De-formation
“If God has called you, he’ll equip you.”
Right?
We had heard it in sermons for years growing up. If God calls you to do something, he will give you what you need to do it – be it money, skill, connections, confidence. If he’s called you, he’ll equip you.
Which is all very encouraging, but…what about when he doesn’t?
Fast forward a few years from the youth group sermons (for which I am, let it be said, very grateful). My wife and I were living in inner-city Manchester. I was a trainee English teacher and my wife was working as a scientist. We had moved with a group of university friends, all living in the same neighbourhood and part of the same church-planting team. The church was nine months into public worship, but we didn’t have a leader.
My wife and I didn’t want to lead the church, but we were asked by our overseeing vicar to consider it. During a week of holding the question before God, we felt him move our hearts to say “yes.”
So, in February 2020, we began leading the church plant as volunteers, in addition to our regular work. You know what happened next.
The Covid-19 pandemic sent the nation, and its churches, into lockdown. That alone would have made leadership difficult. I also got violently carjacked (the car was a write-off), and we suffered three family bereavements between February and May.
The year continued, and teacher training via Zoom turned into an NQT year back in the classroom. The church bounced between venues as restrictions changed: sometimes in person, sometimes online.
Despite all this, it was a surprisingly encouraging time for the church. We were still small enough for Sunday Zoom meetings to be a meaningful space of friendship, and new people even joined us online and stuck around in person. But by spring 2021, my wife and I were running on empty.
I started to get worried when I noticed myself doing things I would normally enjoy – playing music with my wife, walking in the Peak District – and feeling nothing whatsoever. It was like becoming a detached observer of my own heart. Those around us started worrying too. In the early summer, some friends effectively didn’t let us leave their house until we agreed to drop something.
So, in summer 2021, we stepped back from church leadership. Wonderfully, we stayed part of the church, and the handover to new leaders was healthy.
We’ve been asked since if we thought more support or coaching could have helped us carry on or lead more sustainably. But we were supported well, through leadership and handover, by the vicar overseeing the plant. And as for more coaching, we were in (more than) full-time work and leading a church on top. We didn’t need more input: we needed time.
Not just quantity of time, but quality of headspace: time to think creatively together, to pray and seek vision for the church and our neighbourhood. While leading, we could just about keep the church ticking over, but vision and momentum shifts felt unattainable.
Exploring the structural challenges of bivocational volunteer church leadership in the light of human limitedness is, as they say, beyond my current scope. We took on a lot, took some hits, burnt out, and handed over – which was a relief.
My wife works as a materials scientist. In materials science, they distinguish between two ways that materials change shape under stress: plastic deformation and elastic deformation. Elastic springs back; plastic doesn’t.
While leading, we could feel our characters being pulled out of shape by busyness and testing circumstances. We were becoming snappier, glummer, less hopeful: not formed into Christlikeness, but de-formed into emotionally unhealthy, shrunken versions of ourselves.
After we handed over, life instantly felt more sustainable. We had a long summer holiday. We started playing music for fun again. We thought we were bouncing back pretty quickly. It felt like the aftermath of elastic (not plastic) deformation.
Despite the surface recovery, though, there was still a question hidden below the surface – and more than a question, a wounded trust.
“If God has called you, he’ll equip you.”
Which is all very encouraging, but…what about when he doesn’t?
Prayer
Loving Lord,
Give me the faith to bring you the questions,
And the answers that no longer satisfy,
To bring you my wonder and my weariness,
And to follow you anyway.
Thank you that the story isn’t finished.
Amen
Re-formation
“If God has called you, he’ll equip you.”
Really?
My wife and I didn’t initially want to lead our church plant while working full-time. We felt God asking us to do it, so we said yes in trust and to serve his people. We weren’t workaholics: we’d read The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry; we worked with our vicar to devolve pastoral care away from ourselves; we even took a mini-sabbatical. But we still burnt out.
After we handed over church leadership in the summer, we thought we had recovered quickly. But then the deeper question bubbled up: why did God call us to do something he knew we couldn’t handle?
So began several months of painful soul-searching. Early on we wondered if we had heard wrong, and God hadn’t actually called us to lead. That would solve some problems. It would still be painful, but at least we would know why: we’d messed up.
A startlingly on-the-nose prophetic encounter put the kibosh on that idea. At another church in the city, one of the leaders, who knew nothing of our questions or our exhaustion in the last year, came over to us, placed her hands on our lowered heads and shaking shoulders, and said, “You didn’t hear wrong. You heard right.”
Well. That was clear.
But if we couldn’t blame ourselves, what could we do? Blame God?
At times, it was tempting. We certainly felt a sense of solidarity with Teresa of Ávila, who once prayed, “Lord, if this is how you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you have so few of them!”
That winter held a lot of fun – recording an EP of Christmas carols, planning a cycle tour – but also a lot of pain. We felt far from God. Biblical encouragements rang hollow. Church was a duty, with little joy – although it probably didn’t help that our venue had no central heating.
Maybe our deformation had been plastic rather than elastic after all.
Even so, the story wasn’t over.
It’s a cliché, but sometimes you just have to live the clichés. As winter turned to spring, healing came. For me, it included a deepened sense that part of our calling (and ‘equipping’) as Jesus’s disciples is to know Christ by sharing in his suffering, and that resurrection comes on the far side of the cross (Philippians 3:10-11).
Like they say in We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, “We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!”
For my wife, healing included a cathartic and painful realisation that burnout was only half the story: God hadn’t abandoned us, but had been with us and provided for us in ways we hadn’t seen at the time.
For both of us, healing came through the patient kindness of our families and church community. The Church of England’s ordination discernment process also helped us practice trusting God again: gingerly offering the future to him, despite the bruises.
“If God has called you, he’ll equip you.”
I can’t fully get on board with that youth group refrain now – not without a few caveats. Life isn’t always ‘onwards and upwards’. We don’t always know what God is doing. Every disciple is called to the way of the cross.
But here’s something else I first heard in a youth group sermon. The Japanese art of kintsugi involves a beloved, broken piece of crockery being repaired with golden lacquer, so that the cracks are not only visible but emphasised. Having been broken and made whole again, the vase, plate or pot becomes even more highly prized than when it was new.
That sounds like Jesus to me. Not only his healing work, but his body: resurrected, scars and all.
It also sounds a bit like my wife and me now. We took on a lot, and we cracked under the weight. But God broke into our brokenness. Through prophecy, through friendship, through a fair few tears on the bathroom floor, he has led us into trust and wonder again. It’s not the same as before, exactly, but it feels – we feel – a bit more weathered, and a bit more broken and whole at the same time.
Prayer
Spirit of God,
You brooded over the deep waters
And brought forth a world of beauty.
Where there is disorder in me,
Come and bring peace.
Where there is darkness in me,
Come and bring light.
Where there is wilderness in me,
Come and bring life.
I offer you again my hopes and my disappointments.
Please be close to me today,
Lead me closer to Christ in his suffering,
And in his resurrection make me new.
Amen