Toxic weeds thrive in visions for ministry. A fertile spiritual imagination is just as good at growing weeds as a crop.
—Dave Hansen
In western Montana, a weed imported from France, spotted knapweed, plagues some of our best agricultural areas and is moving swiftly into wilderness areas. Only sheep will eat it. Cattle, deer, and elk won’t touch it. A meadow of knapweed won’t support a cow. A hillside of it will not feed elk. An infestation of knapweed can destroy a hay- or grainfield.
Beekeepers imported the plant for its purple blossoms that produce copious nectar even during drought years. The weed is unbelievably hardy, thriving in the driest of weather. It competes unfairly with natural flora; it grows over three feet tall so it shades shorter grasses. But if you clip it, knapweed will blossom at two inches off the ground.
Its most pernicious characteristic, however, is that knapweed is allelopathic. Knapweed’s roots secrete a toxic substance that stunts and even kills the plants in its vicinity.
Toxic weeds thrive in visions for ministry too. It is just as true of spiritual tilth as it is of good dirt: “It will produce thorns and thistles for you” (Gen. 3:18 niv). A fertile spiritual imagination is just as good at growing weeds as a crop. I’ve noticed at least three weeds that can flourish in my pastoral visions.
The dream weed
I love being somewhere long enough to watch the kids grow up. I love preaching through whole books of the Bible. I love watching a church grow and change over time. I love presiding at funerals for people I’ve called on and loved for a long time.
But I really dislike receiving phone calls, back to back, one from Euodia telling me that we should have vacation Bible school in June because that’s the only time we can get any teachers, and one from Syntyche saying that we should have VBS in August because three years ago at a Christian ed meeting, didn’t we decide always to hold VBS in August to promote Sunday school?
What gripes me is that I know the real problem: these two don’t like each other and are playing a game to see with whom I will side.
In such moments sprouts the dream weed, a mental flash, a phantasm from a subconscious reservoir of restlessness. It speaks to our disgust with the mess of the ministry. It shows us a place of benefits without blahs. It may be another church, another career, or just winning the lottery—my kingdom for a day without human foolishness! And of course, it can all be had in a moment, enjoyed in rush-hour traffic or in the middle of a fight at a council meeting.
The dream weed is only a dream away: “I gotta get outta here!”
I’m not naysaying daydreaming. Daydreaming can be an ally of ministry. Put to good use, the ability to live through experiences mentally is great for running through sermons, thinking through pastoral calls, and imagining what might be possible. God gave us the ability to “see” things in our minds.
However, I know this: the mental ability we use for daydreams, which God uses for visions, can be marshalled by our frustrations, our doubts, our anger, our self-pity, and our boredom. When these emotions control our mental scenery, our field of vision fills with dream weeds.
The dream weed is my weed of choice; I know it best. No other weed is this much fun. At Dream Weed University, I’ve gotten any number of Ph.D.s, been a professor at every seminary in the country, and published hundreds of books and articles.
I’ve pastored big churches, the mythical kind where all you have to do is hang around with a totally cool staff who do the down-and-dirty work with all the messed-up people. I’ve had offices where I didn’t have to answer the phone, and where three receptionists stood between me and Mr. McBlab, the parishioner with the personality disorder of critiqueophilia.
How do you subdue such weeds?
The best way is through confession and repentance. Confession is simply recognizing a false vision for what it is and speaking to God about it: “Here it is again, Lord; the old dream weed is back.” Repentance is simply returning to prayer for the right thing: for people, for the church, for stamina and joy.
Other strategies help. Dream weeds are intolerant of contact with anything specific. Jesus tells us to wash one another’s feet. There’s nothing dreamy about that. So I call a grump. I go out and bless a curmudgeon. I immerse myself in the details of church work. I fix the leaky toilet in the men’s room. I pick the popcorn off the floor from the Wednesday night program. We have a custodian for that. But sometimes I need to do it.
Every Sunday morning before people arrive, I sweep the outside walks as metaphoric prayer. God talks to us in parables and metaphors, so I return the favor. I talk to him in a metaphor: “Lord, as I sweep this morning, help me commit myself to washing the feet of this church.” Then I take the broom and go up and down the concrete walks, brushing away the gravel, dirt, and bird droppings. I’m sweeping away daydreams. As I sweep, I am parabolically committing myself before God to care for this particular church and these particular people.
