Baptist Spirituality

When you walk with God, there are never coincidences, only God Moments.

The most difficult times I have faced on sabbatical are Saturdays leading into Sundays. This is the daily window when I usually spend time prepping for sermons and worshiping with my church family.

Although I departed five Sundays ago, being away from Sunday worship at First Baptist doesn’t seem to get any easier. In fact, my hunger for living in community has only deepened. Thankfully, this growth is in a healthy direction: Community for the sake of meeting Christ in our worship, not for seeking out accolades or compliments or the like. Not that I ever sought those things, but when you’re on sabbatical, you learn the difference between keeping community for Christ and keeping it to bolster yourself.

I have felt the loneliness and separation more intensely the past few weeks. It came to a head last Saturday when I wondered where I was going to attend church. The words of poet Jessica Powers, known fondly as Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit, hits just right,

There is a homelessness never to be clearly defined
It is more than having no place of one’s own, no bed or chair…
It is the pain of the mystic suddenly thrown back from the noon of God
to the night of his own humanity*

After some venturing into the darkness of my humanity and clambering through, I decided that Cocoa Beach would be a nice option. I always enjoyed the area, wanted to grab some seafood for lunch, and perhaps read at the beach for an hour or two. The last time I was there for worship, it was to visit a friend at one of the local Baptist churches, but he has since moved and the church went in a wildly different direction absent his leadership.

I kept looking. There is a Presbyterian church, but they have an interim pastor. There are a few community churches, but I find myself longing for liturgy in my spiritual diet, and I don’t sense that any of them had liturgical options. Then my eyes wandered over the Google map to the First United Methodist Church of Cocoa Beach.

It seemed that First UMC had everything I was looking for: It is close to the beach, offered an early worship time (9:30 AM) that didn’t cut into lunch, and, of course, incorporated liturgy and the lectionary. It also didn’t hurt that the pastor has a divinity degree from Candler School of Theology, Emory University, which has a reputation for turning out some great preachers thanks to their long-time homiletics professor, Dr. Thomas Long.

So I stayed in the area and attended First UMC, and the whole time I am wrestling with my emotions and my anxieties, the darkness of my own humanity, so to speak:

What does this vocation of ministry mean to me?
Am I doing the right thing as pastor of our church?
How do I move the church to a place of growth while honoring God?
Is our slow growth a result of some failure on my part?

….You know, the usual stuff with which ministers struggle.

Then I arrived at the church, and it begins like any other — decent worship, beautiful sanctuary, stained glass windows, Eucharist table, and a huge cross. It was more crowded than the previous churches I attended. There were dozens of young families, for which I was grateful.

Then the preacher starts preaching, and MIRACULOUSLY he’s hitting ALL of the points that God has been showing me this sabbatical about living into God’s grace (“What God does for you that you can’t do for yourself,” he says), being a “beloved child of God”, of not “being defined by your failures,” of differentiating between what we can do, which is not saving ourselves, and “receiving as a gift” what only God can do.

I took notes, as you can see.

I thought to myself, “This guy sounds like he’s been on a sabbatical.” And within five minutes, he mentions how, just a few months ago, he was on sabbatical! Then, five minutes later, he mentions staying in a monastery. I determine to ask him after service what monastery he attended, and it turns out that he stayed at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, where I was just last week when I visited friends in Conyers, Georgia!

I left that place knowing that, once again, God directed my steps and provided exactly what I needed, especially after being bombarded by spiritual warfare over the past couple of weeks.

Yep, there are no coincidences with God, and I did get that great seafood lunch I was hoping for too.

Source: Jessica Powers, “Blessed Among Us: Jessica Powers”, in Give Us This Day (August 2026) Collegeville MN: Liturgical Press, 2026.