My pastor often uses the phrase ‘change the way you think’, it is his definition of repentance, this is the place I want to start, changing the way we think and in this case in thinking about every aspect of organisational leadership, management and administration. No thought or action can afford to be left as sacred or secular. Either is an error which has consequences for His Kingdom. There are of course spiritual aspects to life but to make those sacred to the detriment of the emotional or physical will rob us of a fully alive life. Jesus was of course fully God and fully man. The son of God, the most spiritual of beings became the most physical of beings that must teach us something.
If we are to use the common description of the soul as being the combined mind will and emotions then it is interesting to note that God must therefore also represent the soul after all he has a mind, will and emotions.
If we add to this that our heavenly father is creator God and that he created all things physical and what is more that one of the descriptions used of God is that he is the great architect then we should by now have enough to know that a secular sacred division cannot possibly be in the original plans and order of God.
That virtually no one in the bible was in ‘full time ministry’ will add to this argument.
All things are sacred. Once again quoting my pastor he said a few years ago that with God everything is natural and I like to add that once everything was supernatural. These two phrases will most likely start to mess with your thinking and that is the goal. Change the way you think. Think of it another way, once there was nothing on this planet made by man. God hid everything for us to discover! The food, the building materials, the technology waiting, hidden by a creator God who would watch man’s advances through time, man’s great conquests, with the joy of a Dad.
Somewhere hidden in this divide is I suspect a lingering arrogance and Godlessness. A suggestion in our developed psyche that we have somehow eclipsed God with our developments particularly in science. I love to jest that we think that if we gave God a new iPhone or iPad that he would not know what to do with it, but that in fact if we did he knows things that the developers do not know.
Perhaps our division lies in misunderstanding the meaning of sacred and the goal of being holy. Sacred has its roots in being holy but holy is not to be misunderstood as being set apart from the world but rather as Strong’s concordance puts it abstaining from earths defilements. It means to be devoted to the service of deity and the service of deity is to see the whole world filled with the Glory, not just the church.
The Gift of Administration is often a victim of this thinking, what at times exacerbates the problem is that even when used in the church it has been reduced to a non spiritual gifting. The gifted administrator has been twice robbed, their gift when used in the church has been considered non spiritual and their gift when used outside the church has had a non sacred context.
Can we correct this imbalance, I believe that we can. When I wrote my second book. “Kisses from a Good God.’ I wrote a chapter based on a statement which I had made from the pulpit. It was a simple phrase: ‘surgery is not a second class healing.’ In the foreword to my book a urologist, now my friend wrote, ‘that simple message was probably the most profound pearl of wisdom that I have learned in all my years of training and practice. Doctors and other Health Care Professionals have told me that I have changed the way in which they practice medicine. I am humbled but greatly encouraged. I believe that the same transformation will happen to you as an administrator, you will see, as my friend Leif Hetland says, “through heavens eyes.”