Thought for today

The danger with 'cultural Christianity': it sells Jesus as Savior, without demanding Jesus as Lord.You can't have the one without the other.

- Johan Verster via his Twitter account

The Year of Manning Up: NOT Taking Responsiblity

On the other hand, leadership/manning up also involves NOT taking responsibility for certain things. How is anyone going to learn if you keep on doing everything for them? How are people going to be grown, stretched, developed, if you don't allow them opportunities to fall, mess up, fail?

So what does this mean? This means, for one, that I have to stop acting like everyone's functional Saviour. This means that I need to stop doing everything for everyone. This means that whenever someone phones and needs me, it won't always be the best thing for me to drop what I'm doing to be with them. This is not to say that I shouldn't be dependable, but it is to say that I shouldn't be their one and only.

Not being everyone's functional Saviour also means acknowledging that I too need help. Kirsty recently told us how she and her husband had gone to a friend's house for supper, along with a whole bunch of other people. Being the lovely people they are, they offered to help with the dishes, only to have Lisa [I forget her real name, so this will have to suffice], the woman of the house say, 'No, no, don't worry about that, I'll do it tomorrow morning.'

The next Sunday, Tom [being the equal opportunities activist I am, I've also forgotten his real name], the man of the house, came over and said: "I have Lisa's permission to tell you that she's sorry for not letting you help her wash the dishes, and for allowing you to create this over-idealistic picture of her as the perfect woman. She likes people to think that she's capable of doing everything: for looking after the house perfectly, running around after our children, looking after me, helping with my ministries, but she's not. She can't do it all, and next time you're more than welcome to help with the dishes."

This post seems to have morphed from being about NOT taking responsibility into functional Saviourship, but I suppose that if we look at Christ's example, even though he was the Saviour, the Perfect One, He was never a functional Saviour. Look at the way He was with His disciples: there were no magical shortcuts between towns and villages- those disciples trudged the full distance following Jesus. Yet, the disciples undoubtedly learnt so much from him

So it appears then, that in manning up, I'm going to have to walk a fine line between too much responsibility and too little. Hope this made sense.. my head hurts. Sleepy time..

PS I picked up the term 'functional Saviour' from somewhere, so I hope I'm using it correctly...!!!

Ministry matters

I've always been quite intrigued by all the various little psychological syndromes that appear in print in the self-help section at the bookstore. There's Texas Syndrome (similar to Short Man Syndrome, the need to have everything bigger and better), Peter Pan Syndrome (for men who refuse to grow up and act like adults), Barney Syndrome (when you believe that you're a giant purple dinosaur) [joking ;)] etc.etc. I've successfully diagnosed myself with the Saviour Syndrome (the belief that I can 'save' people by helping them out and doing things for them), and the Superman Syndrome (the belief that I can do everything!) ;).

What this means practically that if someone asks me to do something I shall say yes. Never mind if I'm already getting less than 8 hours of sleep (okay, okay, I sleep a LOT so this is a BIG DEAL for me!!), and barely get time for a lunch break! GRACE SHALL DO IT [do you hear the Superman theme song in the background??]

Except... Neither the Saviour nor Superman were actually little Asian girls... In fact, Superman don't even exist, dude!! So God's been teaching me over the last few years that I need to say NO.

I can not do everything. And even if it seems as if I'm coping, God reminds me that He doesn't want me just to cope - He doesn't care what the results are, 'cause what matters to Him is my attitude towards whatever I'm doing.

This realization has struck me particularly concerning my work and my ministry so I shall tackle this in two different posts.

This rebuke struck home particularly with regards to youth ministry. I shall confess now that I rarely spent much time prepping for youth. In fact a few times I would just read the passage we were to tackle before the session, and wing it on the good solid teaching I'd received and able memory God had graciously blessed me with. And they got the lesson, but that doesn't matter regarding my godliness 'cause God cares how I treat ministry because this shows how I regard His work and therefore Him. What I was showing was that I didn't really care that much!

A verse that jumped out at me during a time of conviction and rebuke about this issue was 1 Thessalonians 2:8. Paul writes:

We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well.

I think this is an amazing model of ministry. We are called to share the good news of God with others, but how will they believe us, and how will they see the change in our lives if we cannot share our lives with them and show that our sharing of the news comes from our love for them - that we want the best for them! Ministry is serious - and we can see it in the way Paul (for example) treated it!

So often my mistake is to do the one thing and not the other... e.g. with some of my friends I'll share the gospel of God with them (in this case I happily did so with my youth), and with others I shared my life with them but I didn't share the Word of God with them...

What a lot to think about!