It’s been nearly twenty-five years since my path began to c ross with four men who have become a leadership community of grace for me. One of them, Chuck Miller, was serving as pastor to college students at Saddleback Church at the time. I was a young, driven college pastor at another Southern California church. Our church staff team attended Saddleback’s church growth conference, and when it came time for us to choose a breakout session, I went to Chuck’s session on college ministry. I don’t remember learning a lot about ministering to college students. Instead, he shared his philosophy of ministry, simple and scripturally rich, which has shaped me in two key areas: (1) discovering the practice of solitude; (2) developing a leadership community of grace. This approach became the basis of The Leadership Institute, where I now serve with him today.

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01.  The Practice of Solitude

Before I was given this gift of a leadership community of grace, my ministry had been more about gathering a crowd than about cultivating a community of the committed, following Jesus together with them. My style of ministry was hurried and frantic. My goal was to fill the calendar with more events and fill the seats with more people. I would never have said it that bluntly, but it would have been hard for an objective observer to come to a different conclusion. I felt satisfied and important when the number of college students coming to our meetings was growing. I felt frustrated and worthless when that number decreased or even stayed the same. In conversations among our church staff at the time, we would say, “We count people because people count.” I don’t think that kind of math made anyone but us feel important.

At the beginning of that new season, when I was serving as a college pastor in a larger church, I was introduced to the practice of spending extended time alone with God in silence, solitude, and listening prayer. I had read many spiritual formation books affirming the value of such practices. I very much liked what they said, but I hadn’t actually tried practicing those disciplines myself. I didn’t quite know how to get there from where I found myself in my busy life and ministry. (Over the last twenty years, I have come across many who testify to having a similar experience.) This unhurried practice of extended time alone with God would, however, become essential to my growth as a follower of Jesus.

That first experience of “extended time with God” was only seventy-five minutes. That was about all the leader of the retreat, Wayne Anderson, thought we seminarians could handle—and Wayne was probably right. A number of things happened in those minutes—and most of them in the last ten or fifteen. I spent the first hour feeling itchy and noisy inside. I found myself frustrated that God wasn’t doing something or saying something to me. I expected, I suppose, some sort of burning bush, heavenly vision or inner voice—and I expected it in a hurry! What I experienced, however, was silence and solitude. To be fair, that was the advertised aim of the retreat day.

A couple of days later, on Sunday afternoon, it was time for my weekly two-hour meeting with the college ministry team leaders. After talking through some details about a few upcoming events, I challenged these leaders to scatter around the church property and spend fifteen minutes alone and quiet with God, just listening to him. They were surprised by the assignment but, thankfully, willing.

After the fifteen minutes, as I walked back to my office to meet with the student leaders, God seemed to say, “Don’t do homework tonight. Date your wife.” I was behind on my seminary coursework, but my wife, Gem, had been gone for the whole weekend. I decided to listen to God, so later that evening, I shared with her more about my Friday encounter with Jesus. The seminary assignment eventually got done, but so much that was more important happened in this intimate conversation with my partner in life and ministry.

After the group of leaders had reassembled, we shared with one another what we had experienced in our fifteen minutes alone and quiet with God. Although I don’t remember many specifics, I remember being overwhelmed by the power and reality of what each student experienced during the time. Fifteen minutes together planning a program or solving a problem would have been so much less significant than those fifteen unhurried minutes spent listening for God together. And that listening would bear a great deal of fruit. It would change our understanding of the Christian life as a “following Jesus together” life. We began to learn how to be brothers and sisters to one another—who happened to also share a God-given leadership opportunity. We were growing in the fruitfulness of being alone with God together.

The practices of solitude, silence, and listening to God started to slow me down and enabled me to focus my attention more and more on coming to Jesus and following him rather than talking about Jesus and slaving away for him. In that context and over time, ministry became a matter of simply inviting students to join me in this journey. We were learning to follow Jesus together in community and in ministry. The focus was less and less on our activities for him and more on our attentiveness to him, on walking with him, and on working with him. We were learning together how to follow him—and it was one of the hardest years of my life and ministry. In many ways, my previous focus on planning more events and giving more talks was easier. Staying busy seemed easier than becoming unhurried together, at least at the time. And it was a lot less messy.

