New Season

A few years after I had chosen to follow Jesus, I was nearing the completion of my theological studies in Dunedin. I became very uneasy about the nature of my calling, because I did not seem to fit the standard pastoral mold. One night when we were praying, a fellow student and friend had a prophecy for me that included these words.

God’s hand stretches forth
and is followed by your eyes.
The vision is his, not yours...
The way of fulfilment is his, not yours…
Those who have eyes to see
must pray to see the fulfilment.
Your ministry is one of vision
God has given you eyes to follow his hand.
Don’t be impatient.
Give yourself to him in prayer
and you will see him do works before your eyes.

His words rung a bell for me, but I was not always acknowledged in this role within the church.

It is funny where recognition comes from. The secular organisation that I worked in for 33 years recognised my gifting.

Back in 2005, a hard-nosed Australian was appointed as chief executive, the first outsider to be given the role for several decades. He faced numerous requests from managers wanting funding to undertake important projects. There was not enough money to go round, so he asked a good question. Would these projects get the organisation to where it should be in ten to fifteen years time. No one could answer the question, because they did not know where their organisation needed to be.

I was asked to prepare a paper outlining what the organisation would need to become in a decades time, if it were to fulfil its role. I wrote a paper outlining how things needed to change. I described it as an architecture for the future. Many of the things I described were already known, but they had never been all put together before, with the interactions explained. I provided diagrams explaining how everything should fit together.

When the CEO, saw it, he said, “That’s it. That’s what we need to do”. And he committed the organisation to implementing the vision. Now as I leave the organisation, more than a decade later, the implementation is nearing completion, and managers are committed to finishing it.

When I travelled to an international conference to present the paper, the secular people working in the same field made the same response. They recognised it as the way to go.

When you love Jesus and are sharing a lot of visionary stuff for the future, and the church is not getting it, you can begin to doubt and wonder if you have lost the plot. Even though the acknowledgement came from secular people, it affirmed my wisdom and insight. That was encouraging. They gave me the confidence to press on in Jesus.

Thirty years preparation is not that long. Moses had to spend forty years watching daggy sheep.