Serving from the Spotlight

Each summer, our church’s youth ministry changes our Wednesday night youth group format. Normally, after the last worship song, students gather into smaller groups to discuss the message, their lives, and all that falls between. But in the summer, instead of these discussion groups, we host a huge, free barbecue for anyone who attends. My team sets up tables, cooks, cut vegetables, and serves our large group every Wednesday night. It’s a special way to celebrate summer. I look forward to it every year.

But it didn’t start smoothly. Our first year, I did all of the purchasing and most of the setup for the big barbeque meal myself. I had a small team who could have helped, but I took on most of the logistics myself, even down to setting up many of the tables and grills.

I did it all because I knew I would feel guilty if I didn’t.

Short on buns

This is a very pastoral struggle. I see it more in those who pastor groups under 200, but it remains something most preachers and pastors wrestle with: shouldn’t I be serving?

Many hours in pastoral ministry are given to study and preaching. Our congregation knows this, but it often doesn’t seem like “real work.” What do you even do all week? people wonder. They see us busy on Sunday, but they cannot imagine what we do with our lives through the week.

Many high school students realize they’re not great at math or science and then they meet a youth pastor. His job seems pretty cool. Hang out with kids and be goofy and talk about God sometimes. I’ll be a youth pastor! Our Bible colleges are filled with these pastors-in-the-making.

But any youth pastor (or pastor, for that matter), knows that our days do not stop; that the work, if it not put firmly to bed, could stay awake and badger us for all of eternity. We are busy. But busy with what?

This came to my attention when I didn’t buy enough hamburger buns. You see, I am not a gifted organizer, nor do I have any idea how many hamburgers are needed to feed my youth group. And all of this became extremely apparent when we ran out of food after we’d only fed about half of the group. It wasn’t a great night. Nothing kills a party faster than running out of food and drink—it’s Scriptural, just read about Jesus’ work during the wedding at Cana—and this night lost steam quickly.

One night after the bun shortage, one of my leaders approached me. “Why are you doing the shopping?”

“Well, I guess I didn’t want anyone else to feel like they had to do it.” I said sheepishly.

“But you’re bad at it.” She said.

“That is clear, yes.”

“So let some of us do it—”

I cut her off with a reassuring, “No, no no,” but she steamrolled forward.

“Come on. Our kids are in school and I’ve raised a good number of them; believe me, I know how to shop and a couple of us have the time to do it!”

She was right. Sitting before me was a perfectly capable shopper with wonderful skills of administration who was willing to do the work that I struggled to get done. This is how our barbecues changed to be successful: not by battening down the hatches and trying to hold on to everything down myself, but by turning as much ministry loose as I possibly could. And it was this lesson that made me rethink my role as the group’s pastor.

Before this, I thought I was being a servant leader by doing everything that smelled like service: setup, prep, tear down, administration. But the truth is, I was being a selfish leader, taking all of the work on myself in order that others might see me as “not lazy” and “down to earth.”

But there is a difference between being a servant and hoping people see you as one.

I found out the hard way that we are busy with what we choose—what we say “yes” to and what we say “no” to defines our schedules. Schedules do not just happen. And in my ministry, during the summer, I chose to set up tables and shop for hamburgers instead of training and teaching people that giving is better than receiving, and that they could partner with me in providing meals to students—many of whom have nowhere else to go on a lonely Wednesday night.

Not spectacular at anything in particular

Erwin McManus has said that if you’re not that spectacular at anything in particular you probably have the gift of leadership. This certainly isn’t true in all cases, but nonetheless I recognize a lot of pastors (myself included) in that. We’re not fantastic singers, athletes, writers, or scholars, but we can take a group of people from one place to another. But perhaps inherent in this type of leadership is a lack of self-confidence (I think of Moses); we do not think we’re great people because we do not have wonderful skills, so we try and serve and do everything that needs doing so that people might at least say we’re good at something.

If that motivation isn’t inside us, perhaps the opposite is true. We all know many leaders (or have seen ourselves fall into this trap) who think that without his or her touch on a specific element of the ministry, it is bound to fail. They can cite multiple examples of how they “tried” to give responsibility and ministry to another person only to watch it die. The solution in the mind of this leader is to tighten the screws themselves and try and place their hand on everything the church does. I have never seen this succeed. But I have seen this, in the end, destroy the leader.

The truth is neither self-deprecation nor self-aggrandizement works in ministry. Ministry only grows when it is given away. Only through self-forgetfulness do we begin to find our ministries and even ourselves. When we follow Jesus, we gain his approval by grace and operate out of this new benediction where we slowly stop caring what others think of us, because we don’t even think about us. The great trick of leadership and discipleship is to find that sweet spot where very little can be pinned back to our own efforts.

So really, the best way to spend my time is recruiting people to give more ministry away to, whether that be shopping for an event or running a Bible study. There is no better way to flourish in the kingdom of God than by giving tons of ministry away, by turning it all loose and trusting God’s Spirit for the fruit.

Development through delegation

For a while, I thought it was my job to meet with every student I could in my youth ministry. Then my ministry grew. I couldn’t keep up with meeting with each student, I needed leaders who could be mini-youth pastors and tend to the needs of the individual students. Every youth pastor does this work. Developing leaders like this is the most difficult work of ministry and yet it is exactly the best way to be a servant leader. Even though part of our job is done on a stage or up in front of many people, we spend the rest of our time in this type of work, work that Jesus called discipleship.

Now, when students approach me and ask to meet with me, my first question back to them is, “Have you met with your leader about that?” I do this because I trust my leaders and am pretty sure that they’re smarter than me. But I also do this because I’ve learned the same lesson in discipleship as I learned in event planning for ministry: the kingdom only works when you turn things loose. Releasing my leaders to lead a small group is one thing; pointing students to them in a time of need and letting it go is totally different.

This is the type of ministry we all know we’re called to. When we train, place, and release leaders, we are acting as servants because we are constantly creating new platforms for faithful people. We work to make others succeed. Instead of trying to grab all of the seemingly servant-type jobs and meet one-on-one with each kid, I now lead leaders into places of ministry, where they get both the sacrifices and the benefits. We as pastors just get to sit front row and watch the work of God.

I actually enjoy the fact that people wonder what I do all week. It helps me remember that ministry is more often than not an undercover operation where we work hard in secret and the fruit comes out in public. Then, when people begin to notice, we will never be able to take the credit.

Chris Nye is a pastor and writer living in Portland, OR, with his wife, Ali. Connect on Twitter: @chrisnye