Faith Church pastor earns doctorate with prayer-immersion thesis

During the years it took Mike Sager to finish the dissertation for his doctorate degree, he had one goal in mind.

“My desire was to just up the prayer game,” he said.

Sager, the senior pastor at Faith Evangelical Free Church, recently earned his doctorate of ministry from Trinity International University near Chicago. Part of the degree’s requirements included a dissertation. Sager’s is called “Cultivating Healthy Prayer Practice Among Church Leaders.”

The big takeaway from his dissertation, Sager said, was that churches have to make their ministries saturated in prayer.

“My goal was to put together a tool, a resource that could help pastors foster healthier prayer lives for themselves and their leaders,” he said, adding that prayer is not meant to simply be a ritual.

“I worked on this for so long,” he said. “It’s kind of one of those things that’s always there.” His research was largely focused on interviews, he said, but also included Bible study and other research. Occasionally he would take trips to Chicago, where he would spend his time at work in the library.

Sager said it wasn’t so much an absence of prayer that was the problem, but more that people were not embracing it fully enough. He said when you ask congregation members how their prayer lives are, many will have a guilty look.

“You always want a deeper relation with God,” he said. Sometimes people get spiritually lazy, he added, when what they should do is pay attention and talk with God often.

Sager said many people find it easy to scream at God when something goes wrong or thank him during particularly positive moments, but it is important to also have a strong day-to-day relationship with Him.

Earning the degree itself, Sager said, wasn’t his motivation for attending Trinity International University. He wanted the process and the training so he could keep learning and growing as a pastor.

“You feel a little separated from the cities and seminaries,” he said. “You want to keep being sharpened.”

Typically, the course work itself takes two to three years, and the dissertation afterward takes another three or four.

The degree is a lot of work, Sager said, and about half of those who shoot for it don’t end up finishing the dissertation even after they have completed the other coursework. It was especially difficult for Sager, who, on top of switching ministries during his doctoral work, suffered from kidney cancer in 2007.

“That kind of took me out of the loop for a while,” he said. “By God’s grace, I came through the surgery.”

Pastors getting their doctorate is more common now than it used to be, he said. The degree differs from a typical PhD.

“It’s a more practical degree, more ministry-oriented,” he said. “I found it very applicable to what I am doing.”

To help keep prayer on the forefront of ministry thinking, Sager put together a large binder that he calls his prayer workbook.

“I look at it like a coach’s playbook,” he said, adding it was a tool for ministry leaders to use and reference when they needed it, not to read from front to back. “Things you can do to keep prayer a priority in your ministry.”

Finding faith in college

Sager’s father worked for the U.S. Department of State overseas. Sager was born in Tehran and traveled often, moving between embassies, and living in a wide variety of places, including Cairo and Russia.

“It was a different experience for a little kid,” he said. As a young child, Sager said, he was used to sitting in classrooms during United Nations events full of children from all over the world.

His family returned to the U.S. and lived in the D.C. area for a while, then moved to Seattle when Sager was in junior high, where he stayed until college.

“I had come to know Christ as a senior at the University of Washington,” he said.

Sager graduated with a degree in economics and worked for Merrill Lynch in Seattle. But the connection to his faith he made in college stayed on his mind.

“A friend suggested I go to seminary,” he said.

He did, attending Talbot Seminary and School of Theology, a part of Biola University in California. While he was in seminary, he got involved with a nearby church in Fullerton, Calif. He graduated in 1985, and spent some time at a church in Walnut Creek, Calif., before moving to Minnesota.

He served as pastor at a church in Morris for 19 years, all the while getting to know the Evangelical Free Church of America’s district leadership in Minnesota. The superintendent recommended he look into Faith Church in Austin.

“I had no idea that position was open,” Sager said. He moved to Austin and took over. His arrival ended four years of interim pastors at the church. In total, Sager has worked as pastor in Minnesota for 25 years.

He now lives in Austin with his wife, Holly, who is involved with special women’s ministries, and their three children, Steve, Kristi and Luke. The youngest, Luke, just graduated from Austin High School.

“We had receptions a couple weeks apart,” Sager said.

Kristi, an elementary education major, currently attends Trinity International University. Sager said the family found it funny that his daughter attended the same school he did.

“When Kristi started at Trinity, there was a running joke as to who would finish Trinity first,” he said. “Thankfully, I did.”