Tag Archives: Church Plant

Unexpectedly: The Holy Spirit around the Globe

I received what was called a local preacher’s license in 1952, when I was only 17 years old. That means I have been at this business of preaching for 68 years. I have been the pastor of nine local churches and the organizing pastor of three of those nine. You may wonder why I’m sharing that…and you may consider it a bit boastful. Not so, not so at all. I share it as a part of a confession. The question really is, what sort of church did I plant?

Our scripture lesson – Acts 2:1-14, 42-47–tells the story of the first church plant in Christian history.  At first blush, that certainly was not a good way to start a church. There was the disturbance of a roaring wind that would drown out any speaking. Then uneducated people speaking in languages they had never heard. And not only a roaring wind, and strange speaking, but what was described as “tongues of fire” resting on each of them.

Unbridled excitement and strange acting. What a way to start a church! The question has to be, what was happening here, anyway?  And that is what my sermon is all about: what was happening here?Let’s think about it.

The first is this: God came unexpectedly, which of course is nothing new. God seems to make it a habit of sneaking up on the human race. Appearing unrepentantly, when no one is looking or knows what is going on, God is in their midst.

The kind of thing that happened at Pentecost had happened before. Moses was out in the field alone, taking care of his father-in-law’s flock. And there it was – a burning bush, and a voice coming out of the bush, and Moses was called to lead God’s children out of Egyptian bondage.

And now, here at Pentecost, is this little band of frightened disciples whose leader has gone off and left them; they are stunned, confused, and unable to figure out what to do. The only instruction they had was, “stay, just stay in Jerusalem, until you receive the gift the Father has promised.” What gift, they must have wondered! Then along comes God unexpectedly when they were not even looking.

Friends, I remind you: that kind of God action has not ceased. I have seen dramatic witnesses of it.  One of the joys of my life was to chair the Evangelism Committee of the World Methodist Council for 20 years. This gave me opportunity to travel the world and meet extraordinary Christians. Two of those were Nelson Mandela and Stanley Mogoba. You know about Mandela, the man whose life and witness led to breaking the back of that awful oppressive system of apartheid. But you probably have not heard of Stanley Mogoba. He was the first Black person to be the presiding bishop of the Methodist Church of South Africa.

About the time Nelson Mandela was sent to prison, Stanley met with a group of angry students and sought to dissuade them from violent demonstration. Just for that – trying to avert violence – he was arrested and imprisoned for six years on the notorious Robben Island.  Mandela was already in prison there. He and Mogoba became friends there in prison.

One day someone pushed a religious tract under Mogoba’s cell door. Parenthetically, don’t ever forget: most people become Christian not by big events, but by relationship and simple actions like a person putting a tract beneath a prison cell door. By reading that little tract and responding to the Holy Spirit, Mogoba became a Christian. He quoted the words of Charles Wesley’s hymn to describe his experience:

“Thine eye diffused a quickening ray
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
my chains fell off; my heart was free,
I rose, went forth and followed thee.”

God showed up, in a prison and in a simple gospel tract, and something unexpected happened. A person who was to lead the Methodist movement in South Africa was converted.

Are you listening? God who came unexpectedly at Pentecost continues to show up today…in prisons, on the streets, in person, in the Church.

Yes, in the Church. And that leads to the second thing I would say. Pentecost was a missionary event. Jesus made it clear that he would send the Holy Spirit to empower us for ministry. Listen to Acts l:8: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

It shouldn’t surprise us, friends, when the Holy Spirit comes roaring through our lives and our communities; change will happen, people will be called to minister. People who have never known Jesus before will come to the altar to praise him.

How and why? Because God is a missionary God, and the Holy Spirit is the chief evangelist. Hold that tightly in your mind. The Holy Spirit has the power to create joy in the midst of sorrow and dancing in place of mourning. The Holy Spirit has the power to bring healing for our anguish and rescue life from the jaws of death. The Holy Spirit of God signals a time of restoration, awakening, and revival.

Pentecost was a missionary event. Remember, I asked you to hold tightly in your mind. The Holy Spirit is the chief evangelist. I believe revival is coming, because I believe the Holy Spirit is alive and active in our day, and we are moving toward a global Methodist church, an orthodox, evangelical, Wesleyan, Methodist Church.

