HOLY AMBITION OR WHOLLY AMBITIOUS?

Ambition.

The very word conjures conflicting images. Parents want their daughter’s fianc to be ambitious enough to support their princess. Yet voters are generally suspicious of candidates they perceive as politically ambitious. No minister wants to be perceived as ambitious in a self-centered way. Yet what pulpit committee would seek a complacent pastor with no discernible ambition?

Pastors wrestle with it: What’s good about ambition? How much is necessary, and how much is too much? Is raw ambition ever extracted from holy ambition, leaving only pure ministry motives?

Or, more profanely, will we ever quit worrying about having as many in our Sunday school as that Jubilee Center of Joy across the street?

Spotlight on Ambition

We’ve all wrestled with ambition, usually grappling with this slippery animal in the dark. The many pastors I talked with recently shed some light on the beast. Most confirmed there is a benevolent side to ambition.

“If personal ambition is defined as getting a good education, trying to keep my appearance pleasant, working to be the best I can be,” says Tom Carter, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dinuba, California, “then ambition is not a problem. If it leads to pride, there’s a problem. We stumble most often with what we do with ambition.”

Michael Walker of White Rock United Methodist Church in Dallas agrees: “Ambition, like anger, can be an appropriate drive when kept in its place. A person without ambition is mentally and emotionally in neutral. The issue is not ambition, itself, but whether that ambition controls us. Does it merely provide input, which we hear, measure, and take into account, or does it dictate our actions?”

Ambition appears to be rooted in who we are. “I took the standard psychological tests at the time of ordination,” says Don McCullough, pastor of Solana Beach (California) Presbyterian Church, “and I ended up at the 98 percentile for achievement orientation. That set me questioning ambition.

“Then I studied the apostle Paul, and I realized that not only was he incredibly ambitious-both before and after he became a Christian-but that it took that kind of personality to accomplish what he did. Ambition got converted with Paul.

“So I had to ask, Am I ambitious for Don McCullough or for Jesus Christ? I have to answer that question daily-while realizing that achievement orientation is a part of my personality.”

If ambition is part of one’s personality, mere denial or massive coverup may be fruitless, if not counterproductive. Philip Greenslade writes in Leadership, Greatness, and Servanthood, “Nothing looks sillier and indeed more conspicuous than a leader trying to recede into the background. … Resignation in a leader is more dangerous than overambition.”

Ambition, when rightly applied, can be a necessary and benevolent aid for a pastor. “We have a big commission from the Lord,” exclaims Dave Philips, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, “so shrinking from it isn’t good. Ambition is okay if it is holy ambition, a calling from God to use our gifts in accordance to what he’s given us. We ought not withdraw into passivity out of a false sense of humility.”

Jerry Hayner of Forest Hills Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, agrees: “Ambition can be a God-given quality that causes people to accomplish things greater than the status quo. Without this good kind of ambition, we’d be less than the people Christ calls us to be.”

It’s the dual quality of ambition, then, that perplexes us. Good, holy ambition drives the mills of excellent ministry, helps accomplish tasks the unambitious might deem impossible, transforms churches, maximizes gifts. Raw ambition, on the other hand-personal aggrandizement, the quest for position and esteem, the desire to claw one’s way to the top-pours sand in the ministry gears and forces the machinery to produce an unholy product: human pride.

Ambition Rising

Our ambitions may lie sleeping much of the time, hardly disturbing our ministries. And your ambition may not be jostled awake exactly as mine would. But for most pastors, certain predictable occasions awaken questions of ambition. Pastors reported three broad situations that force the issue:

Decisions. Darrell Johnson tells of his experience wrestling with a new call when he pastored Union Church of Manila in the Philippines: “Preaching in Manila was about as good as things could get for me. On any given Sunday I’d have people from all over the world visiting our congregation and maybe 350 missionaries among the regular attenders. Almost weekly I’d be invited to address some mission board.

