Church Planting in A Thunderstorm

I used to run. Every day. Now after three kids, and a year plus of church planting, I run more like once a week. But when I get the chance, I take full advantage. This past Wednesday I had factored an evening run into the end of my work day and so as I was winding down my tasks, I was gearing up for some music, some solitude, and that feeling of relief mixed with satisfaction when the running is done. I found a new run in our town that is a paved path that extends out to some rolling farmland and a secluded backroad. I love it.

But on this day, little did I realize that I as my little GPS dot all too slowly moved eastward on the radar I was running into a massive amoeba of red and orange that would soon consume the whole of my Weather app and the whole of the horizon. At first the lightning was far off. I’m from Oklahoma, which is another way of saying when it comes to thunderstorms, I consider how I can get the best vantage point to witness the strokes of static electricity on a canvas of stratus clouds. So to say I didn’t mind running with a soundtrack of The National’s new album (Easy To Find, simply brilliant) accompanied by a light show in the distance is an understatement. But as it turned out the storm that I thought was moving away from me was actually rather quickly descending upon me.

I don’t know whether its an old wives’ tale or not but amateur meteorology folklore tells you if you see a flash of lighting and then count the seconds until the rumble of the thunder, you can gauge how far the lighting strike was away. It started innocently enough: flash…one, two…ten, eleven…boom. But then what do you do when there is lighting flashing all around you? As the lighting increased the cadence decreased: flash…one…boom. So I guess its on top of me? Mind you I am in the middle of a field which is not exactly the greatest place to be.

And then the heavens opened. Torrential rains joined the chorus of thunder and here’s me, just your average dope who doesn’t check the weather very often out running in the electrified deluge.

Lessons From The Storm

And, well, I’m a pastor so I guess I spiritualize everything. But as I was completely at the mercy of this awesome force of nature, a New Jersey thunderstorm of truly midwestern proportions, I couldn’t help but talk to Jesus— you can be a tough guy all you want, I was a little unnerved by it. And I believe that unlike Elijah, who heard the the voice of God “in the sound of sheer silence” (1 Kings 19), I heard God speak through the thunder.

The Only Way To Get To Where You’re Going Is To Keep Going

At the literal halfway point of my run, right about the moment I realized that I was the last peg on the game of Battleship and that nature had all the other coordinates covered, I stopped under a metal shed that serves as a farm store. It was closed up for the day, the rain started to fall angry on the tin roof (hello 90’s music) and really I could have stayed there. But my wife and I often share a car on work days and I was due to pick her up in a mere fifteen minutes. As I rejoiced in my reprieve from the storm I realized that if this storm lasted any length of time, I was going to be very late to pick her up and that neither of us would get home to our children for quite a while. I realized that the only way to get to where I was going was to keep going.

Church planting is kind of like this. You set out, you set out because you know you’re doing what you should be doing, you know that even though its hard, it will be worth it for all involved. But then it gets really hard. The idealism of beginnings is met with the reality of building something from the ground up. You are literally in the middle, you have leveraged your career, your family’s security, and your own emotional wellbeing to launch something new and it is so very slow and hard. And there are so many illusions of shelter, places that you tell yourself that if you can arrive at you will be able to rest. But the only way to get to where you’re going is to keep going. If you ride out the storm in the shelter (which if you’re honest with yourself you realize is a joke of shelter anyway), you will never be what God is calling you to be.

He Calls Us To The Storm

Because God doesn’t call us to shelter, he doesn’t call us to destinations, or assurances of controlled environments of security and sunshine. He calls us to himself. And thus, he calls us to the storm. As I realized that I had to keep going, the storm intensified more and more. The lightning became like a strobe light. The sky turned green, like Twister (killing the 90’s references), stuff’s about to start flying sideways green. And the thunder. That bass that doesn’t just hit you in the chest, it makes it hard to breathe. And here I am running in the middle of it. And the voice I hear in the thunder is shouting the question, “do you trust me?” As I am running in between lighting bolts, as I want so desperately to be in my car, as it seems like I’m running in a waterfall—”do you trust me?”

What choice did I have then and what choice do I have now? I don’t know what planting a church will ultimately mean, but one thing I have discovered, is that planting a church was never about what I could accomplish for God, as if he somehow needed me. It was always about my heart, he was calling me to run through the storm to find that he would always be my refuge, that truly the “wind and the waves”—and the lighting bolts— obey him and that its only when I feel small, when I actually need this to be true, that he really is Lord of all and that he really is relentlessly pursuing me, that I will know it for myself.

Usually God whispers. But sometimes God shouts to get his point across. In the tremble of crashing thunder God had drilled his message into me: keep going, do not be afraid, I will be with you. I am grateful for what I discovered that day. As I finally arrived at my car, I had prayed a couple hundred times: “Lord, I trust you, I get the memo, I’ve been telling everyone that God is not an angry, Zeus-Like figure waiting to hurl a lightning bolt at you, it would be really ironic if I died getting struck by lightning.” And you know what? I’ve discovered something else. Running in a thunderstorm is kind of awesome.