Ambitious Like Jesus

So my wife signs me up to participate in a research project at Duke that was investigating the “effect of exercise upon Type A personalities who had no previous experience with physical exercise.”

Why did she think of me as a subject for such a study?

A Duke psychiatrist had gotten a government grant to conduct the research. As he interviewed me to determine if I qualified, he asked me questions like, “Do you ever curse people who cut you off in traffic?” Answer: “I’m a Methodist preacher. I would, if I were allowed, but I’m not, so I don’t.” And, “Do you often think about people who have moved ahead of you in your career.” Answer: “How do you define ‘often’?”

Finally, I said in exasperation, “Look. I’m here at Duke at the top of the academic heap for the same reasons as you—I’m such a nice guy. Ruthless ambition has nothing to do with it.”

Why did Leadership ask me to write this article? Just because I’ve been elected as a Methodist bishop, have written 70 books and have a podcast, that doesn’t automatically make me ambitious, does it?

You are right to be suspicious of anybody who claims to be free of ambition. Pride is one of the Seven Deadlies, and I’ve never known anybody who managed to get out of bed in the morning who did not do so from some sort of ambition for something. Ambition is connected to the sin of pride and is a breeding ground for the sins of envy, resentment, selfishness, and vanity.

Yet it’s hard to imagine anybody who accomplished anything in life or in ministry without a helpful nudge from ambition. Ambition is the engine that drives some of our most noble accomplishments. Would Michelangelo have suffered upon his back atop the scaffolding of the Sistine Chapel if he were not (as many of his contemporaries judged him to be) an insufferable, relentlessly ambitious pain in the neck who thought nothing of stepping on every artistic rival in order to promote his own work?

Recently a Methodist wrote me a letter in which she complained that her pastor was “a pompous, dogmatic blowhard” who was also “insanely ambitious.” Knowing her pastor, I did not dispute her complaints. Still, when I responded to her, I said, “While not excusing your pastor’s ambition, I must say that I know from personal experience how much fortitude, brashness, and chutzpah it takes to enter a pulpit on a weekly basis and attempt to preach the Word of God to sinners like you.” It’s a profession that is not for the faint of heart or the shrinking violet. Who would venture such a vocation without the aid of ambition?

Last week I visited a pastor who has a remarkable inner city ministry that is an inspiration to us all. He has labored over a decade with a meager salary and against impossible odds to bring the message and mission of Christ to the most hopeless of our city’s poor. When he was young, he dropped out of law school and headed for seminary, convinced that God was calling him to turn his back on all the bright allures of this world and go into the ghetto with Jesus.

Considering his self-sacrificial ministry, I thought him an exemplar of the sort of moral heroism that occurs when someone has the guts to turn his back on the temptations of ambition. Then he said, “My humble hope is to be feeding and to have a personal relationship with at least five hundred of this city’s poor before the end of this year.”

Thanks, ruthless ambition. He couldn’t have done it without you.

In seminary, we were sitting around one evening talking about our plans for ministry after graduation. I said that I hoped to return to the South and manage to preach the gospel without having a gang of South Carolina farmers kill me for it. Another said that he hoped to obtain a position as an associate pastor in a large church so that he could continue to develop his own skills in ministry. Then this guy had the nerve to say, “I hope to be a United Methodist bishop.”

We were aghast at his bald admission of his absurdly high ambition, so much so that one of his fellow students threatened to slap him then and there.

And yet, as I thought about it, I had to admit that all of us were, in varying degrees and kind, ambitious. I also had to admit that more than one of us hoped one day to end up toward the top of the clerical heap. Compared with us, the would-be bishop should be commended for his honesty about his ambitions. From what I’ve observed, the deadliest ambition is that which dares not speak its name. Ambition denied can be self-deceitful and eventually self-destructive.

I remember the older pastor asking me, when I was just starting out in ministry, “Where do you hope to be in twenty years?”

