The Vulnerable Pastor E-Book

Mandy Smith

• Herausgeber: IVP
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 309

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Missio Alliance Essential Reading List Hearts Minds Bookstore's Best Books ProdigalThought.net's Top Reads Englewood Review of Books Best Books Leadership Journal's Best Ministry Books of the Year Often as pastors we feel like we need to project strength and competency in order to minister effectively. That's why we go to conferences and emulate the latest superstars. But we know we can never live up to those images. Deep down, we know our own limitations, our weaknesses, our faults. We fear that if people knew who we really are, we'd be disqualified from ministry. Not so. Mandy Smith unpacks the biblical paradox that God's strength is revealed through our human weakness. Transparently describing her pastoral journey, Smith shows how vulnerability shapes ministry, through our spiritual practices and relationships, influencing our preaching, teaching and even the nuts and bolts of the daily schedule. Understanding our human constraints makes our ministry more sustainable and guards us against disillusionment and burnout. We don't have to have it all together. Recognizing our weakness makes us rely on God, so our weakness can become a ministry resource. God has called you to lead not as a demigod, but as a human, so the world can see that the church is a place for humans like them.

Leseprobe

THE

VULNERABLE

PASTOR

How Human Limitations Empower Our Ministry

MANDY SMITH

Foreword by DAVID HANSEN

For the good people of University Christian Church.

You have restored my hope in what the church can be.

The joke of it is that often it is the preacher who as steward of the wildest mystery of them all is the one who hangs back, prudent, cautious, hopelessly mature and wise to the last when no less than Saint Paul tells him to be a fool for Christ’s sake, no less than Christ tells him to be a child for his own and the kingdom’s sake.

Frederick Buechner

Contents

Foreword: by David Hansen

Introduction: God Is an Odd Leader

Part One: Getting Over Ourselves

Vulnerability with God

1 Filled with Emptiness

2 What Makes Us Feel Weak. And What Doesn’t

A Confession

3 Save Me!

Vulnerability and Salvation

4 Feeling Exposed

How Vulnerable Pastors Handle Emotions

5 I Need You!

How Vulnerable Pastors Pray

6 Letting the Bible Read Us

How Vulnerable Pastors Read the Bible

Part Two: Being True to Ourselves

Vulnerability Behind the Scenes

7 Learning to Like the Mess

How Vulnerable Pastors Create Culture

8 Changing the Mold

How Vulnerable Pastors Recognize and Develop Leaders

9 Taking Our Own Sweet Time

How Vulnerable Pastors Use Their Time and Energy

10 Thriving for Others

How Vulnerable Pastors Measure Success

Part Three: Practicing in Public

Vulnerability with an Audience

11 Welcome to the Process

How Vulnerable Pastors Teach and Preach

12 The Right Kind of Desperate

How Vulnerable Pastors Engage with the World

Epilogue: Unfading Treasure in Jars of Clay

Discussion Guide

Acknowledgments

Notes

Praise for The Vulnerable Pastor

About the Author

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

Copyright

Foreword

by David Hansen

The landscape is littered with pastors who feel inadequate. I count myself as one of them. According to Mandy Smith, we are on the brink of an infusion of power if we embrace our weaknesses and count them as gifts from God. In the process we trust the one God to make up the difference between who we feel we are and what our ministry can become. At least we have the apostle Paul on our side, as he tells the church in Corinth, “Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God” (2 Corinthians 3:5).

Part of the problem is the tonnage of literature, seminars, lectures and conferences on ministry where leaders call us to pick up their methodologies and follow them. Of course there’s nothing wrong with a little rah-rah, common sense and good ideas once in a while, but much of it calls us in the end to raw Promethianism as we allow ourselves to become dominated by a cult of personality and go forth to do the same. We go back home, try things out and they don’t work. We feel worse about ourselves than before we started—and, tragically, worse than we really are!

Into this environment Mandy paints a wholly other paradigm. Here is a thoroughgoing exploration of the concept of vulnerability in ministry as strength, as a place to give God the primary place in the equation of ministerial competency. If you’re wondering if her vision of ministry grows a church, it just might: her church is growing. I don’t mind saying that, not to set up an expectation for your ministry, but to overturn the idea from the start that the picture she paints here—and, by the way, she is a painter, as well as a ridiculously good writer—is a justification for oblivion. This is very real for me, since I pastor an old church of about sixty in a high-crime area of Cincinnati. For us vulnerability isn’t an excuse to die. For us vulnerability is a strength as we care for our members and our neighborhood, not knowing what our institutional future may bring.

