Author: Matthew

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Ambition and Church Leadership

I must admit, I’ve always been somewhat perplexed about church leadership. That is, there are lots of different kinds of pastors. Some stand out as the “cool” people in the community. They were the visible movers and shakers ever since junior high. At other times, the pastor can seem like the dorkiest person in the room, and I’m not just talking about generational differences. Others are scholarly and couple (or overshadow) their pastoral ministry with brilliant teaching or writing careers. I’ve seen some very incompetent people suddenly feel “called” to jet off to seminary. Everyone around them shakes their heads.

Being a pastor in America (I don’t know about the rest of the world) seems like this odd paradox of being in an important position of influence and also making next to nothing in terms of wealth. I’ve known many pastors that have honesty worked very hard for their flock but also had to work side jobs (driving school bus, cleaning offices, keeping rentals, etc.) just to keep their family afloat. What is up with all of this? Is being a pastor something do be desired, or does it largely suck? What actually motivates people? I’m confused.

A recent post by CPA offers (I think) some really keen insight into all of this. (emphasis is mine):

So what accounts for the similarity between the “alpha male” ethos of a conference of Southern Baptist pastors and that of a high-powered law firm?

I would say, both are outlets for the ambitious of their community. This is, frankly, the weirdest part of being an adult convert to the evangelical community: realizing that all over the land, many driven, competitive, ambitious kids grow thinking the way to respect and power is to become . . . . a Baptist (or other evangelical) pastor. (But understanding this is useful for understanding, for example, the position of lamas in traditional Tibet, or mullas in the Islamic world.)

For those in the [mostly liberal] mainline world, the idea that religion would be an outlet for ambition, competition, and drive is just bizarre. In the mainline world, those who are driven, ambitious, and competitive go into law, business, or politics. In that world, religion as a career is, almost by definition, the province of the shy, the self-doubters, the bookish, and nerdy. And that is true whether the career cleric is male or female.

In the evangelical church, the pastor is preaching down at his sheep, for whom he is the leader of their social universe. The pastor’s role is as a leader, a commander. And the ambitious boys in that world want to be the pastor, because that is leadership.

In the mainline church, the minister is preaching across, or even up, at parishioners for whom he or she is at best only one voice among many. The minister is an adviser, or a therapist, or counselor, offering words of counsel to the leaders and led of society. And the office attracts those who don’t want to be leaders, but instead stand apart from leadership. The jocks go on to earn big money and make big decisions; the shy and bookish go into the ministry to warn them every Sunday of the dangers of ambition.

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Guinness

Is there actually a beer worth drinking? The jury is still out on that, but the only real candidate is Guinness.

Guy Kawasaki visits the very neat Guinness brewery, the most popular tourist attraction in Dublin.

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Church Relevance

A friend of mine, a young pastor who recently started a church, talks to me from time to time about the new face of church in America-about the postmodern church. He says the new church will be different from the old one, that we will be relevant to culture and the human struggle. I don’t think any church has ever been relevant to culture, to the human struggle, unless it believed in Jesus and the power of His gospel. If the supposed new church believes in trendy music and cool Web pages, then it is not relevant to culture either. It is just another tool of Satan to get people to be passionate about nothing.

– Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz, P. 111

The resurrection power of Christ healing the brokenness in people’s lives will always be relevant to all descendants of Adam on this earth. Cool web pages and trendy music are a medium of communication, just like books or a street sign.

Have you seen people passionate about their street sign? Probably not. That would be silly right? Books. Yes. Music, definitely. Be passionate about the gospel.

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Merton on our tainted thinking

I think that if there is one truth that people need to learn, in the world, especially today, it is this: the intellect is only theoretically independent of desire and appetite in ordinary, actual practice. It is constantly being blinded and perverted by the ends and aims of passion, and the evidence it presents to us with such a show of impartiality and objectivity is fraught with interest and propaganda. We have become marvelous at self-delusion; all the more so, because we have gone to such trouble to convince ourselves of our own absolute infallibility. The desires of the flesh-and by that I mean not only sinful desires, but even the ordinary, normal appetites for comfort and ease and human respect, are fruitful sources of every kind of error and misjudgment, and because we have these yearnings in us, our intellects (which, if they operated all alone in a vacuum, would indeed, register with pure impartiality what they saw) present to us everything distorted and accommodated to the norms of our desire.

And therefore, even when we are acting with the best of intentions, and imagine that we are doing great good, we may be actually doing tremendous material harm and contradicting all our good intentions. There are ways that seem to men to be good, the end whereof is in the depths of hell.

The only answer to the problem is grace, grace, docility to grace.

– Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain, P. 205

Excellent, excellent observation. I think it would be silly for me to try and add much else at this point.

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Doubt as a seed, a story worth retelling

Kathleen Norris tells of a long intellectual battle against the faith of her childhood, finding it impossible for a time to swallow much of Christian doctrine. Later, experiencing problems in her personal life, she felt drawn to a Benedictine abbey where, to her surprise, the monks seemed unconcerned about her weighty doubts and intellectual frustrations. “I was a bit disappointed,” she writes. “I had thought that my doubts were spectacular obstacles to my faith and was confused and intrigued when an old monk blithely stated that doubt is merely the seed of faith, a sign that faith is alive and ready to grow.” Rather than address her doubts one by one, the monks instead instructed her in worship and liturgy.

-Philip Yancy, Reaching for the Invisible God, P. 219

Two things to mention here:

First, you’ve probably heard the phrase “seeds of doubt”. As in “Her friend’s gossip, though she brushed it off initially, planted seeds of doubt in her mind concerning the fidelity of her new boyfriend.” I find the notion described above by the monk to be fascinating and encouraging. A doubt we have may in fact be a seed of faith, ready to grow. This assumes that we come to God as sinners, unbelieving, looking up, wanting to believe. This, in contrast to the idea of being His people and our doubts being something that drag us down and make us fall away from the faith and prevent us from sustaining devotion on our own. I think I like the first idea better!

