t do this work for you. Instead, she has to lead by encouraging you and empowering you to do the hard work of changing how you operate and live.

The second example – that’s a situation requiring adaptive change! And we’re in a similar situation here at Hillside. In order to live a healthy life as a congregation, some changes need to be made. But instead of changing our diet and our exercise habits, we have to change our understanding of what it means to be church, what it means to proclaim the Gospel in our community, what it means to follow Christ in this time and place. All the technical, pastoral and theological expertise in the world cannot change that your pastoral staff can’t do this work for you. The work has to be done by the whole church, not just her employees. And, similar to the doctor in the second example, it is our job in this time to lead by encouraging and empowering you to do the hard work of changing how we operate and live as a community of Christ-followers in the Northland.

This 40 days of prayer is part of that hard work that cannot be done by staff members alone. It is a time of focusing on God, a time of reorienting our goals and vision, a time of asking the right questions. Ultimately, it is the beginning of a transformed spiritual lifestyle for our church – one that should not end after the 40 days are up, and one that has the power to propel us into new life for the sake of the Gospel!

This week, as you pray for Hillside, I encourage you to ask God how we need to change our “spiritual lifestyle” in order to experience renewed health and life. As we meet together to discuss what we are learning through prayer, I look forward to hearing what you discover!

Blessings,

Rev. Lara