But it’s not just about work in the inner city or the dead spots in rural areas. Her “method” (or shall I say, “unmethod”) works in all sorts of ministry environments. The potential is wide; it works with big-church all-togethers who long for a place to be fully human, post-Christian wanderers who can’t relate to highfalutin answers, pastors on the brink of burnout and those already over the cliff who are looking for a way to envision ministry again.

It works because Mandy’s explication of vulnerability lived out is first and foremost a modus operandi of the Spirit. As such it is demanding. Giving in to the Spirit requires a ruthless release of the self-generating self. If this all sounds like biblical leadership, it should. It is the presupposition of Mary giving her body and soul to the Spirit and Moses leading Israel out of Egypt. As much as these are different tasks and different personalities, they are one strategy: utter reliance on God.

Introduction

God Is an Odd Leader

Since being a pastor was impossible, I decided to do that. I prayed: “Lord, being a pastor is impossible, so if you will be with me all the way to help me, I will be a pastor.”

David Hansen, The Art of Pastoring

Our work as pastors is impossible. This is a fact many of us don’t learn until we’re well into it. In the beginning we see some intelligence, charm or talent in ourselves that makes us think we’re up for the challenge of ministry, but inevitably we find it’s not enough. We always will if we’re doing this work right, for we have been given an impossible task as imperfect beings representing a perfect God. Eventually we find that we have been called to something far beyond us. At some point we will be faced with a sadness too great for our hearts to carry, a question too heavy for our minds, a responsibility that crushes us. When we get there, what will we do? Walk away from a cruel God who would hand us an impossibility? Internalize it as our own failing? Blame everyone around us?

Maybe there’s another way. Maybe God gave us an impossible task for a greater purpose.

When we as leaders have an important message or a huge task, we pull out all the stops—lights, music, production. But over and over, when God has some serious business to take care of, he goes small and obscure. Throughout Scripture, when it’s time to cast a vision or start a movement, he begins with a child, a pauper or a stranger. He seems to see some kind of renewable resource in human emptiness, a power source in human weakness. Which leads him to make the very odd choice to call us to ministry.

If God’s effort to engage with humans were only about communicating ideas, he could do just fine without us. His linguistic skill outstrips anything we bring. But he sees potential in us to express his deepest heart. To tell his story, God often begins with human limitation—a blank canvas where he can begin creating.

Whether or not we talk about it, we’re aware of our own limitation. This is especially true when we’re faced with the challenges of ministry. We’re reminded every day how we’re not witty or educated or talented enough. And when we get that sinking feeling of knowing our own limitations, when we’re dragged down by the weight of our own emptiness, we want to do whatever we can to fix it. We desperately work harder, hoping that if we’re perfect this time it will all be okay. We wear ourselves out, trying to match some preconceived ideal. Or we keep ourselves busy or entertained so we don’t have to think about it. And if our own inner voices don’t hound us enough, our advertising culture is happy to tell us how to control the pain of our human condition—buy this product, this program, this book, and all our problems will go away.

In the end none of it helps us feel any better about our ability to fulfill our call to ministry. And the more desperate we feel, the more we try to mask how far in over our heads we are, hoping no one will be able to tell.

But this perpetuates the problem. In our efforts to project strength and success, we continue a cycle of unhealthy ideals, setting up unrealistic expectations for others, reproducing something hollow. When we hear only about the strengths and successes of others, it crushes us. And yet we crush others by presenting only our own strengths and successes.

It’s time for a new approach. God doesn’t need our perfection. He already has his own. He chooses us because we offer something different—humanity. To be what he needs, we can’t shy away from our intense experience of weakness. Our stories of human limitation are a kind of confession, and in them we are strangely empowered. When one person is willing to step into vulnerability, it disrupts forever the cycle that traps us, giving us permission to share our fears, creating a space for others to be human and for God to be God.

