The heart that recoils in shame over failure to achieve potential tends to swell up with pride over success.
— Larry Osborne
Dave was a gifted leader, though not a great preacher. During his second pastorate, he took a dead, inner-city church and turned it around. Under his guidance the church grew into a vibrant ministry, and attendance soared to over five hundred.
Then a call came from a large suburban church. Many things in him said stay: he was enjoying his ministry, his wife and kids were happy, the church was ecstatic with what Dave was doing. But his drive to be all that he could be in ministry won out. So he went.
The next five years were the worst of his life. He’d gotten in over his head. Of the two skills necessary to succeed in a large church — leadership and a strong pulpit presence — he had only one.
Before long, people began to leave, many of them parting with those famous last words, “I’m not being fed.”
Dave was devastated. He’d seldom heard those words before. He’d been more than an adequate communicator in a smaller setting, where people could hear his words and watch his life. But in a setting where people knew only what they heard in the pulpit, he was in trouble.
Today, Dave is out of ministry — a victim of what I’ve come to call the Potential Trap.
Apparently, Dave is not alone. The results of one survey examining the personal and professional lives of clergy claimed that 50 percent of us feel unable to meet the needs of our jobs, and 70 percent of us say our self-esteem is lower now than when we first entered the ministry.
Something has gone terribly wrong. I don’t believe for a moment that God has failed to equip half of us for the tasks he’s called us to, or that 70 percent of us need our self-esteem lowered. But I’m not surprised that half of us feel pressured to do more and more, and that 70 percent of us judge ourselves more strictly than even God does.
That’s what happens when we unwittingly fall into the trap called Potential.
Be All That You Can Be?
Over the years, the Army has spent a ton of money on advertising because a volunteer army demands recruitment — lots of it. One ad campaign stands out: the series of radio and TV spots imploring listeners to “be all you can be.”
These ads play into one of our culture’s most deeply held values: maximizing our potential is one of life’s greatest responsibilities — anyone who settles for less makes a tragic if not shameful mistake.
That assumption is shared by many of us in ministry. Add to that the eternal consequences of our work, and no wonder most of us feel driven.
When I arrived at North Coast Church as a rookie pastor, I brought with me a three-ring binder I called my Life Notebook. In it were a series of laminated pages detailing my future dreams. These pages provided me with a concrete picture of what I thought life would look like if and when I reached my fullest potential: I wanted to pastor a church of a thousand or more, to lead a multiple staff, to do outside speaking. It spelled out the location and type of town I hoped to minister in someday. It even contained a detailed description of the house my wife and I wanted — down to its square feet and number of bedrooms.
I referred to that notebook weekly. I used it as a compass. It kept me focused on my goals and insured that the major decisions of my life were moving me in the right direction. It also served as a measuring rod, a standard by which I could judge my progress and realistically discern whether I was a success or failure.
My notebook may have been extreme. But I’ve found that many of us carry around similar though unwritten expectations within. And we turn to these internal aspirations when we’re trying to decide what we are capable of, which challenges to tackle, and how well we are doing in life and ministry.
A number of years ago, however, I began to wonder if something might be wrong. Among other things, I noticed that those of us who were trying to be all that we could be weren’t necessarily becoming more Christlike. Instead, we were growing increasingly competitive, self-centered, and dissatisfied.
We were also prone to lose perspective, often feeling like a failure in the midst of success. What lay leader or seminary student wouldn’t be honored to lead a Bible study of 120 people? But once a pastor starts focusing on potential, it’s easy to complain about having “only” 120 people at a service. Instead of joy over those who are there, we’re frustrated by those who don’t come.
The pursuit of maximized potential leaves us following a faulty compass, one that always points to the bigger platform, the larger ministry, the more challenging task. It never suggests that we are in over our heads, that the greener grass is only painted, that God might want us to be still rather than charge ahead.
In addition, potential is never reached. There is always something more to do: another mountain to climb, another need to meet, another opportunity I can’t afford to miss.
In short, I was setting myself up to feel like a failure. The marvel and joy of being used by God were too easily drowned out by frustration and guilt over all the things yet to be accomplished. Even when I found a way to get it all done, the result was usually a worn out, exhausted pastor hating life and ministry.
I’ve since analyzed this Potential Trap, and I’ve discovered some principles that have helped me not only to understand but more importantly to avoid falling back into its jaws.
