How to Bounce Back from Losing your Ministry - Chapter 1 Spiritual Bankruptcy

Chapter One

Handling Change – a personal journey

Spiritual Bankruptcy

Most people have defining moments in their lives which cause them to re-assess where they are and where they are going. Many great achievers in life have gone bankrupt at least once. My husband’s uncle, Arthur Earle was a billionaire. He developed most of what is now called Robina on the Gold Coast. He went bankrupt at least three times. But each time, he learned to re-invent himself and become a bigger person. He worked hard and had this philosophy, “the harder I work, the luckier I get.” His first job was taking the wool off dead sheep! He worked hard to move ahead from that job!

It is through some of the greatest struggles throughout your life that you end up redefining yourself and finding your place in the universe. My life is completely different than it has been for the past thirty years. In the past five years we moved countries, changed jobs, dealt with a major health issue in our immediate family, seen our daughter married and move overseas to live and bury my parents. This book is not designed to talk about the personal changes I went through, but to share keys I found in God when I learned by God’s grace to rise above the inherent challenges which change forces you to face. The blessing of God is in you! The trick to life is in learning how to let the blessing of God come and invade your life even in the midst of change. This is especially true if trouble arises in the middle of the change and you find yourself reeling from its effects, while at the same time trying to find your feet! It is empowering when you finally grab control again and start moving forward.

People go through a number of different cycles when they have experienced major change in their lives. There is shock at the initial notification of the change, where life becomes unpredictable and uncontrollable. If it is too difficult to handle people can go through a denial phase where they retreat to what is familiar. From that ‘mind-numbing’ phase, feelings of anger and frustration start to emerge. This is where people shift blame to others, and become confused about how to cope. Once change really “hits home”, there can come a sense of powerlessness which has the ability, if you let it, to plunge you into depression and loss of confidence. Depression paralyses you and here starts a cycle where it is difficult to initiate activity.

When you finally feel you can start to move forward, you accept the situation and begin to let go of the past. You find new feelings of renewal, growth and excitement. Before you finally manage to integrate what has happened there comes a period of reflection and sharing insights, were you learn to balance past experiences. Eventually new direction starts to emerge and with God’s help you begin to get a sense of control.

Our perception becomes ‘coloured’ in hard times and it is not easy to see clearly. It’s important to have friends, family and a community around you that helps you stay on track. One saying that has helped us in our lives is never to make a life-altering decision in a crisis.

I have experienced all these to some degree, and this book is in part some of my personal story on my way back into ministry.

For the first time in 28 years I had found myself out of ministry. My husband and I were no longer pastoring a church. It had come after a very difficult three years where we had embraced many changes in a very short space of time. We had moved country to take over a church and my husband had been appointed to the international body managing the Christian Outreach Centre movement in that nation. One of our children had been diagnosed with a mood disorder and to add to that, we had twins with special educational needs. We had left our eldest daughter in Australia to finish year 12. We moved on our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. It had been an enjoyable twenty-five years of marriage. We had started on what I thought was a new exciting phase of our lives but it turned out to have more excitement than I’d bargained for.

Too many changes on too many fronts led to us to the decision to finally move home to Australia. I was exhausted. I found that although the Word of God was precious to me I had no oil in my life. I would muse but there was no fire! The fire had gone out.

It takes fuel to create a fire

The same way water puts a fire out, struggles tend to take the edge off life and leave you flat! Whether you are in trouble or living life on the edge, it is important to have two things going for you. One is, build a deposit of the Word of God in your life and secondly, wait upon the Spirit of God in prayer. Both are essential: The Word represents the Lamp of God in our heart and the Spirit is represented by the oil. You need both to light a fire!

Matthew 25:1-14 tells us that the kingdom of God is like ten virgins who went out to meet the bridegroom. The five wise virgins kept their lamps filled with oil so when they needed light they were ready. The foolish virgins did not and asked to borrow oil from the wise virgins. Jesus illustrates the fact that you must keep your lamps filled with oil. Whatever you are about to meet in life whether good or bad, you must be ready. In good times it is easy to forget to keep the lamp filled with oil. When trials come, your lamp may be empty or near empty. The Lamp represents the Word of God. The deposit of the Word of God must be built into your life. If you fail to wait upon God, then the oil which represents the Holy Spirit, does not flow into the lamp and there is no light when it is needed most. There is a Scripture is Psalms, which says, “while I mused, the fire burned.” When you wait upon God and meditate upon His Word, the Holy Spirit illuminates the Word. The oil flows into the lamp and as you “muse”, it creates a “spark.” This ignites a fire in your Spirit. This is how God designed you to live. It is called the revelation knowledge. God did not design us to live by natural reasoning. You are to be led by the Spirit. It is an “instinct,” “a hunch,” which speaks to us ever so quietly. If you wait upon God, you can learn to hear it.

