The Journey to MDiv Lead at Briercrest Seminary
As I write this blog post, some 530 of you have read my previous post, “What A God!! What A Ride!!! Fort Mac Here We Come!!!” I am truly humbled that so many people are interested in what God is up to in the life of myself and my family. Many of you have left public comments in various parts of Facebook and a few on the blog itself. Others of you have sent personal messages and emails. Thanks for all your words of encouragement, celebrating with us these amazing doors of opportunity that God has opened. We remain awestruck by how God showers his love on those who seek Him.
In the next few blog posts I am going to attempt to answer a few of the questions that some of you have been asking, some more privately than publicly. Questions like, “I still don’t get your excitement for Fort McMurray, are you sure that’s where you really want to go?,” or “Why did you choose to serve in a much smaller church than where you’ve been, when other doors were open?”
Today I just want to provide a bit more insight into what happened after I said “yes” to going to Fort McMurray Alliance Church, which meant saying “no” to being the Dean at Briercrest Seminary. What happened was totally unexpected. I put it in the “only God,” category, because only God would design a situation that is so in tune with my wiring, where I get to be the Lead Pastor of a compassionate missionally minded church in a city with explosive potential, while being able to be a significant influence in the training and mentoring of the next generation of men and women for vocational ministry through one of Canada’s leading seminaries.
To help you see the way God works, let me share with you an email that Dustin Resch, the Interim Dean of Briercrest Seminary sent to the students of the school on Saturday.
Greetings,
As you are aware, we have been involved in several faculty searches over the course of this year. I am excited to provide you with an update on one of those searches.
In February, we interviewed three candidates for the position of Dean of the Seminary and Master of Divinity Lead. Of those, we decided to bring two to visit our campus. There was overwhelming support from our search committee and students for one of those candidates—Doug Doyle, a long time pastoral veteran from Thunder Bay. We were excited about how Doug would add a significant perspective and unique gift-set to our Seminary faculty. However, like the good pastor he is, Doug was deeply drawn to ministry in the local church and heard God’s call to pursue pastoral work in Fort McMurray, Alberta. This means that Doug felt he should decline our offer to make him Dean of the Seminary.
However, we are thrilled to announce that Doug Doyle will still be able to play a significant role in our Seminary. We have offered, and he has accepted, an innovative new role to lead our Master of Divinity program from a distance. While residing in Fort McMurray, Doug will provide strategic and visionary leadership for our MDiv program, work to foster a network of mentorship for pastoral leaders, MDiv students and recent graduates, as well as to teach two courses per academic year in our seminary. We are ecstatic to have Doug join our team in this way.
The role of Dean of the Seminary continues to be in process. We hope to provide an update for you on that matter soon.
If you have any questions, please do contact me and I will be happy to help.
Peace,
Dustin
Dustin Resch, PhD (McMaster University)
Interim Dean of the Seminary
Assistant Professor of Theology
Briercrest College and Seminary
Dustin, thanks for those very kind words. I too am ecstatic at the opportunity to team with such a spiritually passionate and talented faculty as together we seek to train, mentor and equip men and women for vocational ministry in Canada and around the world. And while this will on top of a significant Lead Pastor role, I’m pumped by the opportunity as a front line ministry practitioner, to bring those front line realities into the formation of future pastors and ministry workers. Only God could come up with such a crazy combination of opportunities. Only God knows exactly how I’m wired and how to open doors to allow for that wiring to be fully engaged for sake of seeing “God’s kingdom come on earth, as it is in heaven.”
Doing Life “With God!”
As 2011 warps up in a little over a day and we enter into the whole new world of 2012, I find myself in the midst of the blessed experience of a period of sabbatical and transition. Now sometimes I’ve had to convince myself that this really is a blessing. Stepping down from almost 20 years of leadership that saw Redwood Park Church grow not only numerically but more importantly in missional effectiveness, is a huge personal deal. Myself and my family have invested a great chunk of our lives into Redwood and have watched God create a uniquely flavoured ministry that has caused so many folk to open their lives up to Christ and get excited about being part of a church family that is tangibly making the love of Christ visible to our city and world.
Stepping out of a vibrant high impact ministry as has developed at Redwood creates this instant sense of an enormous void. Rest and transition and waiting on God for what’s next “seems” to pale in comparison to the everyday excitement that comes from life on what one “supposes” are the frontlines of kingdom advance.
What I’ve discovered in this time of sabbatical and transition is that I have tendency to stake too much value in “living for God,” rather than simply “living with God.” That sometimes I forget that God’s greatest work is simply what he’s doing with me and in me. It’s not that “living for God,” is wrong, it’s just that I have tended to err by making mission the irreducible centre of the Christian life and not God himself. I always imagine that God is the centre, but it’s in times like I’m in right now where I’m able to step back and see a bit more clearly.
It was reading Skye Jethani’s, “With: Reimagining The Way You Relate To God,” that I was confronted anew with the tendency I have to turn mission into an idol. As Jethani notes, it’s not that I don’t “long to see more Christians engaged in the good work God has called us to,” but a “life spent for God,” is not the ultimate goal. No, the ultimate goal is “God Himself.” A life spent for God, must take a backseat to a live lived with God. Hence the title of Jethani’s book, “With.”
