New Leaders

To spend time with the question, "How do we create and sustain a sacred community in a secular world?" will cause some thinking about leadership.  When we allow the account of Pentecost to become a model for a sacred community, we finally come to a place of looking at leadership. To look at leadership in that account is to notice the difference in the disciples before and after.  E. Stanley Jones, a 20th century missionary to India as well as a great evangelist, wrote that the disciples were meeting behind closed and locked doors after the resurrection of Jesus because they were afraid. (John 20:19ff)

How different these timid and fearful men became after the wind and fire of Pentecost.  The Holy Spirit empowered them in a way they could have never imagined.  No longer were doors closed and locked.  Instead, Peter is out midst the crowds preaching about Jesus crucified and risen.  The fear that once possessed him is gone after Pentecost.  In its place is the boldness of a Spirit possessed man who is ready to give leadership to this sacred community being shaped even as he preached.  It is indeed a thing which can be described as one of those signs and wonders.

 

The sacred community for which we pray and long to see can only be created and sustained as the called ones, the leaders both clergy and lay, allow themselves to become Spirit possessed and Spirit empowered.  When I attended seminary long decades ago, we were taught theology, doctrine, and church goverment, but nothing much was said about the supreme importance of being one who lived to be used by the Holy Spirit for the work of the sacred community.  Too many times those who stand as leaders of the church forget that the church is first and foremost a spiritual community which can only be rightly served through submission to the will of God and the power of the Spirit.