Ministry and FTT

FTT

My wife first introduced me to those initials. Nancy was a nurse when I first met her. There were many parts of nursing for which she did not care. But she loved diagnosis. To this day there cannot be too many episodes of Grey’s Anatomy or ER for her. (Oprah either, but that’s another story.) She is constantly telling me her private diagnoses of people—even total strangers—based on their skin color. She can tell you how long you have to live if she gets a long look at your face and the light is good.

But of all the diagnoses I ever heard her discuss, FTT is the one that sticks in my mind. Those initials would go on the chart of an infant who, often for unknown reasons, was unable to gain weight or grow.

Failure to thrive.

Sometimes, they guess, it happens when a parent or care-giver is depressed, and the depression seems to get passed down. Sometimes something seems to be off in an infant’s metabolism for reasons no one can understand, so FTT is one of those mysterious phrases that sounds like an explanation but explains nothing.

Failure to thrive.

I didn’t know why it struck me as so unspeakably sad until I read Dallas Willard’s The Spirit of the Disciplines, a book that has affected me more than any book other than the Bible, from which Dallas actually gets his best ideas.

Dallas writes that although we have tended to think of the word salvation as the forgiveness of sins or the escape from punishment, it actually has a much more robust meaning for the writers of Scripture: “the simple and wholly adequate word for salvation in the New Testament is ‘life.’ ‘I am come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly.’ ‘He that hath the Son hath life.’ ‘Even when we were dead through our trespasses, God made us alive together with Christ.’ “

This is the human condition. FTT.

Thrive is a life word; a word full of shalom. Thriving is what life was intended to do, like a flower stubbornly pushing through a crack in the sidewalk. It is why we pause in wonder at a human being’s first step, or first word; and why we ought to wonder at every step, and every word. Thriving is what God saw when he made life and saw that it was good. “Thrive” was the first command: be fruitful, and multiply.

Thriving is what human beings are made for; and pastors and churches too. Being fully alive, and curious, and fearless. Wide awake.

I remember a phrase in a book by Wallace Stegner years ago about a character experiencing an “explosion of growth,” and wanting it so badly that I was jealous of a good friend whom I knew was experiencing it. Thriving is what I want; more than success or reputation or experiences or achievement.

Thriving is the joy I know when the level of my challenges reaches the level of my gifts, and I am consumed neither by boredom nor anxiety but simply grace. And its because thriving is so God-ordained that the failure to thrive is so tragic.

I wonder how many churches—and how many pastors—would have FTT written on our charts, if only we could see them. For I believe it is FTT that beats down so many in ministry. It’s not the lack of recognition, or success. We all know that there is no life in those imposters.

It’s days and weeks and month of frozen smiles and forced pleasantness and artificial harmony and wondering if people think we’re doing well. It’s pretending to agree and listen and placate people we don’t agree with or even like, and telling ourselves we do it because it’s the pastor’s job, when the truth is we do it from fear or ambition or habit. And then we feel drained and hollow and thin-souled.

I was talking to a friend today who used to work in the marketplace but now works at a church. She was challenged by the transition. It struck me that for many folks, their jobs are stress-producers, but the church is a stress-reliever. So they think to themselves, “If I could just work at a church, I’d get rid of my stress-producer and be forever at my stress-reliever!” What happens, of course, is that the church (when it is a job) becomes their stress-producer. Not only that, they’ve lost their old stress-reliever, since even when they come to church on Sunday they’re coming to the job site.

So my job, even more important than preaching or leading, is to thrive.

Which means my life outside my work must be way deeper and bigger and more interesting than my work alone. Which means I need to monitor how much energy I have for family and learning and non-strategic friends and long walks by the ocean. Which means I need to monitor how good sin looks, because failure to thrive always has the effect of making sin look good.

For one day, I’m going to die. And most of what preoccupies and drains me now will recede into nothingness. But the dead in Christ will rise.

Which is to say, thrive.

John Ortberg is editor at large of Leadership and pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California.

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