Gateway Church Australia
Resilience Through Adversity - Mark Pomery
So the title of the message was sort of called Resilience Through Adversity, but the real title of the message is my 100% perfectly valid reasons why I could have quit and why I didn't. And the context is that last November we had a board member go rogue, I know that happens sadly, and quit the board, left the church immediately, and that also happens. However, this particular board member decided to then wage a campaign against me to try and take me out, and so they started doing the thing, you know, sending the emails, making the phone calls, getting people together for coffee, and telling just a lot of stuff that wasn't true. And however, over the next six weeks, many of those people that listened to this list didn't verify the list, and our attendance went down by 50% in six weeks, and our giving went down by 40% in six weeks. So it's a pretty steep cliff that we dropped off, and I just say that the next six plus months was brutal. We were, you know, praying the three AM prayers, you know, where are the new people going to come from? Because we haven't met them yet, are we going to be able to remain financially viable? This big hole that we've had in the budget, that's sort of like some practical stuff? Then there's the personal stuff, you know, the personal betrayal, the lies, all that sort of stuff. That stuff cuts like a knife, and that's because we're human, obviously. And these are people that we prayed for and prayed with, people that we've had into our homes, led into our hearts, and so it's not just that they leave you, but they leave you by the lobbing grenades back over the fence on their way out. And then in this particular season, we had a lot of gaps open up on our organizational chart. There was a lot of boxes with no names. And so we had to start inserting ourselves, myself and many of our other key team, into those boxes, while playing hurt. And that's tough sledding, okay? And anyway, now I don't need a hug, write that down, because thankfully, in the first eight months of this year, we've grown by 50%, and, you know, God turned a exodus into a pruning season, and he's been very good to us. That said, I'm aware that some of you could probably beat me in a church hurt scar measuring contest. I'm not, like, standing up here, like, oh, I've been for it worse than any of you can even imagine. But I just want to share some of that journey and what it looks like and the role that resilience plays in that journey, which I think that's what's universal, regardless of your level of adversity in the past, maybe some of you now, or potentially things that are going to happen in the future. But the definition that I like to lean on is really the important one, that resilience is the ability to bounce back and thrive in the face of adversity. This idea of resilience, it's more than just surviving. Now you have to survive, like, enduring plays a role, but there's a superpower that God can actually unleash in our lives, in our ministry, in our leadership that can be attributed to this idea of resilience that actually will see us bouncing back even stronger. Now with the endurance athletes that I coached, so I'll send them a schedule for the week of the workouts, and I'll typically include two or three what I call breakthrough workouts. And these are the workouts that when my athletes see them in rising, they start to associate my name with some adult language, and they're like, oh, dear, Wednesday is not looking good for me. And the purpose of these breakthrough workouts is actually to break them down a bit. And then the next part of that process is to then spend some time recovering, and then ultimately build back stronger. That's why they're called breakthrough, that you will actually come out the other side stronger. But all three of these things matter. Now in the case I'm talking about ministry, and adversity, and bad actors doing bad things, you don't choose that. Now these athletes sign up for me to coach them, but taking that, things will happen to us in church life and leadership that will break us down. We don't always have control over that. But this recovery process is literally the key to then being able to come back more resilience and experience new levels of breakthrough in our leadership. So I just want to give you a quick flyover of my recovery principles. These aren't original, hence the slide. And they're not exhaustive either, but I've only got 15 minutes. So it's a short list. This is the first one. Don't live in denial. See, one of the things as Christian leaders is we can sort of think to ourselves, we can only think Christian thoughts. You know, when people do bad things to us, we can only think Christian's thoughts. We have to pray. God bless them. Let me assure you, when all this stuff went down December, January, I wasn't praying God bless them. I was praying God get them. That was literally it. And I prayed God get them for the next two months, then I kind of started to recover a little bit, and then I started praying God don't let them have a stroke. That lasted for about another four months in the journey. But allow yourself to acknowledge that this sucks. This is horrible. This is just don't skip this step, but don't get stuck there either. Then I had to remember why I started, and by the way, I had to remember what I started sometimes daily and sometimes hourly. Like this isn't fun at the moment, God. But yet when I was 26, I quit my corporate job, and I went to Bible college because I felt a call to give the best hours of my day to full-time ministry, and I've been doing that for several decades, and my thing was like, if I'm going to quit, which I had considered, I'm not going to do it because of some bad actors. I'm not going to let the bad actors determine my destiny. If I'm going to quit, it's because I feel God saying fair enough, but I didn't. And then this one, monitor your altitude. That's not a typo, monitor your attitude, although I could have talked about that. But monitor your altitude, and this really came down to, during this recovery process, it was so tempting, so often, to get into a little dark room with some of the people that are there and just take shots at the bad actors, because I knew, at least for a moment, I would have felt better about myself and start, and I had to remember, no, I'm better than that. I'm not going to lower myself and what I say. I'm either going to say nothing at all, actually, I said nothing at all, then lower myself to that altitude. Now, you do need some people that are your trusted confidants that you can sort of just open it all up, and Rick was that person in this occasion. I phoned him up, and I shared this story, and Rick said to me, "It's okay, Marco. We've had more ecstatuses than Moses," and I was like, "I found that strangely encouraging." And then the next kind of piece, and this is kind of linear, I mean, it's not like linear, but it's like chronologically linear, forgive fast, and the word fast here is relative. Okay? We know the quicker we forgive, the better it's going to be for us. But there may be the reality that you're not ready to forgive. So we're not talking about forced forgiveness, but putting forgiveness out there as an aspirational goal. Like God, I want to get to where I'm ready to start forgiving these people. Six months in, I made a list of all the bad actors, and you'll be happy to know it wasn't a hit list. It was a forgiveness list, and I literally wrote them out every single person, every single name, it was a long list. It was a long list. And then I literally went through that list name by name, and I prayed the exact same prayer. I had it written down with the blank space baby to put their name in, and that was it. And by the way, I've recycled that several times with some of the worst actors, because later on, I realized I still really haven't fully forgiven them. So some of them I've forgiven three times and counting. And this is really where it kind of lands, that you don't have to seek your own vindication when people come against you, when people grind your gears, when people, particularly when it's false deception, lies, all that sort of stuff, Joe McKeever, a US leader who calls these people preacher eaters. And I stumbled across Psalm 56, and clearly I don't have time to read it all, but I will read a slice of it, but the whole Psalm Psalm 56, so you can bookmark it for yourself, if and when you have some bad actors lurking in your life, this is just a small slice of the reminder that God's our vindicator. And this is David, you keep track of all my sorrows, you have collected all my tears in your bottle, you have recorded each one in your book, isn't that just good to know that God's like actually paying attention. All right, let's start. And then I don't have to pray God get him, because actually he might, but that's on him. Like he doesn't need suggestions, because he might get him, like literally take him out the back of the school gymnasium and like smack them silly, like he might do that. But I don't need to do that, and I just need to trust if that's what he wants, or whatever he wants to do, the point is, my enemies will retreat when I call to you for help. And this I know God is on my side. And then final thought is that if you're in ministry, you will accumulate scars, okay? They don't put that in the Bible college prospectus, but they should. Because at least we'll go into ministry with some realistic expectations, I wasn't prepared for this. We will accumulate scars, but here's two things why that's good news. Number one, to quote the prophet Rocky Balboa, chicks dig scars, so that's a good thing. And the second is that your scars and my scars, they're actually visible signs that the devil tried to take you down, or take you out, and he failed. (applause)