With the dream weed gone, I find a reappreciation for my church. With my field of vision cleared, I can see that God has truly been in this place, and that he calls me to work here.
The greed weed
My fifteen-year-old son and I were hunting white-tailed deer on a local cattle ranch. Evan was sitting quietly on a knoll overlooking a hayfield, waiting for game to appear. I sneaked around a section of cottonwood trees, willows, and brambles adjacent to the hayfield and walked through it, hoping to flush a nice buck into the field.
I didn’t disturb an animal, but I got covered with burrs. I don’t remember seeing the burr-bearing weeds, but when I emerged, my hunter’s-orange sweatshirt was covered with spiky burrs the size of Ping-Pong balls. Sharp-pointed foxtails coated my socks; they lost no time working through my cotton socks into the flesh of my ankle.
Rambling through a river bottom, praying for my congregation, I hope to flush out a vision for our corporate life. I never stumble upon a burning bush. I see cottonwood trees and a red-tailed hawk. I hear wind, rushing water, and a Clark’s nutcracker.
Visions come like Elijah’s still small voice—gentle-whisper visions, unobtrusive projections upon my imagination. They present themselves with the utmost modesty. They don’t demand faith; they inspire it. I don’t propel them; they propel me. I don’t need to flesh them out; they flesh themselves out in me and in my congregation.
When I pray for a parishioner, often I “see” the person in my mind. As I pray for people, often I see them not as they are, but as they could be. I see possibilities for them. I see what their life might become under the lordship of Christ. These little visions don’t intrude or demand; they suggest and propose. They are the working capital of my pastoral calling.
Such visions are good, but opportunism clings to them like burrs. In the middle of “seeing” the building made new, the pews full, and our Sunday school bursting at the seams, I also see a mental image of a new fly rod that I could purchase with the raise I’d get if my ministry thrived. It sickens me.
When my spiritual imagination is at its best, I am also at my worst. Hedonism works its way into the fabric of my visions like foxtails into socks.
Too often greed sprouts are treated like playthings, harmless plants. They are not harmless. Greed was the sin of Hophni and Phinehas, the sons of Eli. They looked with “greedy eye” at the sacrifices and offerings of the people of Israel, “fattening themselves” on the choicest parts of the offering. Their sins brought down the house of Eli and destroyed their own lives.
Calling on a ninety-six-year-old blind woman who lives in a tarpaper shack doesn’t present a conflict of interest. But put the same woman in a richly decorated home three times bigger than she needs, and visions of discipleship can become stuck with burrs and foxtail visions of big donations.
If the power of ministry is the love of God working in and through us, what happens to our power for ministry when we cast a greedy eye on the sacrifices and offerings? We stop seeing the person; all we see is her money.
Before I make a pastoral call on people with financial resources, I pray through my motivations vigorously and relentlessly. I have to pull the greed weeds. When my mental landscape is congested with greed weeds, I try resetting my timetable for the things I want. Greed has a crude intolerance for delayed gratification. Greed wants it now. I want a new fly rod (they aren’t cheap). So I reset my goal for getting a new fly rod by a year. We want to put new windows in the church. Not this year. We must wait. A new computer! Wait. A nice fat raise? Let the little ones build up over time.
Patience pulls greed weeds, and a patient heart is an inhospitable environment for greed weeds. Funny thing is, once the greed weeds are cleared away, love appears. The fruit of the Spirit grows best in a well-cleared field of vision.
The hero weed
An older lady stuffed a note into my hand as she greeted me in line after church. She winked at me. Five years later, serving a different church, I have that note taped to the window in front of my office desk. It reads: “There is no limit to the good you can do, if you don’t care who gets the credit.”
I don’t keep that note for sentimental reasons. It’s there because, like most of us, I like being a hero. I like getting credit when things go right. Maybe my sagacious friend knew it.
When we desire hero status in our churches, we become allelopathic to the people who serve with us. Like that toxic weed from France, we may come off as sweet as honey, but we stunt the growth of those around us. The poison of our pride places a limit on the good that we can do, and the good that those around us can do.
My visions are saturated with my face. It is repelling and embarrassing, but I must admit it: I can take a wonderful vision and muddy it with a mental image of my getting credit. What a glorious vision to see a little country church on the brink of closing its doors come to life! What a sad splotch of spilled ink to see myself in front of packed pews basking in the glory of being the one the people came to hear. It’s repulsive. But I can’t seem to eradicate the problem. Is the answer throwing out vision? If a vision is spoiled by an ego spill, must the picture be thrown out? Can any part of a vision in which I project myself as the hero ever be from God?
