The Fellowship of the Holy Spirit

Part I: When I Nearly Became a Pastor

There was a time when I nearly became a pastor in the commonly known sense because I had not yet fully understood what it meant to serve God. 😂

I had believed in Jesus Christ shortly before joining the University of Nairobi for my undergraduate studies. I came into the faith through a vibrant spiritual church in Mombasa where there was a powerful emphasis on serving God wholeheartedly. There was much that was genuine and life-giving in that environment: an earnestness about faith, a seriousness about Scripture, a hunger for spiritual things, and a conviction that Christianity was not something to be worn casually on Sundays and forgotten during the week. God was to be pursued, obeyed and served. Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, I can also see that our understanding of what constituted serving God had become considerably imbalanced.

The prevailing idea seemed to be that serious commitment to God eventually required one to leave something behind. If you were employed, you might have to abandon employment. If you were in business, perhaps business itself stood between you and your calling. If you were pursuing a profession, professional ambition could easily be interpreted as reluctance to surrender completely to God. Even university studies were not necessarily exempt. Abraham had left his country and his kindred and journeyed towards a land God would show him (Genesis 12:1), and somehow that magnificent biblical story had become a template through which many ordinary vocational decisions were interpreted. To serve God properly, one had to “come out,” leave the familiar behind, walk through some wilderness by faith and, eventually, enter a promised land of ministry.

And the promised land looked remarkably attractive.

Those already occupying its visible precincts appeared to be doing rather well. Some dressed impeccably in the fashions of the day, drove impressive cars, lived in neighbourhoods associated with the prosperous, travelled widely, commanded attentive congregations and appeared to enjoy both spiritual authority and material success. To a young believer, the conclusion was not difficult to draw. Serving God seemed not merely holy; it looked glamorous. The wilderness might contain a few scorpions, certainly, but Canaan appeared to have excellent upholstery. 😂 Pastoring a church, founding a ministry, becoming an evangelist or working within one of these ministries appeared to constitute the higher form of Christian service. Ordinary employment, business, professional practice and even study seemed somehow spiritually inferior. If your life had become reasonably comfortable, there was almost an unspoken suspicion that perhaps you needed to become uncomfortable before God could really use you.

The consequences were not always amusing. I knew students whose studies were discontinued under the influence of that mentality. My own undergraduate education came perilously close to the same fate, but somehow, I survived the onslaught and graduated. Even after graduation, however, the underlying theology followed one into professional life. When difficulties arose in employment or business, they could easily be interpreted not as the ordinary trials through which human beings navigate life, but as evidence that one was resisting “the call.” A difficult employer might suddenly begin to look suspiciously like Pharaoh. A struggling business could acquire the theological significance of Jonah’s storm. 😂 Perhaps, one wondered, heaven itself was making professional life uncomfortable because one had refused to abandon everything and serve God properly.

What had not sufficiently percolated into our understanding was the liberating biblical truth that one could serve God precisely where one already was. A student could serve God by being a faithful student. A professional could serve Him through conscientious professional work. A businessperson could conduct business before God. A craftsman could honour Him through craftsmanship. Scripture says, “Whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men” (Colossians 3:23). The breadth of those words is astonishing: whatever you do. Scripture even presents Bezalel as filled “with the Spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship” for skilled craftsmanship (Exodus 31:2–5). Joseph administered the economy of Egypt with such extraordinary wisdom that Pharaoh himself asked, “Can we find such a one as this, a man in whom is the Spirit of God?” (Genesis 41:38). Daniel served within the administrative machinery of foreign empires while remaining unmistakably God’s man. Evidently heaven had never drawn quite the sharp boundary between sacred ministry and ordinary vocation that some of us had absorbed.

During this journey, another influence became enormously important to me. From around 2014, I encountered the through-the-Bible teaching of Jon Courson and immersed myself in it. By then I had already read the Bible from cover to cover at least twice in personal study during my undergraduate years, but Courson’s patient movement through Scripture, from Genesis onwards, added another layer of grounding. Book after book, chapter after chapter, passage after passage, the great architecture of Scripture became increasingly visible. Themes encountered in Genesis resurfaced in the prophets, flowered in the Gospels and reached their magnificent consummation in Revelation. “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17), and I remain eternally grateful for that season. Long before I understood where all this was leading, the Word was quietly laying foundations beneath my feet.

