Even More Radical and Controversial Advice for Elder Wannabe's
Already following all sixteen points in my last post? Echoes of the Rich Young Ruler ought to be floating about in your head about now and rightly so. Don't know about the Rich Young Ruler? Turn your computer off and go read your Bible several times. Don't come back to any blog for a month or two. Just keep reading your Bible. Oh wait. I was supposed to provide a numbered list. Okay, well, anyway, that first one was a freebie.
Here are some more to think about implementing:
1) Go get a part-time job and give all the proceeds to your pastor without him knowing. Round your check off to the nearest twenty, put the cash in an envelope with a typed card that reads, "I'm so thankful you're my pastor". The amount is less important than making it completely anonymous but don't make it less than a hundred a week. Are you in one of those churches where your pastor makes way too much money? Get out. Or, alternatively, find someone who is financially hurting in your congregation and give them the money while still remaining completely anonymous. What?!? You don't have a job? Your living at home with Mommy? Quit reading this list. Go get a job or two, get your own place, and don't think about the ministry again EVER (or at least, not for another few years while you've been on your own and gainfully employed and promoted more than once). The last thing the Christian ministry needs is just one more slacker.
2) Learn everyone's name in your congregation. If you're in a congregation too big to do that, you're likely in a congregation too big to really learn how to do ministry or to really interact with elders who give a flying flip about you. Go find a smaller congregation–preferably one with less than a hundred people. Find one with lots of older people and an older pastor–the kind that you think is in decline or not worth your time. Truth is it will probably be much like the first congregation you pastor because older people have a lot of patience for someone who is likely going to really screw up the first time. Might as well get used to it early on and if you can't handle the bad music, the older folks, and especially your own failures–you're not even ready to think about ministry.
3) Invest in the lives of people you don't know and especially in the lives of people you don't like. Learn that their values and their understanding of things has good in it as well as bad. Do everything you can to understand issues and perspectives from their point of view. Give people the benefit of the doubt the first time around when conflict occurs. And the second. And the third. And the fourth. You get the idea, I hope.
4) Befriend the oldest person in your congregation. If that person is 29 or 35 go find a REAL church to minister in where people actually have gray hair. Take this person to get their medicines or get their medicines for them. Get to know them well enough to take them to the doctor or hospital whenever needed. Make them dinner. Clean their house even if they pay a housekeeper. Impose yourself gently upon them and put yourself on call for whatever they need. Pray for them and ask them how to pray for them.
5) Look for elderly widows in your congregation and do the same as #4 above. What was that verse about true religion? If you've never exercised any care for widows and orphans what makes you think you're really called to be a minister? Spend afternoons getting to know the widows of your church. Ask them about their lives, their children, their husband, and look at pictures with them. Tell them you want to know more and really want to know more. Be genuinely concerned with them and their future but don't stay so long that you make them tired when visiting. If you have kids, leave them at home unless they are thoroughly well-behaved. If they are riotous, undisciplined, and/or require constant attention from you–stop reading. Implement real parental discipline and get your family in order. Do not pass go and do not collect $200. Quit while you're ahead.
6) If you are married, ask your wife to follow in line with you doing numbers four and five above. If she's not already doing that with you or on her own or refuses, take some time to really consider if the ministry is for you and your family or not.
7) Abandon teaching an adult Sunday School class or other Bible Study you may be involved in. Go volunteer in the nursery (if your church has one) or teach primary grade children. Don't give into the temptation that others may present you with–any known ministerial candidate gets thrown into youth ministry. Don't do it. You don't have the skills and you're likely not mature enough to handle the real problems inherent in any church doing "youth ministry".
8) Tithe ten to twenty percent of your GROSS income to whatever church you are attending. Don't tell me you believe in ministry and ought to be a minister if you're not regularly giving to your church in the first place. As a minister, you're going to live your life off of the gifts of faithful Christians. You should know early what that sacrifice means on the part of your fellow Christians and learn to appreciate it.
9) Learn a trade or skill that will at the very least pay the bills when nothing else will. Consider the wisdom and place of bi-vocational ministry and remain open to it. Also, consider that if you're faithful, the ministry won't be a cakewalk and getting a secure position like a pastorate at a big church is likely never going to happen. You don't want a position like that anyway if you're a real minister.
10) Keep your desire to be in the ministry a real secret. Don't tell your pastor about it, don't ask him about what real ministry is like, don't ask people if they think that is what God's will is for your life, don't go around doing anything other than acting like a servant of the church. Keep Christ's footwashing of the disciples ever present in your mind and look for ways to serve others in the least rewarding and most humbling way possible. But, never let on that any of this has anything to do with thinking about or going into the ministry.
11) One caveat to number ten if you are married. Ask your wife what she thinks and learn to rely on her advice for the extent of your whole career. If she counsels against you entering the ministry–DON'T DO IT at least until she gives the go ahead without any pressure from you. Ask her if you are too selfish for the ministry–if you think you're doing it because you want to instead of other more appropriate reasons. Ask her where you fail and how you can do better. Ask her if she's ready to be a pastor's wife. Ask her if she can handle you not being around when she needs you and then ask yourself why you would want to sacrifice your family in that way. Talk with her about these things often and continually keep her advice and concerns in mind. If she's not for something, don't go there. Period.
12) Quit listening to Christian music and Christian radio. Tune your radio to other stations and listen to music you normally wouldn't on iTunes or elsewhere. Find the kind that really grates against your own musical tastes and ask yourself what the artist is trying to say and accomplish. Ask yourself how you would communicate the gospel to someone like that and what good is in that music.
13) Never go into a Christian bookstore again. Buy all your books online or used. Anything that's sold in a Christian bookstore today is likely garbage and not worth reading. Start cruising the Amazon lists of books to read by others but remember that many Christian bloggers and others easily fall into fashions and fads like any other group. Learn to read deeply into each of the major Christian traditions. Take the hit, buy the Eerdmans' Early Church Fathers set and actually READ the volumes on your shelf. Read Martin Luther. Read John Calvin. Not books about them. Not yet anyway.
14) Don't waste your money on Bible commentaries yet. You'll probably buy all the wrong ones anyway. Take the time to learn the original languages of the Bible instead and you'll be far ahead of anyone reading Bible commentaries. Bible commentaries are really for people who already know the biblical languages and can discern whether or not a commentator knows what they're talking about. Most of them don't.
15) Spend time in intimate conversation with God. Wherever you are, whenever you are. Especially when you're doing things you don't want to do or that are seemingly unpleasant at the time. Face the fact that things that are unpleasant for you to deal with are likely so because you are just exercising your own sinfulness. Go buy Brother Lawrence's The Practice of the Presence of God. Implement it in your own life. Don't forget to do the common things of human existence (and do them well) but do them with the presence of God in mind.
by Kevin D. Johnson |
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