A summer of significance

Is it really Labour Day already? Seems like just yesterday I was sitting by the lake, soaking up the friendly sounds of laughter and thinking of nothing more than what kind of cereal my two-year-old would want for breakfast the next day – likely the only kind we didn’t bring with us! It’s amazing how each year, with a simple flip of the calendar, summer turns into a distant memory.

Once September hits, the pace quickens, the calendar crams, and the volunteer vacuum causes church leadership stress to skyrocket. Yes, the ministry year has begun in earnest.

And sometimes (or should we admit, most often?) the things that are truly important get lost in the frenetic pace of the restless season churches call “the fall.”

This summer, I decided to prepare for the onslaught. I picked up two books that would challenge me to probe deeper into my own life and to cultivate habits that would assist me in my growth as a person and as a pastor. I wanted to make this summer a season of significance when it came to what I read.

My summer reading odyssey began around Father’s Day. In preparation for preaching, I got Donald Miller’s latest book, To Own a Dragon: Reflections on Growing Up Without a Father (NavPress). Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz and Searching for God Knows What, writes about what he learned – and did not learn – growing up without a significant male role model in his life.

Miller speaks candidly, and with his characteristic passion and authenticity, about the pain of a church experience oriented exclusively towards families and a peer culture that reinforced his sense of isolation and marginalization. His basic premise is wonderfully redemptive: regardless of your personal history, your gender, or your theological imagination, you can still come to know and revel in the love of your heavenly Father.

Despite Miller’s negative experiences, this is not a caustic or cathartic piece. It’s a well-honed pedagogical treatise on the nature of God as our Father and our Healer. By weaving together biblical theology and personal narrative, Miller reminded me that to minister well this season, I must choose to enter the deepest longings of those who have lived with the deep wound of fatherlessness.

I was challenged to take a serious look at the culture of our church and to ask whether we have created intentional strategies in our home, schools, and churches so positive male mentoring and equipping occurs. Months later, Miller’s book still has me pondering.

This summer, I also wanted to grow in the discipline of resting well. I don’t often do a good job of this (just ask my wife). I knew if I was to enter this September ministry season as a church planter refreshed and re-focused, I would need some guidance in keeping my spiritual and emotional health intact.

I turned to Marva Dawn’s latest offering, The Sense of the Call: A Sabbath Way of Life for Those Who Serve God, the Church, and the World (Eerdmans). Dawn has already given us an excellent treatise on Sabbath keeping in Keeping the Sabbath Wholly. Her emphasis on learning not only to rest but also to cease, to feast, and to embrace various realities of the character of God and the wonderful world that is local church ministry was inspiring. Her insightful questions and personal candour are always significant; in this latest work, she does not disappoint.

“For us to experience the fullness of God’s well-being in the midst of the rigors of our work,” Dawn writes, “we who seek to serve the Church and the world constantly need a profound sense of our call. In a nutshell, the sense of our call is that God’s Kingdom reclaims us, revitalizes us, and renews us. . . . When we grasp this . . . we are set free for a Sabbath way of life: a profound resting in the Kingdom’s grace instead of a perpetual struggle to ‘do our work.’ ”

Coming into summer soul-weary from having worked hard again all year, Miller and Dawn gave me a wonderful gift: the gift of perspective. They extended to me gentle yet prophetic reminders of what is really important.

Now, if only I can keep these things in focus through the month of September, I will truly have had a summer of significance.

Brad Sumner is campus pastor at Jericho Ridge Community Church, Langley, B.C. and the father of two toddlers.

“How much of our work is spoiled because we hurry the process, instead of keeping ourselves centered in our focal concerns of loving God and neighbor! I’m dreadfully guilty, I confess. . . . How many relationships have been marred because we did not take enough time for loving engagement in conversations? How many sermons have been less than our best because we scurried away from the study to attend to other matters? Rush is necessary only when we haven’t said No often enough, when we have too much on our plate because of our laziness in discerning what are our focal concerns and thus what is our proper work.” —Marva Dawn in The Sense of the Call, p. 127