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.
But the little messiah in me dies hard. A few aspects of ministry have become increasingly important to me in fighting grandiosity.
I must minister in community
Psychologist Milton Rokeach once wrote a book called The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. He described his attempts to treat three patients at a psychiatric hospital in Ypsilanti, Michigan, who suffered from delusions of grandeur. Each believed he was unique among humankind; he had been called to save the world; he was the messiah. They were full-blown cases of grandiosity, in its pure form.
Rokeach found it difficult to break through, to help the patients accept the truth about their identity. So he decided to put the three into a little community, to see if rubbing against people who also claimed to be the messiah might dent their delusion. A kind of messianic, 12-step recovery group.
This led to some interesting conversations. One would claim, “I’m the messiah, the Son of God. I was sent here to save the earth.”
“How do you know?” Rokeach would ask.
“God told me.”
One of the other patients would counter, “I never told you any such thing.”
Every once in a while, one got a glimmer of reality—never deep or for long. Deeply ingrained was the messiah complex. But what progress Rokeach made was pretty much made by putting them together.
It’s a crazy idea, taking a group of deluded, would-be messiahs and putting them into a community to see if they could be cured. But it has been done before. “A reasoning arose among them as to who should be the greatest,” Luke tells us about Jesus’ followers. You know who suffers from the messiah complex? Disciples and inmates. Everybody’s in the same asylum.
Some time ago, I’d had a run of too much travel, too many meetings, too many talks. I was fatigued. One standing weekly commitment was to a friend, also involved in church work. I was complaining about my schedule, fishing for sympathy, when he surprised me by asking, “Why do you choose to live like this?”
The only honest answer was, more than anything else, I was running on grandiosity. I was afraid that if I said no to opportunities, they would stop coming; and if opportunities stopped coming, I would be less important; and if I were less important, that would be terrible.
Out of that conversation developed a small, “personal schedule group,” with a covenant that we would not take on any commitments without discussing them with each other and with our families. It meant giving each other permission to talk not only about our schedules, but also about the motives behind the schedules.
One reason I’m glad I’m part of a teaching team, rather than the sole teacher, is that it forces me to confront my hubris. Sometimes one of my friends will give a great message, and I’ll be tempted to compare myself to him. Then I see the absurdity: I’m jealous because he convinces people to die to themselves better than I do. Sometimes I could use a little trip to Ypsilanti myself.
I must practice ministry of the mundane
Jesus invites us into ministry. But how do we keep ministry from becoming perverted into one more opportunity to establish who is the greatest-only now it is “Who is the greatest minister?” The temptation may be obvious: to measure my greatness by how many people attend my church. It may be subtle: to take my service at a smaller church as evidence of my spiritual superiority over super-pastors who must have sold their souls for success.
Bonhoeffer, in Life Together, notes how everyone in the community will seek to establish spiritual superiority-the weak as well as the strong, the shy as well as the outgoing. Always the temptation involves the ancient argument: “There arose a reasoning among them . . .”
So Jesus takes a little child in his arms, and says: “Here’s your ministry. Give yourselves to those who can bring you no status or clout. Just help people. You need this little child. You need to help this little child, not just for her sake, but more for your sake. For if you don’t, your whole life will be thrown away on an idiotic contest to see who’s the greatest. But if you serve her, often and well and in secret and cheerfully, then the day may come when you do it without thinking, What a wonderful thing I’ve done. Then you will begin serving naturally, effortlessly, for the joy of it. Then you will begin to understand how life in the kingdom works.”
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, one of my children cries, and someone’s going to have to check what’s wrong. Generally it comes down to who can successfully fake being asleep the longest. The optimum performance is to say a few words groggily as my wife is going out of the room, as if I would have gotten the baby but I’m just a heavier sleeper so it’s too late now. This way I get both credit for wanting to help and the luxury of staying in bed.
But here’s what can happen. I can get up and take care of my daughter. And instead of being resentful, I can be thankful she’s alive. Instead of focusing on all the ministry tasks she’s taking me from, I can focus on being there to help her. It can even be kind of fun.
And if I do this, I become a little less addicted to having my way. I become a little more free to serve someone else. I need to serve her not just for her sake, but even more for mine.
In the church, this “non-strategic ministry of the mundane” means sometimes I must be interruptible for tasks not on my agenda. I need to be available to pray with troubled people whom I will not be able to cure and who have no ability to contribute to my success. Sometimes in meetings I need to remain silent even when I have a thought that might impress somebody. Sometimes I need not to seek out information, even when I could get it and it would make me feel part of the inner ring.
Sometimes, non-strategic ministry just involves following the rules everybody else follows. Muhammad (“I am the greatest”) Ali once allegedly refused to fasten his seatbelt on an airplane. After repeated requests from the flight attendent to buckle up, he finally said, “Superman don’t need no seat belt.” To which she is said to have replied, “Superman don’t need no airplane.”