We have been in a tumultuous time, contending with a mysterious virus; then came massive and widespread demonstrations calling us to racial justice. Our nation is politically divided, and hatred is blatantly present across the land. At the same time, we are also struggling with a painful divide in our United Methodist Church. It is a tough, heavy time.  Discussion of separation is rampant, and I do believe separation is coming. Please hear me now. Separation doesn’t have to be bitter and angry. It can be redemptive. In fact, I believe it is going to be redemptive. That was signaled in a Holy Spirit event on December 17, 2019.  Leaders from different perspectives of the church – from the most liberal to the most conservative – signed a “Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation.” I believe that if we had not had to cancel the General Conference that was to happen in May, that protocol would have passed and we would be on our way to a new global Methodist church.

People who know me and my history in the United Methodist Church are sometimes surprised about my position on some issues and my confidence that revival is coming. Some are surprised that I now believe separation is essential and can be redemptive. For decades, I have worked as hard as any lay person, minister, bishop or other leader in the church to preserve unity as we have struggled. So, let me share how I have come through the struggle to the place I am now in. The bishops called a special session of the General Conference in 2019 because the denomination was on the verge of implosion. We traditionalists prevailed at that General Conference in preserving the authority of Scripture. However, when we had done that by standard procedural vote, the conference deteriorated into a shouting match of anger, hateful accusations, and debate. I left the conference feeling with the psalmist, “Why are you cast down, O my soul?”

That was my state, when two weeks later I went to Cuba. I had visited Cuba twice before, and I knew revival was taking place, but I was not prepared for the robust power of the Holy Spirit being demonstrated in the church there. My time there was redemptive. It was a spiritual time of recovery in the wake of the General Conference experience.

The Church in Cuba is not affiliated with the UMC, it is the Methodist Church of Cuba. Bishop Pereira is a dynamic, Spirit-filled, Spirited-guided leader. Normally he would have attended our special General Conference, but he was needed at home. The communist government was seeking to change the legal definition of marriage. The government wanted to change that to simply a union between two persons. The bishop of the Methodist Church of Cuba had stayed in his country to lead his church in opposing what the government was proposing.  I had come from a meeting in which I and others opposed a part of our church, including many bishops, seeking to do what would have resulted in the same thing the Cuban government was seeking to do. It was the church in Cuba, not the government, that prevailed.

Our missionary God has sent his primary evangelist, the Holy Spirit whose power cannot be denied. I’m going back to Cuba as soon as Covid will allow. I want to be encouraged by the hundreds of little bands of Christians that are being formed every year. The government will not allow the building of churches. So these little groups meet in homes, house churches being established all over. And one day, that government will discover that Holy Spirit power is more dynamic than anything they can design and impose on the people.

In Havana, there is a statue of the Risen Christ towering over the city, almost as high as the famous Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro. Not far from that statue is Che Guevara’s house, the companion of Castro as he seized leadership of Cuba in 1959.

Our small group shared communion at the feet of Christ, literally, as we gathered at the base of the statue on the morning we were leaving Cuba. There we were at the feet of Jesus, with his shadow falling over the city. When we took the bread and wine, we knew and proclaimed who is Lord, and that one day, he will claim the kingdoms of this world as his own.

More than ever, I believe that Holy Spirit revival is coming, and I pray regularly the prayer we pray during our Walk to Emmaus weekends:

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Thy faithful and kindle in them the fire of Thy love. Send forth Thy Spirit and they shall be created, and You shalt renew the face of the earth. Amen.

Featured image courtesy Hasan Almasi for Unsplash.

How Church Planting Relies on the Power of Prayer

After my wife and I planted and established a Wesleyan congregation in the Indianapolis area, we shifted gears toward a different mode of reaching people for Jesus. Church planting continued to be our heart, so as a ministry team, we accepted the opportunity to serve as Directors of Church Multiplication for the Great Lakes Region District of The Wesleyan Church. In both settings, we believe that the number one way to enter a community missionally is through prayer.

Prayer and church planting have always gone together. In our strategy, there is little room for action or “doing” without also engaging in the constant work of prayer. In fact, I sometimes say that while some whistle while they work, people in church planting pray while they work.  Before a planter enters a new community, we ask that she first prepare herself with an army of prayer warriors; we actually recommend 500-1000 people committed to regular prayer. Church planting and prayer always go hand in hand.

Part of the way we invest in church multiplication is by training church planters in what that prayer looks like as they prepare to enter a community, because it’s not necessarily obvious. We encourage planters to pray for discernment, wisdom, and humility. This will shape how they engage with their team and their community. Planters have coaches and mentors as well, but praying in this way shapes moments of engagement.

