Leader's Insight: Overcoming My Strengths

I have spent a good deal of energy and time in my professional life overcoming my weaknesses. I have learned to recognize them and studied how to overcome them and to rely on other people around me whose strengths can compensate for my weakness. Of course, ultimately, I recognize that the negative effects of human weakness can only be mitigated by the strength of God. As I have learned to rely on God in the areas of weakness, it has been a blessing to see God work despite my weaknesses, sometimes by doing so much more than I even hoped and prayed he would do. While I remain concerned about my weaknesses, it’s my strengths that may be the undoing of my leadership.

This became evident to me recently when our church interviewed a candidate for youth pastor. His strength was a dynamic and engaging personality. It was clear that young people would be drawn to him. He said that his weakness was administration. He had struggled with being organized. He told us that he had really come a long way in the five years of his ministry in this area of his work. He also had, wisely, learned to surround himself with organized people.

After the interview, as we considered how he might work at our church, I was more concerned about the way his strengths might hinder his ministry than I was about his weaknesses. He would probably attract big crowds of teenagers to our program that were drawn in by his personality, as his references said. I didn’t believe that his weakness in administration would hamper his ministry. However, the concern was that he would rely on his strength and not feel the need to rely on God.

This realization prompted me to ask myself, “Which of my strengths have I relied on that have prevented me from relying on God and what impact does it have on my ministry?” I began to pray about this and I must have caught God on a slow day, because God seemed eager to answer this prayer.

I am a pastor of evangelism and have the training and qualifications to develop and work out an effective evangelism strategy. I work to train our people to reach out. Part of my job is to gather information from and about the people who visit our church and the needs they have. This information gets passed on to the other leaders in our church to enable them to design programs that will meet the needs of the people in our community. Another responsibility is to think through the various aspects of our outreach program to ensure that our outreach efforts are the most effective use of the resources they require. All of this works together to achieve respectable results.

God laid on my heart that I was very focused on programs, models of evangelism and growth, and demographics, but I was overlooking many people who really needed to hear the gospel.

One of my strengths is a drive for growth, as I have focused on growth in every organization I’ve served. While respectable results can be satisfying, they are poor substitutes for seeing God do something you could never explain in terms of human planning and diligent efforts. Being satisfied with what could be done by following good ministry principles prevented me from pushing beyond what was being done to earnestly seeking what only God could do.

I decided to ask God to give me a deep and aching burden for the lost. As I prayed, things started to happen. Suddenly, I noticed many people that were close to me or to people of our church that needed the Lord, but no one was witnessing to them. We were talking about witnessing. We were training to witness. We were even actively seeking people to witness to and seeing many of them trust Christ. But we were still overlooking people that were close to us.

I found that I began to witness outside of our evangelism programs more often. This led to challenging people to witness to the people right around them, not from the pulpit or in evangelism classes, but one-on-one asking people, “Have you talked to this person?” While our evangelism ministry remained organized and focused, it gained new passion and we saw people that had resisted the gospel for years trust Christ. When that happened, the only sentiment expressed was “Praise God!” We were thrilled because we knew we were watching what only God could do.

While overcoming our weaknesses may be the difference between failure and success, overcoming our strengths may be the difference between respectable results and living and ministering on the front edge of God’s will. Yes, God has given us our strengths and wants us to use them, but He does not want us to depend on them. Dependence is something we should reserve for God alone.

Wes Haddaway is pastor of evangelism at Harmony Bible Church in Danville, Iowa.

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