Secondly, citing the source of this idea presents an obvious problem. Some old and wise man of the Benedictine order taught his novices this encouragement of “doubt being a seed”. A monk down the line passed this on to Kathleen Norris (a poet and novelist I’m not really familiar with). She wrote it down in a book somewhere and it was recounted by Philip Yancy in one of his works.

I think Yancy has largely made a writing career out of compiling pertinent excerpts from other’s writing and then sprinkling in a little bit of his own commentary. There are lots of good one liners and illustrations, but ultimately not much is added to our collective body of literature and understanding. A lot of academic research can end up looking like this too! When your primary motivation for writing a thesis is to gain tenure at your institution, why not just recycle and repackage ideas? It may still take quite a bit of effort to produce, but there is no risk and little burden to be creative. Digging deep into original sources and experiences can be a lot of work with little to offer the casual reader.

Nevertheless, I guess I’ll appreciate Yancy (and other folks like him) for what they doing anyway.

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The fool at the table

There’s always some fool who loses. So if you look around the table and you don’t see him, you’re the fool.

-Coy, The Nautical Chart, Arturo Perez-Reverte

I thought of this quote recently when I heard a similar comment during an interview with actor Steve Carell by NPR’s Terry Gross. Steve plays a character in The Office, which if you haven’t seen it, is a TV sitcom about office culture. Think live-action Dilbert. Michael Scott is the name of the clueless (but not evil) boss character in the show.

…that’s basically what Michael is up against. He thinks people think he’s cool. He thinks people like him and think he’s funny and charming but he’s really none of those things. And incidentally, when you say everyone knows a Michael Scott…I guess the rule of thumb…Ricky told me this in regards to the character he plays, David Brent, in the BBC version of The Office, that if you don’t know Michael Scott, then you ARE Michael Scott. So better that you actually have a frame of reference for him!

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Light those candles when you pray

It would be surprising to meet a monk or a talmudic scholar or a minister who would say, “yes, we burn the incense or turn down the lights or ring these bells or light these candles as a way of creating a room where people are more likely to believe in their prayers,” but of course that’s exactly what they’re doing. (and you know what? there’s nothing wrong with that.)

-Seth Godin (brilliant marketing author)

Godin is a smart guy and I really enjoy his writing. He is no theologian though so he may not be keen as to what other motivations there could be for this kind of behavior. Obviously there is more to it than what he is describing, but it’s certainly a legitimate side-effect!

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The bride is not a child

Wise parents nudge their children away from dependence toward freedom, for their goal is to produce independent adults. Lovers, however, choose a new kind of voluntary dependence: possessing freedom they gladly give it away. In a healthy marriage, one partner yields to the other’s wishes not out of compulsion but out of love. That adult relationship reveals, I believe, what God has always sought from human beings: not the clinging, helpless love of a child who has no real choice, but the mature, freely given commitment of a lover.-Philip Yancy, Reaching for the Invisible God, P. 223

What do Calvinists think of this? I imagine they would pretty much stick with the part about God treating us as children. Certainly much of the language of the bible is like this: God’s relation to the nation of Israel, etc. However, some of it really isn’t. The church as the bride of Christ. Do you treat your bride like a child? Not unless you’re an ass. So why does God use that imagery over and over again if he still means to treat us as children in all our relating? I don’t think that’s what the Lord is looking for in the church, as mentioned above.

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What large amplifiers are best for

In his autobiography, Thomas Merton recounts a scene from his early college years:

Two attempts where made to convert me to less shocking tastes. The music master lent me a set of records of Bach’s B Minor Mass, which I liked, and sometimes played on my portable gramophone, which I had with me in the big airy room looking out on the Headmaster’s garden. But most of the time I played the hottest and loudest records, turning the Vic towards the classroom building, eighty yards away across the flowerbeds, hoping that my companions, grinding out the syntax of Virgil’s Georgics, would be very envious of me.

-Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain, P. 99

I clearly remember my first week in college, living in the “scholar’s residence” which was on old Greek row with all the frats and sororities. Most of the houses had procured large, Van Halen-roadshow-sized speaker systems from which they blasted ACDC and Snoop Dog at volumes that would ricochet off the sides of the football stadium a mile away. I remember walking by them and casting a look of scorn in their direction while secretly wishing I might blast a few of my own tunes back. Our professor of early music history suggested Verdi’s Dies Erie. Very good choice. Love that bass drum solo right before the first repeat.

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On receiving praise

How can he be puffed up with vain words, whose heart is truly subject to God? Not all the world can lift him up, whom the truth hath subjected unto itself; neither shall he, who hath firmly settled his whole hope in God, be moved with the tongues of any who praise him.

– Tomas A’ Kemis, The Imitation of Christ, Book III, Chapter 14

Can you think of a celebrity who isn’t puffed up (at least to some degree) by the attention they receive? There are some I imagine. If what man wants is money, sex and power (and he does), then receiving praise falls under the fame category, which is a subset of power. Once again, the meek inherit the earth and the praise of God while the man who desires it the much is the most easily deceived by it. He can be more easily moved by the words of others. He has subjected himself to other men.

I think you can take this the wrong way though. Some of us have trouble receiving praise. We write off any compliment we receive. I think this is often a symptom of the dreaded “nice-guy syndrome”. Unfortunately, this is NOT the same as the man who is subject to God. We may not be so subject to the words of other men, but we have replaced it with being subject to our own selves. This can harden us against correction and (more commonly I think) rob us of the joy of encouragement.

Realizing this condition exists doesn’t seem to make it feel any easier!