One of the most encouraging moments in my ministry was when Hayden, a seminary student who attends my church, said, “When I see how you do ministry, for the first time I see that I could do ministry.” The hope I saw in his eyes is what I want to share with others who may not feel they can do it. Because, ironically, the way I do ministry has grown out of a deep sense of my inability to do it. Hayden was not looking at my great skill, only at the way I have learned to laugh at my inadequacy and keep on working. We admit weakness not only to be free from the shame of our limitations but also to turn to a true source of power.

What discipline is required for the future leader to overcome the temptation of individual heroism? I would like to propose the discipline of confession.

Henri J. M. Nouwen1

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not naturally comfortable talking about vulnerability. I’m painfully aware that my writing is filled with first-person pronouns. I’d much rather talk about impersonal ideas. But confessions begin with “I.”

It began with confession to my congregation, with my need to break out of the silent shame of my limitations, trusting Bonhoeffer’s wisdom that when we confess to a fellow believer, we are no longer alone but we experience the presence of God in that person.2

And what do I confess? Not sin in the way we usually understand it. And yet it is a “falling short of the glory,” an unhealthy appetite of a different kind. I confess that I am vulnerable. Not simply that I feel vulnerable, but that I am inherently susceptible to weakness, inadequacy. And that in response I try to compensate, to be invincible, to be God. If it was their efforts to be like God that had Adam and Eve expelled from the garden, this is serious confession.

In confessing for my own sake, I’ve watched how it’s given grace to others, how it’s breaking a culture of performance, perfectionism and shame. And so although it’s uncomfortable, I’m happy to extend that confession to a broader community in the form of a book, albeit a book with a lot of the word “I.”

Another reason I’m uncomfortable talking about vulnerability is because the discussion naturally turns to issues of gender. In my conversations with women and minorities, I’ve seen the unique challenges we face. I don’t like to talk like a victim, but there are certainly many times when, directly and indirectly, I have been told my voice is less valid than others’—so finding it has taken more grace and courage than you might think. We could say that the history of marginalization reflects the failure of those in power, yet it doesn’t stop the marginalized from feeling like failures. It’s hard for anyone to admit weakness. It’s even harder for the marginalized as they work to be taken seriously in a world not their own.

While the marginalized are figuring that out, those of us in leadership feel the added pressure of an audience. While I don’t have a chip on my shoulder, as the only female lead pastor in my fellowship of some six thousand churches, I feel the pressure to be perfect.3 Even as I ask myself, Can I do this? I know there are many watching me who are also asking, Can she do this? They’re assessing my attitude, the success of my church, the power of my preaching—and even if it’s mostly with good intentions or curiosity, it puts pressure on me to be strong. So it’s even harder to admit how very much I’m weak.

I don’t want this to be “A Female Pastor’s Guide to Ministry,” but I am a female pastor. I realize the cliché—a woman writing a book about weakness and vulnerability. But I’m not naturally good at it. Everything in my education and culture has taught me to put on a good front, to work extra hard behind the scenes so that my performance is faultless. When you’re the first woman anything you have to be better at it to be taken seriously. Taking myself seriously worked for a while. But before long it was ludicrous. My only choice was to throw up my hands and laugh.

I can laugh because confessing inadequacy has taught me this: If feeling our own weakness makes us rely on God, and if the best ministry grows from reliance on him, then our weakness is a ministry resource. And we have an unlimited supply of this resource. With this approach, learning to embrace weakness has made me feel strangely invincible! The things that used to bring shame and fear now force me to tell those I lead, “Well, we’re just going to have to trust God because I’m so inadequate it’s funny!”

I’ll tell the story as it unfolded for me: first in a deeply personal place, then with my church leaders, then with the congregation, then with the broader world. Allowing the questions to begin in my own life meant I had to trust that I was not the only one asking them. Whether we’re talking about an individual’s experience or the experience of the billions who inhabit this earth, we’re talking about vulnerable human experience.

This question of what it means to be human is one of the most important questions we can ask. And important questions should be handled in important ways, which often means in detached, formal ways. I started there when I first asked this question, but my nice, detached ideas kept burrowing themselves back into their birthplace—my own life. Eventually I had to stop fighting and let them stay there, not because it’s comfortable asking important questions in a very personal way but because when the questions are about humanity, the investigation of them must be a human one. If we believe the same truth expresses itself in Scripture, the world and our lives, we can make our lives a study of how the truth of our human vulnerability and our need for God remain singular and yet reveal many facets.

