"Practical Pastoring" messages have to do with issues of spiritual leadership and reflect Pastor Hayford’s approach to a subject. This series exploring seven fundamental concepts that gird the foundation of The Church On The Way, its life and ministry, is intended to help those seeking mentorship and guidance about the practical issues of church leadership.

Two events are pivotal to the existence and growth of The Church on The Way, and to my more than thirty years of leadership and service here: A directive God gave to me, and a visible manifestation of His glory.

No amount of education or grasp of the Word of God can substitute for having an encounter with the living God where He completely changes your perspective on yourself and on Him. In a 1969 encounter I had with the Lord in the early months of being assigned to The First Foursquare Church of Van Nuys (The Church On The Way), God told me that this was where He wanted me to be. At the time, the church was a tiny place with only 18 members. I was forced to confront my fears about my future and what I perceived to be other people’s expectation of my success, of living up to what they thought was the promise of my life.

I discovered a dimension of pride I didn’t really know was defined as pride: a preoccupation with what people think about you. This order of pride dominates you with a kind of intimidating fear that you’ll never meet their expectations. So when God said He was going to put me in a place that seemed like a failure, I was suddenly scrambling for survival, and I recognized some things that were very distasteful about myself.

That was the first major breakthrough. I didn’t know what was happening at the time, I was just responding to the Holy Spirit’s dealing in my life. I would later look back and realized that I hadn’t obtained the mastery of anything, but that something had broken open.

The second thing concerns an incident which took place in 1971 when God gave a visible manifestation of His glory to dwell at The Church on the Way, and said, "I’ve given My glory to dwell in this place." When it happened, I looked in the scripture and found in John 17 He does indeed give His glory to His bride, the Church. Immediately following this manifestation, the church began to grow at a dramatic rate, and although new people joining the church may have thought it had something to do with my leadership, I wanted to make it clear that I knew it was a lot more than that.

This encounter with the Lord in which He gave His glory to dwell is the main thing behind the phenomenon known as The Church On The Way. Similar to Moses and the Red Sea, you know it’s not about you or the "stick." You know that you are related to what’s happening, but what God is doing and what you have done is so disproportionate that there’s no question in your mind that you happen to have a partnership in something that He just decided to do.

Over the years, we have distilled seven principles by which we live and minister. During the next few weeks, we will be examining in the Online School of Pastoral Nurture these foundational concepts by which The Church On The Way has lived and grown. The seven principles are:

1. Ministry-centered mindset
2. The priority of worship
3. Word-based preaching
4. Being Holy Spirit-led and empowered
5. Dominated by love
6. Giving-oriented
7. Christ-exalted

We believe that all ministry centers in the membership of the Body of Christ. The mindset of the pastor determines whether this is an idea or a reality. You can believe in the ministry of the membership of the church, but if you feel even remotely threatened by the possibility that people may indeed rise to ministry through your ministry influence on them, then there will always be a measure of reserve on your part as to how far you are willing to go with this idea.

I had to come to believe in it more than a theological concept. I had to become willing to pour myself out on the proposition that people in fact might become far more influential in dynamic than I would like for them to be. This comes from the fact that my background involves hierarchy, which is basically fear — the fear that we as leaders won’t be needed, wanted or respected anymore when people get a handle on who they are and what they are about.

I became convinced that the heavenly Father had created an incredible treasure in every human being, and that my privilege was under His touch. As a gift at the hand of Jesus, as a pastor-teacher, I was to do everything I could to help the people maximize the possibility of their creative intent under God through Jesus. But there was the fear that if I gave myself to that, I might eventually render myself unnecessary. What I discovered, however, was that when people find out you really feel that way about them--that all you exist for is to help them "happen"--then even when they don’t need you anymore, they still love you and consider you worth having around.

They love you because they’ve found somebody who really would give their life for the sheep. They found out that your whole interest and concern is for them. That doesn’t happen because you give them each two hours a week of private discipling or counseling; you obviously can’t do that as a church grows. It’s something that happens because they see it in your life, in your demeanor, and in your relationship to them. They realize that your life exists for the sake of them becoming what they can become.

The Bible says that’s the way the gift multiplies and expands itself. Each member of the Godhead has made a gift; those given complement one another. They are all spiritual gifts, but they’re not all gifts of the Holy Spirit. The gifts of Ephesians 4:11-16 are gifts of Jesus Christ to His Church. The gifts of Romans 12 are gifts of the Father to every created individual. The gifts of 1 Corinthians 12 are gifts of the Holy Spirit.

What the Father/Creator made each of us to be has to do with a person’s identity and destiny that has somehow been smothered under the impact of sin--wound, hurt, failure, outright rebellion. Through redemption, people begin to be salvaged from that. The role of the gifts that Jesus gave is to begin to help them uncover what they were created to be and get back to it so that on those foundations, the gifts of the Holy Spirit can be placed as a supernatural enablement beyond themselves.

So you have people created with certain abilities, and people will exercise those abilities whether they are redeemed or not–it just depends on the degree to which sin one way or another inhibits. Sometimes sin advances some of their skills for a time, but they only become more dangerous and destructive by reason of not having a redemptive quality to their life.

Jesus gives the church and its leadership to help people be recovered so their destiny can be realized, and the Holy Spirit enhances and endows what Father God has created them to be by making possibilities of transcendent dimensions through the giftings of His supernatural power.

This is the ministry-centered mindset: that the purpose for which we exist is to help people find out what they were made to be and begin to see that fostered and developed under the touch and teaching of pastoral leadership. Our objective is to see people move into the perception of themselves in Christ of what God made them to be, and then to see them enabled by the dynamism of Holy Spirit giftings working in their lives.