I was shocked by his question. Me? Oh I just hope to be servant-hearted enough to go wherever the bishop sends me. I just hope to be a good pastor who loves his people.

“Be careful son,” the wise old man advised. “When you won’t admit your ambition, you are setting yourself up for future disappointment when your unacknowledged, unsought ambitions are unrealized or when this sort of lying becomes routine.” Ouch.

So I can’t think of any reason why we clergy shouldn’t admit ambition, shouldn’t examine and strategize on the basis of our ambition, shouldn’t acknowledge and then realistically critique our ambition. I can’t think of any reason why ambition should not be embraced as a natural, ever present partner in our ministry—except Jesus.

The main reason ambition is a tough subject is not because we pastors tend to be self-deceitful about our real motives but rather because of Jesus. The one who modeled ministry by kneeling before his disciples and taking up a basin and towel is the one who is determined to make otherwise healthy, normal, virtually unavoidable ambition our enemy.

When his own disciples got into a squabble about their ambitions in signing on with Jesus (Mark 10:41), Jesus rebuked them in the harshest possible language, calling them no better than a bunch of position-grabbing pagans: “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.”

Jesus modeled a style of leadership that we pastors are called to emulate. Not only that, but Jesus seems to have a decided preference for those who were not wise, not powerful, not rich, in short, just the sort of people who were flops in the game of ambition. Even worse for our ambitiousness, he said repeatedly that we are to deny ourselves, take up his cross, and follow him in his own path of downward mobility. If we’re to follow Jesus and exercise our perfectly human, understandable ambitiousness, then we’ve got to be ambitious for what Jesus cares about rather than what the American Way tells us to lust for. Surely this is what Saint Paul meant when he said that he was a better slave to Christ than anybody, “And that’s why I boast.”

“And when I am lifted up,” Jesus says in John’s Gospel, “I will succeed in drawing all the world to myself.” Of course the irony is that Jesus has a very odd, decidedly countercultural definition of what it means to be high and lifted up.

“Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” says the heavenly voice. And in every age, a few outrageously ambitious souls have responded, “Here I am. Send me!”

The trick, it seems to me, is not to forswear all ambition but rather to pray for the grace constantly to align our ambitions with His. Just as I don’t believe that conversion to Jesus stifles our passions but rather redirects them toward their proper object—passionate love for God—I also believe that Jesus plays to our ambitions, reworking what was our natural ambition to promote ourselves into a supernatural ambition to please God.

To that end, we pastors ought to pray for the honesty to admit to our ambitions, and then prayerfully to examine our goals and our means for achieving those goals. Are we ambitious for that which the world cannot deliver? Are our ambitions unworthy of disciples of Christ? What would it take to make us think that we have arrived at something worth living and dying for?

I remember Richard Neuhaus, in his wonderful book Freedom for Ministry, saying that the most important decision a young pastor could make is to write down just how much money he needed in order to consider himself successful, otherwise you might be tempted to sell out for too little.

Neuhaus also quoted community organizer Saul Alinsky, in a meeting with young clergy, asking them, “How many of you would like to be a bishop?”

A couple of hands were raised. “Well, you can leave now because that’s probably all you will ever be,” said Alinsky.

We ought to submit our ambitions to the critique and the reformation of Christ. I aspired to be the sort of pastor who could form a faithful church, bring everyone in the congregation along with me, and be loved and appreciated at the same time. Then an older woman said to me, as I chastised myself for my failure to successfully lead during a particularly stormy church board meeting, “Young man, you shouldn’t attempt to be more successful in ministry than our Lord himself.”

From what I’ve seen, it’s not necessarily a sin to be ambitious for a large salary, or lifelong job security, or a 40-hour work week. These aspirations are worthy goals. What’s stupid is to be ambitious for these goals as a Christian pastor.

I write all this as a simple, Bible-believing country pastor who never intended to be a bishop, someone who just wanted to be used by Jesus for the good of other people.

Yeah, right.

Will Willimon is bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church and formerly dean of the chapel at Duke University.