God is one. But God also reveals himself in various ways that at first don’t always seem to fit together. . . . It is always the same God, but the “person” or the “face” or “voice” by which we receive the revelation varies. But here’s the thing: every part of the revelation, every aspect, ­every form is personal—God is relational at the core—and so whatever is said, whatever is revealed, whatever is received is also personal and relational. There is nothing impersonal, nothing merely functional, everything from beginning to end and in between is personal. God is inherently and inclusively personal.

Eugene Peterson4

This has been my approach as I have worked to figure out how God in Scripture, God in my life and God in the world can be One. I write to share how I wrestled with these questions as I adjusted to long-term life in the United States as a transplant from Australia and as I transitioned, within just two years, from associate to co-lead pastor to lead pastor. I share the lessons I learned as I figured out what it meant to lead University Christian Church (UCC), a campus and neighborhood congregation and fair-trade café in uptown Cincinnati. But I trust that the result is more than memoir. As Esther Lightcap Meek puts it, “Insight isn’t informational; it is transformational.”5

To keep this from remaining only my story, there are invitations throughout for you to wrestle yourself, opportunities to reflect on how the story connects with God’s movement in your story. And so while this book is not theology or exegesis in the usual sense, I hope that it is thoroughly theological and exegetical. I don’t tell my story because I think it’s so unusual but because our stories share a common human theme. Step with me into this trust that things that seem deeply personal have global ramifications and things that seem global have deeply personal ramifications.

We’ll begin with personal questions: When we sense we’re not all we should be to fulfill our calling, will it be our undoing? Or will it hold some new potential? If God called humans to lead his church, is it okay for us to be human? How is our culture intolerant of weakness and what weakness fixes does it offer?

We’ll confess how we deny our intrinsic vulnerabilities, how instead of approaching God from need we try to earn our own salvation (and what that means for our evangelistic efforts). We’ll confess our efforts to dominate emotion, to manipulate God through prayer, to tame Scripture, to control church culture, to force leaders into our mold. We’ll confess how we desire to be superhumanly productive and successful, to determine the development of others. We’ll confront our overcompensation for the powerlessness we feel when we can’t fix everything, can’t understand everything, can’t hold back the post-Christian tide.

And these confessions will free us to step into healthier habits: following, praying, feeling, creating, communicating and engaging in new ways, unafraid of vulnerability. We will discover a leadership that’s comfortable with following.

This new approach reveals untapped leadership potential. It renews energy from burnout. It uncovers opportunities for God to work not only in spite of, but because of our weakness. It teaches us how he can work in and through the people he has made us to be right now. It helps us name our fears and limitations for the sake of acknowledging our need for him, freeing us from the need to be enough. That freedom will change how we see this moment in the history of the church. As the world changes and Christianity falls from power, we will see how God can reveal his power even through our lack of political sway. In the end, what better Christian leadership can there be than the kind that models a deep trust in him? He chooses us in all our inadequacy so that when it’s all said and done, there’s no question whose power was at work.

Part One

GETTING OVER

OURSELVES

Vulnerability with God

1

Filled with Emptiness

The week I stepped into my new role as co-lead pastor I attended a major convention for Christian leaders. For four years I had served as associate pastor alongside my good friend and lead pastor Troy Jackson, and then his growing passion for justice work led us to reduce his workload at UCC to allow him to pursue those opportunities. As we were entering this new partnership, I attended the conference with an open heart, hoping it would equip me for what was ahead. It certainly did, but not in the way I expected.

The more workshops I attended and bookstands I perused, the more strange I felt. Something didn’t feel right. I sat in the sessions and earnestly took notes, waiting for something to connect, but the harder I tried, the more I felt myself sinking. After a day of this discomfort, I found myself at dinner with some of the key speakers. I was surprised to hear myself ask them, “Do you ever feel like you’re making it up as you go along?”

I know they responded to me, but I have no recollection of what they said because none of it gave me what I was really asking for—a glimpse behind the scenes into their human hearts. I’m sure they left wondering, “Who was that awkward person with her odd questions?”

I went to bed that night feeling defeated, but in the morning I psyched myself up for another day.

