Prepare for Rain

By Michael Catt

The story of a church that believed God for the impossible. Follow the story of Pastor Michael Catt and his congregation as the Lord changes a "typical Southern Baptist church" into a ministry center that reaches thousands through a variety of outreach programs, and has even challenged the Hollywood establishment with a locally produced, nationally syndicated movie, Facing the Giants.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CLC Publications
• Release date: Jan 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781936143405

Michael Catt

Michael Catt has served as senior pastor of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia, since 1989 and is executive producer of the popular Facing the Giants and Fireproof films that originated from the congregation. He the author of Prepare for Rain, The Power of Desperation, The Power of Persistence and The Power of Surrender and the founder of the ReFRESH™ revival conference. Michael and his wife, Terri, have two children.

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Introduction

IN THE movie Facing the Giants, Grant Taylor, a discouraged football coach at Shiloh Christian Academy, gets an unexpected spiritual lesson from Mr. Bridges, a prayer warrior. When the coach tells Mr. Bridges, I just don’t see God at work here, the prayer warrior responds with a story:

Grant, I heard a story about two farmers who desperately needed rain. Both of them prayed for rain, but only one of them went out and prepared his fields to receive it. Which one do you think trusted God to send the rain?

Well, the one who prepared his fields for it.

Which one are you? God will send the rain when He is ready. You need to prepare your field to receive it.

How do you prepare for rain? How do you cultivate the soil of your life in preparation for God’s outpouring? How do you break up the unproductive ground? How do you wait both expectantly and patiently for God to act?

I want God to send the rain. I want to see Him work in my life; I want to see revival in the church. I want to embrace all God has for me. When I read the stories of awakenings and revivals of the past, I long for that to happen in my church and my lifetime. I long for history to become present tense. I want to prepare for rain and watch God send it.

But I must admit there have been times that I felt as dry and discouraged as Grant Taylor, and I didn’t see God at work. He was working, though not in the way I expected. God was preparing my heart for growth and revival by turning the plow in my life and uprooting things I didn’t want to deal with. Like the parable of the sower in Matthew 13, the problem was not the sower or the seed, but the soil. My soil needed to be tilled.

I serve as pastor of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia—a congregation that has received a great deal of attention recently. The establishment of Sherwood Pictures in 2000 brought a visibility to this fifty-two-year-old fellowship that we never imagined possible. Through our first two movies, Flywheel and Facing the Giants, we’ve expanded the impact and influence of this local assembly far beyond our Jerusalem. We are literally hearing of changed lives around the world.

I’ve been asked hundreds of times, How does a church make a movie? That is a tough question to answer, but I think it misses the point. A more relevant question is How can I overcome my personal obstacles to believe God for something bigger than myself? Along with that is another question: How do I believe God for revival and awakening that so energizes and empowers the church that we see Him do the impossible?

To answer these questions, I need to share with you my story and the story of Sherwood Baptist Church, a congregation that has learned to trust God for great things and no longer be content with the status quo.

Alex Kendrick (Coach Grant Taylor) and Ray Wood (Mr. Bridges) in Prepare for Rain scene from the movie Facing the Giants

1

Plowing the Field

SHERWOOD is only my second senior pastorate. My first was in a town of about 17,000 in the Midwest, where I served for three years. The church was the largest in the community, and it was historically influential. After almost a decade of decline, we were seeing new birth, new members and new life. God was moving.

At the same time, I felt like I was fighting a battle for survival. Like many churches, the deacon board wanted to run the church and treat the pastor like a hireling. But after a few difficulties, we could see that God was turning the old ship around.

I had received repeated requests from Sherwood Baptist Church to consider becoming their pastor, but I declined. I felt like my ministry was just starting at this church in the Midwest, and I had no desire to move on. For one thing my children were very young, and I didn’t want to uproot my family. Besides, I didn’t want to be one of those preachers always looking for the bigger and better every few years.

In August of 1989 the late Manley Beasley came to our church as a guest preacher on Sunday and Monday. He was the greatest man of faith I’d ever met. I had read and preached You’ll know when I’m through tonight if your ministry here is over. about living by faith, but Manley was the walking personification of it. He had survived incurable diseases and an untold number of health issues. When Manley spoke, people listened.

That weekend I shared with Manley about the church and how at times it was like rolling a rock uphill. While we were making headway, it seemed that my authority was constantly being challenged, and I felt on guard. On Monday night, before he preached, Manley walked up to me and said, You’ll know when I’m through tonight if your ministry here is over. You can imagine that I put my spiritual antenna up during that message! (I told my wife to pay attention because we might be packing and leaving town under the cover of night.)

Turning to Isaiah 6, Manley preached a message entitled Who Wants to See the Glory of God? It was one of those God-moments when you could sense the Lord’s presence throughout the room. Twenty years prior the church had seen a great revival and movement of God. Surely this message would stir the coals and rekindle the fire. Who doesn’t want to see God’s glory, especially if they’ve made the effort to come back to church on a Monday night?

When the invitation was given, I thought surely no one could stay in the pew. Terri and I immediately went to the altar and began to pray. I could sense others had moved forward, but I wasn’t sure who or how many. The invitation didn’t last long. A few minutes later Manley walked off the platform, placed his hand on my shoulder and said, Now you know.

