Joe Pursch

In today’s pastoral leadership culture of easy celebrity and even easier falls from grace, consider this strong example in a pastor from the 1200’s who only reluctantly responded to the call of God but went on to inspire thousands with his preaching.

Click to listen: Transforming Moments Antony 022811 #5 Mix

I’ll be joining my friends on the GodWorks Speaking Team once again this Sunday night on the stage at Family Life Community Church in Stockton. Come and engage with me, my long time friend Pastor Mike Bowers and nationally known Christian comedian Stephen B as we experience a night of high energy worship and high interest interaction with Gods Word…the God Works way.

Check out the video below and let Mike and Stephen B introduce you to the God Works Experience.

GodWorks is a unique concept in Biblical teaching where three different communicators engage a Scriptural text both among themselves and interactively with an audience. The setting is casual cafe style, the mood sways from inquisitive through hilarious to suddenly profound, and the audiences we’ve worked with so far leave with a deeper grasp of the Bible and a sense of having been involved in the discovery.

GodWorks. It really works. And so does He.

Wondering if you’re making a difference under all the demands of your life as a parent? Take heart from the legacy of  one of America’s most unheralded “power couples”.

Click to listen: Transforming Moments Jonathan and Sarah Edwards 1

Here is an amazing thing. Jesus, on the night of His betrayal, actually thanked the Father for His own impending death. We can read about it in Luke 22:19, “And He took bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke it and gave it to them,  saying, “This is My body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.”

Wow. I never saw this more clearly than I did early this morning, listening to an audio sermon of an old country pastor preaching himself to tears over the sacrifice of Christ. He reminded me that the bread was the symbol of the Body that was to be broken within hours of that evening, on the cross of Calvary. So Jesus was thanking the Father for the coming breaking of His own body on the cross, even as He led His still clueless disciples in that very first communion.

How could such a thing be possible? Thanking God for your own death? The only reason it was even thinkable was because Jesus knew the “life-story” for sinners that would come out of the “death-story” of His sacrifice. He was so vividly committed to this that He was able to actually thank His Father for executing Him.

What a matchless Savior we serve.

In a recent devotional time that I led with our church staff, I brought some comments on one of the most well-known New Testament verses about life in the workplace:

“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.” Colossians 3:23

To illustrate the application of the text, I told them two stories, one drawn from my life, the other drawn from a famous figure of the the past

Years ago, a wise friend of mine gave me some counsel when I was languishing in a job that I felt was taking a tremendous emotional toll on my life. On the one hand, he encouraged me to do everything I could to trust God for a different position that would be healthier for me and my family. On the other, he admonished me to work with an eye toward the satisfaction of God while I waited. When I replied that I felt like I was wasting not only my time but God’s, my friend said “Doing any work for Him makes that work a great work.” I’ve never forgotten his words. They helped me get through several seasons of “missing motivation” when I found myself on assignment from God in a job that I knew was given to me to provide for myself and my family, but wasn’t necessarily right for the vision God had given me for the future. My friend’s wise advice helped me to be faithful while waiting for God’s best.

Decades ago, another man gave the world a different version of my friend’s advice in an earthier vernacular when he said, “You don’t have to be in a big place to do big things.” The man who said that was at the time the the most widely heard preacher in the world, having already presented the Gospel to millions. His name was Billy Sunday. Interestingly, Billy Sunday’s career traveled exactly the opposite arc from that which most people today seek after. He started at the very top of his game, in the eyes of the world. He was a star third baseman for the then Chicago Black Sox, but he left his baseball career at the height of his success after finding Jesus and receiving a call to evangelize men. Almost single-handedly, Billy Sunday started a turn-of-the-century version of what we would see today as the Promise Keepers movement, filling stadiums with tens of thousands of spiritually hungry men in an era when involvement with the evangelical church was distinctly seen as something only women were interested in. He roused the crowds with great stories of daring the devil down, and always at the end of his messages would re-create the drama of the baseball diamond when he would “call the devil out at home.” (You can see him making that call in the photo above, from 1902). Billy Sunday left money, influence and social adoration behind at precisely the moment when he had them all at his command. In short, he walked away from one of the most (humanly) satisfying jobs in the world.In exchange, he stepped out by faith to follow a stirring of God in his soul to seek men for Christ. As it turned out, he ended up playing for larger crowds than he ever appeared before on the baseball field. But I’m sure that even if his success had been much more modest, he probably still would’ve died a happy man, because he had listened to the call of God, and gotten into a game for the Master’s pleasure and not his own.

