From around the corner I heard raised voices.
"Don't your kids do anything but play basketball?" It was our women's leader, not normally shrill of voice. "Surely you know we're preparing for a missions banquet. We expect to raise $10,000 for an orphanage in Zaire. Our banquet has priority over a silly basketball game!"
"This is no silly basketball game!" countered the youth leader. "We've been planning this for two months. I've got a Christian pro basketball player coming to speak. We're expecting more than fifty non-Christian teenagers to be here. What do we communicate to teens if we cancel an opportunity to evangelize here so we can send money to Africa?"
There they were, two department heads in the same church, both genuinely loving the same Lord and trying to serve him, yet both shouting at each other. Through an office error, both had received approval to use the gym on the same evening.
Their arguments interested me. They didn't try to determine who'd booked the gym first or who was at fault. The question was: Whose work is more important? Which ministry has priority? What is more significant: raising $10,000 for an orphanage in Zaire or reaching fifty teens with the gospel? The disease I detected was ergocentricity—the attitude that says, "My work is more important than yours."
Self-centeredness and self-sufficiency surface in many forms. The egocentric person, caught up with himself, says, "I am more important than you are." The ethnocentric person says, "My culture is more important than yours," which is an attitude missionaries wrestle with as they try to understand Christian lifestyles overseas. Ergocentricity is perhaps less understood. It's the attitude that surfaces when we're so engrossed in our task, when our ministries so consume our emotional energy, we forget the legitimacy of what others are doing.
Ergocentricity shows up in a variety of situations.
George was the pastor responsible for setting up small-group ministry in a large church. With great enthusiasm, George prepared the congregation. Then he dropped the bombshell at the staff meeting: he expected the six other pastors and their wives to participate in the groups. The fact that the other pastors were tied up most nights with children's meetings, calling programs, converts' classes, and choirs didn't enter the picture. George expected the staff members to shuffle the other activities on their schedules to make room for the small-group meetings, which, of course, he considered more important. "The people have to see we're all behind this," George argued.
George failed to see the equal importance of the other ministries. The significance of his program was in no way undermined by the other pastors continuing with choir cantatas, counseling sessions, and youth ministries. But in his passion to do what God had given him to do, he was blind to what God had entrusted to others.
George's persistence resulted in serious tension around the office. Other staff members resented the new small-group ministry. In the end it was deemed counterproductive to the rest of the church's ministry and eventually dropped.
Ergocentricity can be deadly. It's divisive. It breaks relationships. It breeds pride and pettiness.
I wrestled with ergocentricity when I returned home after ten years of missionary work in Africa and Asia. As I visited churches, I saw pastors erecting multimillion-dollar complexes that I considered ornate examples of poor stewardship. After struggling overseas with inadequate facilities and equipment yet seeing a great response to the gospel, it seemed to me my work was more important than what was being done in these plush buildings. My work deserved a bigger slice of the church's financial pie!
What I failed to see was that ergocentricity infected me just as much as the pastors who had little interest in my missionary work. I was so caught up in what I saw God doing overseas that I failed to appreciate what God was doing through my brothers at home. In actuality, my work was no more important than theirs. We both served the kingdom of God.
Since then I've run into other manifestations, such as pastoral ergocentricity that intimates: I'm doing the spiritual work around here. I preach. I counsel. I marry the living and bury the dead. You folks in the pew can paint the classrooms, landscape the lot, and tend the nursery. Just leave the significant work to me.
Single-agenda folks pester the pastor with ergocentric viewpoints. One man recently blasted me because nowhere in our three dozen ministry programs do we have something specifically for alcoholics. He suggested we cut some of our present ministries to make room for his program since, in his view, most anything is secondary to helping alcoholics. Although I shared his concern, I couldn't disrupt other valuable programs simply because he felt his deserved top priority.
Ergocentricity is costly, unity priceless. A Christocentric body unites the work of all its members, glorifying Christ, who is the most important.
—Calvin Ratz
Abbotsford (British Columbia)
Pentecostal Assembly
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