With a crowd of about 400 present, the only people at the altar were the church staff and a few members of the congregation. Deacons sat in their seats seemingly unmoved; Sunday school teachers looked like they were ready to leave. When I faced the congregation, I saw blank stares—they were lined up in the pews, stone-faced and seemingly indifferent. I knew it was over; God had released me from that ministry.

Less than a month later, the search committee from Sherwood called for a fourth time to see if I would reconsider. God immediately began to turn my heart toward Sherwood, and I’ve never looked back. I became their pastor in December 1989. Sherwood is not perfect, but it’s the greatest church I’ve ever been a part of. I’ve been in a number of other churches of all shapes and sizes, in the inner city and the suburbs, but I’ve never seen people allow the Spirit to work like they do at Sherwood.

This journey of faith has not been easy, and it has not happened overnight. We are maturing as a congregation while staying young in our hearts. There have been problems, but there always are, anywhere you go. Transitions have sometimes felt like train wrecks, but God has been sovereign and faithful through it all, and I’ve learned to trust Him every step of the way.

Cold Feet

But to tell you the truth, I almost never made it to Sherwood. The weekend we were to be introduced to the congregation, I began having second thoughts. I even went so far as to tell the pastor search committee that I would preach on Sunday, but I wasn’t sure I should come as pastor. I don’t know why I got cold feet. Maybe it was because God was uncovering an issue He wanted me to deal with up front—one that was serious enough that it couldn’t wait.

The first hint of trouble came when some of the leaders in the church were joking about the fussing and fighting in long deacons meetings. There’s always a grain of truth behind that kind of humor, and I certainly wasn’t interested in coming into a situation like the one I was coming out of. I knew one thing: God had called me to shepherd and lead—not referee!

In my first deacons meeting as pastor, the problem became clear to me. The entire meeting consisted of reviewing a document they called a deacon’s digest, which was a summary of church purchases, programs and committee reports. They were functioning like an executive board or finance committee, and they had operated this way for years. We spent several minutes discussing three bids on vacuum cleaners. As I looked around the room, I had a strange thought: I bet none of these guys ever uses a vacuum cleaner. If I want to know which vacuum cleaner to buy, I’ll ask their wives!

I came to realize that the deacons were good and godly men, but they had become wrapped up in tradition rather than Scripture regarding the role of a deacon. They needed to be Biblical in their thinking. I heard them talk about how they would leave meetings with knots in their stomachs; there was no joy in serving. They had hearts for ministry, but no one had ever shown them a better way of doing it. They needed to be freed up to serve the way the Lord designed it in Acts 6.

So at one of the next meetings early in my first year, I announced a silent coup to the deacons. I said it was crazy for us to (1) vote on money already spent, (2) act as a second finance committee or (3) I announced a silent coup to the deacons . . . We were going to change the way we did ministry. be known for fussing and fighting. We were going to change the way we did ministry to focus on widows and keep unity in the church.

Thankfully, the deacons understood what I was trying to do and were willing to take a chance with their new pastor. They had great respect for pastoral authority and were willing (some reluctantly) to give this a try.

It was one of the defining moments for the church. We discovered that Acts 6 still works. We are living proof that a 21st-century church can function, grow and minister using a first-century model.

Organizational Changes

Once we had reformed the deacon ministry, we began to prune the organization. The church had over sixty committees, but lacked focused direction. We had people serving on committees who didn’t even know it! It was a classic example of an organization beginning to fall apart through lack of leadership. (The church had been without a senior pastor for some time.) It’s not an intentional thing, but the momentum of a church rises and falls on leadership—especially pastoral leadership. While a ministry may hold its own, it cannot grow without direction.

We began to eliminate committees that did not help us fulfill the purpose, vision and mission of the church. Over the course of three years, we cut the number of committees from sixty-two to two. If a committee had not met in the past year, it was gone.

Now we don’t have committees; we have ministry teams. We have lay leaders who serve as the finance team and help us administrate the budget. The personnel team is an advocate for the staff. They work hand-in-hand with me and our executive pastor. When necessary we form a task force that meets for a specific purpose and is disbanded when the job is completed. This has allowed us to engage people who are purposeful and passionate in certain areas of giftedness. It also keeps the structure of the church streamlined and fluid, so that we can quickly respond to new situations and challenges.

Alan Redpath said, There is no revival possible in any fellowship without a price being paid,¹ and we lost some people when we made these changes. They wanted the church to operate like a secular corporation and wanted to be in control. But the church is not a place for fleshly power and human control; it is a vessel for the power and presence of the Holy Spirit.

The Worship Wars

Another mountain we faced was what has commonly been called the worship wars (though it seems to me that using worship and wars in the same sentence is a denial of what worship is all about!). I loved our worship at Sherwood, but we needed to make some changes in our style without compromising Biblical truth. We wanted to reach our community, and you can’t reach a community that is predominantly African-American with Southern Gospel music.

If we were going to reach our Jerusalem, we needed to move forward with our music and worship. God was calling us to be a multi-generational and multi-racial church. We had to adjust in