How about you? Is it possible that the game you feel may not be worth playing today, the professional game that you’re in, might dramatically change if you simply decided to change who you are playing for? You think about that.

In the message series I give to our church every Christmas, I am spending time exploring the ages-long plan that saw its revealing in human history on that first Advent. It was truly the muted but marvelous arrival of His Majesty into the midst of our darkened world.

Even though I have been preaching the great Christmas texts in the Gospels for thirty years, I never tire of the new discoveries I make each season as I review them for my people.  This year, one thing that arrived in my thinking as I preached Matthew’s account of the Virgin Birth was the sense of how the will of God can be both a privilege and a perplexing experience, all at once. It was certainly so for the ultimate First Family, Joseph and Mary. In my message from Matthew 1, I explored the impressive pathway of faith that they both chose to follow in response to the angelic announcement that they were to be the parents of Messiah. Every detail  of the pathway that God laid out ahead of them was perplexing to them. How could such a conception occur, how would they face the ostracism from their families and friends, how could the loneliness and isolation that was to come be lived through, and perhaps most importantly, how could they ever be up to the task of raising the God-Child that Jesus was? The answer was never given by the angel, except to say “Nothing shall be impossible with God.” On that one assurance, this young couple hung their future, and walked into both the privilege and the perplexity of the will of God.

In my message, I applied this challenge to my listeners by drawing out one simple connection that any believer can have with this First Family: a God given responsibility. Each of us has received some kind of God-given role in the world. Some of us are parents, while others are grandparents who have become “parents again” as wayward kids have moved back home. Others of us may not be parents, but we have been given a call to the ministry which (trust me) has a daily dose of perplexity built right in. Still others of us have been led into secular professions that we are clearly gifted for, but which include more stress and pain than we ever planned on, and more integrity battles than we think we can face.

Each of these categories of modern living could be regarded as a God-given responsibility, much like Joseph and Mary’s was to be. And like theirs, ours can come with both privilege and perplexity, and with both favor and fear. And also like Joseph and Mary,  if we don’t fulfill our God-given responsibility, nobody else will. It is our calling, our role. If this is you today, take some time to re-read the story of Joseph and Mary’s determination to walk into the mystery of the call of God. Listen to the message link below. Draw encouragement from the fact that the Gospel  writers show in beautiful ways how with the perplexity of the call God also gave Joseph and Mary a promise that HE was able for all that lay ahead.

Click on the link below to listen:

The Majesty of Christmas Part One The Remarkable Arrival of Messiah Matthew 1.18-25 12.4.11

Reflect on these evidences of brokenness in a spiritual leader I recently gained from a Spiritual Life Conference. May they be growing dimensions in my life, and yours too if you are charged with shepherding broken people:

1. All rights surrendered
2. Willing to be rejected
3. Transparent – willing to share weakness
4. Vulnerable – willing to share failures
5. A sense of total inadequacy in self strength – 2 Cor 3:5
6. A sense of adequacy in Christ through His strength – Phil. 4:13, 2 Cor. 3:6
7. Trusting God whatever – resting even with external turmoil
8. Obedience out of a love motive because I want to, not because I have to
9. Recognizing the power in weakness
10. Willing to be weak
11. Willing to fail
12. A readiness to let others receive credit
13. Genuine humility
10. Placing value upon those who have little or no value to yourself
15. A readiness to affirm (build-up) others
16. Teachable
17. Willing to be out of control
18. Willing to be misunderstood