This is important to the story because when I later contemplated venturing into ministry myself, I was not simply an excited young Christian who had encountered three favourite verses and concluded that the nations were waiting for him. 😂 I loved Scripture. I had read it repeatedly. I had taken in sustained Bible teaching. I sincerely wanted to serve God. What I had not yet fully disentangled was a subtler assumption: that serving God wholeheartedly and entering formal ecclesiastical ministry were essentially the same thing.

And the surrounding religious landscape did little to discourage the thought.

Indeed, one of the more extraordinary spectacles of urban Christianity can be witnessed on certain Sunday mornings in schools whose classrooms have been hired by several different churches and ministries. One congregation may be deep in praise and worship in Classroom One. Next door, another has reached the announcements. In Classroom Three the ushers are collecting the offering. In Classroom Four the preacher has reached that glorious stage where the sermon is no longer merely being preached but physically launched into the atmosphere. 😂 Somewhere down the corridor another congregation is praying in tongues, a keyboard has reached full Pentecostal velocity, drums are thundering through partition walls, and several public-address systems are conducting simultaneous negotiations over territorial airspace.

The result is a magnificent holy commotion: praise, prophecy, preaching, announcements, offerings, keyboards, drums and microphones all rising together into one enormous ecclesiastical cloud. One sometimes gets the impression that each congregation is perfectly happy for the others to reach heaven, provided heaven hears its own classroom slightly more clearly. 😂 Yet beneath the comedy are sincere brothers and sisters seeking God, serving Him according to their understanding and reaching for that same promised land of spiritual significance. The atmosphere can be compelling. It can also be remarkably magnetic.

Eventually I thought: why remain a spectator? Why not jump into the fray myself?

By then I felt reasonably prepared. I had read the Bible from cover to cover. I had sat under extensive Bible teaching. I loved God and wanted to serve Him. What remained, apparently, were the minor administrative details required to convert spiritual enthusiasm into an institution.

An acquaintance handed me a church constitution.

I read it carefully.

And suddenly the mysteries of ecclesiastical existence began yielding their secrets. Apparently, one needed a constitution, officials, organisational structures and registration with the Registrar of Societies. This looked manageable. I drafted my own constitution and then addressed the equally weighty matter of naming the coming work.

The result was magnificent: Garden of Grace Ministries.

And, in fairness to my younger self, the name was not merely the product of ecclesiastical marketing. 😂 There was a biblical vision behind it. I had been deeply taken by Isaiah’s magnificent description of God’s redeemed people as “trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that He may be glorified” (Isaiah 61:3). That was how I envisioned the people who would eventually constitute the congregation: men and women planted by God, rooted in grace, growing into spiritual maturity and becoming great oaks of righteousness whose very lives displayed the splendour of the One who had planted them. It would be, quite literally in my imagination, a garden of grace filled with the planting of the Lord.

The theology was therefore already in place.

There was only one minor horticultural difficulty.

The garden did not yet contain a single tree. 😂

No congregation. No premises. No registration. Not one solitary oak of righteousness had yet appeared above the ecclesiastical soil. But the vision was already luxuriantly green, the constitution was ready, and somewhere in my imagination an entire spiritual forest was apparently waiting for the administrative machinery to catch up.

There was only one further difficulty. I learnt that registration of new organisations of that kind had been frozen by the government. The available alternative was apparently to operate under an existing registered ministry. But Garden of Grace Ministries had already been conceived, named, constitutionally organised and, at least in the mind of its founder, landscaped directly from Isaiah 61. 😂 I saw no compelling reason why an administrative moratorium should prevent so promising a plantation from acquiring earthly visibility.

What I needed next was somewhere to plant the trees.

