My wife had a hyperactive thyroid. While it was hyper, she had massive amounts of energy, needed hardly any sleep, burned up everything she ate, and moved and talked at warp speed. It was like being married to Tony Campolo, only with more hair.
There are times I wish I had a hyperactive thyroid. I think one should be issued to everyone who goes into church ministry. Hyperactive ministers for hyperactive churches.
In fact, lack of hyperactivity has become one of the leading problems facing clergy today. Seventy percent of all people in ministry acknowledge they get stressed out just trying to keep up with books, articles, and seminars on how to deal with clergy stress! (I’m making these numbers up as I go along.) Over half have had an episode where they completely lost their emotional composure in the pulpit. (This does not include preachers in certain independent churches, for whom losing composure in the pulpit is a primary homiletical style.) Sixty percent say they have fantasies involving large amounts of caffeine and would be willing to preach false doctrine on eschatology if they had to do it to get a good strong cup of coffee first thing in the morning.
So I’ve developed a little inventory to identify candidates whose ministry could be seriously aided by a hyperactive thyroid:
* Do you find yourself failing to use guilt to motivate people when the opportunity presents itself?
* Do you find yourself falling asleep during the treasurer’s report?
* Do you have any children participating in organized soccer? (Kids in organized soccer are the number-one barrier to effective ministry in America today. And that doesn’t count all the time their parents have to spend selling almond roca. I have been given information that makes it evident that the American Youth Soccer Organization is, in fact, the largest cult in America today. Don’t you find it curious that you never see Pele and L. Ron Hubbard in the same photograph? Even Oliver Stone is afraid to make a film about AYSO.)
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you probably need to get a hyperactive thyroid of your own from a donor somewhere. Or go Episcopalian.
In my wife’s case, the doctor said her thyroid was dying and must be put to sleep. (There’s no service in my minister’s manual for presiding over the death of a thyroid; I checked.) So the doctor gave her a pill, in a lead-lined box, and made her radioactive for a while. The radioactivity has pretty explicit instructions to go for the thyroid and leave everything else alone, and what with nuclear fission and one thing and another, pretty soon the thyroid is toast. (I know how it works, but there’s not enough space in one column to spell it out. If you don’t understand, it’s just too bad, that’s all.)
The children had to be farmed out for a few days because it wasn’t safe to be around her. One of them, talking to Mommy over the phone, had only one question: “Do you glow at night? Turn off the lights right now and tell me.”
• I was allowed to stay home, either on the theory that I was bigger, or that my thyroid really doesn’t count for much in the big scheme of things, or that I’d already been seriously affected by radiation.
Life will be different without her thyroid. But it had to go; it revved her heart to too many RPM.
Most of us would like to be hyperactive-thyroid ministers. But it isn’t safe–for us or the people around us. That’s when it’s time to go to Messiah-Complexes Anonymous. Step One: “We acknowledged our lives were out of control, and turned them over to Ourselves.”
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John Ortberg is a teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois.
Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./LEADERSHIP Journal
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Copyright © 1995 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
