Pastor Vernon Brings New Strengths and Ideas While Advancing Our Shared Vision
Lakeland Community Church is pleased to announce the installation of Dr. Reverend Vernon Burger as lead pastor, following our service on April 6, 2025. From an initial pool of 150 applicants and an intensive search process, Pastor Vernon clearly stood out as a candidate who aligns with our church community’s ethos.
Senior Pastor Dan, who retires in June, looks forward to the energy, insight, and experience Pastor Vernon adds to Lakeland.
“Pastor Vernon is an interesting combination. His first doctorate is on lament and poetry, and the doctorate he is working on now is on grief,” Senior Pastor Dan said. “Here’s someone who started a huge ministry in Uganda, bringing stability to an under-resourced area. He’s very aggressive about changing people’s lives, and yet he also has this deep contemplative side to him.”
Elder Laura Hartwig, who served on the search committee, said she looks forward to how Pastor Vernon will contribute to Lakeland’s vision.
“Our church vision is to build a community of authentic followers of Jesus. Vernon’s talents and spiritual gifts help us in every sense of that vision,” she said. “The authenticity that comes from his personal experiences and his studies makes him a great fit. I also look forward to Vernon’s new perspectives on how we see our calling.”
Pastor Dan, Laura, and the entire pastoral search committee feel blessed to have Vernon join our church leadership team. We look forward to witnessing the many ways that God will work through Vernon and our entire congregation as we continue to grow our church community.
A Q&A With New Lead Pastor Vernon Burger
You may have already heard Pastor Vernon preach, visited with him, or even asked a question or two after a service. You may also know Vernon and his family as fellow congregants who joined Lakeland last year.
To share even more about Vernon with our congregation, our leadership team sat down with him in late March to hear what drew his family to Lakeland, his perspective on what the future holds for our church, and how our work as Christians can be more like a healthy pair of lungs.
What initially drew you to the opportunity to serve as lead pastor at Lakeland?
Pastor Vernon: If I were going to plant a church, it would look like Lakeland. The authenticity of the people here is something that I deeply value. From a personal standpoint, I admire how Lakeland draws from the best of different traditions and is able to bring them together in meaningful ways. This provides a sense of familiarity for people of different denominations, offering them a safe place to unpack life.
Can you share a little about your background and how your prior experiences align with what’s happening at Lakeland?
Pastor Vernon: The mission focus at Lakeland is certainly aligned with my experience. I started an organization in East Africa that’s still going after 25 years. During that time, I leaned into a foundational belief that people can individually and communally hear from God and that they can then go out and actually live a life that looks like Jesus’.
That’s a value of mine and, of course, Lakeland’s. We’re aligned in the sense that you don’t just have to wait for the sermon to know what to do. It’s in our DNA to be able to hear from God and live that out.
That’s how I’ve patterned our organization in Africa. We’ve seen orphans that we started off with in South Sudan, and some of them are on our staff now; some of them are out in the world as lawyers, doctors, businessmen and women, and social workers in professions all across the board.
Our belief has been this: You’ve got what it takes and God’s uniquely going to speak to you, and wherever he puts you, whatever sphere in society he puts you in, you can be effective and carry this out. Similarly, Lakeland isn’t a pastor-centric church. Lakeland is what our community is.
What ideas are you excited to bring to Lakeland?
Pastor Vernon: Our vision is going to be the same: to build an authentic community of followers of Jesus. But I do have four areas where I really thrive: vision casting, preaching and teaching, counseling, and team building. Pretty much anything else I’m terrible at, to be very honest.
One of the biggest questions I want to help answer is, “How can we gather around a set of core values that we can implement with our people?” Because I think that, as many people have said before, “Culture is simply your values plus your behavior.” How do we work in these values all the way from children to people that are in their 80s and 90s, and how do they live that out? I think that I can help to give some texture to that.
I believe that through collaboration, through clarity on vision, mission, and values, and then just the belief of seeing all the gifts that people already have in our community, that’s how I think we move forward.
What is one of your personal core values?
Pastor Vernon: Collaboration. I’m a huge believer in multiple people helping to make decisions. I don’t believe in the singular person going off, getting things declared to them, and then coming back. So how we’re set up as a church is that we have ruling elders — a plurality of ruling elders. And so I look forward to working with them, especially on vision and mission values.