The hardest thing was to get up and moving again. When you are hurt and tired you want to crawl into a corner. Your confidence takes a hit. I experienced this in the first two years when we moved back to Australia. First, I was in shock then I went into denial, followed by emotions of frustration and anger, but also a deep loss of confidence which plunged me into a mild depression. Now I don’t think I am alone in this experience, because it’s not what we go through in life that determines the outcome, it is our reaction to it. Successful people get up and get into life again. New experiences that do not reach their desired end don’t have to spell the end. If life were a game of “high jump,” you would keep elevating the bar until you knocked it down. You never know how high you can jump if you do not keep elevating the bar. The failure is not in knocking down the bar; it’s not attempting to jump the bar at all.

Most successful people have lives littered with shattered dreams and some failures. But in there is their success too! The secret is they never quit and eventually they do succeed. I am glad that Peter and I have taken on every challenge ever presented to us because it makes life exciting. It makes you extend yourself. You find your limitations, and that in turn forces you to modify and improve your life. It can only make you a better and more fruitful person. Most people stay in the ‘safe zone’ of mediocrity because they are afraid of change. I have never wanted to settle for mediocre. I hope this book will encourage you to reach out for more. I hope you will find your limitations, and then with God’s help push out the limitations and become a bigger person. Therein lays the adventure!

It is great to read autobiographies of highly successful people. One thing they all have in common is that they do not blame their poverty, their illiteracy, their families or their circumstances for life’s troubles. Achievers take personal responsibility for where they are and what they can do to improve their lives. When they face change of any kind they embrace it; and with an unmistakable belief in themselves and God, they set out and adjust their lives. They adapt and work on improving themselves and their situation. Successful people have their eye on a goal. They are looking forward. Change is hard. Human nature doesn’t like to change but a certain amount is inevitable. Some changes we can plan for, some take us completely by surprise. Whatever way it comes, it has to be managed. Our ability to adapt to change will determine how much of the blessing we can walk in.

“We cannot move at all, unless we are willing to accept losing our balance, at least temporarily.”

This book is about how you can reach down on the inside and receive the blessing. It doesn’t matter whether you are happy, sad, rich or poor, content or discontent. You can be blessed, NOW! Take on trouble and beat the hell out of it! If you believe you are a victim, you will be one. But you don’t have to be a victim. You can make change work for you! Dr. David Yonggi Cho who pastors the largest church in the world in Korea, says that the blessing of God springs from within. No matter what is happening in your life the best will come from within you, not from your circumstances. People say, “if only I could find the right partner in life, then I would be happy,” or “this job is making me miserable.” Looking for something outside of yourself will not make you happy, even if you do find it. The problem does not lie with the outward circumstance; it lies within. Even if you could change your circumstances it would not be long before you would be unhappy again because the problem is within. Modifying our behaviour and attitudes will help make outward circumstances look a lot brighter even if nothing changes outwardly. Change itself can spell trouble for many because it is unsettling, but we can be blessed and content while walking through change.

“Your life is formed from the inside out.”

A man whose wife had left him came to my husband for help. He was in a dreadful state. Not only had she left and taken their four children with her, he had just found out that three of his four children were not his. Through personal coaching he is now functioning again. Not only that, he has started more than fifteen small life transformation groups with newly saved Christians. He refocused his life, took on a new challenge and is moving ahead. His personal circumstances have not changed, but despite adversity he has found the blessing of God. In himself, he has never been happier and felt more fulfilled. Only God can take you to that place. It is only by God’s grace that you can find contentment in the middle of change. To be content in the midst of change is a challenge. It is the skill to keep the heart quiet. Grace is God’s divine ability. His strength is available to you when you need help.

“Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need. “ Hebrews 4:16

The responsibility is upon you to draw on God’s grace when you need help. Jesus did it all. He made all the provision He is going to make through the Cross of Calvary. His Grace, His ability, His strength, His adequacy is available for you to draw upon. His help comes in different ways, from different people and sources, but you must ask for it! When we are born again the Bible says we are partakers of the divine nature. In His divine nature there is everything you need that pertains to life and godliness. The blessing is in you! Everything that pertains to life is in Him! You can access it through grace and faith. If it’s in Him, and He’s in you, guess where life and godliness and blessing are! They are in you. Everything you need that pertains to a great life is in you by Christ Jesus!

There tends to be a faulty theology which says that if you are in the will of God all will go well for you. But the Bible doesn’t bear this out. There is a passage in the Old Testament that says God left some enemies in the land so that the younger generation coming up “would learn to know war.” God wants us strong, and we need a few battles to make us strong. Most Bible heroes lived their lives constantly dealing with new challenges and changes or facing crises. We will look at some of them closer throughout this book.

