Years ago, while visiting my airline’s corporate office, I witnessed what must have been the quickest rejection of a job applicant. A young, shaggy-haired man with baggy clothes, hanging low around his rear, approached the front desk and requested a job application. The secretary asked if he would like to complete the form and submit it immediately. He declined and moped toward the exit. Before he could step outside, the secretary shot me the “not in a million years” look about this young man.

This young man’s dress and demeanor reminded me of a conversation I had with a teen around the same time. This teen felt that individual expression should trump societal norms, but there is a reason you pass the rolls and not throw them, unless you’re at Lambert’s Cafe in Missouri where it’s expected. While I do believe in expression of individuality, my flight kit had a comic with people floating in the water with a plane sinking; the caption read: “Bad day at work.” Things like dress or table manners transcend the individual. They say something about what you believe about yourself and others.

I’ve met with many parents who desire that their children learn to respect authority yet think nothing about speeding, which is a subtle (or sometimes blatant) disregard for authority. Little do these parents realize that they are undermining their own authority. (Dear Alanis Morissette, that’s real irony).

This line of thinking inspired me to develop the Everything Speaks message series. As a professional speaker, I learned many years ago — like our appearance and driving — that everything speaks; everything communicates something about what we believe, even if unintentionally. It’s why we value things like punctuality, firm handshakes and grace.

During the message series, we discovered that how we pray, how we surrender and how we serve each say something about what we believe about God’s power, sovereignty and our own depth of love for our neighbor.

If we have a weak prayer life, it can communicate to others that we believe our God is weak and unable. A hesitant surrender can expose a lack of trust in God. And a torpid level of serving might broadcast a lack of concern for others. Everything speaks. So I challenged my congregation to pray some risky prayers. I say risky because if you pray them earnestly, prepare to never be the same, again.

Pray: Search me; Psalm 139:23 — “Search me, O God, and know my heart.” Ask God to reveal the sins and fears in your life that are keeping you from the plan He has for your life.

Pray: Break me; Job 17:1 — “My spirit is crushed, and my life is nearly snuffed out.” Pray for a brokenness that requires a dependency solely on God, which fosters intimacy, clarity of purpose, and your God-given identity.

Pray: Use me; Luke 22:42 — “Father, if you are willing, please take this cup of suffering away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine.” Pray that, because of you, others would come to know Christ and your actions would bring glory to God.

Pray: To desire the world less and Him more — downward mobility versus upward mobility. (My prayer growing up: Lord, help. Please help me to want to love You, to know You and to serve You.)

Pray: To be rich in the things that matter — invite family into a better story: prayer and reading the Word, serving together; be known more for what you give than what you have; seek intimate and purposeful relationships; view school/work/career as a mission field not a paycheck, etc.

Pray: To be fully surrendered to His will — trusting in His provision and strength to die to old habits that keep you at anything less than full surrender. His Word: learn it, love it, live it.

Referencing John 13: Pray: To get up — to leave a place of comfort and familiarity. (Jesus left the table); free up your schedule by setting your priorities and living them. Pray: to open up—to not only be more trusting/vulnerable, trusting ultimately in yourself and God’s voice in your life, but also about being someone that is trustworthy. Pray: To do it — Put your purpose (and redemptive story) into action with empathy and mercy in a way that brings God glory through serving your neighbor … loving them as you love yourself.

C.J. Wetzler is the Next-Gen pastor at First Baptist Church of Deerfield Beach. Before transitioning into full-time ministry, CJ was a commercial airline captain and high school leadership and science teacher. For questions or comments, he can be reached at cj@deerfieldfirst.com.

At the time of writing this article, the population of the United States is 324,192,360. Of those, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 130,000 of them are employed as a commercial or airline pilot. That means only .0004 percent of the U.S. population fly cargo or people professionally. If you were to attend a sold-out Yankees game, of the 54,251 spectators, statistically there are only 22 pilots in the stands. That’s three less people than one team’s active roster! It’s a prestigious career with few completing the extensive training, unrelenting testing and demands that professional pilots experience. I know this because I was one — a captain by age 24, even.

Six years after my departure from the airline industry people still ask, “What kind of plane did you fly?” And when I reply that I operated the CRJ-200, a 50-seat regional jet, forget what I wrote above. I might as well have said that I pulled a Radio Flyer wagon behind my Big Wheel and, yet, some would still consider that the more prestigious.

Easily disregarded by the public is the fact that regional aircraft and crew are held to the same certification and reliability standards as the mainline carriers, which is proven by the regional airlines’ exceedingly unprecedented safety and reliability record. Also ignored, regional pilots — one could argue — possess surpassing “stick-and-rudder” skills as a direct result of the increased amount of operations in what is statistically considered the most dangerous part of the flight which is the take-off and landing (or terminal) environment. Finally, consider how the regional jet has positively impacted the market for the customer by expanding to service smaller cities and providing greater schedule flexibility. Yet, no one wants to fly on the “tiny” jets — the scourge of the industry. Vacation, yes; via a regional jet, no.

As a pastor, the size game continues. How many people go to your church? How many youth went on the summer trip? How many students attend the Wednesday night experience? Numbers, numbers, numbers! In aviation, you’re not a real pilot until you’ve flown a plane with 100 seats or more. And in ministry, you’re not a real pastor until your weekly attendance exceeds 2000 with the additional “pastor street credential” bonus for being multi-site.

Please hear me; I believe God has, and will, use varying church styles and sizes. But what’s being increasingly neglected by church-goers is the focus of what’s most important in the ministry — Christ. Somewhere we’ve come to measure the health and success of a church solely by two metrics: attendance and giving. Can these two be indicators of health or deficiency either way? Yes, they can. But should they be the sole qualifiers? I say absolutely not! As recorded in Matthew 7:20, Jesus says, “[Just] as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify people by their actions.”

Timothy Keller, in Shaped By the Gospel, writes, “The most important [action taken] is that a ministry be faithful to the Word and sound in doctrine,” with Christ at the center. We must resist the temptation to be ensnared by shallow number-crunching and instead hold fast to the promise of what God desires to accomplish through a handful of people fully surrendered to His will.

It is we, who call ourselves Christians, that have been commissioned to gather as the body, the Church, and to be known by our actions. We are people with a “passion for His presence, a deep craving to reach the lost, sincere integrity, Spirit-led faith, down-to-earth humility,” and a recognition of our own “brokenness” (It: How Churches and Leaders Can Get It and Keep It, Craig Groeschel).

When we act in such a way, we’ll see rebellious hearts turn toward God and He will “add to the Church” because we abandoned seat-counting and returned to devoting ourselves “to the apostles’ teaching, and to fellowship, and to sharing in meals (including the Lord’s Supper), and to prayer” Acts 2:38-47.

C.J. Wetzler is the NextGen pastor at First Baptist Church of Deerfield Beach. Before transitioning into full-time ministry, CJ was a commercial airline captain and high school leadership and science teacher. For questions or comments he can be reached at cj@deerfieldfirst.com.