Illustrations by Yukai Du
For her seventh-grade science project, our youngest daughter, Emily, decided to measure bacteria levels along the bank of a local stream. I was doing the project with her, and at our first stop, we waded into the creek, got a water sample, and carefully tested it. We were both nervous about following the precise steps of our little bacteria-testing kit, so before we started, we prayed.
After we finished our first test, Emily took out her logbook to record each step. She asked me what we’d done first, and I told her we’d prayed.
She said, “I can’t write that.”
“Why not? We prayed.”
“That isn’t how it works, Dad. They don’t want us to say that.”
Emily had gone to Christian schools her whole life, starting with nursery school. She regularly attended church and Sunday school and went to a Christian camp in the summer. All her friends were Christians, along with her brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles. Frankly, she lived in a Christian ghetto. Yet a mysterious “they” trumped the massive Christian influence in her life.
Behind Emily’s “they” is a philosophy called secularism, which doesn’t just deny God’s existence but denies the existence of any spiritual world. Talking openly about God or to God feels odd when “they” control the narrative, which they do in most of the Western world today.
Pastors aren’t exempt from secularism. In a recent pastors’ cohort, I asked everyone to draw up a plan for creating a praying church. As I read their plans, they had many good ideas (start an elders prayer meeting, be more thoughtful about the pastoral prayer), but something was missing. I told them, “Guys, none of you put down the strategy of praying for your plan. No one was asking God any questions.” One of the pastors said, “How incredible that all eight of us would try to build a praying church without thinking that prayer might be part of the strategy.”
In a recent pastors’ cohort, I asked everyone to draw up a plan for creating a praying church. No one included prayer as part of their plan.
Instinctively, they put planning and prayer in separate buckets. It’s no coincidence that the church prayer meeting has declined simultaneously with the rise of secularism. This is a near perfect example of secularism that relegates prayer to the not real world of fairies and astrology. That is, when we get serious and plan, praying isn’t part of the plan. When that happens, the gospel is sitting on the surface of a church, over an essentially pagan power grid. Planning by prayer alters that power grid.
At our next meeting, I showed the pastors the “beating heart” of my planning: multiple prayer cards filled with questions I ask God. Prayer saturates my planning. Everything I do as a leader of a Jesus community begins with prayer. Why? That’s how a Jesus follower in a Jesus community does life, whether you are a single woman, a wealthy businessperson, or a pastor.
And quite frankly, prayerless planning is incredibly ineffective.
A spirit of expectant waiting where you don’t plan is a critical ingredient to a praying church. The author of 1 Samuel is at pains to contrast the impatient spirit of Saul, who can’t wait, with the praying spirit of David, who is constantly consulting God.
Acts opens with a 10-day prayer meeting: “All these with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer” (Acts 1:14). They were simply following Jesus’ plan: “Wait for the promise of the Father” (1:4). What does that mean? This really drives some management consultants berserk: You don’t know. You don’t know when or even how. We don’t control the Spirit. We wait and pray.
We tend to think of prayer as mainly asking => answer. That’s true, but it is far broader and richer than that. A praying community reorients how it does life, which includes work and management.
Let’s take a look at how Jesus and the early church practiced management by prayer, and then examine a modern-day example.
A Case Study of Jesus’ Management by Prayer
Most leaders are quick to acknowledge that recruiting good staff is challenging, so let’s watch Jesus do HR (human resources) work.
Before Jesus selected His disciples, “all night He continued in prayer to God” (Luke 6:12). Jesus is making one of the most important decisions of His earthly life: selecting the church’s DNA. As the world’s most dependent human being, He can’t pick disciples on His own, so He prays. He manages by prayer. In contrast, most churches go into a management mode where prayer functions like a window dressing.
What emerges from Jesus’ prayer vigil is shocking: He selects 12 blue-collar laborers. Instead of Harvard, Jesus goes to Home Depot. At least seven of the 12, and clearly the leaders (Peter, Andrew, and John) are tradesmen. Matthew, a tax collector, is a cross between a sleazy used-car salesman and an entrepreneur. No priests, scholars, or elites. Jesus followed His own advice to “pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest” (Luke 10:2). He picks laborers, not leaders. Surprise is one of the Holy Spirit’s signature moves.