“Then as I contemplated going to a more stable, homogeneous church-Fremont Presbyterian in Sacramento, California-it seemed like stepping back. When I accepted the call, friends wrote to congratulate me on my ‘promotion.’ While Fremont is a great church, it didn’t feel like a promotion.”

Johnson was doing what so many pastors do when facing a new opportunity: weighing how it fits not only with a sense of God’s will, but also with one’s sense of accomplishment and place in ministry. Pastors want to heed God’s call, wherever it may lead, but feelings of worth and achievement enter the decision.

Johnson understood what was going on. “I had to come to terms with why I work so hard on my preaching,” he recalls. “Is it to preach in a place of prominence, or is it to communicate God’s message? As I worked through my call to Fremont, God helped me rediscover what my ministry is about.”

Johnson learned what many pastors discover: a decision about relocating can force the question of ambition. First, pastors want to know if the change is God’s will, and that brings up questions of gifts and abilities. Should they be used in as large an arena as possible? Or is that just raw ambition wanting to make a bigger splash? What if the call appears to narrow your influence-can your ego accept that? Such questions produce sleepless nights.

Other decisions force the ambition issue, such as how to further growth in a church. Extending the kingdom of God is a laudable task-as long as God is in it. Unfortunately, it also tends to involve the pastor’s ego.

“About forty years ago,” relates Tom Carter, “our church split, and another Baptist congregation was formed. The parting left a bad taste, and members sometimes talked of getting the two churches back together. Both churches had about 150 attending, and neither could afford more than one pastor, each of whom was spread thin. Then about four years ago when the other church was without a pastor, the question came up: Is this a good time to reunite?

“I thought the reunion could be God’s way to reconcile us. But my support of the idea forced me to ponder motives: Am I in favor of this because I’d pastor a significantly larger church and be able to hire an associate? And doesn’t a merger often lead to diminished ministry? Is this a good idea or my selfish dream?

“Finally I was convinced the merger would be for the good, although I did have some lingering doubts about my ambition. It has proven workable after four years, so I’m glad my doubts didn’t derail the plan.”

Any decision to launch something significant in ministry probably carries with it questions of motive and personal ambition. That, in itself, isn’t bad. Nor should it put decisions on hold. It merely presents an opportunity to reexamine why we do what we do.

Comparisons. Consider the way comparisons force their way into a pastor’s thinking, such as comparisons to:

-Classmates and associates. “Those who graduated from seminary with me were competitors because of our backgrounds,” recalls Howard Childers, pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Amarillo, Texas. “The models held up to us in seminary were, for the most part, large, affluent churches. So in the back of our minds was the thought, We may make some early sacrifices, but we’ll eventually pastor the kinds of churches we came from. Most of us now pastor midsized churches, so the Holy Spirit has forced us to deal with our idols.” Questions of Have I done as well as they? are bound to surface, however, as pastors view their peers.

Another pastor said, “A young guy I once hired now pastors a church with half again as many members as ours. I find I think about him a lot!”

-Other pastors. Most towns have a pastoral pecking order, as do denominational associations, so most pastors know exactly how large their churches are in comparison to the others. Also, in small towns, the effectiveness of a pastor sometimes is determined by who gets the “best prospects.”

“It’s always a temptation to feel proud when people switch to your church from another,” confesses Tom Carter. “And when active Christians move to town, everybody wants them. It can become a game of who can grab them first.”

The ambitious pastor often wins such games, but may lose part of his pastoral soul in the process.

-Other professions. “A lawyer my age sends his daughter to school in Esprit clothing, drives a Mercedes, and skis in Colorado,” laments one pastor. “I provide my daughter clothes from J. C. Penney, drive an outdated Dodge, and shovel my driveway in the winter. I’m as educated, and I work as hard as he does, yet he has all the perks!” Such thoughts dog underesteemed pastors and can lead to unholy ambition.