Help Wanted: An Affectionate Pastor

In First Thessalonians 2: 17 and following, Paul speaks to these believers with such deep affection. We know that they had developed an inferiority complex in regard to whether Paul really loved them or not, perhaps because he had not returned to see them after being forced out of their city by persecution. But what they didn’t know was that Paul and his team had tried repeatedly to return to the church in Thessalonica, but they had been opposed by the Enemy himself. And so Paul takes a moment to let them in on this untold story of his devotion to them as a pastor. It’s important to realize that Paul had only been a pastor to these dear people face-to-face for a few short weeks, and yet he has this true affection for them. He had planted many churches and was caring for many others, but he still had the Spirit – powered concern for these people that enabled him to write these words.

Who Wants a “Problem Church”?

The thought that moves into my mind as I read this is that churches are never to be seen by pastors as “opportunities”, but rather as obligations. What I mean by that is that too often today in our professionalized ministry, we look at churches from the standpoint of how they treat us as leaders or for what they can produce for us as organizations. To put it another way, we try and avoid “problem churches.” We become more enthralled by the churches that have “potential”. I find that kind of thinking completely alien to the philosophy of ministry that the apostle Paul lived by. Instead, the great apostle allowed the problems of this young church to become his problems. In fact, he gave these new Christians the high honor of knowing that they would be his source of greatest joy when he stood before the Lord Jesus in eternity. This little church, with its unschooled new believers still trying to shed the old habits of pagan sensuality, still struggling with emotional immaturity and doubts, this humble assembly was going to become a source of honor for the great apostle to the Gentiles. Makes us wonder if there are really any such things as “little” churches. Here we learn that even the littlest church can produce the greatest of rewards in the life of a faithful shepherd.

Leadership or Shepherdship?

Gain a picture of the apostle’s great heart in this epistle, and you will learn that he was a shepherd before he was a leader. Today in ministry training, we so emphasize the role of “organizational leadership.”, as though we would find the idea of leadership scattered all through the epistles. Problem is, we really don’t find that to be true. The major key sounded in the life of God’s pastors in the New Testament was not leadership, it was shepherding. There is a dramatic difference in the two ideas. Leaders produce results; shepherds produce disciples. Leaders drive organizations; shepherds feed sheep. Leaders are powered by their vision; shepherds are called by love.

Paul goes on in the third chapter of this epistle to tell these new believers why he longed to return to them: to fill in what was lacking in their teaching. He didn’t want to return in order to take care of them and protect them from suffering, or to lead them into any kind of major achievement. He wanted them to receive one thing from him: doctrine. He knew that they were suffering personal unrest precisely because they had not received sufficient doctrine from him and his team right after they have been brought to Christ.

The Desperate Need for Doctrine, Then And Now

We know this because in the Book of Acts we find described the fact that Paul and his team had only a few short weeks to disciple these new Christians in Thessalonica before they were purged from the city by persecution. And so these young believers didn’t have a clear understanding of the experience of death as it related to Christians, or a clear confidence in the Second Coming of Christ. So now when some deaths had been experienced in their young church and some false teachers had created confusion about the return of Jesus, the believers in Thessalonica were in trouble. The solution for their trouble was deeper doctrine, and Paul longed to return to them and to deliver just that.

Today we get involved in arguments as church leaders over what is most important for believers to learn: relevant principles for living or deeper doctrine. If we were to bring that question to the church at Thessalonica, I think we know what their answer would be: the deeper doctrine of God’s Word.

