Once I was an emerging leader, I think. I was young, and I was in on the beginning of a satirical, cutting-edge magazine that got a lot of national attention. We were fresh, creative, and bold, my friends and I.
Before that, within the circles I had grown up in, people often commented on the great things they believed God would do through me one day.
The saying “There is no burden like a great potential” was not my experience of emerging. I liked the attention and thrived on the optimism and expectation.
Though they were legion, my many faults were excused because my trajectory looked good. What could be better than to be more highly regarded for what I might be than for what I actually was?
My potential trumped my actual over and over again. Emerging was a good deal.
I have emerged, I think. I don’t know what the cut-off age is, but it’s been a while since I could meaningfully be called an emerging leader. What you see is probably all you’re going to get. Unless there are some big surprises ahead, it appears I have found my level, which is pastoring college students.
Bravo for God’s little ironies. I now spend a lot of time with a bunch of fresh, creative, and bold emerging leaders. They are precious to me.
What do I pray for them? I pray God would be gentle and show them the same mercies he has shown me. Father, do not hold against us the sins of our youth! But as I pray, I know it wasn’t his gentle mercies that were the best; it was his severe mercies, the things that drove me to my knees, that made me pray.
It was the six weeks unable to get up, recovering from a painful back injury, with nothing to do but pray. It was being 50 and hating my job, but having a family to raise and a mortgage to pay, and nothing left to do but cry out for mercy.
Above all, it was the struggle for the souls of my children, when again there was nothing to do but pray.
The mercy in all these severities was not learning that prayer is such a great thing, but that God is the only thing. Unless the Lord builds the house, being young, fresh, creative, and bold is worthless.
But to be emerging, or to have emerged, is not to have arrived. This is the critical point. Like the marathons I ran when I was young, starting is exciting, but finishing is essential. That’s what races are for.
In the emerging, one gravitates to Scriptures like “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” That verse is true at any stage of the race, but as time passes and the miles accumulate, other verses stand out:
“I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time has come for my departure. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”
More important than what we think of ourselves or what others think of us at the beginning is what God will think of us at the end. Where we will have emerged on the leadership ladder is nothing. Who we will have become in holiness is everything.
God’s regard of me will not be according to the influence I exerted, but according to how I pleased him. The crown will not be a crown of leadership, but the “crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge will award to me on that day.”
Ben Patterson is campus pastor at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California.
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