The pastor who comes from a family of wealth or prominence may feel rather insignificant at family gatherings. When talk is of stock portfolios and Caribbean vacations, an investment in Kittel and a junior high trail hike hardly sound significant. This family member, no matter what he accomplishes in his ministry, probably will feel the underachiever of the litter. And that may produce restlessness.

-The highly accomplished. Comparisons become brutal when we look at people at the top of their fields. Barry Moller, associate pastor at Solana Beach (California) Presbyterian Church, relates how such comparisons bring out ambition, both good and bad: “Recently I heard Lewis Smedes speak, and I started thinking, I’d love to be able to communicate as authentically and profoundly! Such wanting to be better can be both a blessing and a curse. It can make me ambitious to improve myself, and that’s good. But frantically chasing everyone else’s best gifts can also cause me to beat up on myself mercilessly. If I can’t be happy being effective in ways God has gifted me, I end up not only ambitious, but unfulfilled and depressed.”

Expectations. Most pastors struggle with expectations placed on them by three sources:

-Themselves. “Pastors get to a certain point,” explains Dave Philips, “where they decide they’ve either (1) accomplished what they wanted or (2) have failed to reach their expectations.”

Mike Walker elaborates: “Some people have a private agenda, like writing a book or preaching to a congregation of a thousand.” If that goal isn’t met, they grow restless. Pastors typically have an idea of how brightly they expect their star to shine. Some who find that brilliance too early must face the ominous What now? Others who never achieve their expected candlepower agonize over their smoldering wick.

-Parents. Some people enter the ministry to please parents and gain their approval. Trying to please someone as important as a parent can be an unrelenting prod for a pastor.

-Parishioners. “For fifteen years,” Darrell Johnson concedes, “accolades after a good sermon would trigger a drive to make the next week’s sermon even better. I couldn’t simply rest in a job well done; I had to improve on it the next time out. Otherwise, I feared, people would think the sermon they affirmed the week before was an exception.” Driven by such expectations (in this case, Johnson admits, imagined), ministry is one frightening sprint toward acceptability through accomplishment.

What do all these situations have in common? Each forces the pastor to do an ambition check: Am I serving God or elevating myself? So how do we decode our ambition quotient? Let’s look at the symptoms of raw ambition.

Symptoms of Naked Ambition

I asked pastors if they felt ambition had discernible stages. Is it a progressive, growing problem that can be detected early and headed off? If so, maybe a holy radiation therapy could destroy the malignancy.

No such luck. Tom Carter sang the dominant theme of the chorus of responses: “I see ambition more as a continual tug of war, a struggle back and forth that I never fully win. Sometimes my heart seems to be ambition on the loose, and other times my ambition is under the control of the Holy Spirit.”

The problem of naked ambition rarely becomes apparent through a slow strip tease; uninhibited ambition seems ready at any moment to shed respectability and bare itself, to our shame. It does so in a number of ways.

Jealousy and competition. I once heard a minister tell of a former senior pastor who was leaving one congregation and trying to convince his staff to follow him to the new church. His crowning argument was revealing: “Look, there’s only one church in that whole town that’s doing much of anything, and if you guys come with me, we’ll bury it!”

When “the competition” becomes the other thriving churches rather than the La-Z-Boys and Bud Lights and Out on a Limb gurus, and when a drive to accomplish great things for the Lord gets twisted into an entrepreneurial bent to eliminate other church ministries, ambition has streaked one’s soul.

Jerry Hayner says, “We can get caught up in doing all the right things for all the wrong reasons, such as wanting to be seen as more successful than the next pastor. I have to keep in focus what I’m supposed to be doing and not allow myself to get caught in a competitive or jealous mind-set.”

Discontent and fruitlessness. Barry Moller described this as feeling you need to “dance harder, dance faster, and dance better.” The problem, he says, is that “when raw ambition drives me, doing something better becomes the sole motivation. Successes are never satisfying, because I start focusing on what I haven’t done, and I cannot even rejoice in my accomplishments.”

