It has been a while since I posted here, for a couple of reasons.
My Doctoral work left me with a strong sense of what I wanted to be as a leader and the limitations of my ability to live that out in my present situation. I am told that this is a very common occurance.
So I began to ask God is there was somethign in His mind for me. Stay and keep on doing what I was doing? Stay and make changes that would create turmoil? Go elsewhere? What!!!???
Then last january during a study week I realized that i had no real vision for my preaching or for the church for the fall. That had never happened before and I began to realize that God was prompting me.
For a while I thought that God was leading me to be the state Pastor for Kansas and the Oklahama Panhandle. And while I would have loved that, I began to realize that I was a bit more radical than the leadership there was ready to handle. So that door closed.
At the same time I went ahead and resigned from my senior pastor role.
What followed was a couple months of real faith testing. We ended up selling our house and going for July without a house or a job and just a lot of faith.
Then I got a call from Western Canada. The Western Canadian District of the Christian and Missinory Alliance Church was looking for a Church Effectivness Coach. The 110 congregations of the Alberta Alliance Church are coached by three guys, whose task in to encourage, support, mentor and care for the churches in an effort to help them be effective.
The invited me to talk to them and when I did I felt that this was a job that was written for me. It was a difficult choice to move from the Church of God! Though in a larger sense I guess I really didn't. I get to keep my Church of God (Anderson) credentials as an Ecumenical (sp?) pastor, which is both cool and shows a great deal of spiritual maturity in the Alliance church.
So, Tuesday, August 15th, I start my new job. I am living in Alberta Canada, and will move into a house in Cochrane Alberta, a town of about 12,000 just west of Calgary, Alberta, and work out of an office in downtown Calgary.
The cool thing is that most of my family and my wife's family live near ehre, so it is both a new beginning and a kind of homecoming. And that is cool!
That's life at the moment!
Ken
2 comments:
Ken,
Good to see you on the blogosphere again. Hopefully you will continue to share your thoughts here, including your adventures with the CMA. In Western Canada, in particular, the CMA have really done some significant things. I'm sure there are things we can learn from them.
I will be in prayer for you as you continue through this transition process.
And 7 years later, I, your son is in University for music while your daughter is in school for the possibility of Pharmaceutical Tech or a high paying job. You are successful in your job at CMA and mom is working and doing what she loves to do, sewing clothes and knitting. Life changes, and God was there through all of it, and has so much more yet to come for all over us.
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