Voices in the Muck: When the Spirit Won’t Stay Silent

When Don arrived to take up a leadership position at his new church, the Holy Spirit gave him a dream. He saw a group of men dressed in white hazmat suits. They were cleaning out piles of horrible muck from a culvert and moving it to the roadside nearby. Don woke up thinking how horrid it was that the muck was being exposed to all those driving by. Two days later, the nature and depth of the “muck” became clear as one by one, six different women came to Don to confess an affair with the former senior pastor.

This episode of the God Conversations podcast is a heavy but important one. Our guest is a pastor from New Zealand who has decades of experience in ministry but has also been privy to some God conversations he’d rather not have. Along with his wife Karen, he led Gateway Church in Hamilton, New Zealand for 20 years. During this season, they watched God restore a church that had been torn apart by the sexual failure of its senior leadership to become a thriving congregation of over 1200 people.

Don Barry is a gifted teacher whose ministry has been appreciated throughout New Zealand and many other nations. You’ll learn so much from his wisdom born of experience walking with the Spirit.

On the show you’ll hear about:

• Don’s spiritual journey and pathway into ministry leadership, beginning with a startling God conversation that led Don and Karen from their church in Cambridge to a church in Hamilton. Don reflects on how the Spirit used a feeling of being unsettled and then spoke through three different people to speak the same message. God may speak clearly but doesn’t always give the details!
• Don’s dream that God gave him twice when he arrived to take up a leadership position at his new church and the events that occurred almost immediately after, with six different people  confessing affairs all independently of one another.
• A second vivid dream that showed how God was bringing sin to light so that it could be cleaned up. Instead Don faced pressure to cover it up.

“I knew it was the Lord and we needed to know it was the Lord because a couple of voices from our executive said to me that this is the devil’s attempt to destroy a good man’s ministry. You should keep this covered…”

• Don reflects on the reasons why sin cannot be hidden. The only way God can transform our hearts and set us free is to convict and expose our sin. Transformation requires truth – you cannot receive grace without first confronting truth, ugly as that may be.

Covering up is the worst thing we can do. There are rotten apples in any barrel. The test is what leadership do with them. The answer is not to put the lid on and hope they go away. People felt safe confessing it to you. Perhaps there was safety and integrity in your heart.

Uncovering sin is painful. There’s no such thing as “Dr Painless the dentist.” We must confront the ugliness of of our lives. It’s not to condemn but to deliver, but it does require the drill!

• The need for safe and trusted spaces so that sin can be exposed and people can be restored. Don reflects: “If could be our turn next week.”
• The role of conscience in relation to God’s voice. For Don, the longer we walk with Jesus, the more our conscience and God’s voice close ranks!
• God’s purpose in exposure is always redemption. There is no shame or condemnation.

God has incredible love for his church. If we don’t discipline our children, we hate them. Truth-telling is an act of love – not a thing to be feared, but to be welcomed.

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