A midcareer pastor noticed this problem: “As my influence broadened, what earlier I’d thought would be satisfying turned out to feel-I’m almost ashamed to say-more like a stepping stone. At first, I thought pastoring a church like this would be the summit of my ministry, but now it’s beginning to feel normal. I find myself wondering if I should make a mark somewhere else.” He’s not endorsing this phenomenon; he just recognizes the insatiable appetite of ambition.

Other pastors feel ambition’s presence in periods of ministry listlessness. “The overly ambitious pastor risks losing spiritual power and the anointing of the Holy Spirit,” warns Tom Carter, “and that can make a ministry fruitless.”

Perhaps the experience is a little like dashing madly after happiness: it can’t be found in direct pursuit. Ambitious striving often produces the opposite effect from the one desired. Seek prominence, and it eludes your grasp; “seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.” These things may well include fruitfulness and fulfillment in ministry.

Darrell Johnson personalizes the experience. “It’s easy for us, like the church in Ephesus, to forsake our ‘first love.’ That hit me as I reread the account of Jesus with Mary and Martha. I realized my great ambition used to be to sit at Jesus’ feet. I used to be willing to spend the time to listen and pray. But lately I had become so busy preparing that I wasn’t taking the time to be with Jesus. I had become a ‘human doing’ rather than a human being. I had to hear what John wrote to the church in Ephesus: ‘Repent and do the things you did at first!’ “

Compromise and sham. Seeing the film, Glory, about the 54th Massachusetts Regiment in the Civil War, again brought home to me people’s pernicious penchant to work any situation to fit personal ends. The heart of the movie is the selfless commitment of the 54th Regiment’s officers and ex-slave troops, but a self-serving quartermaster and a crooked, plundering general offered startling counterpoint to the soldiers’ sacrifice.

Ministry, like war, offers opportunities to twist a noble pursuit for selfish ends. When what begins as pastoral service becomes the means toward ignoble personal gain, you can be sure vainglorious ambition is present.

Money can be one sign. Dave Philips remembers a reported conversation in which a cynical pastor stated flatly, “The ministry is a job-J-O-B-and we pastors are in it to make a living, just like everyone else. We do our best in order to get the best living we can.”

“A preoccupation with money,” levels Philips, “is a sure symptom of ambition on the loose, especially if the goal is to obtain more than someone else.”

Compromised convictions are another sign. Don McCullough describes this as “sensing deep down that I’m making compromises, hedging the difficult word in a sermon, doing things for the applause rather than for the sake of the truth. It’s so human to do these things, but so important to notice it, to feel the inner check from the Spirit, saying, Who are you trying to impress, Don?

Jerry Hayner sees this compromising tendency in such things as:

-“Cheap evangelism” to pull in numbers of people. “There’s a difference between a church growing and bloating,” he says.

-Shoddy workmanship to find a shortcut to one’s goals. Some pastors have been known to begin skeleton programs, destined to fail for lack of substantive structure, simply because they want to enhance their dossier.

Darrell Johnson adds interpersonal compromises. “When I get overly irritated with people ‘getting in my way,’ it means I’m following my own agenda, not Christ’s. Jesus Christ built up people. Ambition uses people.”

Self-promotion and divine displacement. Probably the greatest indicator of naked ambition is the drive for which the first commandment was written: “You shall have no other gods before me.” We place ourselves before God, exactly reversing John the Baptist’s statement that Jesus “must become greater; I must become less.”

This drive is insidious. “Often you first see it in attitudes,” says Jerry Hayner. “People may say all the right things, but their disposition of mind and spirit betrays the message. Objectively, everything looks fine, but subjectively they’re pursuing their own agenda.”

The signs of the subjective going bad? Barry Moller says, “When I take my focus off the persons who will benefit from what I do, my ministry becomes an ego thing. I may be helping people, but my being effective is more important. God and other people are still in the equation, but they’re not the main figures.”