It was more of the same: programs to plug in that would fix my problems. Systems to integrate that would manage my congregants. Books to buy that would prop up my insecurities. Everything was intended for good, but it was not for me. The programs and measurements of success did not represent me. The assumptions didn’t include me (statements like “All leaders will be motivated by . . . ” and “Your church doesn’t want a leader like this; they want a man who . . . ”). As far as I could tell, no one in this huge gathering of church leaders looked or sounded or thought like me. I hadn’t gone with a chip on my shoulder, expecting to be marginalized. In fact, I had expected to be welcomed and included. But by midday, the sinking feeling returned with greater intensity and I faked a coughing fit to mask my teary departure. Feeling shame at my emotional state, I headed for my hotel room, where I told God, This job isn’t for me. I have nothing to give. You’ve made a mistake.

The realization was so disturbing to me—at forty years of age, after years of prayer and preparation for this role—that for the next twenty-four hours I couldn’t leave my little hotel room. It’s a blur to me now but I remember bouts of tears, dry retching, restless sleep and the kind of prayer that scrapes your insides on its way out. The place inside of me where I go to draw on strength or faith or feeling was a wasteland. If a fire could scorch a desert and leave it drier and deader than it already had been, that was the state of my soul. I longed for God to comfort me with words like, “You’re stronger than you think” and “You’ve got this—look at all the gifts I’ve given you!” But instead, in my despair, God’s voice was assuring but vague.

A broken and contrite spirit I will not despise.

In your weakness I am strong.

Deep truths that felt flat compared to the empty expanse in my soul.

Yeah, yeah, God, I know. Keep trusting in your strength . . . still . . . again.

Although I awoke the next day with eyes swollen closed from crying and my stomach still churning, I knew I had to return to the world. I grabbed something for my headache and invented an explanation for my red eyes. I got through the conference and returned to my home and work, still raw from the experience. We often joke that going to a conference is like drinking from a fire hose. What do you do when it’s more like gulping for air as the torrents threaten to drown you?

A Shaky Beginning

And so I began this new phase of leadership not with assurances of my own ability but with a mental map of every hollow of the cavernous emptiness within me. And yet a sense of God’s strength was enough for me to falteringly step into the work before me. As I did, God helped me get over the rawness of the emptiness and, in the process, get over myself.

When I have no words for my feelings I make a collage. Flipping through magazines and cutting out what resonates (without having to explain why) is like taking a glossy Rorschach test. After hacking up several magazines I had two piles of clippings. In one I gathered:

I’m embarrassed

Mistake

Creative

Imperfect

Experimental

Trust

Endurance

Music

Open

Jazz

Free

Bare it

Imagination

A little picture of a naked man riding a bike

The second pile of clippings included:

Fear

Win

Live life on center stage

Be fabulous

Control

Achieve

Safety (twice)

Paralysis

Image

Feeling like you’ve sold your soul

Several images of shiny armor

A woman in a killer pair of heels

I knew there was a choice to make between a life of safety, control and adulation (which felt good but also seemed like a compromise of something valuable) and the risky, experimental life of freedom and heart (which seemed like the right choice but also scared me to death). The scary choice seemed to lead toward God, and yet how could God expect it of me? One thing I knew for sure: I had never been more aware that I was completely limited. I had never felt so filled to the brim with emptiness. This was not the way I expected leadership to feel!

When the safety net has split, when the resources are gone, when the way ahead is not clear, the sudden exposure can be both frightening and revealing. We spend so much of our time protecting ourselves from this exposure that a weird kind of relief can result when we fail. To lie flat on the ground with the breath knocked out of you is to find a solid resting place. This is as low as you can go. You told yourself you would die if it ever came to this, but here you are. You cannot help yourself and yet you live.

Barbara Brown Taylor1

My choices warred in me. (Why couldn’t I just keep the best of both? Could I be on an adventure but still be in total control?) So I played out this war with my paints. It felt right to finger paint first with yellow—thick and lumpy—on a huge old door. Finger painting feels like childhood, like freedom under your fingernails. But when the paint was dry and knobbly, two large black crayon squares wanted to impose themselves on the fun. Strong and perfect (if you’re a Star Trek fan, think the Borg), they wanted to corral the mess. And yet the texture of the yellow kept the black from overcoming and bits of yellow broke through everywhere. After so many hard, dark lines, it was time for some playfulness again and this time green paint squirted itself with abandon across the board, pleasing me with the way it formed tendrils. But the darkness couldn’t abide such joy so, in the form of black shoe polish, it swirled and billowed, threatening to cloud out the life and color. In places it grayed the brightness, but one little green tendril defiantly held back the cloud.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. . . . Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either daring adventure, or nothing.

