If you are young person called to church leadership, I have bad news. You might have a lot of waiting ahead of you.
In all likelihood you will not immediately be like Moses, leading the Israelites out of Egypt and across the Red Sea. No, first you will probably be like Moses in a different phase of life: herding the sheep of his father-in-law Jethro in the land of Midian for 40 years. And that’s OK, if you use that time to become the leader God is calling you to be.
I’m a young person who has spent a lot of time waiting on God. I call your attention to Moses herding sheep because those of us called to leadership tend to look at the finished products of active leadership as they are portrayed from pulpits, books, and magazines. We lack a view of the years of struggle and anxiety these men and women faced. We see their glory but not their shame. We tend to edit out the doldrums and disruptions.
We consume these pictures of leadership and then we consider our own calling and ministry—or lack thereof. We get frustrated, angry, depressed. Why do I have these gifts but no place to use them? I know God made me to lead people out of bondage. Why am I stuck taking care of my father-in-law’s small business? Someone is to blame. If not me, then God. If not him, than me. The days are long working for your father-in-law. You have time to shift the blame back and forth. And there will be time tomorrow as well.
Nothing Wasted
Young people who are called to lead tend to lack the perspective needed to see that this “wasted” time is not wasted at all. The formally anonymous advice columnist Cheryl Strayed (“Dear Sugar”) wrote: “The useless days will add up to something. The … waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God … these things are your becoming.”
The frustration of being young and being called to lead is that a part of our core is aching to be realized. But we can’t simply snap our fingers and become Rick Warren. And most of the time it is impossible for us to see how “the useless days will add up to something.” It is especially hard to see how they will add up to something meaningful enough to offset their present uselessness.
These feelings compound when we have tried to lead and have failed. You joined a church plant that failed, led a small group that ended in chaos, started and bankrupted a non-profit, or went to the mission field only to find that you never felt more powerless and alone in your whole life. Now, your calling has taken on the guilt of Moses after murdering the Egyptian. You work as an accountant for a lumber company in a suburb and wonder if you have disqualified yourself from leadership. A resume of failure doesn’t normally procure top jobs.
How do we prepare for leadership while God has us in a holding pattern? Henri Nouwen wrote: “The Christian leaders of the future have to be theologians, persons who know the heart of God and are trained—through prayer, study, and careful analysis—to manifest the divine event of God’s saving work in the midst of the many seemingly random events of their time.”
With Nouwen’s vision for leaders of the future, let’s look at some practical ways we can begin to prepare for this calling even if we don’t have an opportunity to lead today.
Knowing the heart of God
The Christian leader, as Nouwen points out, knows the heart of God. I take this to mean we experience God, his presence and power, in a shockingly immanent way. This experience does not need to be a single moment to which we point with conviction. The work of God more often spans years. It continues with or without our attention. Our work is merely to look and to listen. This is the beginning of the journey.
We look and listen to God through Scripture and prayer. Sometimes we can read Scripture and in our “seeing not comprehend.” We begin to comprehend as we let the Holy Spirit reveal the Scripture to us. We grow the interior life by meditation and contemplation on the Word of God as revealed by the Spirit to us while we read it alone in private devotion. But we should remember that reading the Bible is a practice which is taught to us by the church. We see the vitality of Scripture through the men and women in the church to which we belong. We also receive revelation of the Scripture as it has been shown to the church throughout history. The first reminds us that the Scripture is active and at work today and in real people. The historical focuses our sight on what has been shown true across the centuries.
As a leader, the life of prayer should begin to expand beyond our self and encompass the needs of our community. Hebrews presents the image of Jesus Christ as a high priest interceding for his people. This is our goal. To develop a life of prayer that brings others before God. We are no longer the blind man crying “son of David have mercy on me.” We become the men who tear open a roof to lower their lame friend before Jesus.
Training to manifest God
When Nouwen tells us we must be “trained—through prayer, study, and careful analysis—to manifest the divine event of God’s saving work in the midst of the many seemingly random events of [our] time,” I think we must assume he means something closer to apprenticed than taught. An apprentice is trained to perform a craft by a master worker. This is very different from say being trained for your job at, say, Chipotle.
Theologian Stanley Hauerwas illustrates the point well discussing his father’s occupation as a bricklayer: “To learn to lay brick, it is not sufficient for you to be told how to do it; you must learn to mix the mortar, build scaffolds, joint, and so on. Moreover, it is not enough to be told how to hold a trowel, how to spread mortar, or how to frog the mortar. In order to lay brick you must hour after hour, day after day, lay brick.”
In the same way, we cannot be told how to manifest God in seemingly random events, we must attempt to do it daily and we must submit these attempts to the observation and critique of a master craftsman. But where do we find a master craftsman in the Christian faith?
One place is seminary. Traditional training for pastoral leadership has taken place in the seminary for hundreds of years. For those whose denomination helps pay for their training, seminary is an especially attractive option. Seminaries and graduate programs in theology will challenge you to think about God differently. They will force you to consider the limits of your own understanding. But what makes seminary, or any organized Christian training, worth the price of admission is that it has attracted many men and women who want to train and develop leaders. These relationships often continue after graduation. I have a handful of professors from both of my alma maters with whom I still correspond. These teachers continue to enrich my life with their wisdom and encouragement.
Your own church family might have a master craftsman who would offer guidance and encouragement. Perhaps you feel like there are people in your church who you would like to have a relationship where they invest in your spiritual growth. Maybe it’s even the head pastor. Often we shy away from these folks because we don’t want to bother them or give them just one more thing to do. But I encourage you to ask. It is an honor to be asked to disciple someone. Sometimes the person will be too busy. But sometimes they won’t. It is worth asking.
But come with a specific intention for the relationship. You want to be mentored, but what does that mean to you? Do you want to meet weekly or monthly? Are there specific areas of life you would like help with? It is difficult for someone to agree to mentor you forever. Ask if they would meet with you once a month and pray for you while you are seeking a new job or discerning God’s will in a situation. Sometimes the relationship will continue after the proposed time. But sometimes it will have run its course. Either way it is an easy way to get started and provides your potential mentor with a better idea of what the requirements will be for their time.
Try to think about ways you can serve beyond your primary skill set. Bill Hybels wasn’t always a church leader on an enormous stage. I’m sure he has stacked chairs and helped in children’s ministry. The goal of Christian leadership is to have the heart of a servant. By looking for the needs of your community instead of opportunities to lead you learn humility.
Last, make a practice of finding joy in the place you find yourself today. The leader who will be able to show God in “seemingly random events” is the person who has learned that “these useless days add up to something.” Most of us will not encounter something as spectacular as Moses’ burning bush. We will encounter the burning of God in a people. Not an explosion of God, mighty and awe-inspiring, but a slow burning ember of his presence. This fire will speak to us just as it did to Moses and tell us to go. Maybe not to part seas or defeat empires, but to embark on a lifelong journey that eventually leads to the Promised Land.
Lane Severson blogs at The Guilty Conscience. He is involved in lay leadership at Church of the Resurrection in Wheaton, IL.
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