All this talk of how naked ambition exposes an emperor/pastor who has no clothes can be embarrassing. How, then, can we recognize the garments of holy ambition?

Signs of Holy Ambition

Holy ambition is Joshua conquering the land, Nehemiah restoring his people, Paul going on to Derbe after being stoned in Lystra, 80-year-old John Wesley riding horseback from sermon to sermon. “Godly ambition is vision, dreams that are God’s dreams,” says Mike Walker.

So how does this holy ambition appear in our lives?

All for Christ. A striking mark of holy ambition is that it elevates Christ and not the ambitious striver.

“On a sabbatical recently,” says Don McCullough, “I was laboring to craft noble thoughts into worthy sentences and chapters of a book. In the midst of that hard work, my mind started wandering perversely to some of the personalities whose ghostwritten books sell in the hundreds of thousands, and I started thinking, Why should I worry about writing good sentences, when the public eats up the stuff these celebrities spill out?

“But God didn’t allow that attitude to remain. Suddenly, there at the keyboard, I felt overwhelmed with the presence of Christ, and the message was clear: ‘There’s really only one reader you have to worry about-me!’ We’re all trying to please somebody, but we have to remember who it is we’re trying to please. In the end, only the Lord matters.

“J. S. Bach wrote on each manuscript SDG-soli Deo gloria, to God alone be the glory. Perhaps we need to imprint that on everything we do.”

When holy ambition is in control, a sense of grace presides, according to Dave Philips. “Holy ambition is a response to God’s gracious calling; it’s based on utter humility that concedes, ‘I can do all things, but only through him who strengthens me.’ We see examples in Gideon (‘How can I save Israel?’) and in Mary (‘How will this be?’) when they were tapped by God. Both responded humbly but obediently.”

“One way to verify an ‘all for Christ’ ambition,” says Tom Carter, “is to ask myself, Do I care who gets the credit for what I do? If mine is a holy ambition, I won’t care. I can do things for the advancement of the kingdom without worrying about getting the praise. I don’t have to be stroked or thanked.”

Self-denial. Pastors who find themselves doing godly things they’re not inclined to do may well be onto the meaning of holy ambition. Jerry Hayner says, “When I am moving toward surrender of self-will to God’s will, God pushes me to grow in ways I never expected. For instance, I have to force myself to pursue church growth and to be an evangelist. I need godly ambition to do these things.”

We may be ambitious for a TV ministry, a speaking tour, and book-signing sessions. Yet God may have other ambitions for us.

“Holy ambition often is confirmed in the little things,” Howard Childers points out. “God’s ambition for me and my church may be realized in such things as people beginning to love one another, the choir gaining a few new members, a growing sense of trust-the little things with scant fanfare but importance in God’s eyes. I see myself as a pastor, so I need to look for pastoral signs of success, not published sermons or people cheering.”

The person operating from holy ambition is willing to fail, if God’s greater purposes are furthered. “At times God has used me through my experiences of brokenness and deficit and inadequacy,” offers Barry Moller.

Freedom and fit. When I asked Darrell Johnson how holy ambition is manifested, there followed a long pause. Finally he spoke with deliberate care: “When I have holy ambition, I feel content and free to do what I can do. When I’m driven by any other motive, I’m uptight; I’ve got to produce. But when my holy ambition is to lift up Christ, I can say with conviction, Lord, here I am. You know who I am. You know my schedule. I’ll give it my best shot. So here we go. You’re big enough to make this happen.

“In a committee meeting, for instance, when I’m well motivated, I sense that Christ is present. I don’t have to push my agenda. I can articulate my views but then feel free to lay it on the table and see how it works. After all, Christ is there orchestrating his will. I don’t have to be threatened personally, as if it were my plan that I had to push through.”

This sense of freedom was confirmed by Barry Moller. “Success-blessing-seems to come from the inside out,” he said. “You’re not working hard at it. As it flows more naturally and intrinsically from within, the more holy it becomes. Ambition has a passive side. We need to open ourselves to God’s work and let God accomplish things in us and through us.”