Why does Jesus bypass elites in favor of peasants? He is creating something entirely new, from the ground up. He needs new DNA. He had said, “No one puts new wine into old wineskins” (Luke 5:37).
Who would have thought that a group of fishermen would be Jesus’ first-round draft pick? And yet I’ve marveled at the church’s resilience to the onslaughts of unbelief in the last 200 years. Much of that is simply the blue-collar bent of the church. Peasants are notoriously stubborn, quick with an opinion, and often speak in short pithy sayings.
My wife is a peasant. Growing up on the streets of Philly, Jill got used to the tough side of life. She taught me the skill of walking in a rough neighborhood: be aware of your environment, but keep your head down, don’t make eye contact, keep a good pace. Like Sam, the gardener in “The Lord of the Rings,” she’s not easily snookered. Popular opinion rarely sways her.
Elites can easily despise or dismiss peasants. This theme echoes all through the gospels. When the Sadducees order the temple police to arrest Jesus, they return empty-handed and tell their bosses: “No one ever spoke like this man!” The Pharisees answered them, “Have you also been deceived? Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him? But this crowd that does not know the law is accursed” (John 7:46-49).
A praying community reorients how it does life, which includes work and management.
You can feel the utter disdain the elites feel for the peasants.
Practically, what are the implications for selecting leaders? For starters, I know lots of churches who wish they’d spent a night in prayer before they selected their current leaders. Maybe this is one time where WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) should be something we actually do. My suggestion: Stop hunting for leaders. Instead, pray regularly for God to raise up laborers for your church. Then hunt for laborers, faithful men and women who show up and do their work well, with humility. Your leaders will naturally emerge out of your laborers.
A Case Study from Acts: Management by Prayer
As we saw, Acts opens with a 10-day prayer meeting. During this time, they make their first HR decision. So when they select Judas’ replacement, “they prayed and said, ‘You, Lord, who know the hearts of all, show which one of these two you have chosen” (Acts 1:24).
Likewise, when the church sends the first missionaries it emerges out of a prayer time: “While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting (prayer), the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.’ (Spirit) Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off (to proclaim Jesus)” (Acts 13:2-3).
Notice that prayer isn’t a window dressing, it’s where the Spirit works.
My dad used to ask pastors, “Who selected Barnabas and Paul for their first missionary journey?” Pastors typically would say, “The church in Antioch.” Then he would show them this passage. The church affirmed the Spirit’s call and sent them off, but the Spirit called them. The Spirit is a real, deciding, thinking person running the show.
How did the Holy Spirit work? Luke doesn’t tell us, but I know that when I slow down, especially during my weekly two-hour prayer time on Friday, stuff happens; unexpected thoughts come. In fact, most of our breakthroughs happen during those quiet times of prayer.
Notice the Spirit’s signature move: surprise. Just before this, Luke mentions the five key leaders of the church at Antioch. Two of the five (Barnabas and Paul, likely the most gifted of the five) are selected by the Spirit. What church in its right mind sends off its senior pastor and executive pastor into missions? I mean, missionaries disappear. When I worked for 10 years in urban Philly, it was like I was off the grid. And yet, isn’t that just what the Father did with His Son?
The Spirit pulled apart this highly successful, multi-ethnic leadership team, thus weakening the church in Antioch in order to grow the church in the wider Roman empire. Imagine how a congregation’s vision of missions would change if the senior pastor left for Africa? Plus, pushing out two gifted leaders opens up room for younger leaders to emerge at Antioch. Typically, stronger leaders are reluctant to let go of control, thus stifling younger leaders.
Don’t misunderstand. The Spirit isn’t opposed to good management. Over the next 10 years, the apostle Paul wisely pivots between the two key centers of the Greek world — Ephesus and Corinth. But the Spirit can’t breathe if management takes center stage. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre points out that management has no end goal other than order and efficiency. It’s focused on process. It has no telos or end goal. Only the Spirit of Jesus can lead us into impossible tasks that we never dreamed about.
