Senior Pastors' Retreat

A dozen senior pastors from multi-staff congregations of the Lutheran Church of Australia met for two days at Gympie, Queensland. This was an informal get-together for mutual encouragement and peer mentoring.

For me it was a privilege to be among colleagues whom I highly respect. We shared our personal stories and heard again from Pastor Steicke. At his recent mission trip to Uganda he and his team experienced demonic attacks with the same physical manifestations independently from each other and then God gave them the huge joy of answering their prayers with the opening of a blind man's eyes. Wow!

We do have an impact on each other. Every morning we journaled and Pastor John O'Keefe introduced this practice by saying that he had learned journaling at one of the previous senior pastors' retreats and it changed his life. While it took him months to internalize the habit, now he cannot wait to open his Bible and feed on the Word of God by journaling what God impresses on him.

The expertise of the other pastors in terms of strategic thinking, staff development, vision casting, etc. revealed my own shortcomings but at least I know now whom to ask for resources. Pastor Robin Stelzer supplied us with other resources from his son Tyson and in good Lutheran fashion we did enjoy the number of excellent reds at night.

In the final session we anointed each other with oil and prayed for each other. Then we were in for a surprise. One pastor got up and said that he usually never attempts to do this in a Lutheran environment but he feels that God has given him a message in tongues for the person in the middle and he also senses that someone else will have the interpretation of this message.

He proceeded to speak the message in tongues which we did not understand with our human minds but it sounded beautiful with strong non-Australian guttural tones. Then we waited and there was indeed another pastor who was prompted by God with an interpretation. The words were not outlandish in any way but simply very encouraging for the person receiving these words.

For many of us this was the first experience ever of hearing a word in tongues and then also hearing an interpretation of this word. However, we did not doubt that this was from God. What else is he going to do in our midst?