The one chained to ambition is never free. The one discovering the dimensions of God’s ambition for him or her is both free and fulfilled.

Training the Ambition Within

Good ambition. Bad ambition. Both present. Both at work. So how do we tame the ravenous beast of selfish ambition and yet feed the workhorse of holy ambition?

Reflectively. “A person needs to have reflective time, not just productive time,” Jerry Hayner advises. “Whether it’s in a retreat setting, a study leave, or a prayer closet, we need to step back, gain some distance, and look at the whole picture: What’s really happening in my life? in my ministry? If I keep going this direction, where am I headed?

“Once in college, some friends and I pushed an abandoned boat into a pond and used it as a float. Hanging on to it, we just paddled along, caught up in conversation. The next thing we knew, a storm blew up, and we’d drifted 150 yards away from shore. Then the boat sank, and since I couldn’t swim, I nearly lost my life.

“I think of that episode as a parable about life: If we don’t keep our eyes on a reference point, or if we don’t stop regularly to take a good, hard look around, we’ll drift into danger.”

Don McCullough needs to go no farther than a hospital to become reflective. “Visiting the dying or performing a memorial service puts ambition in perspective for me. I realize that some of the things I strive for aren’t important. It makes me ask myself, Don, just how do you want to invest your life?”

Not all reflection is so grave, however. “When I begin to take my aspirations too seriously,” chuckles Dave Philips, “before long I’ll see myself in a mirror and think, Wait a minute! Anyone who looks like you can’t be that great!”

Devotionally. Prayer and Scripture reading remain powerful correctives to errant ambition. Peter Joshua, an evangelist who was a product of the Welsh Revival, gave Darrell Johnson a piece of advice: “When you walk into the pulpit, acknowledge, Lord, I want them to think well of me, but more than that, I want them to think well of you.”

“I used to beat myself, agonizing over my motives,” Johnson recalls. “But that, in itself, is still self-absorbed behavior. By simply acknowledging my mixed motives and giving them to God in prayer, my task is put into perspective.”

Strategically. These pastors mentioned discipline and accountability as strategies that effectively combat arrogant ambition. For discipline:

-Rest. Take a Sabbath. Mike Walker advises: “The Sabbath is pacing that God put into the order of the universe, and most of us get into trouble if we get out of that pattern. If I’m too busy and important to take a day off, it’s a signal that I’m too ambitious.”

-Practice the discipline of servanthood. Again, Walker counsels: “We ought regularly to do something menial-carry out the trash, change diapers, help a secretary carry a heavy package. If everybody is allowed to cater to us, we begin to believe we’re somebody special, and that’s poison. We need to avoid the cloying symbols of power.”

Probably the best strategy is to become openly accountable to “dear friends who love and trust you and raise honest questions, making you deal with hard issues,” as Howard Childers put it.

Don McCullough spoke to those gathered at a men’s retreat recently, saying, “Yes, I have an achievement-oriented personality, and here’s how I struggle with it . . .” He says, “It’s hard not to deal with motives when you’ve opened yourself like that.”

Gracefully. All this soul searching and breast beating can get heavy, and we can be unmerciful with ourselves, something we’d never do with another. Mike Walker says, “We need to live under a theology of grace-not a theology that overlooks willful ambition, but one that accepts humanness and knows that God accepts us. That helps deliver us from an oversensitive conscience continually condemning ambition. The temptation to selfish ambition is not wrong-only yielding to it.

“It’s like a teenager feeling guilty for having sexual drives: it’s not the drives that are the problem but what one does with them. Some of us, I fear, have been conditioned to take on guilt merely for being tempted with selfish ambition. That’s why we need grace-even for ourselves.”

“I have to recognize the reality that mixed motives will be with me continually,” maintains Barry Moller. “And I need to embrace that mixed bag as the only place from which good may come.”

Holy ambition or wholly ambitious? The answer is yes.