ONE YEAR LATER, WHAT DO I THINK OF MINISTRY?
… it drove me to a cliff and as I got to the edge of the cliff I looked down I had the opportunity to gaze into what depression may look like…
…You should never allow the work of God replace the God you are working for…
…the Lord who called me and my family here has been right beside us holding our hands through it all…
I was going to write this privately to Zacc Burke and Nic Crowe, two guys who I had the privilege of watching as they grew out of some of the youth groups I’ve volunteered with and have recently become youth pastors themselves. I’m always encouraged to see youth walking into the call of their lives, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a pastoral call, I do consider every career to be a calling. However, I find a pastoral call to be one of the most exciting and at the same time very challenging calling. I care a lot about those in ministry (friends and strangers) this is the reason I decided to share my reflections publicly as I realise there could just be someone else in addition to my friends who may benefit from this.
I’m here to share with you some of my reflections after a year into full-time ministry… There have been victory times and there have also been struggles, the Lord who called me and my family here has been right beside us holding our hands through it all---something that I have forgotten or even neglected at times ( I wish I could emphasize that point a million times). I will start with the challenges so we can get those out of the way not that they’re not important, but more because they have ended up becoming my motivation factors. Challenges are not what we look forward to and when going through challenges we tend to want to cruise through them, but sometimes if not most of the times it’s through challenges that we learn and grow the most that is if we are going through those challenges with our eyes fixed on Jesus (Hebrew 12: 2).
CHALLENGES & LESSONS …
NAVIGATING THE EQUATION OF YOUTH MINISTRY: doing what you want to do, what the youth want you to do, what their parents want you to do, what the church (leadership and/or congregation) wants you to do and ultimately what God wants you to do. As if that equation isn’t complicated enough while trying to reach the maximum potential of the kind of a Youth Pastor I feel God wants me to be there’s the first ministry, my family, where I’m first called to pursue to be the best husband and dad of two young ones. I wasn’t the best Math student during my high school years and I thought logarithms were/are some of the hardest math problems to solve, but the equation I’m working with right now is the most difficult and yet exciting one to navigate.
I’VE LEARNT TO LISTEN A BIT MORE
Listening to God: My first boss is definitely God and lucky me! I do feel everyone mentioned in the equation above understands that (maybe with exception of the youth who are still trying to understand who God is). One of the first things I begun to do as soon as we arrived in South River was to have morning devotions and prayer as regularly as possible at home and I was so happy when my little Grace started to wake up with me and eventually my wife also joined in. I was doing these mostly very early in the morning simply to start my day with God. Grace started calling my office the “Prayer Room.” She’d correct me every time I called that room my office, “no papa! It’s the prayer room” (we had not even watched the movie “War Room” by that time) … Unfortunately, I failed to keep up with this as life got busier and busier: Faith’s maternity leave ended in February and PRAISE God she got a job right away something we didn’t expect (I’ve come to know Him as Jehovah Jireh and Psalms 23 has become more and more real for us). So things got busier and I gave in, I didn’t do those morning prayers and devotions as much as I could. This is one of if not my biggest regrets in this past year, it came to bite and I will share more about that later in “WHAT HAPPENS WHEN GOD IS SEEMINGLY SILENT WHILST YOU ARE LOST IN THE MINISTRY JUNGLE.”
Listening to others: Yes God is our Boss, but God tends to use other people and God used a church in order to bring you in ministry so in part you want to listen to your earthly bosses. This is great skill to have and one you will always need to keep improving. The challenge is that “Jack and James” will always not have the same opinions so you always want to work around not being favourite of one, but always seek for the best option if not the middle ground. It is okay during this time to also say “I love your thought, but I think at this point I/we can’t do that for now.” “YES” all the time isn’t always good so is “NO” all the time. One other thing which helped me in this process was also to create methods of listening to people who don’t necessarily talk to me. I’d befriend myself with someone from a ‘section’ of the church so that I could be getting feedback from a group of people who I’d necessarily not be in constant contact for instance, senior ladies. You are not always going to satisfy or do everything you are told to, but you can try at least to listen to people’s concerns, interests, ideas and yes their complaints as well. I tried my best to make my volunteers be aware that they can disagree with me anytime and hopefully they realise I’ll do likewise in love and with grace.
Listening to self: As far as listening to myself is concerned, this year I’ve had to do that quite often where I’ve tested myself here and there to see and listen to what I do best and where I struggle and that list can go on and on. But one thing that helped me in that process is staying true to my personal vision and mission as well as my vision and mission of the youth ministry (and the church) I am serving. That discipline has helped me not to be blown by every wind that blows, however I felt I could have done more to imprint my vision and mission on those I serve and those I serve with. One thing I’ll strongly recommend is that I borrowed an idea from my experiences with an organization I worked with and tailored that idea into my journey in ministry. I wrote a letter to myself at the very beginning of my time in South River and I also asked my volunteers to do so; I wrote what excites me about my calling to serve in South River, what I anticipate to be my challenges and how I hope to deal with those. In that letter I also wrote what and why would I decide to move on or let’s use the Q word “quit”, I wrote to Yves “First of all you are here because you were very convinced God was calling you to come here … This also means that when you want to move on you will have to make sure God has also communicated just as clearly as He did when He asked you to come here.” Boy, did I hate reading that part of the letter later on when I wanted to jump out of this boat. Well, I invite you to read the next chapter.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN GOD IS SEEMINGLY SILENT WHILST YOU ARE LOST IN THE MINISTRY JUNGLE...