What challenges do you foresee in the years ahead at Lakeland?
Pastor Vernon: I think from an identity standpoint, it’s the same thing that all of us have personal struggles and breakthroughs with. The deepest reality you can know about yourself is that you’re a beloved child of God, and that you always have been, and you always will be. It’s a continued process for people to adopt that internally and live that out.
That’s the greatest challenge of any church or just walking with Jesus. At some point you have to realize, “Oh, I’ve always been beloved.” There’s never been a time that you weren’t beloved, and you always will be. And when you fall down, you’ll still be beloved, and people will be there alongside you and give you a gracious hand up and teach you how to pivot.
Secondly, it’s been stated that we need to become more outward focused. Our work should look more like breathing lungs. You need to be able to take the in-breath to come together in community and learn to grow, but then you need to have the out-breath to go out in the world. If you’re ever going to have healthy lungs, you need to do both. We’re going to press into that.
What would you say are things that folks can do to continue on this path?
Pastor Vernon: There’s a missionary, Jim Elliot, who was martyred in Ecuador. One of his famous statements was, “Wherever you are, be all there,” which to me means really paying attention to how God is already working in your life.
Another author, Ken Shigematsu, says, “We’re not so much people that are trying to sell people the gospel. We’re much more like hiking guides that are walking alongside people, trying to help them notice how God is all.” God has already been working in our lives. We just have to ask, how do we pay attention? How do we open our eyes to how God is already working in our lives and how do we build on that?
This all starts with our personal journey, but then it starts in our homes, in the community, in the church, and how we’re serving. And then, we should ask, “How is God working in the world?”
Wherever you are, be all there and pay attention. Consider how God is already working in your life. You don’t need to conjure it up. You just need to open your eyes.
What’s something that you think that the Lakeland community will find particularly unique about you?
Pastor Vernon: I am a highly relational person. My greatest success as a leader is seeing other people succeed. It literally lights my fire. I’m going to be a person who asks you, “How are you hearing from God and hearing from the community? What does that look like? What does success in your life look like?” That relational piece is going to be really key for me.
I actually do want to be a pastor alongside people. I’m not just about stage presence and things like that. I mean, I dig preaching and teaching, but that’s just not the type of leader I am. I want to embrace the dual role of teaching the ways of Jesus and learning from our congregation. I’m going to learn exponentially more from others than they’re going to learn from me. That can be disarming.
You initially chose to attend Lakeland with your family before this opportunity came up. What impressed you about Lakeland as a congregant?
Pastor Vernon: The people here are unbelievably welcoming. Right when we came in the door, everyone was so hospitable and really showed us around. Everyone was incredibly kind and willing to take time to answer any questions and be present with us. Age-wise, Lakeland is all across the board, and we loved that aspect too. It literally is multigenerational.
We hear you’re getting a second doctorate.
Pastor Vernon: I have a Ph.D. in the history of ideas. I’m getting a Doctor of Ministry degree right now in spiritual formation and leadership. My Ph.D. research is on Biblical lament and poetry. My bent is poetry. Research-wise, I’m studying how local churches cultivate spaces and places for people that have negative emotions and grief. I’m really looking at a nexus between theology, psychology, and poetry.
Tell us more about your interest in poetry.
Pastor Vernon: I consider myself to be a poet first and that can be, at best, awkward in a local church. And I’m not trying to be a punk about it. It just is what it is. But I love the poetic life, embracing nuance, and the art and form of it. The poetic life is being in a place where people can all come together with a super wide range of views and still live in harmony.
This makes me think of Ephesians 2:10, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.”
That word workmanship — the root word is “poem” in Greek. Every single person is a living, breathing poem. Every person.
We were created in the poetic in Genesis 1 and 2. The Psalms are poetry. We’ve got the Lord’s Prayer. I think everybody is a living, breathing poem. The question is, what verse are you living right now?
Learn More About The Burgers’ Mission Work
Pastor Vernon and his wife Amber will continue to serve as stateside leaders for their organization, His Voice Global, which aims to “raise leaders among the vulnerable” in East Africa.
You can also hear Pastor Vernon teach at our Lee’s Summit church on Sunday mornings at 10:30 a.m.