Recovering Passion

My Friend Aida has a blog called Forgetting the Former Things. She recently wrote a great article on recovering passion. It stirred things in me. I know that in the attempts to nurture my own vision that I've stiffled others. During my time in the organized church I had a hard time fitting my vision underneath other's vision. At the same time I kept other people out of my sand box too.

Now I am on a journey of rediscovering that passion. It seems scary. Right now it is enough just for me to come to terms with what went wrong.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on Aida's entry.

A number of years ago, I became interested in the subject of leadership. I bought every book I could find that taught how to develop leadership skills and I went to several leadership conferences. Also, I spoke with everyone I could find who was interested in leadership principles.

Although there’s much that I could say about the institutional church’s concept of leadership, I really want to focus on only one aspect – passion.

One of the characteristics of a good leader as taught by the institution is passion. A good leader needs to be passionate about the particular cause he is promoting. Also, it’s his responsibility to meet regularly with his team in order to stir up their passion for the cause and to re-kindle it when it starts to die down.

As the leader, he is also responsible for imparting the vision to his team. He receives the vision and passes it on to the others. Therefore, it’s important that he describes it clearly so that the team will know and understand the direction in which they are to move. Everyone is expected to move together in order to fulfill the leader’s vision. In these conferences, there was much talk about running with the vision because it’s important that the leader’s vision be fulfilled. As a result, many workers are needed to serve the vision.

After growing in grace, I’ve come to believe that leadership as taught in the institutional church is not effective and has actually hurt the church.

In the institutional church, the only vision that matters is the pastor’s. Church members are expected to work to fulfill their pastor’s vision even if it means allowing theirs to die. As a result, we have thousands of believers sitting in pews who have no passion because their vision has died.

The early church as described in the book of Acts was a passionate church. The Leader was the Holy Spirit and it was he who instilled vision in the people and filled them with passion. As a result, their passion didn’t die so they didn’t need another person to constantly stir them up.

In the institutional system, intercession is strongly promoted so, for most of my life as a believer, I tried to make myself into an intercessor. I went to intercessory prayer meetings and I studied the lives and prayer techniques of well known intercessors. Although I talked about the importance of prayer and even taught it, there was never a burning passion in my heart for prayer. Basically, I was trying to function out of someone else’s passion and, since their passion never became mine, it wasn’t enough to carry me through to the end.

I believe that the religious system destroys passion. As I look at today’s church, I see a church that for the most part lacks passion. Its members depend on weekly sermons to pump them up because they don’t really care about what’s going on.

Darin Hufford in his audio series on prayer states that we depend on prayer lists and prayer chains to tell us what to pray for because we couldn’t care less about we’re praying for. As Darin puts it, “We’re just flapping our gums.” Instead, he says that we should pray for what we care about.

Wow!! How profound and yet so simple!! If you care, pray.

I believe Darin’s advice is the key to passion. As a free believer, I’m learning that I do care about issues and I don’t need weekly meetings to stir up my passion because the Holy Spirit is in me and he constantly fills me with his passion.

As I’ve re-connected with my heart, I’m discovering passions which are now coming alive after years of dormancy. I’ve found that the Holy Spirit is constantly stirring up those passions and directing my steps towards their fulfillment. The church that Jesus is building is a passionate church and he means for our lives to be filled with adventure as we follow the passions of our hearts.