Helen Keller2

As I painted, my heart cheered on the color and playfulness, humming all along (“I will sing, sing a new song. How long to sing this song?”), hoping it would win but fearing it wouldn’t. The result of my work could have been a scene from Revelation, but instead of a dragon there were black squares and gray clouds, and the woman had become yellow swirls and green life. I know who overcomes in the end. Without even knowing how to step away from the comfort of black squares, that day I chose to step into the freedom—and vulnerability—of green life.

Daring Adventure or Nothing

At this time a friend shared with me the now-famous TED talks on vulnerability by Brené Brown, who might as well have turned to the camera and addressed me personally as she stated, “Vulnerability is not weakness. Vulnerability is pure courage,” and “Vulnerability is the birthplace of joy, creativity, belonging and love.”3

How does one lead with vulnerability? I’d never seen it done so I had no choice but to jump in. Learning on the job is hard at the best of times. I’d been dropped into the deep end at work before, trying to run a sandwich shop while the lunch line snaked out the door. No one had showed me how to make ten sandwiches at a time while also working the register. But now I was learning on the job before an audience of 160. The stakes were much higher than messing up a few sandwiches.

Now I was stepping into an iconic role—The Pastor—which was not unlike how it had felt to become The Mother. I was living a stereotype: The Pastor is always kind, patient and wise but also strong, capable and decisive. The Pastor can never say, “Can I have a week to make that decision?” or “Can I avoid difficult people when trying to write sermons?” And The Pastor doesn’t express unfiltered feelings—exasperation or annoyance—and certainly never has a full-on sobbing meltdown. The Pastor must reflect nothing less than God himself at all times.

Practicing in Public

It seems I had more to learn about improvisation. I had been so proud years before when I taught myself to play music by heart. Controlling every note had made my performance consistently good, but improvising meant it could be great at the risk of being terrible. Back then I was in a band with six other musicians, so my terrible was covered. Now I was becoming a soloist of sorts and my mistakes were glaringly obvious. Couldn’t I just step aside for six months? A year? To figure out in private how to do this and come back when I was ready? I never asked to practice in public.

I journaled. “Is it my role to fail well? To live an example of brokenness in a public sphere so that others have permission to fail? To give myself grace and say, ‘I’m sorry,’ and trust grace will be given?”

The following pages remained blank.

Brennan Manning came to my side through his memoir, All Is Grace, which opens with a Leonard Cohen poem:

Ring the bells that still can ring.

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.4

I copied it onto a chalkboard by my back door and it’s still there, years later.

In the margins of Manning’s book, I scribbled, “Reading this story of a man whose alcoholism drove him to God and gave him a deep understanding of, and ministry of, grace makes me wonder if God doesn’t use us in spite of our brokenness but because of it.”

Here was the beginning of resurrection. A little seed had been planted in me and something living was beginning to shoot from it. Another “friend,” Henri Nouwen, came to cultivate it with these words: “The Christian leader of the future is called . . . to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self.”5

But who was this self I was to offer? I felt like an insecure teenager all over again as I dug inside to work out what God saw in me—and came up with very little. Which is when a trusted mentor cautioned, “Maybe there are messages you’re believing that aren’t from God.”

So I set to making a list of the false messages I believed. Here’s what I wrote:

I need to perfectly reflect God’s character at all times, never get angry, never upset anyone, never make mistakes.

I need to represent women pastors well, especially with how I express my feelings and how I look. I should never be girly or frumpy or remind anyone of the baggage they have with their mothers.

I need to present only fully developed intellectual ideas. My playfulness, stories, creativity and emotion are childish and less significant than ideas and arguments.

I need to live up to others’ standards.

I can’t have needs.

I need to make everyone happy.

My voice is smaller and less valuable than others’.

Reflect

What are the false messages you believe? Invite a trusted friend to help you name them.

