The Dreamer
For breakfast this morning, I’ll start with a bowl of Cheerios with bananas and skim milk, and a piece of my wife’s marvelous homemade multigrain bread, toasted and buttered. I can see it. I can smell it. I can taste it. And I know what I have to do to make it happen.
I have, that is, a vision of what I want from life and a subsequent plan to get there. At least for the next hour or so.
The fact that I’ve recently taken aim at ministry vision statements and strategic plans and such does not mean that I believe envisioning the future is wrong. It is in fact necessary. Every journey, even the one to get up from a chair to make breakfast, begins with vision and involves specific plans.
My concern is that when pastors are told what they must dream, what they must envision, something inside them dies. A vision is a dream that arises from within our hearts. It can be nurtured but not imposed. Telling me that a real breakfast involves kale or that a real pastor leads his church to break the two-hundred barrier shrivels my heart.
My concern is to encourage pastoral hearts to dream freely. Having been force-fed the notion that the only valid vision for the church is numeric growth, the dreams which might otherwise flourish in our hearts are gnawed off at the roots. Some pastors wear well the skin of the entrepreneur but for many it constrains us, and under its shadow our dreams die.
A friend discussed his dreams for ministry with the pastor under whom he was doing an internship. This pastor told him that his dreams were tainted with “small church thinking.” My friend was challenged to put such ideas to bed if he wanted to successfully pastor.
But I wonder what would happen if a church and its pastor were freed to dream about what they wanted their ministry to look like apart from the shadow of growth. “Small church thinking” is not wrong. In fact, quite possibly what the church needs is to revisit the beauty of small church thinking.
I want pastors to dream dreams of a church and ministry unshackled from bondage to metrics. What would a beautiful church, a beautiful pastorate, look like to you if, without concern for growth, you could have what your heart truly desires?
Our dreams won’t all be the same. I dream of Cheerios, you may dream of a steaming three cheese omelette with a side of grits and a jellied bagel. Pastoral dreams will overlap, and some will include growth, but they won’t be the same. Nevertheless we must dream. Freely.
Dreaming can be dangerous, of course. It may open portals to different ministries and different callings. Sometimes when I let my mind so wander, I fantasize the most unrealistic things. But somewhere in our fantastical dreams are the nuggets that our hearts truly long to pursue. Think it through. Write it down. Clarify what your heart desires. Dream with the Spirit present, asking to hear the voice of God. Let him shape your dreams. Discuss your dreams with friends who won’t say you’re crazy or dismiss them as small-churchish.
Dreams may lead us to places we never considered going before. They may lead you to your own five-year plan. But when that plan arises from who you are and not who you are supposed to be, it will stand a chance of being fulfilled.
Dreaming may make the present darker, as we see how hard our dreams will be to reach. Or dreams may open up a pathway out of our present darkness. Dream on, and then act on your dream.
But it has to be your dream.
Harrison Scott Key is a writer who dreamed of getting published. In writing about this he says that
The hardest part of dreaming is that if you don’t do it, nothing terrible happens. Life goes on. This is why crying babies and student loans always take precedence; if you don’t see to those matters, things explode, break down, civilization stops being civilized. But if you never cut that album you always wanted to record, what happens? What worlds come crashing down, but the one in your heart? None.1
And that’s the point. For some of you, your world has been crushed because you have not been freed to dream. So dream. Dream large, dream small, but dream real. If it’s your dream, you’ll work your heart to joyful exhaustion to get close to seeing it come to pass. Dream, pastor, dream. Let those dreams become the heartbeat of the life you live.
Harrison Scott Key, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?: A Memoir, (United States: Harper Perennial, 2018), p. 87.
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Agree. But the elders and congregations (or some people in the congregation) also have dreams of what the church could be doing. Or should be doing. Or is doing! They want to share those visions with the pastor, who then can evaluate whether the visions of others are valid, useful and Spirit-led. And be challenged in a good way, not pressured.
So thoughtful and encouraging. I think too when the focus is on growth in numbers we can lead our congregations and ourselves into scarcity thinking—that we don’t have enough. That WE are not enough. And congregations get worn out by repeated exhortations to embrace the latest church growth program—and disheartened by the implicit message that they’re not good enough as they are.