Passionate activist leaders like myself who love to live life on the frontlines of missional advance need to be careful not to put “the good mission of God into the place God alone should occupy.” In contrast Jethani gives this observation about the Apostle Paul, “He understood that his calling (to be a messenger to the Gentiles) was not the be the same as his treasure (to be united with Christ.) His communion with Christ rooted and preceded his work for him.”
And that’s what makes this period of sabbatical and transition such a precious blessing, that I have the gift of time to recalibrate and make sure that I fully lay hold of this treasure, what it means to live with Christst. It’s a time to see that my calling to serve as an instrument of missional advance flows from and takes a backseat to that “with Christ” relationship.
As we read the New Testament, the Apostle Paul was pretty clear about this priority of living with God. Paul calls myself and all of us, “to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that (we) might be filled with the fullness of God,” (see Ephesians 3:14-19). He challenges us to understand what it means to “have Christ in (us), the hope of glory,” (see Colossians 1:27).
AB Simpson was the founder of the Christian & Missionary Alliance, the church family I’ve served with for well over 30 years. That means I’m old enough remember some of his hymns that are now relics of past worship eras. It seems to me that Simpson as a passionate activist leader also struggled with finding self worth in what he did “for God,” and not always in living “with God.” Let me quote just a few random lines in the middle of one of his better-known hymns called “Himself.”
Once ‘twas painful trying, Now ‘tis perfect trust …
Once ‘twas busy planning, Now ‘tis trustful prayer;
Once ‘twas anxious caring, Now He has the care …
Once ‘twas what I wanted, Now what Jesus says’
Once ‘twas constant asking, Now ‘tis ceaseless praise.
Once it was my working, His it hence shall be;
Once I tried to use Him, Now He uses me.
Once the power I wanted, Now the Mighty One;
Once for self I labored, Now for Him alone.
Yes in the end, it really is all about Himself! It’s all about living with the God who lives in us! It about allowing His love to fill and transform who we are from the inside out so that whatever we do is secondary to what He is doing with and in us. It starts and ends with “Christ in you the hope of glory!” (Colossians 1:27)
Jethani also explores a few other idols we Christian gets caught up in – idols like living under God, or living over God, or living from God rather than living with God. In each case the situation is similar: we allow some good motives which in and of themselves are not wrong, to usurp the priority of simply living with God Himself. And when we do that, we rob ourselves of the ultimate treasure God has for us, and that is “God with us, Immanuel.” How quickly we forget what the real gift of the Christmas we just celebrated is, “Immanuel.” (see Matthew 1:23)
As I look to 2012, I am eagerly looking forward to what God has next for my family and myself. And I do that with the resolve of keeping “Himself” as my treasure, knowing that “life with God” means that having a healthy soul and successful ministry do not have to be mutually exclusive.
About
Doug has just recently accepted the position of Lead Pastor of the Fort McMurray Alliance Church in the bustling Oil Sands region of Wood Buffalo in northern Alberta. Fort Mac Alliance is a church with a passion to tangibly make Jesus visible to our municipality and world, serving as a grace filled community that is welcoming and sensitive to people whatever their faith background and wherever they may or may not be at in their faith journey. It’s an adventurous community that is willing to think outside the norm while prayerfully wrestling with what it means to be involved in ministry both within and beyond the walls of the church facility. This results in a passion to see individual lives and the city as a whole touched and transformed by the love of Christ. Being in a city with global influence, Fort McMurray Alliance is seeking to be a unique global influence for Christ in partnership with it’s denominational family, the Christian & Missionary Alliance.
Doug is also involved with Briercrest College and Seminary in Caronport, Saskatchewan, where he teaches two courses a year as an Assistant Professor of Pastoral Theology. From his home base in Fort McMurray, Doug serves as the Program Coordinator for Briercrest’s MDiv (Master of Divinity) program, with an urgency to see the next generation of ministry leaders raised up up to serve effectively within our ever evolving Canadian culture, as well as our vastly changing world.
Previously Doug served for 20 years as the Lead Pastor of Redwood Park Church, a multi-site missional community that is committed to seeing the message and life of Jesus impact Thunder Bay, Barrie and beyond. LIFE, PASSION and ADVENTURE are three words that both Doug and Redwood uses to describe the nature of Christian spirituality.
Doug is married to Jane, who possesses an amazing gift of hospitality and the ability to cook for hundreds! They have three young-adult children. Meagan is a pediatric resident at the Alberta Children’s Hospital in Calgary. Susan who is married to Chris Groenheide, among other things supply teaches at Dennis Franklin Cromarty First Nations High School and promotes “eating local” through a variety of greens and specialty vegetables from her market garden. Graeme who has been involved in an eclectic mix of insurance and financial planning, working for a highway line painting company, and ushering at Thunder Bay’s Community Auditorium is heading off with a generous scholarship to the Vancouver Film School. Each of them in their distinct way has a yearning to be difference makers in this world.
Meal times at the Doyle household tend to be a bit of a party, but you might want to ask what it is you’re eating – as sometimes Doug enjoys a hike with a good friend and a gun in the beauty of our rugged Canadian outdoors, or maybe a paddle on a remote lake with rod in hand. He’s thinking that with the move for Fort McMurray, he might have to break down and add an ATV to his toys.
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