Then I remembered Mrima Secondary School in Likoni, where there was a block of classrooms that I had previously constructed under a contract awarded during the tenure of the late Mwalimu Mwahima, then Member of Parliament for Likoni Constituency. The connection seemed almost providential. I prepared an application on the letterhead of Garden of Grace Ministries requesting use of the classrooms.

Then came the signature.

I had no registered ministry. I had no church building. I had no congregation. The garden had no trees. As far as I can remember, I did not yet have a single sheep requiring shepherding.

But apparently, I already had a shepherd. 😂

I signed: Pastor.

The application was declined.

At the time, that probably appeared like an obstacle. Looking back, I regard it as one of the more consequential closed doors of my Christian journey because what followed changed my understanding of serving God altogether.

My attention was drawn to two apparently ordinary people in the opening chapters of Luke’s Gospel: Simeon and Anna. I returned to their story and encountered something I had somehow read before without appreciating its implications. Simeon possessed no ministry constitution. Scripture mentions no organisation bearing his name. There is no record of headquarters, branches, congregational membership, annual conferences or ecclesiastical title. Yet Luke says something far more extraordinary: “the Holy Spirit was upon him” (Luke 2:25). It had been “revealed to him by the Holy Spirit” that he would not die before seeing the Lord’s Christ, and when the appointed moment arrived, “he came by the Spirit into the temple” (Luke 2:26–27).

Anna appears beside him with similar simplicity. An elderly widow given to prayer and worship, she possessed none of the visible machinery by which religious success is commonly measured. Yet when Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus into the Temple, she appeared at precisely the appointed moment, recognised what heaven was doing and spoke concerning the Child to those awaiting redemption in Jerusalem (Luke 2:36–38).

Then came the question that changed everything for me:

Where was their registered ministry?

There wasn’t one.

And yet these people were in contact with heaven.

That realization was enormously liberating.

Consider Simeon carefully. The Holy Spirit was upon him. Something was revealed to him by the Holy Spirit. Then, at the decisive moment, he came by the Spirit into the temple. Presence. Revelation. Guidance. Here was a man apparently without the visible apparatus of ministry, yet heaven could reach him and he could respond to heaven. When one of the greatest events in the history of creation was quietly unfolding, when “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), Simeon was spiritually sensitive enough to be moved into position.

The scene becomes even more extraordinary when one imagines it. Mary and Joseph entered the Temple carrying what outwardly appeared to be an ordinary infant. Priests were presumably attending to priestly duties. Worshippers came and went. Religious activity continued. Yet concealed within that ordinary-looking family was the One through whom the worlds had been made. Heaven had entered the Temple in human flesh.

And Simeon recognised Him.

He did not receive a circular.

There was no conference poster announcing MESSIAH VISITATION: ONE DAY ONLY. 😂

The Spirit led him.

That was ministry of an altogether different order.

Suddenly, the whole matter looked different. Perhaps the highest expression of serving God was not necessarily acquiring a pulpit, founding an organisation, adopting an ecclesiastical title or abandoning one’s ordinary vocation. Perhaps one could possess the constitution, letterhead, title, microphone and congregation and still miss what heaven was doing. And perhaps another person could possess none of those things and yet walk so closely with God that the Holy Spirit could guide him into the very centre of divine purpose.

Paul would later write, “As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God” (Romans 8:14).

That was the reality I wanted.

I was liberated.

Garden of Grace Ministries therefore disappeared before its first oak of righteousness had even been planted. 😂 The constitution was abandoned. The founding pastor returned peacefully to civilian life. The magnificent plantation that had flourished so vigorously in my imagination vanished without requiring a dissolution meeting, disposal of assets, transfer of membership or even the inconvenience of notifying the Registrar of Societies.

But the irony is that the original vision had not really died. It had merely been corrected.

God indeed desires “trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that He may be glorified” (Isaiah 61:3). What I had begun to discover was that I did not first have to manufacture the garden in which He could plant them. God had been cultivating His people long before Garden of Grace Ministries occurred to me. Simeon was His planting. Anna was His planting. Joseph had been His planting in Egypt. Daniel had been His planting in Babylon. Bezalel had been His planting in the workshop. Their locations and occupations differed enormously, but the divine Husbandman remained the same.