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| There comes a time in one's ministry life when you get lost in the 'ministry jungle' and you feel like heaven is silent.. It's enough to drive a man's crazy, it will break a man's faith... |
There came a time where nothing about ministry was fun at all including the very same things I thought I passionately loved. I found myself encouraging an individual and walking them out of what might have been suicidal thoughts and telling them just how much prayer works and how Jesus wants them to hold on to hope, hope that does not disappoint (Romans 5:5) and that we should always take everything to God in prayer as per the good old hymn, as I finished chatting with that individual they walked away apparently encouraged and ready to face tomorrow, as for me, I looked in the mirror (not literally) and I was even more sad that I, myself, was failing to live up to those words, I was going through what I call ‘lost in the ministry jungle’ period. I’m told this is something that one goes through at some point in their life in ministry, but mine might have just showed up a bit earlier.
I was starting to question whether I was meant to be in ministry or at least whether I was in the right place and I promise you in ministry you are going to face challenges, but this one happens to be one of the most challenging experiences in ministry. I’ve gone through some of the most difficult challenges in life (including the loss of my sister…), but this past summer was the most difficult experience I’ve ever gone through. It may not happen to you as soon as it did for me, for you it may take a bit more months or years, but there comes a time of questioning--- questioning whether you are meant to be where you are (in ministry), whether you are accomplishing what you think you should be accomplishing, how long you want to stay where you are and whether and/or when you want to move on. Those sound like simple normal questions anyone ask themselves about their career, in ministry, they are not that simple. What makes those questions even more challenging is when God appears to be silent as you pray and implore Him to speak--- The Silence of God (this is a topic in itself and let’s explore this more another day). As Andrew Peterson sung “it’s enough to drive a man crazy, it will break a man’s faith …” it surely did that to me, it drove me to a cliff and as I got to the edge of the cliff I looked down I had the opportunity to gaze into what depression may look like, I thought I always appreciated the struggle my mom and others go through, but this summer I came to appreciate even more what those struggling with depression go through. I wouldn’t say I was depressed, but I came very close. I came to dislike ministry, this was disliking what I like the most, yes that sounds contradictory. I knew there wasn’t anything better I’d be doing if I was to quit and I felt there was nowhere else God would have wanted me to move on to because this was the place God very clearly showed I need to be, but He just appeared to be silent and I found myself lost in this jungle where I felt like my passion, creativity, drive, love for ministry was fading away, I felt like I was losing myself. “It’s starting to feel like God has abandoned me…and I hate leading others in this state” I lamented to my wife. I felt lost while still saved ☺. The thought of quitting was mostly because I was starting to worry that I felt like I was driving this bus of kids while feeling dizzy, but on the other side I wasn’t hearing God giving me the okay to move on, neither did I hear Him encourage me to carry on… JUST SILENCE… total silence...
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| My journey into ministry has me realized more and more what a perfect wife I have for the adventures and challenges therein. |
WHAT LED TO THIS?
...Pouring without being poured into.
There are various explanations, one of which is that it’s just a season in ministry… but for me I realised that I became so busy with getting things done, busy working for God without having Him work in me. You should never allow the work of God replace the God you are working for. My devotions and prayer times reduced, yes I was spending time to read the Bible and some books, but most of that was done to prepare a sermon or devotion for others. When we serve we pour into others and we need to be constantly having God pour into us through His Word, through times spent in prayer and through His people (friends, mentors, accountability partners). If we are going to pour into others and neglect being poured into we will run dry and will find ourselves viewing ministry as this sour pill that you have to take daily. Many times it’s not that we consciously neglect to get poured into, but rather the busyness of ministry easily become an excuse for one to not find that self-care time. I strongly encourage you to fight for that time with God and with your family and friends, you need it.
You should not allow the excuse of wanting to prepare well enough for your ministry activities to come at the expense of spending time with God for your selfcare. It’s very easy to steal some minutes from your devotion time and saying you will recompense it later as soon as you get the other things done, guess what? You will never have time to recompense that. In fact you will end up reducing your selfcare time with the promise of doing it later until you have completely stopped taking that time. You take good care of others when you take good care of yourself, in our ministry language, you draw others to God as you draw yourself to God. You will unconsciously get caught into the temptation of saving others instead of letting God do saving and you do the serving. Miraculously, it was until I decided to cut my planning time and going back to my devotion and prayer time, things all of a sudden started falling into place. I came to realise that the seemingly silence of God was as a result of me doing the talking so much that God was wondering if I was ever meaning it when I kept asking Him to speak. Many times we come to God like that little impatient but clever kid who is pretending to want to listen, but in reality all they are there to do is simply to wait for you to be done talking and they jump at the next opportunity to ask for candy or something. Sadly, that is sometimes how we come to God...
If you ask me today if I trusted in God a year ago I’ll tell you definitely yes, but I trust in Him now more than before. Trusting Him to lead and just being available for Him to use me as a vessel. Psalm 20: 7 talks about some trusting in chariots and some in their horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord, but our ‘modernised’ faith today tend to trust a little bit in some of our chariots and horses and the other bit in the Lord, I’d be harsh and say that’s not faith, but how about I just call it that’s contaminated faith, God wants us to trust Him fully.
...Pray and play, both are good…
to be continued…
We keep running the race (Philippians 3: 14-16) ... God isn't yet done with us...
We keep running the race (Philippians 3: 14-16) ... God isn't yet done with us...
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