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There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from trying to control everything. You know the feeling. It’s the late-night spreadsheet tweaking, the endless strategy meetings, the desperate attempt to make sure every single variable is locked down. For over twenty years, that was Dr. Debbie Salinger’s reality.
If you looked at her resume back then, you’d see a classic corporate success story. But her journey actually started long before the corner offices. It began on the vibrant shores of Jamaica, moved to the relentless, fast-paced streets of New York City when she was just sixteen, and eventually landed her deep in the tech industry. She earned her degrees, climbed the ladder, and learned exactly what it takes to manage high-pressure environments, strict budgets, and rigid expectations.
But here’s the thing about control: it’s mostly an illusion. And for Debbie, moving from corporate leadership into ministry meant bringing those hard-earned skills with her and discovering what happens when the Holy Spirit takes the wheel.
In her powerful book, God’s Match: How to Light a Fire in Your Church, Dr. Salinger invites readers to recognize familiar patterns in their own congregations and consider what renewed life might look like. Through stories, reflection, and the metaphor of fire, she opens a conversation about becoming receptive to the Holy Spirit’s transforming work. When we get too comfortable, we freeze. We cling to old traditions, outdated strategies, and the illusion of safety. We become, in her words, “zombie institutions.” We go through the motions, terrified of the very thing that could actually save us: change beyond our ability to predict or control, approached through prayer and responsiveness to the Holy Spirit.
This is where Debbie’s unique background really shines. She doesn’t offer a sterile, five-step strategic plan to fix organizational decline. Anyone who has been in management knows that binders full of new policies rarely change a culture. Instead, she talks about something much more alive: “Holy Spirit combustion.”
And if you know anything about a real fire, you know it isn’t neat, predictable, or easily managed. It requires three specific things: fuel, heat, and oxygen.
Debbie breaks this down in a way that just makes sense. The “fuel” is our willingness to let go of the old stuff. It’s the outdated assumptions, the “we’ve always done it this way” mentality, and the cherished security blankets we use to avoid risk. We have to be willing to use the past as kindling for something new.
The “heat” is the friction. Yes, friction. We are often taught to avoid conflict at all costs, but Debbie argues that healthy debate, passionate brainstorming, and daring to take creative risks are exactly what we need to spark a flame. Heat reminds us that we’re still alive.
And the “oxygen”? In the book, Dr. Salinger is crystal clear about what this oxygen is: it is the Holy Spirit. “For us, that ‘breath’ is the Holy Spirit of Christ among us, our all-powerful, almighty source for both identity and change,” she writes. Without the Holy Spirit, we are just dry wood. We can’t manufacture this breath through a clever marketing campaign. We have to surrender to it.
For the creatives, artists, and culture-shapers reading this, Debbie’s message hits a very specific nerve. We live in a culture that is deeply allergic to raw, unscripted emotion. We want our art polished, our performances predictable, and our lives neatly packaged for social media. But Debbie challenges that impulse. She asks us to look at the “magic kingdom” we’ve built to hide from reality and step out into the messy, beautiful wilderness of authentic connection.
You can’t script a genuine moment of connection. You can’t force a creative breakthrough by filling out a form. You have to be willing to let the fire burn away the dead wood.
While reading her work, I found myself wondering: what does it actually take for someone to make a pivot like this? To go from analyzing tech infrastructure to shepherding a congregation as an ordained pastor?
The answer, Debbie suggests, is surprisingly simple. It’s love.
She shares a beautiful, grounded story about her daughter’s garden. When her daughter went away on a trip, she asked her sister to watch the plants. When she returned, she was dismayed to find them withering and dying. The solution wasn’t a complex botanical formula or a complete overhaul of the garden bed. The roots were still alive. They just needed some love and water.
Debbie texted her: “Salvageable. The roots are alive. They just need some love.”
That’s the absolute heart of God’s Match. It’s a reminder that whether you are leading a tech startup, a community arts program, or a local faith community, the roots of your passion are probably still alive. They are just waiting for you to stop managing the decline and start breathing life back into the room.
Debbie writes that a declining organization has lost its desire to feed its future generations. It becomes content to feed those within it on “mashed potatoes and apple sauce until its dying day.” It’s a striking image, but it’s one we can all recognize. We’ve all been in rooms, or been part of teams, where the energy is just gone, replaced by a tired resignation.
Her remedy isn’t to panic. It’s about moving from a place of fear to a place of fierce, unapologetic faith. It’s about realizing that you don’t have to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. You just have to provide the windmill and the match, and trust the wind to do the rest.
So, the next time you feel like you’re just going through the motions, or that your creative or spiritual well has run dry, remember Debbie’s advice. Stop trying to control the wind. Stop trying to manage the fire. Just clear away the dead brush, strike the match, and let the fire do what it was always meant to do.
God’s Match: How to Light a Fire in Your Church is available now. Learn more at SpiritFireMatch.com.
About the Author: Dr. Debbie Salinger is a recently retired United Methodist elder in the Florida Conference. She holds a Doctor of Ministry degree from Portland Seminary, where her studies concentrated on Semiotics, Church, and Culture.
