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| Leland, Michigan |
When leaders lose their souls, so do the churches and organizations they lead, writes Ruth Haley Barton. (Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry, 13)
For this reason I'm going to go apart and pray this afternoon, for several hours. I've done this for decades. I am so looking forward to meeting alone with God today. I have burdens I need to bring to him, and God has things he wants to bring to me.
Gordon Cosby has written:
“Soul slips away easily from a church or an institution. You may go to any of these places and find that the Spirit has departed and the Shekinah is gone. . . . When a local church loses its soul it begins to slip into mediocrity and is unable to give life. The average person doesn’t even know when a church begins to lose its soul. It takes unusual deeper wisdom to see it, and then when we see it, it is costly beyond words to retrieve it.” (Quoted in Ib.)
My Praying class, which begins this Sunday night at Redeemer, is, among other things, a course in soul retrieval and cultivation. (See here if you want to attend.) This is another way I am combatting soulless mediocrity in myself and with my Redeemer Jesus family.
I am praying for soul retrieval and restoration.