Here are some of the ways we have learned to pray in church planting:

Pray for discernment in sharing faith and vision.

Pray for discernment in spiritual conversations.

Pray for discernment for receptive people.

Pray for wisdom to contextualize ministry.

Pray for wisdom in discipleship that makes disciples who make more disciples.

Pray for humility to enter a community as a learner, servant, and witness.

We believe that when you enter a community through prayer, you enter in stride with the Holy Spirit.

Harley Scalf ~ The Power of Five

My life is being radically transformed by five minutes a day.

Just recently, I was “invited” to take part in a training event for church planters. My fellow clergy colleagues know the reason I put that word in quotation marks. When pastors get “invited” to participate in a meeting or training hosted by their conference or denomination, it’s a nice way of saying, “this is required and you must be present, but we want to sound really nice when we say that.” So, I was “invited” to be a part of this training.

I didn’t want to go. I grumbled. I complained. I whined. I looked for ways out. Nothing worked, so I went.

To my surprise, the training turned out to be a retreat. I rolled my eyes some more. With all the things I have going on trying to plant a new church, I did not have time for a training event, not to mention a retreat!

Over the course of this three-day retreat, I discovered something about myself. We were given some time to read in the book of Revelation chapters one and two. I was speed-reading (in spite of being instructed to slowly read and reflect). Then, God’s Word cut me to my core. As I was about to check off another thing on my list, I read these words from Revelation 2:2-4: “I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance…I also know that you are enduring patiently and bearing up for the sake of my name, and that you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.”

Without having realized it, I had become the church in Ephesus. I had become so busy working on planting a church that I had been neglecting my first love. I had not been working on my own personal relationship with Jesus. That’s the reason I am planting the church in the first place. I want people to know and fall in love with the Jesus I know and love. Yet, somehow, in the midst of everything, church work had taken over spiritual work…and make no mistake, the two are not the same.

Later in the retreat, we reviewed a spiritual inventory we had completed a month prior. Graphically, it was represented in a pie chart. Mine looked like someone had stolen a piece of my pie! The missing piece (or the piece that was extremely low) was about personal spiritual development – no big surprise there!

The rest of the retreat, to be quite honest, was a bit of a blur. I was so stunned by this divine revelation that my soul was deeply disturbed. How could it happen? Was this the path to burnout that so many pastors travel before leaving ministry? Was I becoming a statistic? Could I turn it around?

I began looking over my day. The truth is there was no time for personal spiritual development. My days were full of meetings, walking neighborhoods, phone calls, and emails. It was a very unhealthy way of doing ministry and life. I knew I needed God-time…just God and me. At the end of the day, I am so exhausted that I knew that would not have any benefit, because the moment I close my eyes to pray, I’d fall asleep. I’d tried that. It didn’t work – and the phrase, “when I fall asleep praying, it’s like I fall asleep in God’s arms” is just a lazy person’s way of getting out of prayer. That would not do. I had no time in the evening and no time during the day. The only time I could find was the morning. Let me just say that I don’t believe the devil is in the details, the devil is in the morning! I am not a morning person at all! I need at least ten minutes and a cup of coffee after waking before any conversation is directed toward me. I’m a firm believer that nothing should happen before 10 AM.

That being said, I had to make it work. It was my only option.

So, what did I do?

Well, I began setting my alarm clock to an earlier time…five minutes earlier.

That has been the key for me to turn things around. At first, it made little or no difference. Then, after a few days, five minutes became 15 minutes. Now, five minutes is an hour. I wake up before everyone else. I get dressed. I make coffee. I have God-time. It’s silent in the house. I invite God to come be with me, I read Scripture, I pray, and I listen to the Holy Spirit for whatever message I need to hear. This is sacred time for me. I believe it’s sacred time for God, too. I don’t check emails. I don’t check Facebook or Twitter. Those things can wait until after I’ve spent time with God.

I thank God for this time that I have. I thank God that He got my attention through an “invitation” to a retreat. I thank God that He saved me…again! I was headed in the wrong direction, even though the church was headed in the right direction.

Now, things are different. Things are better…not perfect, but better. My love for Jesus is getting stronger each day. And to think…it is all happening because of just five more minutes every day. Getting up five minutes earlier today than I got up yesterday. I’m willing to commit five minutes to recapture my first love. Will you give five more?