Back in the day when I was training as a younger leader, we used to use the distinction “strong natural leader versus strong spiritual leader”. That was in a time when corporate management styles and organizational philosophy were just beginning to become the rage in church leadership. We felt that it was important to make the distinction between spirit–powered servant leadership and achievement–powered natural leadership. As someone who, by God’s perfect plan, has had the opportunity to spend time both in the ministry world and the corporate world, I certainly tasted the distinction of both approaches.

In our emerging ministry culture today, the great need to be discerning about the source and the focus of our leadership style still remains. Below is a great article I came across this morning on the issue of making the key distinction between spirit led leaders and naturally driven leaders.

Worldly Leaders vs. Spiritual Leaders, by Jonathan Dodson.

Gathered Thoughts

Paul always began his letters to his beloved churches with a variation of the same wish, “Grace to you and peace.”  It’s as if he knew that the most important thing they needed was the depth of the knowledge of God.

1:5 . There are two ways in which the gospel comes to a people. It can come in word only, or it can come in power.

1:6 So you want to have a ministry like the great apostle Paul? In order to imitate him, all you have to do you is live in virtually constant affliction. But in the bargain you will have the same joy in the Holy Spirit that he had.

1:7. There are two ways to become a well-known church. One is through your activities and achievements, which is the standard process today. The other is to become known for your example of living under affliction for the sake of the Gospel with joy. That was the way the Thessalonian church became well known. It’s the way in which the church in the suffering Third World today is becoming well-known here in the West.

Pastor, Welcome to the Good Fight

2:1ff Anyone who is going to be involved in pastoral ministry, particularly in evangelism, needs to learn to live with conflict. Paul describes the suffering he went through at Philippi, but he affirms that this did not draw down his reservoir of boldness in God. He came on ahead to the Thessalonians and began to declare the Gospel to them in the midst of much conflict. A lot of that conflict came from false accusations laid against him by religious leaders who were losing their turf to Paul’s ministry. They criticized Paul’s character and credentials, probably seeking to divide his audiences. But Paul did not preach based on the endorsement of any religious group, or any set of established leaders. He believed that he had been approved by God Himself to be entrusted with the gospel, and so he only had to please one person, the Lord. He knew that there was One judge who would test his heart. And what would he be tested for? Boldness, courage, security, and faithfulness.

Perhaps you’re reading this and you have experienced the loss of the approval of other people because of suffering in your ministry, or even because of outward failure. You wonder if there’s any place for you to be used by God because so many people disapprove of your qualifications. My charge to you is to discover anew if God is still with you in your ministry by stepping out in faith and performing whatever ministry He has placed before you, no matter how humble it might be. If you’ve not disqualified yourself on moral or doctrinal grounds, then I see no reason why God would not want to step up and use you in a powerful way to touch others for Christ. Jesus Himself said that the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few; what room is there for you to take yourself out of the work?

Lord, It’s All About You…And Yours

In this second chapter, Paul defines and defends his ministry by describing his relationship with his churches in very intimate and unusual terms. While his detractors talked about their abilities, achievements and qualifications, Paul described himself as a nursing mother taking care of her own children. He also described himself as a father exhorting and encouraging his children as they learn to walk with God. In fact, from his words you almost get the image of a father gently helping a toddler learn to walk across the kitchen floor. He ends the chapter by saying that the Thessalonians themselves were his glory and joy, not anything that he had achieved through his own strength or saw reflected in his own person.

I guess another way to put it is that when Paul looked at himself in ministry, what he had achieved didn’t matter; it was all about the flock. So there was very little room in Paul’s life for comparisons with other leaders. That was a pointless conversation for him, because the issue was not comparing himself to other leaders in terms of greatness or achievements. No, the issue was the flock and the flock’s welfare. When Paul described his ambition in ministry, his was an ambition built around the idea of his passion for the greatest level of growth in the lives of his people that he could possibly imagine. Again, it was all about the flock, not about him. In this age of Internet ministry stars and inevitable comparisons that we make with our ministerial peers, this is an understandingthat is very much worth getting a real grip on.