The ministry of the mundane is primarily a ministry to me, a grandiosity-buster. Bonhoeffer writes that anyone who does not have time for this ministry of “active helpfulness” “is probably taking his own career too seriously.” A sobering thought, especially when you consider what Bonhoeffer accomplished in his career.
I must regularly retreat from ministry
The completion of their mission, recorded in Mark 6, is for the disciples a time of great excitement. They are highly motivated. This is a critical moment to advance the kingdom. Any gifted leader would know now is the time to disperse and claim the nation for God.
Jesus could appeal to their grandiosity. He could send them out to save the world.
Instead he tells them to come apart to eat and rest.
A critical part of forming people is the right combination of presence and withdrawal. This is what wise parents do, so the child eventually experiences what John Bowlby speaks of as “presence in aloneness”—learning that aloneness is not paralyzing abandonment.
This is also part of what God does. Jurgen Moltmann notes that the first act in Creation is the act of withdrawal. God—who is present everywhere and in everything—must in a sense withdraw, step aside, so there will be space for that which is not God, so there may be matter and even will and purpose that are not his. It is, in a way, an act of humility.
Jesus demonstrates the same ministry of withdrawal. When Jesus says, “It is good that I leave you” to his friends, he is not just trying to keep them from getting mad at him. It really is a good thing. His withdrawal-painful as the thought is to them-brings growth in them that would not have happened had he remained. Withdrawal was part of his ministry.
I need to practice regular withdrawal from ministry. Sometimes it simply involves days off; sometimes it involves a day or a few days of utter solitude.
Sometimes it involves a time of sheer play.
A few weeks ago, I went with three friends to an afternoon Cubs game, and we were having too much fun to go home. So we ended up having dinner, going to a movie, going bowling at 11 p.m., and seeing another movie after that. We didn’t get home until 3:00 in the morning.
The evening was a gift from God. I was reminded of how mechanical and routine I can allow life to become, and reminded that (as C. S. Lewis puts it) joy is “the serious business of heaven.”
This, of course, is not to say that the main need in church life today is for greater pastoral involvement in movies and bowling. (Though when you stop to think about it, if Baptist pastors would see more foreign films, and their Episcopalian counterparts would do more bowling, it would probably result in more actual church unity and goodwill than five years of ecumenical dialogue.)
But when I engage in the ministry of withdrawal, I am reminded that I am not indispensable to the church. I am not the messiah. In fact, people grow when I am not around in a way they would not if I were always present.
I must bear with others
Bearing with others sometimes refers to forgiving them. But sometimes I experience people as burdensome when they have done nothing I need to forgive them for. I experience them as burdensome not because of any fault in them, but because of lack of love or tolerance in me.
I was in a prayer group once of about ten people, most of whom were involved in church ministry. The sole goal of our meetings was to learn from each other about our experiences in prayer during the past week. The leader of the group gave some wonderful advice. She said we should set aside any tendency to evaluate people and their comments, and simply let God speak though them.
I realized that reflexively, I had started sizing up the group from our first meeting. Here is a troubled, recovery junkie type, I thought, as one person spoke. And here is a traditional, hyperrational, old-school character who will not discover or reveal his heart. And here is a wise, high-functioning person I can really learn from. And so on, putting people on a maturity continuum, ready to listen to those who seemed advanced and endure those who seemed behind.
The leader’s one direction, to let go of evaluations and allow God to speak, was a gentle indictment of my whole way of listening. I realized my evaluations-while not totally distorted-had more to do with me than with the people I was evaluating. The ministry of bearing with one another is more than simply tolerating difficult people. It is learning to hear God speak through them. It is learning that the most difficult person I have to deal with is me.
This means I’m called to free people from the mental prisons to which I consign them. Bearing with a person who criticizes (justly or unjustly, lovingly or spitefully) the way I teach. Bearing with the most difficult person of all-one in whom I see the struggles that rage inside of me.
Bearing with people does not necessarily mean becoming best friends. But it means learning to wish people well, releasing my right to hurt them back, coming to experience our common standing before the cross.
Fighting the subtle sin of grandiosity means learning from Jesus how to do ministry in a way that draws me toward him. For there was no grandiosity in Jesus at all. That’s one reason why people had such a hard time recognizing him.
The oldest Christological heresy—docetism-arose because people could not absorb the notion that God might enter into vulnerability and suffering. John says it is the spirit of antichrist that denies that Jesus came kata sarx—”in the flesh.” Jesus was no Superman. He did not defy his enemies, hands on his hips, bullets bouncing harmlessly off his chest. The whip drew real blood, the thorns pressed real flesh, the nails caused mind-numbing pain, the cross led to actual death. And through it all, he bore with people, forgave them, loved them to the end.
For God’s great, holy joke about the messiah complex is this: Every human being who has ever lived has suffered from it, except one. And he was the Messiah.
John Ortberg is a teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois.
1997 by Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.
