In a discussion with other pastor-types recently, the topic rolled around to the state of our souls. “I don’t mean to whine,” said one of us (who shall remain nameless, though I’m certain it wasn’t I), “but I actually found it easier to pursue spiritual health when I was not in ministry.” Almost everyone agreed: we felt hurried, overloaded, drained, and often taken for granted.
This wasn’t the first conversation I’d heard along these lines. We often talk as if working at a church gets in the way of living the gracious, winsome life Jesus calls us to. After a while the question is bound to surface: What is happening when involvement in “ministry” seems to produce less spiritually vital people?
I had breakfast recently with a friend whose father has ministered in Christian circles for close to fifty years. His dad said to him recently, “Well, son, we’ll have to get together soon, as soon as I can get my schedule under control.” His son commented: “For all thirty-nine years of my life, my dad has talked about what we’re going to do as soon as he gets his schedule under control. He actually seems to believe that someday his schedule will come under control. He refuses to talk about or even acknowledge the real reason why his schedule is out of control.”
I remember a church-planting consultant who warned a group of us that we would need to pay the price if we wanted a successful church plant. We’d have to do whatever it took: let our marriages suffer, put our children on hold.
But it seemed to me then, and it does now, that this cannot be the way God intended ministry. If the purpose of ministry is to convince people to live the kind of life Jesus invites us to live, how can the church be built on people who give up living the kind of life Jesus invites us to live?
The deeper truth
It may be that we get too busy doing ministry out of misguided but good intentions. We think we are furthering the kingdom at our expense.
But usually the truth runs deeper than this. I believe that—certainly in my own case and in a fair number of others—behind much of the fatigue and overscheduling in pastoral ministry is a sizable dose of a subtle sin: grandiosity.
This sin may involve saying yes when I ought to say no. It often involves being preoccupied with my job and failing to be fully present with my wife or my children or with God. That’s because it’s not just the kingdom, it’s my career or reputation that I’m extending.
A friend, a business leader, told me that one difficult thing about getting older was reading accounts of other, more successful executives, and then noticing they were younger than he. (“These articles always mention their ages.”) When he was younger, he told himself that when he reached the age of whatever tycoon he was reading about, he’d match his or her success. But as he got older, the game got tougher to play.
What struck me was I had done exactly the same thing in reading about people in my line of work. I suppose this should not be a surprise. Ernest Becker, in his classic book The Denial of Death, writes that narcissism is in fact “the mainspring of human activity,” which is, at heart, just a good, Lutheran diagnosis.
This sin rarely gets named anymore. In our day grandiosity is tolerated as acceptable, if not embraced as an outright virtue. To the Greeks, Narcissus stood as a warning against excessive self-love. Were he alive today, Narcissus would have an exercise video, a chain of mirror-walled fitness clubs, and a string of successful infomercials.
But in our line of work, we are more likely to disguise grandiosity. We don’t give it its proper name, so we’re tempted to think we’ve overcome it when really we’ve just driven it underground. It comes out—in resentment, or frustration, or a vague sense of failure and shame.
Is Christ being formed in me?
A central question for my life these days is this: Is my involvement in ministry helping Christ to be formed in me?
It’s important to be clear on this question. How should ministry affect the life of the minister?
This is not the same thing as saying people in ministry should do more “self-care.” Ministry may be inconvenient, tiring, even dangerous. It will not necessarily make my life more manageable. When Paul speaks of beatings, stonings, shipwreck, nakedness, sleeplessness, and hunger, he is not describing a life that sounds particularly manageable.
But authentic ministry will never work in opposition to leading a life of increasing joy and love and gentleness. Ministry must never be separated from spiritual formation.
This central truth helps me identify grandiosity in my work: If ministry is being done right, it will aid in having Christ formed in me. My involvement in ministry (using ministry in the narrow sense of service to the body of Christ) needs to be seen in light of an overall way of life designed to help me become transformed. If it is not doing this, something, somewhere, has gone wrong.
Next Week: What can be done when my need for ministry jeopardizes the rest of my life?
John Ortberg is teaching pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California. A prolific author, he will be a featured speaker at the National Pastors Convention in San Diego, February 5-10.
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