The book of Acts serves as our playbook for ministry as it prepares us for the active presence of God.Studying the book of Arts takes us back to the future. It shows the church how to trust in the active presence of God and inspire people to move from being mere members to bold disciples. As members become disciples of faith, they experience the unstoppable power of disciplined growth and divine purpose in Christian living. Rev. Dr. Michael W. Foss is Senior Pastor at St. Mark Lutheran Church, 1115 Grand Ave., West Des Moines, IA 50265 From Members to Disciples Leadership Lessons from the Book of Acts By Michael W. Foss Abingdon Press Copyright © 2007 The United Methodist Publishing House All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-687-46730-3 Chapter One The Power of Waiting—Acts 1 Introduction Waiting has never been high on my priority list. I have found little or no mention of waiting as a critical function of leadership, but it is. Perhaps the real problem is that many of us confuse waiting with doing nothing. We don't understand how waiting can be an active, spiritual exercise in leadership. It is hard to imagine that waiting can be productive—but it can be. Effective leadership always begins with waiting. The first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles is a study on productive waiting. Luke writes: After his suffering he [Jesus] presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. "This," he said, "is what you have heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now." (Acts 1:3-5) The first great missional era of the Christian church began by waiting. Why? How would this season of waiting be productive? Why didn't Jesus simply give the Holy Spirit at the moment of his ascension— Acts 1:9? We had just completed a major capital drive at Prince of Peace. One of the key elements was the purchase of seven acres to the northwest of our Worship Center. With the city of Burnsville, Minnesota, already built to 98 percent of its capacity, some of the few acres left for development were just to the west of our property. I was aware that hotels and restaurants had already made significant offers to the Fairview Hospitals and Clinics real estate division that held title to the land. Abutted on the east and south by three- to five-story buildings, with our northern boundary a heavily traveled county road, the only hope for our church to have a future with any visibility was for us to secure some of the property to our west. Since we were part of a Planned Unit Development (PUD), green space requirements and the necessity of sharing parking had previously been determined. Those regulations allowed building to be developed up to five stories high. If multi-storied buildings were placed directly to the west, Prince of Peace would find itself at the bottom of a canyon. We had received a letter of intent to sell seven acres to us. But, when we went to finalize that agreement, things had changed on the hospital side of things. With their need for expansion, simply selling us the land was not in their best interest. The deal was off the table. I waited. As conversations about the land deal plodded on and the questions within the congregation grew more frequent, I could feel my frustrations growing. What was God up to? Had I, or a member of our team, dropped the ball? Why had this needed opportunity to secure our future been lost? The weeks dragged on into months. Then it happened. The conversation shifted to a land swap that was to our benefit. There would not be any money spent from Prince of Peace. Land that was not very useful to us but was very useful to the hospital could be traded, and the parking lot we had added there would be purchased by the hospital. More than that, for the first time in more than thirteen years of my serving at Prince of Peace, there seemed to be the possibility of the city vacating a street that ran between our Worship Center and the land we would acquire. This would result in more available land to build upon than we had first thought possible, as well as greater visibility for our ministry. While I had been impatiently struggling against my waiting, God had been at work. As the hospital administrator said, "God was working out a better deal for all of us." We live in an Acts time. The enormous challenges before the Protestant church in North America, when seen through the lens of the Acts of the Apostles, become great opportunities for mission. The book of Acts serves as our playbook for ministry in this season of change and reformation. Why? Because the book of Acts reminds us of the presence and action of God in a time when we must learn new models and behaviors for effective ministry. This creative tension b