A Modern-Day Case Study of Recruiting by Prayer
When “we” started seeJesus in 1999, the Spirit had been weakening me for almost a decade in multi-layered dying. It’s hard to describe how low the Lord had taken me. I was literally down to one close friend. When I started seeJesus, I was the only employee. I wasn’t sure I could raise enough money to cover my salary. The immensity of shame and loss I felt constantly drew me into a fellowship of His suffering.
If you’ve been shunned or slandered, you lack weight. The Hebrew word for glory is weight. When you lack weight, it’s hard to get people to return phone calls or to take you seriously. The gift of this lengthy death created new contours in my soul. I’m so aware of what it’s like to be outside the camp and bear the reproach He endured (Hebrews: 13:13) that I try to be quick to return emails and phone calls.
I was in an unusual place: The Lord Jesus had given me this immense vision of preparing the bride for suffering, but He’d stripped me of all human power to implement that vision. So I had to do everything by prayer. In one of the many twists of the Spirit, what Jesus had taught me about prayer during some of the worst of the suffering, I wrote into the book, “A Praying Life,” which surprised us all by becoming popular!
But the problem of weightlessness still haunted me. When I tried to recruit a director of ministry for seeJesus in 2010, I had a string of recruiting failures. I was discouraged. With 13 direct reports, I had little time to write. Finally, during one of my Friday prayer times in 2018, I did two relatively obvious things: I prayed, “Jesus, would you run this thing?” And I decided to recruit only by prayer.
Within months, unusual things began to happen. I’d been convinced that we didn’t have anyone inside our work to manage it. We had some “Home Depot workers” (including me), but we needed “Harvard grads.” Then, a surprising thought formed in my mind, “You have the people within your work to lead it.” I treat promptings like this cautiously since this could just be human intuition, so like Mary, I hide them in my heart.
The Spirit isn’t opposed to good management. But management has no telos, or end goal. Only the Spirit of Jesus can lead us into impossible tasks that we never dreamed about.
I’ve noticed though, that promptings from God have “markers” — they tend to be unusual, outside the box, and yet thoroughly biblical. I was aware of my weightlessness and how it limited my work, but I’d not pushed it away or opened the door to bitterness. I’d received the dying, and I knew that dying well was the launching pad for resurrection. So like the captain of my granddad’s ship, I kept a weather eye out for a wind change.
A few months later, I got another prompting during my Friday prayer time, “Bob Loker could be your director of ministry.” As our board chair, Bob loved and valued our ministry. We’d gotten even closer when his wife, Becky, passed away from cancer, but Bob was a few weeks shy of 80 years old! Yet it struck a chord with me. I called our management consultant, who knows Bob well; he had the same positive response.
The Spirit’s help that spring was remarkable. In addition to Bob joining the staff, I promoted three more staff members, and our consultant suggested we form a leadership team, something I’d been praying about for 10 years. Then I asked our consultants help with a management system, and he introduced us to one that has helped us immensely. We are still Home Depot, but we are also a cathedral not made with hands.
I say this because management and the Spirit’s work aren’t opposed to one another. The Spirit helps us manage better. You just don’t want managing to be in the driver’s seat. If you do, you kill imagination because the manager can only see what is, but the praying leader sees what could be. Recall that Ephesians 3 ends in “now unto him who is able to do beyond all that we can ask or think.”
The Bob Loker story is ordinary, yet it feels spectacular to me because I can still feel how weak and overwhelmed I was. I’m only aware of this story because it emerged out of prayer, and I’ve continued to be attentive to its unfolding. I’ve watched and prayed. So to the weary saints out there, don’t despise the lowliness of your stories. Don’t bother that others might not be able to value your stories the way you do. They are His gifts to you. Enjoy them.
Our families, businesses, and — yes —even our science projects require good management. We do our homework. We invite the wisdom of a “multitude of counselors.” Because our deepest management need is the executive power and wisdom of the Spirit of Jesus, our first step is always to pray.
Paul Miller is executive director of seeJesus, a discipling mission that mentors through seminars, cohorts, and Bible studies. He is the author of “A Praying Church” and “J-Curve.” Paul and his wife, Jill, live in the Philadelphia area and have six children and fifteen grandchildren.