I must confess that I have always found myself to be on the privileged end of global injustice! I was taught from an early age, that there is always someone worse off than me. My mother had a great saying when I was feeling battered and bruised: “find someone else worse off than yourself then you won ‘t feel so bad!” Teasing would have to be the limit of what I would call being “badly off.” I can remember crying to my mother that the “toughies” on the bus had taken my bag off me on my way home. They had then thrown it out the window as the bus was leaving after the bus driver had made me get off the bus. This happened most afternoons while I was in primary school.

Successful people draw upon negative experiences in life to make them bigger as people. The world is such a small stage now with technology advancing so rapidly. You can watch a war as it happens, or view the devastation natural disasters cause. We are so connected to our fellow human beings. You cannot stay detached from the pain and suffering in the world. When you feel you have drawn the ‘short straw’ of life, it is a good decision to “go and find someone worse off.” Helping others elevates you above your situation

Purpose after displacement

When I came back from America, we were displaced and had lost the ‘vehicle’ which had framed our sense of destiny for the past twenty-eight years. My husband recently went to Chile and Argentina and a ministry colleague Maria Theresa, told him of how she had received a dream of our family at the airport with their bags packed and nowhere to go. She received this dream at the exact time we were leaving Americ to come back to Australia and said that she had been praying for us ever since. Thank God for His body the Church, which He stirs in our times of need to pray for the saints. If you are going through a hard time or find yourself no longer in ministry, be encouraged; God raises up his people to pray for others!

The ‘call’ to ministry

Coming back to my ‘call’ to the ministry has often acted as a shock-absorber and helped me stayed aligned with God’s purpose.

A year after I was saved, God called me to the ministry. Peter and I were living on the farm and Peter had received a very specific ‘call’ to serve God. I wasn’t particularly looking for a word from God, but one night, I was transported from my bed and I found myself standing before the Lord of Glory. I was speechless. I had never read Revelation 1:14, but that is what I saw before me:

“and in the midst of the seven lamp stands One like the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the feet and girded about the chest with a golden band His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and His eyes were like aflame of fire. His feet were like fine brass, and His voice as the sound of many waters...”

I was speechless. I now understood what Paul was talking about in the Bible when he wrote of being speechless before the Lord. In a moment of time, I was standing before the Lord of Glory, Jesus Christ. The light of His Glory is indescribable and overpowering. I heard Jesus talking to me. I could not understand what He was saying to me because it literally sounded to me like the “sound of many waters.” I tried to speak, but I was dumbstruck, my jaw was on my chest, and I couldn’t speak. I don’t know how long I stood in His glory, in awe of His presence, but I do remember when the glory started to fade. I didn’t want the glory that I was surrounded in to fade. As I write this, I am transported back to that moment and I remember that feeling of not wanting to leave His glorious presence! I reached out as if in some vain attempt I could grasp it and hold onto it; but it became dim and in a moment His glory was gone. Suddenly I became aware of the walls of my bedroom, and I was conscious that I was coming back into my body. I don’t remember leaving my body; did I actually leave my physical body? What a strange experience! Was it a vision? I had a vague idea about visions in the Bible. Was this one? My husband, Peter was asleep beside me. I would have to wait until the morning to talk about it. The next day seemed so surreal. I didn’t know what Jesus talked to me about. I wished I knew what He had spoken to me! Peter and I discussed it and he suggested I seek God for the answer to that question. The next night I sought God for the answer to what He had spoken to me. This is what He told me:

John 21:15 “...do you love me? Yes Lord, You know that I love you” Then He said, feed my lambs. ‘He said to me a second time, ‘do you love Me?” Yes, Lord, you know that I love You. “He said ,tend my sheep.

I knew I had received a privileged call to serve Him.

Coming back to my original purpose for life has held me, like an anchor, through many trials and tribulations.

You may ask the question, “this isn’t what I expected?” or “why did I start this?” Maybe Jesus had one or two of those fleeting thoughts cross His mind during His ministry! If Jesus had of looked up at the treatment He received from His Father’s Hand, it would have paralyzed His ministry. Instead, Jesus always kept the ‘big picture’ in mind. He was there for a bigger purpose than Himself. He looked at how He could serve His fellowman and God exalted Him. Jesus knew He was there to serve His Father. No matter what we go through we have a loving Father that keeps His hand upon us. He wants to give us a bigger picture. He wants us to keep the whole of our life in perspective; to enjoy the good, learn from the bad, adjust to change and ultimately live life well.

Read Chapter Two “Being Productive” coming in the next few days.

If you would like more of Peter and Lindsay Earle’s teaching go to www.pastoralministrytraining.com