Santa Claus God and Slave Driver God

It was surprising how quickly I could put into words this unspoken self-talk that daily circled my head. And it was surprising how, once out of me, these lies became repulsive. I wanted to step away from them but didn’t know what to step toward. I longed to discover what it could look like to lead from the heart, to have joy in my role, to work without the burden of performance and duty.

These questions were pressing because all the while I was taking on more and more responsibility. While I was questioning what it meant to fill this co-lead pastor role (and the conference I’d turned to for encouragement had left me even less confident), I never considered stepping down. Not out of courage but out of obligation. I was a workhorse, ready to take the load. My co-lead, Troy, was being called into new ministry opportunities, things I’d encouraged him to pursue, and I didn’t want to let him down. When all the leadership transition dust settled it suddenly dawned on me that I’d taken on much more responsibility than I’d anticipated. I was resentful.

I’m trying to raise a family and support my husband in his ministry. Being an associate pastor has been stressful enough! God, why would you lay more on my shoulders?

I stepped into the well-worn slave track. I knew the routine: bear the load so that others can be blessed by God. Don’t complain, do your duty, override your needs and desires. I still hadn’t discovered how to lead from the heart or have joy in my role. A good friend cautioned me, “If you run in your own strength, at best you will have earthly success.” It sounded wise—but how to run in God’s strength?

When others heard my description of my slave driver God, they reminded me, “No, you’re a child of the king. Whatever you ask, you will receive.” And so I flipped from slave driver God to Santa Claus God. From feeling the weight of his demands I shifted to making demands, listing all the ways I’d worked out that God should behave so I would feel loved.

He didn’t do any of it. And I don’t blame him.

I’m sure God grew tired of swapping his whip and scowl for a sack of toys and a jolly grin, many times within one day. And I grew tired of swinging from overburdened victim to pouty, demanding child. As much as I knew neither caricature reflected reality, I had no idea what was true. In desperation I prayed, “God, these roles I’m casting us in feel right because I’ve seen them played out in human relationships. But their familiarity doesn’t make them true. Could you remind me of an experience that’s more like the truth?”

And the fastest answer to prayer I’ve ever received came in the form of a memory.

I was nine and watching TV in those glorious hours between school and dinner, when my dad called out that he was fixing the car and needed help bleeding the brakes. A little part of me was disappointed to step away from my favorite show. But a different part of me was honored to be asked, especially since it involved sitting in the driver’s seat. I was sure the neighbors would be impressed. I knew my part: pull the seat forward so I could reach the brake and just wait for my dad’s directions.

“Press it halfway down!”

“That’s right. Now all the way down!”

“Let it up now.”

“Good job!”

I knew I was part of something significant, even though my part was small, and it was an honor that my dad had asked for my help.

This was a totally new way to understand my relationship with God. He is not a demanding slave driver, sitting in the shade while I do his bidding, assessing my performance from afar. Neither is he a sentimental old fool, set on keeping me in perpetual childhood. He is an active Father, at work in the world, honoring me by inviting me to walk with him into the adventure. How could I say no? How could I apologize for the lies I’d believed? For the burden I’d felt in his invitation? I’d missed the invitation because I’d expected it to feel cozy, but there it was, hiding in the challenge. The challenge became an invitation to be where God was.6

The Silent Motivator

Now came the biggest challenge of all: trusting that it really could be true, that a God who loved me was calling me to receive his love in deeper ways than I ever had. Maybe it was all just a fairy story made up by weak people to soothe themselves. How could I prove to anyone that God loved me? How could I prove it to myself? When I looked at people who’d had the courage to step into his love, I saw wholeness and freedom. When I remembered others who weren’t willing to risk believing that they were loved, their bitterness and fear felt like the weight of what I wanted to leave behind. And so I experienced a moment of salvation. I wanted freedom and wholeness. And although I didn’t understand it, I stepped toward it. I had been a believer for thirty years, and yet it was like coming to faith for the first time. I chose to trust his love.

Perfect love casts out fear. And although I’d never put them into words, just as quickly as I had been able to write out the lies I believed, I was able to list my fears:

I will make bad decisions.

I will upset someone.

It won’t work out.

Money and people won’t come.

It will be messy.

I will be embarrassed.