And therein lay the greater revelation: perhaps the whole world was larger than the little garden I had been trying to fence off as “ministry.”

The God who could plant Joseph in Egypt, Daniel in Babylon, Bezalel in a workshop, Simeon in Jerusalem and Anna in the Temple was evidently not constrained by the boundaries within which I had imagined His service. His field was larger. His callings were more varied. His purposes could be worked out through a pulpit, certainly, but also through a classroom, an office, a construction site, a business, a university, a home or a writing desk. “Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). The decisive issue was not whether one had escaped ordinary life in order to serve God, but whether ordinary life itself had been surrendered to Him. The same Lord who called Peter from his nets also left Daniel inside government, Joseph inside administration and Bezalel among tools, timber, gold and skilled workmanship. Apparently, heaven had rather more occupational diversity than my youthful theology had allowed.

That realization did not make the call to serve God smaller. It made it immeasurably larger. Suddenly the whole of life could become sacred ground. One could teach as unto the Lord, practise a profession as unto the Lord, conduct business as unto the Lord, study as unto the Lord, write as unto the Lord and undertake the thousand apparently ordinary duties of human existence as unto the Lord. The question was no longer whether I possessed a ministry through which I could serve God, but whether God possessed me in whatever I was doing. The pulpit might indeed be somebody’s appointed place of service, and a noble one at that, but it did not follow that everybody who loved God needed to climb into one. Otherwise the Body of Christ would eventually consist almost entirely of mouths, with nobody left to be the hands, feet, eyes and ears of which Paul speaks so beautifully in 1 Corinthians 12:14–21. 😂

And so, rather unexpectedly, I returned to ordinary life. Garden of Grace Ministries had vanished before its first oak of righteousness broke through the soil, but I no longer felt that I had somehow failed to serve God. Quite the contrary. I began to discover the exhilarating possibility of living what might appear from the outside to be an entirely ordinary life while cultivating an extraordinary inward reality: communion with heaven. One could work, think, teach, write, make professional decisions, encounter difficulties, rejoice, suffer, succeed, occasionally get things spectacularly wrong, get up again and continue through the familiar terrain of human existence while quietly remaining attentive to the Spirit of God. There need be no clerical costume, institutional letterhead or microphone announcing that anything spiritual was occurring. “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God” (Romans 8:14).

That, increasingly, became the life I desired. Simeon had shown me something far greater than how to start a ministry. He had shown me the staggering possibility of a human being living in such communion with God that Scripture could simply say, “the Holy Spirit was upon him”; that heaven could disclose something to him; and that, when the decisive moment arrived, he could be moved by the Spirit into precisely the right place (Luke 2:25–27). The magnificence of his life lay not in the size of an organisation surrounding him, but in the sensitivity of the man within. Amid all the religious machinery of Jerusalem, Simeon could hear heaven.

Perhaps that is why one of the most familiar sentences in the New Testament eventually acquired an entirely different depth for me. Paul closes his second letter to the Corinthians with words Christians have repeated for centuries: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Corinthians 13:14). I had heard that benediction many times. But somewhere along the journey, through reading Scripture from Genesis to Revelation, through the biblical grounding for which I remain eternally grateful, through an ambitious constitution, the splendid Garden of Grace Ministries, a congregation composed entirely of prospective oaks, a letter confidently signed Pastor, a classroom application providentially declined, and finally an encounter with two institutionally unimpressive saints named Simeon and Anna, one expression began to tower above the rest:

The fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

What an extraordinary proposition. Not merely the power of the Holy Spirit. Not merely the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Not merely occasional encounters with the Holy Spirit. Fellowship. Communion. Companionship. Participation. A life in which finite human beings may walk in conscious relationship with the Spirit of the living God. Suddenly the lesson reached far beyond whether or not I should start a church. It raised a question infinitely larger than Garden of Grace Ministries could ever have contained:

What does it actually mean for a human being to live in fellowship with the Holy Spirit?

That is the question to which we turn in Part II.