Dear Elim Grace,

It is rare that in ministry I have set out to find a new method of doing things. Rather, I have more times than not “happened upon” a new method.

Over a decade ago I wrote my sermons using a particular method or procedure. I can say it wasn’t that innovative. In fact, I can say it wasn’t much a method at all! But I had a way of doing things, I was using the skills I had to the best of my ability. And then it happened.

I was leading an early morning men’s Bible study when in a flash I “saw” the frustrated sermon outline I was working on. But I saw it written out in my mind in a completely new and innovative way to me. Bible study ended and I raced to my office to write on one sheet of paper everything I saw. I “happened upon” a method of writing sermons that changed my preaching forever.

In his book, “So Good They Can’t Ignore You,” Cal Newport writes about “the adjacent possible”. The adjacent possible is a term borrowed from biologist Stuart Kauffman. Kauffman describes a soup of chemical components sloshing and mixing together. What results is that new chemicals are made possible by combining the structures already found in the soup. The new chemicals found are in the adjacent possible — the space right beyond the cutting edge.

Cal Newport goes on to apply the principle by saying, “The next big ideas are found in the adjacent space that contains the possible new combinations of existing ideas.”

This has stayed with me as a principle of both life and ministry. God’s purposes for us are often found in the adjacent space to the sloshing and mixing together of our sorrows and joys. It can’t be rushed, it must be endured. It’s not something we make happen, it’s something we allow to happen. It happens to us in the slow process of mundane faithfulness and routine patience. It turns out “the cutting edge” in ministry isn’t always a straight path. And it’s not always that exciting.

Consider Jesus. He throws himself to the ground, in mental anguish, in suspension between what he wants and what God wants. “Is there another way?” (Matthew 26:38-39) There is no other way. It’s on the edge of “there’s no other way” that Jesus sees and submits to God’s purpose for him. But it’s also at the dead end of his pain and suffering that Jesus sees the adjacent possible of salvation. Not His, but ours. So for the joy set before him, he endured. The cross was the great cutting away of Christ in our place and, in Christ, of our sin and death.

For ministers and servant-leaders of Christ Jesus, to live on “the cutting edge” of God’s will for us and for His (not our)church, is also to live on/under the sharp edge of God’s grace. He cuts away, but He adds. He takes away, but He gives. He breaks away, but He heals. He prunes away, but He grows. All things are possible in the adjacent possible of Christ, not of ourselves.

On the back of my office door hangs Jeremiah 45:5. It’s been there for about 20 years now. “And do you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not”. God has changed my definition of greatness over the course of my life and ministry, of what great really is. Great becomes less and less about “doing great things for God” and more and more about “doing things for a great God”.

Again, God’s purposes for us are often found in the adjacent space to the sloshing and mixing together of our sorrows and joys. Flashes of grace at the edge of our strength and wisdom revealing desires and methods we never would have seen or thought or imagined on safer more comfortable ground.

Pastor Jonathan