This is a guest post by Brian Sanders. He leads an incredible church network in Tampa Bay called Underground. He is one of the most inspiring leaders I know. I love listening to him teach and I love the way he thinks about leadership, church planting, and missional communities. He is an apostolic leader through and through and you see this no better than in the way he is the chief architect for his network of churches. But he also comes hard with timely prophetic words. One of which was his last post you can find here.

Prophetic types might be the hardest to welcome because their gift is often unwanted. Even the most refined prophets are hard to hear. The history of, well, history—is that religious people don’t just fail to welcome prophets, we kill them. Here, then are some tips on how to welcome (and not kill) your prophets.

Don’t be afraid.

Try not to feel threatened or intimidated. Most mistakes we make with a prophetic person happen because we misunderstand their heart. Prophetic impulses often present themselves as aggressive, rigid or proud. Truthfully, unrefined prophets can be hard to like. I am not sure I would like myself were I to meet my 19 year old counterpart. But fear (and the loathing that can follow) is often rooted in our own insecurities and not the prophet’s failures. We perceive prophets as threats because they are.

Prophets, when they are functioning perfectly, will challenge and critique existing structures and practices. In theory, good leaders want that kind of input. But in real life it can be almost unbearable to hear. If you are already struggling with the wisdom of a certain decision or even more profoundly the wisdom of your leadership in general, a prophet might just set those insecurities on fire. What is a smoldering inadequacy can become an inferno of self-doubt and defensiveness in the company of an unseasoned prophet. The first step then, is to buttress your own confidence. The first and best thing you can do to welcome a prophet is to be totally rooted in the love of God and confident in your own gifts and authority.

See past the bravado.

Because prophets challenge the status quo (of which you are likely the steward) they can come off like real tools. I listen to myself sometimes and think, “What is your problem?” There is fearlessness to the way I communicate which is often perceived as bravado, hubris or distain. While I am no stranger to the deep darkness of human pride, I can say that is rarely my core motivation. In my own life the leaders who saw past that surface sin of pride and saw in my heart a genuine hunger for God, were the ones who led me best. I would not be who I am or where I am without the vision of a few men and women.

My own story starts in controversy. My hiring supervisor faced incredible opposition to my hiring (I would discover later). “That guy is trouble,” was the consensus opinion about me. The man who hired me saw more than that. Maybe he saw the truth about me or maybe I became more because he saw it. Still, don’t let a little bravado throw you. Just as the quite student often has the most profound thing to say, or the funny student often holds an abiding pain, so the cock sure prophet almost certainly carries their own tenderness, pain and insecurity. Welcoming them will require a deeper analysis of love and curiosity.

Listen to them.

I was invited to a gathering of pastors in my city, most of whom I did not know. I quickly learned they would use the bulk of their time together to tackle a “big issue” related to pastoral work. The topic for the day was what to do with difficult people. “You know the type, the moderator explained, “always complaining, problem with everything, that guy.” What followed was a circus of cynical comments. Responses like, “I just ignore them.” “I rebuke them” “I tell them to go find another church” were all met with laughter and banal back slapping. I was new so I tried to hold my tongue. I was unsuccessful. Respectfully, I offered another angle.

“What if they are right? Everyone talks about these people like they are pariah, but what if they are disaffected, hurt by you or (hard to believe) actually sent by God to challenge something that is wrong with you, your leadership of your church? Is that really so hard to believe? And are you so arrogant as to believe that you don’t need to improve?”

I pressed. “I know that sometimes the critique comes in an immature package but if we are wise, we will not write them off – we will listen to them. We will listen past the immature communication to the thing that is driving them to confront us. I know that people are sometimes wrong but you all talk as if the people you lead are idiots. Where is the love for your people and the respect for their point of view? The only option not offered here is to listen, because they might just be right.”

We all sat in what was a pretty long, pregnant silence. I felt in that moment that they were all trying to decide what to do with me in their own hearts.  These were men acquainted with truth and they had to decide if they were going to receive the truth of what I was saying that moment (accept the correction) or reject it. It was a powerful case in point.

To their credit, one by one, they conceded. And each in turn told stories of poorly worded critiques that God has actually used in their lives. It is the plainest response to the prophet but perhaps the most important; listen to what they have to say. Even when it is poorly presented the issue is what could God be saying through this person? This is the purest hospitality to the prophet, to really consider what they are saying.

Insist on integrity.

The difference between a true and false prophet is often consistency. False prophets feel free to criticize other people while leaving their own lives strangely free from the fury of their own analysis. Jesus resisted the Pharisees primarily because they wanted to be prophets but not practitioners.

An immature prophet will call out the church for giving so little of its money to the poor, but never realize they give even less of their own money to the same cause. If you would welcome a prophet you must call them to live their own message. In fact, it is not only a failure of love to hold back that expectation but it is actually destructive to their development. I wonder if false prophets started off well but never had someone in their life to hold them to their own message. I once sat through a presentation by a political leader in my state. In it he openly ridiculed a teacher who, in rash email to him misspelled several words. He quipped “This is what’s wrong with our education system when our teachers can’t even spell.”

In the very next slide he waxed wise about vision, even quoting from the Bible. The slide read, “Without vision the people parish” (emphasis mine). I wanted to grab the guy by the collar and take him out of the room. He had misspelled the word perish. Apparently he thought spelling was important for school teachers (even in rashly written emails) but not for political leaders (in carefully crafted PowerPoint presentations).

This kind of hypocrisy detonates your message. If you are not equal to the call you make, you have no integrity and you make a mockery of your message. If you care about the young prophet you have to teach them this and hold them to their own standard. More than that, you have to teach them to look first at themselves before they level any kind of correction toward others. Give them time, but insist that they live by Jesus’ own words to the hypocrite in all of us, “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?  You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

Call to them to love.

Welcoming anyone into your ministry is a covenant making gesture. It is to say (at least in the quiet of your own heart) “I will help you become a disciple.” For a prophet to become Christ like, they must master love. There is no more important pursuit for them as disciples. A prophet’s vertical orientation makes them keenly aware of the problems people cause and without love they can disconnect the correction from its intent. In other words, they may love God deeply but struggle to love people at all.

To become a disciple they must learn that God’s oracles sometimes correct and sometimes direct, but always they are governed and guided by love. The writer of Hebrews illuminates the motives of God himself; “because the Lord disciplines the one he loves.” When prophets fail to love they fail the fullness of the truth they profess. Allow young prophets time to grow in love that matches the intensity of truth, but keep them on that journey. Because, the prophet without love is not only wrong they are lost. If you would make a place for the prophet, please disciple them in how to love.

[You may also like to read “How to Identify a Prophet“]

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