It’s not a matter of throwing out visions, however. It is a matter of extracting our egos from them. What pulls the hero weed is private prayer.
A parishioner was going through an especially acrimonious divorce. Of course, there were darling children involved. Of course, the couple fought over everything, including the Jimi Hendrix albums. I prayed for all parties involved, but one of them attended church regularly, so I felt for him a special pastoral responsibility.
I wanted to save the day. I felt like it was my job to go in and make a difference. I knew well how my pastoral capital would go up if I had a profound impact on this person’s life and he shared it with people. I could “see” their accolades. I became more concerned with the glory for being a good pastor than being filled with love and pity for my suffering friend. That’s hard to admit.
A couple of times, I decided to give an afternoon of prayer to the guy. I can’t sit still and pray, so I walk. Well, when I took a long walk and prayed for him, I saw myself staying away from him. The vision was odd, unusual. My impression, though vague, was that my whole responsibility was to pray and stay away. Over and over I asked, “Is this right? Am I just supposed to stay away?”
I didn’t hear a voice; I just saw myself staying away. “But what if I get called on the carpet for not reaching out to him? Staying away makes me look uncaring.” Fear entered in. Ultimately I obeyed the quieter picture of my staying away and just praying for the person. My interest piqued when, after his divorce, his church attendance picked up. A year after the dust settled, I visited the gentleman. We talked about his divorce. As he began, a deep confidence filled his eyes. The bitterness was gone. I knew he’d lived through hell. He recalled the difficult times. He did not dismiss the pain. But he went on to tell me that whenever he was at his lowest point, for some unexplainable reason, God had always shown up.
“When I was all used up and had nothing left, God was just there. He comforted me in my very darkest hours. God has been so good to me!”
This man, who few would have mistaken for a mystic, had learned to pray. He could hardly contain himself.
I could hardly contain myself. I wanted desperately to shout out “I prayed for you! I prayed for you!” Thankfully, I held my tongue and smiled.
Private prayer is therapy for allelopaths.
A cleared field of vision
As we pull the dream weeds, greed weeds, and hero weeds, we find a cleared field ready to produce a crop. True vision for ministry can grow.
In my mind, I can still see nails protruding from badly weathered siding. If you pounded them in, they popped back out. The eighty-year-old wood wasn’t worth another coat of white paint. The sanctuary was so poorly insulated that the water in the Christmas tree stand froze every December. Of course, the water pipes froze every winter too. The windows were cracked. The ceiling tiles bore yellow-veined stains from the leaky roof. The concrete steps and sidewalks were decomposing.
I did not pray for the renovation of the sanctuary. Frozen pipes and peeling paint were the least of our problems. But as I walked through the woods praying for the church, in my mind I saw not a broken-down church building, but a clean, white renovated sanctuary. I did not realize it then, but “seeing” the renewed sanctuary was a vision. It was so modest a spiritual phenomenon that I barely took it into account.
These little visions never came as announcements, prophecies, or revelations. At no time did I feel a message had arrived from God to oversee the renewal of the sanctuary. I never thought that seeing a pretty building in my mind constituted a vision. But that gentle, unobtrusive Spirit-whisper became a focus for my ministry at that church.
So I never announced to the church council, “I have had a vision: our sanctuary is going to be made brand new, and we need to start working on it right away.” Fixing up the place never became an intentional goal, but for whatever reason, at council we began to talk not about my vision or anybody else’s vision; we just started working away at fixing up the building.
Over nine years, little project by little project, the church was made new. We got a new roof. We applied new siding, insulated the walls, installed new exterior doors and double-paned windows. We added handicapped access. We poured concrete sidewalks and steps and painted the sanctuary walls and ceiling. We relandscaped the front yard, planted a new sign, and even insulated the crawlspace under the building so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. The sanctuary is now the brilliant white building I saw in my vision. Actually it is prettier than I thought it would be. The fulfillment exceeded the vision in beauty.
No aspect of church life is too spiritual or too material for visions. We need visions for deeper spirituality, more functional buildings, greater passion for God, steadier finances, and more effective Christian education. Seeing these ahead of time (even if not recognized as visions from God) constitutes the pastor’s spiritual field of vision. We simply need to clear that field of its weeds.
Copyright © 1996 by Christianity Today/Leadership