A Search for Truth
The Potential Trap says we need to exploit fully our gifts and abilities for God. It is, of course, based on the assumption that we can get an accurate read on our gifts and abilities.
But that’s a bad assumption.
In spite of, or perhaps to compensate for, our struggles with self-esteem, the vast majority of us rate our relational and leadership skills well above average. One recent Leadership survey of pastors found that over 80 percent of us believe we have above-average preaching skills. In a related survey sent to laypeople, over 60 percent of our parishioners said our messages weren’t so hot — average or below average!
Obviously, something is out of line. By definition, at least half of us are below average. The problem is, it’s always the other guy.
Why do we overrate ourselves?
To begin with, we’ve all got a sin nature that, as Paul warns in Romans, encourages us to “think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think.” In addition, those of us in ministry receive a lot of well-intentioned but frankly deceptive encouragement. If we believe it, we can end up thinking our potential is a lot greater than it really is.
It starts with our first feeble attempts at ministry. As a lay leader, a seminary intern, or first-year assistant, we get a chance to deliver a sermon. As we look back on it years later, most of us think of it as pretty bad. But what do we hear at the door the morning of that first sermon? Nothing but praise. No one is trying to deceive us; it’s just their way of encouraging us to keep after it.
Unfortunately, the pattern continues in many churches. Social conventions at the church door call for compliments, not criticisms. Who is going to say, “That was a real dog, Larry. Hope you do better next week”? So Sunday after Sunday, people praise us, even though their words may have little to do with what they think.
All of this has made me slow to accept praise and compliments seriously, especially when they’re offered immediately after a sermon. Instead, I’ve learned to put my stock in what I call secondhand compliments: those things said out of my earshot and without any notion they will be reported back to me.
When someone tells one of our staff members, “Larry’s last sermon was perfect for the problem I’m facing now,” and it’s reported back to me, it means something.
Such realism goes a long way toward avoiding the Potential Trap. It helps me see what gifts I have and just how far I can nurture them — and it’s often not as far as my flattered ego thinks.
A Call to Obedience
Growing up in a church, I heard many sermons on Jesus’ parable of the talents. The application was always the same: don’t waste any of the gifts and talents the Lord has bestowed on you. I took that to mean that the best way to please him and to be obedient to his plan for my life was to make the most out of every opportunity. My goal was to die having gained the greatest return possible with whatever “talents” he gave me.
That’s okay as far as it goes. I’ve since learned, however, that obedience to the Lord sometimes means turning down opportunities. Sometimes it even means intentionally choosing to do or be less than my best in a given situation.
When a seminary president left his post to care for his ailing wife (she had Alzheimer’s disease), it created quite a stir. He felt he was faithfully heeding God’s call to obedience. But in so doing, let’s not forget that he also walked away from a great deal of potential ministry. When he left, he was still capable of accomplishing much that needed to be done. But God wanted him to take care of his wife. So he did.
From time to time, all of us have to work through the same sort ofissues. We must never forget that Jesus, in his early thirties — in the prime of ministry, in the prime of life — sacrificed all his talents and ministry opportunities for something greater: obedience to God.
Admittedly, our situations are seldom as dramatic or the price of obedience as costly, but sometimes we have to make the tough choices. If the Master wants me to wash dishes, it doesn’t matter if I have the latent skills to be a virtuoso. I belong in the kitchen, not the concert hall.
That doesn’t mean turning down every opportunity, but obedience requires careful listening for God’s voice. During the middle of my third year here at North Coast, I received a letter from what I considered to be one of the plum churches in our association. They were asking me to apply for the senior pastor position. In fact, it was one of the churches listed on the laminated pages of my Life Notebook as a church I hoped to pastor some day.
At that point, North Coast Church was still fighting through leadership issues. The numbers were small, and growth was stagnant. My self-esteem was taking a beating. Worse, I had little hope that the clouds would break. On the surface the decision looked like a no-brainer: Go for it!
As I read this letter, I was surprised by a sudden and strong sense of God’s presence. Before I could even ask, he said, “No.” It was more than an inner prompting. It was the clear and unmistakable leading of the Lord.
I was stunned but convinced it was a mystical leading of the Holy Spirit. I wadded the letter, threw it in the trash, and went on with my day.
