Perhaps it starts with a new church directory. Let's say your medium-sized church puts out a new photo directory every other year with members' phone numbers and addresses. Let's say you take up a fresh copy of your church's directory and consider its meager heft in your hand. Half the heft is attributable to the plastic binder, to be honest. Let's say you give in, momentarily, to the idea that it would behoove you to add some heft to this document before the next time it's reprinted.
In fact, you think to yourself as you flip through the smooth and sharp-edged pages, perhaps this directory could be expanded, heft-wise, a great deal indeed. With new members, that is. We're not talking about adding blank pages for notes here.
You head back to your office with the directory in hand and shut the door. You set it down on your desk and sit in your office chair. You turn on your desk lamp and scan your bookshelves in the dim light.
You see a number of somewhat dated books about growing your church the way one grows a business. Nope, you think, you have no truck with those guys anymore. No, sir. You look back at the directory on your desk. You are a guardian of the gospel in an old-school way. You understand that the Spirit has to move before new folks start showing up, and even if a bunch of new folks start showing up, it isn't necessarily a great situation. You've been to those big churches with the glittery bands and massive speaker decks. It isn't necessarily a great situation. But even so, you're considering a voluntary pay cut next year. A few more folks in the pews …
You tamp this thought down, then clarify your motives and your objectives. "Lord," you pray, "I want to grow this flock. I want to feed more of your sheep." You become quiet for a moment, thinking of where to go with your prayers next.
That's when the idea strikes you. You want the Lord to grow his flock, so you're going to have to get down on your knees and pray for him to bring in the sheep. You're not just going to have to pray; you're going to have to pray with importunity. Every thought, you think, needs to be taken captive to this unceasing act of prayer, and with this prayer-covering, the church is bound to expand, to become healthy again, to take on that holy heft. But how to focus this kind of expansive personal prayer? You look again at the directory. You purse your lips and nod. You know where to start.
So, you start coming in early twice a week to pray for portions of the directory. You do this without letting your staff know, so as to avoid encouraging guilt vis-à-vis their not joining you.
5:00 a.m. arrives on Tuesdays and Thursdays; it is the hour of stumbling about in the dark by the bed, looking for the pants and socks you set out the night before. Clothed, you arrive at church and sink into your chair under your reading light and reach a leg out to heel-stomp the button that turns the light on. You take up the directory. This morning's task is to prayerfully cover F to O. Well, actually, the rest of the E's, then F to O, since you didn't finish the E's last time.
You look through heavy eyelids at the bright photo of the Ethan family, made up of two parents and two kids. The boy's a tough case; you're pretty sure he's the one doodling on the pages of the hymnals in the row his family sits in every week. In fact, he's kind of a little jerk. Your sudden frustration makes your drowsiness evaporate as your aggression-based adrenaline kicks in. Oh Lord, quiet my heart. Every thought a captive.
Two months go by. When 5:30 or 5:45 a.m. rolls around, you can be found in your office (maybe 6:00 once in a while, which is totally fine, of course), praying or about to pray or just checking your email before praying or maybe pouring a cup of coffee before checking your email before getting down to pray.
Sleep deprivation? You just need to hit your cycles right. So long as you pick up four-and-a-half or five or occasionally six hours of sleep, you will be fine. Jeremiah didn't have a sleep number bed, you think, as you scrape the frost off your windshield at 6:30 a.m. one morning with the hard plastic spine of the directory. You pray as you scrape. When you arrive in your office at 7:06 a.m., you feel a twinge of guilt for being so late, and then another twinge about scuffing up the directory folder. But you also feel proud, as though the physical weathering corresponds to a spiritual strengthening. You frown and shake your head, willing your thought back into a prayer: "Lord, may I become weathered in the way a used Bible is weathered." You say it out loud, washing your hands.
Another month. You have started weeping in your office for no reason. You think, Didn't Jeremiah weep for no reason? The Ethan family is on the prayer docket again this morning. It's 7:18 a.m. You look down and notice that the Ethan boy's face is dotted with a real tear. The drop soaks into the paper and darkens and wrinkles part of his face. He looks like a deformed person. "Aren't we all deformed, Lord?" you begin a prayer, wiping your eyes with your hands and wiping your hands on your shirt to prevent more families from becoming deformed.
Lord, what is the deal with these ulcers? You pray this—well, you sort of half-think, half-pray it. It is a new morning with new mercies. The time is 6:23 a.m., two months after the weeping started. You pray it fully—"Lord, please help me with what I think are possibly ulcers"—to be sure the sentiment has been taken captive fully. The coffee is a deep brown-black, bitter and grainy in your mouth. When you swallow it, you can feel a residual film on your tongue and the insides of your cheeks as the liquid drops into your stomach with an acidic burn. You nicked yourself while shaving an embarrassingly high patch of scruff this morning, and the cut is still dribbling out blood, just below your eye. You are a mess.
How many months have you been waking up twice or six times a week at 4:30, 5:00, 5:12, 5:20, 5:36, 5:40, 6:03, 6:15 to come to your office to pray over the directory to spur your church on to growth? You look at the stack of unsheathed directory pages in front of you. You took the directory out of its plastic binder in order to free up the spine of the binder for windshield-scraping purposes after having a look at the family finances with your wife and figuring that most of the rest of the year's planned purchases (e.g. a new scraper) weren't going to be necessary at this point in time. (You trashed the binder completely after a couple days of futile scraping and have since made do, ingeniously, with a pair of heavy plastic hangers.) So you look at the stack of faded and smudged CYMK-colored directory pages, and rest your hand over the faces of the Abaya family, and start to weep. Your church, of course, has not welcomed any new members lately.
"Jeremiah wept, too, Lord, and I hope my tears … " you begin. The next words don't come. "I'm not a hero," you say—or pray, it's another utterance in that liminal zone—and then, for the first time in your life, you believe you hear the voice of God.
Perhaps instead of the voice of God it was only a super-verbal groaning, or a thought-projection of your own, or an angel speaking on behalf of God. In any case, before you can parse it, you hear a knock and look up. Your wife is at the door. It's 6:41 a.m. She opens the door. "Here," she says, and presses into your hands a still-warm croissant.
A little over a year later, a new directory comes out. It doesn't have the extra heft one might hope for, were one the sort of person to hope for such things. But there is one important difference between the new directory and the old, you think to yourself as you put it up on the shelf, away from your reading chair.
In the new photo, taken after the croissant/revelation-of-grace scenario and a subsequent abandonment of your grueling regimen of early-morning directory-based intercession, you are not only smiling with your mouth, but with your eyes. You are even, rakishly, holding in front of you a breakfast pastry—a breakfast pastry!—and though the laughter is shared among your family and your church, the glory is God's alone.
Martyn Wendell Jones is a writer living in the Toronto area.
Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
