Leading in the Dark

Confessions of a Successful Church Planter, Chapter 5

This is Confessions of a Successful Church Planter.

Heather Weber is an ordained minister in the Assemblies of God, coach, and the founding pastor of CityChurch, Iowa City.

CityChurch was planted in 2016, and it closed in August of this year.

I have asked Heather to write a series of posts under the title “Confessions of a Successful Church Planter.” The title is intended to poke at, deconstruct, and contradict prevailing, unreflective (and indeed unChristian) narratives of church success. We invite readers to catch up on Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, and Chapter Four.

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My Lord, my Love, 

you have called me to float blind 

down the dark river which leads

to the kingdom of light. 

May my journey be for the healing

of those to whom you send me

who walk in the shadow of death.

-Father Thomas Greene’s journal, 1977

It’s early January 2020. I sit in a coffee shop with one of my congregants, a mature believer, well-practiced in waiting on the Lord, and who–not kidding–wakes at 4 a.m. most mornings to sit in silence for an hour before a grueling work day at the hospital. As we sip our tea, we share with one another what we think the Lord is speaking to each of us, and I tell her that, when I asked the Lord for a word to help me anticipate the year ahead, I heard only “unknown,” as in “into the unknown.”¹ 

I cannot see beyond the next few months. As a pastor, I typically always have a sense of what to prepare for in the coming year, a sense of how God wants me to cooperate with His agenda, where to invest my time, who to bring along with me on the journey. But here at the start of 2020, all is dark except for a dim glow in one corner, which allows me to foresee that a good portion of our congregation will be moving away in May. I can’t fathom how finances will be covered given people move faster than they join the church, and it takes even longer for them to start giving (a story most pastors know well).

Early March, 2020. A  family member drops a bomb. There’s a confusing and explosive conversation, leaving me dysregulated and spinning. That evening I drive to the local high school parking lot and sit in the car, dialing three of my local pastor friends in turn, sobbing through the story. I hear myself say, “I can’t go on like this,” meaning: I can’t continue to carry my ministerial load while navigating this situation. My friends are reassuring, pledging to walk with me. One gives me permission to walk away from ministry completely in order to care for my family.  Again, I cannot see into this dark.

*

The life of faith often feels like sailing into the dusky unknown, but my lack of vision at the beginning of  2020 was peculiar to me because the darkness was so profound and foreboding. In hindsight, I can understand that God chose not to reveal–and my imagination was not active enough to predict–a global pandemic or the family dynamics that ensued in my life that year. However, as COVID-19 erupted across the globe, concern about the distant future fell by the wayside. I needed only enough light to see how CityChurch could meet the following Sunday. Only enough light to, day by day, walk my children through the total shutdown of life as they knew it.  Enough light to acquire hand sanitizer, rubbing alcohol and groceries and then wonder where in the world I could buy a facemask.

Eventually, as we became more adjusted–if that’s possible–to pandemic life, dawn broke slowly. I could see several weeks and then months out at a time. Gradually, I found my bearings on the choppy water. I had an associate pastor then, who carried the weight of leadership with me. We wrote Spirit-inspired sermons and were able to serve them to our congregation during the rest of that pandemic-meets-election year. My kids found a rhythm for schooling online. It was now easy to order my favorite sandwich and pick it up curbside from the local alehouse; it was a breeze to purchase face masks at Target.

Despite the eventual light in the last quarter of 2020, I’ve noticed that the Lord has a habit of leading me back into the dark unknown more times than I feel I can withstand. This is the place where I struggle to see and don’t know which way to walk. There, I’m tempted to strategize my way out by making plans A, B, C, and so on. “Shooting in the dark” is the old and unseemly-in-our-time adage that describes this behavior. However, my efforts mostly leave me disconsolate and drained. Shooting in the dark wastes ammo and energy; rarely does one hit the right target.

Ignatian spirituality–rooted in the practice of discerning how the Spirit is leading–would urge us to pay attention to two things when we walk in the dark. Consolation–the tender comfort and peace we may feel when meditating on an idea or a prospect–encourages me to consider the idea through to its outcome and seek the Lord more fully on the matter. Desolation–a despairing sense of distance from the Source of love–bids me refrain from taking a considered road or course of action, even when the road or the action bears the image of goodness, practicality, or godliness. This practice of discernment and mindful attention to the promptings of the Spirit through desolation or consolation–even in the dark–is for our good, and keeps us from wasting our energies on needless strategies and plans. 

“Truly, the best thing any of us have to bring to leadership is our own transforming selves,” writes spiritual director Ruth Haley Barton.² In order to serve my loved ones and the people I lead, I am used to falling back on my natural gifts. Give me a strengths assessment and you’ll see that what I bring to the table usually involves effective strategy, efficient planning, and the identification and elimination of obstacles. However, if it’s true that the most significant gift we can bring to others is our own transformation–submission to the work of the Spirit in our lives–then for me, it means asking God how God wants me to respond to this un-knowing darkness.

Here, I first fought against the darkness itself, sculpting my worry like a bodybuilder's chiseled muscles, and fretted over the not-knowing of timings, relationships, finances, health, and various occasions of future happiness. Now, my firmly growing conviction is that the work I have to do in the dark–and the transformation God wants for me–is learning how not to be anxious about each proverbial tomorrow. 

God knows it’s in the dark, and the dark alone, where I choose to obey Jesus’ instruction to not worry, where I choose to surrender all impulses for planning an escape. I fail at this frequently. And so, after short reprieves in the light, he returns me to the dark because that’s where I learn things “I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again.”³

I’m not the only one afraid of the dark. My children worry. My congregants worried, too, about the stability of the country, the war in Ukraine, the outcome of elections, or the health of their loved ones. My fellow ministers worry. In the dark, they too, need to enter the promise of Christ’s peace and care for tomorrow.       

Church planting (and pastoring, one could argue) is itself a journey into the dark unknown. We set out to serve a people we have never met, and with them we wait in eager expectation of the warm rays of the rising sun as it guides our feet in the path of peace.⁴ In leading others, we are in company with Moses himself, who would have been happy shepherding literal sheep, but instead obediently began an uncertain journey of rescuing a human flock. Yet, Moses was not allowed an up-close glimpse of this world’s promised land, and he was unable to comprehend that his obedience would change the trajectory of all humankind. “[His ministry] has given him little sense of fulfillment as far as we can tell; it has brought him lots of grief, and this is how it will end,” gazing at the promised land from a distant mountain summit.⁵

For our good and because of his great love for us, God allows for our becoming in the dark. Transformation is for our own sakes, yes, but it also serves the people of God. Will we be miserable protesters–unhelpful company–on the dark and murky river? Indeed not. For God’s sake and for the sake of the world, we are called to cultivate hope and joyful expectation on this blind voyage of faith. Let us not forget our inevitable end—arrival in the noonday fullness of the Kingdom. 

Where then, Darkness, is your sting? 

1. I’m not a Frozen fan. This is God’s well-developed irony on display.

2. Barton, Ruth Haley. Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership

3. Brown Taylor, Barabara. Learning to Walk in the Dark.

4. Romans 8:20-21; Luke 1:78

5. Deuteronomy 3:27; Goldingay, John. Numbers and Deuteronomy for Everyone.