Prayer unites embattled pastors
MAPLE RIDGE, BC—In January, about 15 pastors who meet weekly to pray for their communities of Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows on the eastern edge of Metro Vancouver felt it was time to encourage their people to start praying together as well.
"Three weeks later, really spur of the moment," says Mark Burch, senior pastor of Maple Ridge Baptist Church, "we had about 500 people from 19 churches show up."
A key factor in uniting these pastors in prayer is the fact that many have been battling against severe adversities that have placed their ministries and even their families at risk.
"It's like doing ministry in quicksand," says Burch. "As long as you keep running really fast over the surface and don't sink down in, you're fine. But the minute you slow down, you just immediately start to feel like you're sinking."
Since arriving in 2011, he says, "all hell has broken loose on both sides of the family—family crisis, marriage crisis, teenage crisis, health crisis. 'God, when will this stop?'"
Burch spoke recently with two newly arrived pastors, and found the same sentiments emerging. "They don't like it. They're discouraged. Their wives are struggling," he says.
For John Martens, planter and pastor of The Connection, their problems began in 2009, and escalated to the point two years later that they very nearly lost everything.
"We started having one thing happen after another, really out of the blue," he says. "Some of it was people stuff, some of it circumstantial, some of it health issues. They just kept cascading. Our entire church was destroyed. I thought our family was finished."
On the brink of giving up, Martens says God told him to "try once again"—which he did. And since then, there has been a major turnaround. "I'm definitely not saying everything's going well," he says, "but it's almost like something cracked in the spiritual realm."
Burch estimates of the 25 or so evangelical or gospel-centred churches in Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows, a quarter "are just hanging on by their fingernails."
"On a really good Sunday," he says, there might be 5,000 people in church out of a population of 100,000.
"We don't want to paint a martyr-like image—poor us—but spiritually there often appears to be a cloud over Maple Ridge," says Duane Goerzen, lead pastor of Maple Ridge Community Church, which his father launched in 1985.
"I don't know what it is, but maybe there are just some spiritual barriers to God moving," says Martens. "Pitt Meadows has this big Wicca group. Maple Ridge has a large Hell's Angels contingent."
Yet it is these trials that have driven many of these pastors collectively to their knees. "Because we're all feeling the same thing, we're saying, let's unite, let's pray," says Burch. "I think there's a growing love among the guys."
"When I first got here three years ago," says Josh Arrington, planter and pastor of Church on the Rock in Pitt Meadows, "there was a lot more of, 'Who are you and why are you coming to my area?' Now there's been some leadership turnover in these churches, and these new leaders are saying, 'How can we work together to impact the Kingdom?'"
But Goerzen cautions his fellow pastors not to raise their hopes too high.
"It's not always about the results you can see," he says. "You don't know if you're called to do the prep work for those that will follow. So when you're seeing the trickles but not the breakthroughs, you've got to persevere and trust you're walking where He's called you to walk."
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