Serving Bread

After a six month Sabbatical, I was eager to hear of the state of our ministry. At the front end of my Sabbatical,  I had created space in my heart to anticipate fantastic progress along with some disappointments. In the past five days, I have been spending time praising God for the ways that he has been good to our ministry in my absence.

One of the strongest themes of my Sabbatical was a deeper appreciation of God’s grace. At the culmination of my Sabbatical, I had identified five ways by which God had expressed his grace to me. But in the past five days, I learned a sixth dimension fo God’s grace that pressed me to consider the centrality of God’s grace to leadership.

God has done much in the life of my fellowship in my absence: Student leaders have more confidence in their authority; young students have ownership for the work on campus; the ministry had reached over 2% of the campus population; students see the work of God in their life; and the community is stronger than I have ever experienced. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, God is at work.

As a strategist, I can identify reasons for some of the success in the ministry (and I can also identify plenty of reasons for some of the failures and disappointments). But the strategy alone cannot explain why God is at work in student lives. There is a variable beyond the strategy that is unexplainable, which is the mystery of God. God’s grace is such that we cannot totally comprehend why (and where) God chooses to work. The ancients confessed in their prayers their lack of understanding why God would bless one community over another. The variable in Christian leadership that is unexplainable is God’s grace. It presses me to give glory to God and to be in awe of all the ways that God is good to me despite my failures or successes.

It’s as if the equation to communicate Christian leadership is S + F + X = Ministry where S stands for Strategy, F stands for Faithfulness and X stands for the mystery of God. We can put much stock in developing S and F, but the X is waiting on God to do what God does best—to bring hope and life.

Five years ago, the ministry we had at Cal State Northridge consisted of a handful of students who were faithful to meet once a week to study Scripture. Today, hundreds of students on campus are being infected by God’s love in a new way. The credit and glory belongs to God. Praise be to God!