20070125
Hey! Joel here, first time blogging on this. Haha.
So I guess the article I'm gonna post has a sort of significance for me.
Hope this helps for whoever that's reading this. God bless.
Leader's Insight: The Subtle Sin of Grandiosity (Part 1)
Is my life in ministry helping or hurting my walk with Christ?
by John Ortberg, guest columnist
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.
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