When those closest to me heard about my decision, most thought I was crazy. Why would I choose to stay in a “dead-end ministry” when a well-known and significantly larger platform was readily available? What a waste of potential!
But that’s the point: fulfilling potential and obeying the Lord are not always the same thing.
The Need for Faithfulness
The quest to fulfill self-perceived potential also tends to confuse success with faithfulness.
We all know there’s a difference between God’s definition of success and the world’s. But I’ve found the more I focus on maximizing my potential, the closer I come to using the world’s dictionary instead of God’s.
In our culture, fulfilling potential has more to do with tangible results than how the game is played. When we contemplate fulfilling our potential, we seldom think about martyrdom. We’re not even thinking about faithfully toiling away in relative obscurity. We’re thinking about winning, overcoming obstacles, numbers, success.
Driven people are seldom driven to be good. They are driven to win. That’s true of even ministers. We set our sights on being successful — larger attendance, larger staff, larger budget — often on the assumption that being successful and faithful are one and the same.
During my early years here at North Coast, I took failures hard. Whether we were struggling with a lack of unity, lackluster worship, or stagnant growth, I assumed the blame, sure that God was sorely disappointed with me. I strove to get my act together, pray more, study more, sin less, increase my faith and vision — hoping then things would turn around.
The result was a lot of sleepless nights, a battered sense of self-worth, and a joyless ministry.
Then one day I came across a passage in Proverbs that became a catalyst for a radical change in my outlook: “There is no wisdom, no insight, no plan that can succeed against the Lord. The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but victory rests with the Lord” (Prov. 21:30-31).
The key insight was this: I wasn’t ultimately responsible for success or failure. Though I’d read it many times before, I’d never actually applied this verse to my ministry. While I could certainly sabotage my ministry, thereby guaranteeing failure, there was nothing I could do to guarantee victory. That was out of my control. My job was simply to prepare the horse for battle the best I could. It was God’s job to decide who won and who lost the battle.
This revolutionary insight called for a drastic change in the goals I set and the way I judged my ministry. I had to stop asking how successful or unsuccessful our church was and start asking how faithfully I was preparing it for battle.
Among other things, that meant shifting from a focus on numerical growth to spiritual health. For example, home fellowship groups are key to our discipleship emphasis. We want to have 70 percent of our Sunday morning attenders involved in them. So now, whenever the percentage drops below that, we stop all communication with visitors — something we’ve done twice. We get tough, because we do not want to grow faster than we can assimilate people. The goal is a horse better prepared for the battle: not more people attending North Coast but more people growing in the Lord and doing ministry.
Furthermore, this insight helped me accept some failures and not wallow in self-criticism. For example, while we minister to singles through our home fellowship groups, so far we’ve been unable to put together a successful singles ministry — this despite the fact that singles make up a major portion of our community and church. We’ve tried a couple of programs to draw them out, but the programs failed.
I’m concerned about that, but today I don’t take it as a major blow to my ego. I’ve found that I can suffer a defeat I’ve done nothing to create. Not that I’ve became a fatalist. I still work hard to win. I still plan strategically. I still hate to lose. But I no longer equate a rough road or even an outright failure as a spiritual problem on my part.
A Different Ministry
Ironically, our decision to focus on health has fueled growth. Maybe it’s not so ironic: once I gave up the manipulation of numbers and concentrated on ministry to people, it’s only natural more people were interested in coming. Perhaps being faithful has something to do with one of the great spiritual mysteries: we gain life by losing it, and we enhance ministry by giving up the yearning for successful ministry.
Still, I mention this growth with some hesitancy. I do not for a second believe that the formula for growth is to relinquish the pursuit of potential, concentrating on spiritual health. I shifted my focus when our attendance hung around 150, and stayed with that focus as it continued to hover at that figure for a couple of years more. I had no idea that the church would grow, and that was okay. I had already begun releasing myself from the Potential Trap. The joy and fulfillment of ministry had already returned.
I can’t say I’m completely free of the Potential Trap; with the opportunities that come with a larger church, I’m still tempted to fall back into it. I still live in a culture that harangues me to become self-actualized. A large part of me is still driven. But I’ve discovered that the heart that recoils in shame over failure to achieve potential tends to swell up with pride over success. I don’t want that kind of heart, nor do I want to fall back into the trap called potential. Ministry is too great a privilege not to enjoy.
Copyright © 1993 by Christianity Today