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02.  Developing a Leadership Community of Grace

One of the transitions we made in our college ministry that year was that my wife, Gem, and I began to focus much time and attention on a small group of student leaders. About a dozen of them— young men and women who, like me, had been very hurried in planning all of the events and meetings and trips for our college ministry—joined us in seeking Christ together in the context of our leadership gatherings. Often we would take thirty minutes of a two-hour meeting to go our separate ways and simply be alone with God. Depending on where we were meeting, we would walk the church property or around our neighborhood. We’d either listen to what God was saying to us personally through a passage of Scripture or just wait on God together in a heart posture of attentive listening. I wanted to assume that the students could do this on their own time, but we discovered that our way of life and ministry up until then made that unlikely. We needed to learn together how to live this “Come to me, come follow me” way of life.

When we began to focus on Christ like this during our leadership gatherings, when we listened for what God had to say to us and prayed for the larger community of students we served, we realized that being unhurried before God was a messy proposition. Personal struggles surfaced. Conflicts arose. It may sound strange, but we weren’t accustomed to being that involved in one another’s lives. We were used to staying busy with the work, but that year it wasn’t uncommon for us to spend a large portion of these weekly meetings addressing those personal struggles and interpersonal issues. Sometimes two or three smaller meetings would be occurring as small groups of students hashed out their hurts and hardships. Sometimes a few students would gather around to pray for another who had confessed a particular struggle that had been, until then, hidden by the busyness of doing ministry.

This is what I mean about becoming a leadership community of grace. We sought to make it clear that each person, their life and their growing in Jesus was of greater importance than their contribution to the ministry program (as valued as that was). Being brothers and sisters preceded being fellow workers. I had too often gotten this reversed. This priority of sharing communion with God in community became a very fruitful place for us. The impact in each leader’s life was deep and lasting, and the fruitfulness of their leadership grew. This intersection between communion with God together and deep community has been a very fruitful place for me. Many of us still enjoy that community, even at a distance, all these years later.

One of the ways The Leadership Institute team has described this priority is to say that we must always be the people of God before we do the work of God together. This priority of community among leaders is one of the intangibles that translates into generations of leaders going through the journey together. Rather than seeking community with one another first, we pursue deepening intimacy with God together, which draws us closer to one another. Community is the fruit of our primary shared pursuit of God together. Deep community is an overflow of deep and shared communion with God.

This is what Gem and I experienced through that first year of doing life and ministry differently with our volunteer student leaders. At the end of that year, we took a group of students across the country to Urbana, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s triennial missions conference. In one of the sessions, we were given five or ten minutes to be silent and listen for God together. There were about eighteen-thousand of us in that assembly hall. During those few minutes, God seemed to be giving both my wife and me a vision, which was odd, because we didn’t expect God to do things like that anymore! Later that day, Gem shared that she had seen an image of us in a room full of leaders, first her alone with women and me alone with men, then both of us together with the whole group. We were simply sharing our lives. We were telling our stories. In my vision, I had seen what looked like a large map, a grid, with all of the squares grayed out except the bottom left one. It looked like a fully developed map with streets, rivers and other features. I knew intuitively that it was an image of a future ministry of expanded influence.

Realize that Gem and I were in our late twenties at that time. We didn’t yet have much life experience to share with others. Over time, though, we’ve come to realize that these visions were an invitation to develop followers of Jesus by becoming his followers ourselves and then inviting others to join us as a community on the journey. Our visions invited us to step off the ministry hamster wheel we had made for ourselves and instead take on the easy and well-fitting yoke of Jesus for our lives and our ministry—and then help others do the same. That choice has made all the difference. As a result of that choice, we began to think differently—and perhaps less hurriedly—about our lives and on our focus in ministry.

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03.  Deep Community

As I got to know Chuck, Paul Jensen, and the other founders of The Leadership Institute, one of the greatest gifts I began to receive from this leadership community was the experience of deep community that is the fruit of shared communion with God. Before I entered into a formal ministry relationship with The Leadership Institute many years later, we would often meet together to share our lives with one another, reflect on the Scriptures together, and pray with one another. Of course, we were also fellow workers, but this was always held as our secondary rather than primary connection.

In the years since I first embarked on this journey with mentors who have become brothers, I’ve been grateful for a leadership community who has encouraged me in my insecurity and honest doubt, and listened to me in places of deep frustration and authentic confession. These long-term relationships of shared life and leadership have proven to be a place of stability and rootedness in my life. To borrow from one of Eugene Peterson’s book titles, it’s been the gift of a long and shared obedience in the same direction.