Daniel Huskey
“As a Church Planter and pastor, I have to make war every day on ego and impatience, while breathing the toxic air of a wider church culture that readily applauds quick results over godly longevity.”
10 years ago, Jess and I (along with a soon-to-be 3-year-old Hope and a 1-year-old Makinley) were nearing the end of what was easily the hardest year of our lives. Though still very fragile from a torrent of hurt and heartache over an exit out of Ukiah that felt egregiously premature, all of our focus was on an impending surgery to remove a 1.5 inch tumor from my thyroid. And that surgery wouldn’t even be my first of 2013 as an ERCP (an Endoscopic Retrograde Cholangiopancreatography to save the inquisitive amongst you a Google search) was the successful conclusion of a very painful and dangerous 2 ½ week stint in the hospital with a stone blocking my liver. Despite all of those health challenges, however, my body would heal. But my soul was another story.
The previous 6 years in vocational ministry (2007-2012) had taken their toll. I arrived in Austin eager and yet broken—excited and yet crippled. The symptoms were multitudinous: anger, depression, anxiety, etc. But the diagnosis was singular: fear. I had zero confidence in who I was as a man, a husband, a father, a disciple, and as a pastor and that scared me into a shell of a man. As Adam Ramsey wrote in a piece for The Gospel Coalition in 2018, “As a […] pastor, I have to make war every day on ego and impatience, while breathing the toxic air of a wider church culture that readily applauds quick results over godly longevity.” That war fought with the Spirit is life-giving. But that war fought with my own power, determination, and grit became enslaving and ultimately it broke me. It was in that moment that Jonathan Dodson, then pastor of City Life Church in Austin, TX started to work through my brokenness and chronic fear and insecurity with me. Jonathan was both a wordsmith and a soul-care savant, but it was his sharing of the Scriptures with me—and one in particular—that had the power to change the trajectory of my recovery and reclamation of who I was in Christ. They came from Paul’s words to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 3:1-6:
1 Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you, or from you? 2 You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all. 3 And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. 4 Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. 5 Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, 6 who has made us sufficient to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
For Paul, it was the changed lives of the Corinthians that gave a clear message from Christ. It was the work of the Spirit in/through the Corinthians transformed lives as a result of Paul’s ministry that confirmed the new covenant of Jesus was being established through his ministry. That meant that just as with Paul, and Moses, and all of the OT prophets, my sufficiency came not from myself (i.e. my gifts, abilities, performance, etc.) but solely and explicitly from the grace of God. Just a few verses down from that exhortation lies the more well-known passage from vv. 17-18:
17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18 And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.
I can still remember that moment when, by the Spirit’s work through Jonathan, I felt true freedom. Freedom to embrace the truth of the gospel that I do not have to perform to be loved, affirmed, or approved by him—or anyone else. In that moment I began to rest securely in the truth that Jesus performed perfectly on my behalf. That his righteousness is already credited to me through his performance and that means I can find my confidence in him and his work alone.
That reality-altering lesson has since shaped every moment of ministry. That’s not to say that church planting and pastoring haven’t been hard—they have—in more ways that I could’ve ever imagined. But I’ve proceeded with confidence in Jesus. That confidence is what gives me great joy to be able to write this with one of the happiest and flourishing seasons of ministry I’ve ever experienced. I can sit here and write this reflecting on how City Parish embodies 2 Corinthians 3:1-6. The work of the Spirit in the transformed lives of the dozens of saints that make up our church family is my confidence. Though I hate clichés, there genuinely are too many evidences of why my confidence is so resolute in the work of Christ in/through City Parish. I thank God every day for the hard fought lessons over the last 10 years and for City Parish to have celebrated five years of faithful ministry this year!