My Greatest Failure as a Pastor
By Dale Schlafer
I sent a letter to the elders of South Fellowship (Littleton, CO) in the fall of 1994, following my departure from the church to take a full-time position with Promise Keepers. In it, I asked the elders if they would invite me to a meeting in the near future so that I could address my greatest failure as their senior pastor.
For 22 years I had served the church in that role. In the time leading up to my final days as pastor, I spent a lot of time on airplanes between Promise Keepers conferences. It gave me opportunity to evaluate my time as the spiritual shepherd of that church.
There was much I had done well. There were things I wished I had done differently. And there were things I had not done well. But as I reviewed the totality of my 22 years, one glaring failure stood out above the rest. One area desperately needed to be addressed—and if possible, corrected.
So I wrote the letter asking the elders if they would allow me to come back to address my greatest failure, and they were intrigued enough to extend the invitation.
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Missing in My Leadership
My greatest failure was my commitment to lead the church in corporate prayer. Let me hasten to add I am convinced few churches in America at that time spent more hours in training and teaching on the need and practice of individual prayer than we did. Developing an individual intimacy with our heavenly Father was one of our priorities. We spent considerable time practicing this aspect of prayer.
And I don’t mean to say that we never prayed together. But it was always in the context of small groups or retreats, never the entire body of our fellowship and certainly not during Sunday morning worship.
In the time between when I left the church as senior pastor and my visit with the elders, I had become convinced of the need for corporate prayer. As a revivalist I saw over and over again that revival most often came in answer to the gathered people of God calling out for Him to come. I shared that with the elders and told them that they had a unique opportunity to change the DNA of the church. Because they were searching for a new senior pastor to replace me, and as yet no one was on the horizon, they could actually change the way prayer was viewed, taught, and practiced.
I challenged them to pray corporately within the morning service. I pleaded with them to call special corporate prayer meetings of the congregation. I suggested that they join with other churches in their part of the city for area-wide corporate prayer. I was not asking the elders to change the strong direction the church had for individual prayer, but rather to add this dimension of corporate prayer.
The result of my time with the elders was that they prayed together about the direction they should move in, and then they began a very deliberate, structured shift toward corporate prayer.
I believe the reason behind this failure of mine was that I had no training in corporate prayer and no mentors to tell me how important corporate prayer is to the life of a church. Praise God that this is beginning to change today as God’s people are creating a culture of both individual and corporate prayer.
