Years ago, a mentor of mine gave me some advice on working with volunteers. He said, “If a volunteer can do the job 80% as well as you can, then let them do it.”

I was recently reflecting on this advice and I began to wonder:

- How many people, who were called to serve in ministry, did I exclude because I didn’t think they measured up?

- How many people were affected by me not allowing to used their gifts? How many people would have benefited?

- What impact did the expectations of my boss, other staff, parents, kids play into me excluding people form ministry?

- what need was I filling in myself by excluding them?

- How does someone who is gifted learn the nuances of ministry with out doing it?

- In what ways have entitlement, performance and measurement influenced how we involve people in ministry more than our theology or beliefs?

- A person gifted to a do a job, but who lacks experience may start out doing 40% of the job I would. Maybe for a year. But after that, I will do it 40% as well as they do.

To me, this video of Dave Grohl playing guitar and singing brings to mind a few things.

1. He was made for this. chewing his gum. making a pretty darn tricky guitar rhythm looks super easy, and singing with his unique voice is just plain fun to watch. There is no denying it. He was made for what he is doing in that moment and it’s captivating to me.

2. As he played I thought about his story. Something about the intimacy of the setting maybe, I don’t know, made me think about where he’s come from. Drumming for Nirvana. Decisions he’s made. How fortunate he is to have found his niche.

3. What are you made for? There are things you do, that captivate people. Are you doing them?

If you’re hitting up google to learn how fire a youth pastor, then it must be bad. Real bad. It’s a sign things are getting ready to get messy. Is it conflict? Is it lack of communication? Kids don’t like the youth pastor? What’s going on that’s brought it to this?

Maybe you’re a pastor, who’s struggling with expectations for your staff? What’s normal and what not?
Maybe you’re a parent who’s at the end of you’re rope with the youth pastor.
You don’t want to make a fuss and you want to do what’s right.
Seems to happen a lot.
Maybe you’re talking to other parents or friends who’re pastors.

How you proceed will take a lot of wisdom and prayer.

30 million people have watched this video. Why do you think that is? Joy is contagious I think.

This week a friend of mine was surprised with a meeting called by his boss and exec team. Last week a different friend was surprised by a group of concerned “citizens” who took issue with my friend’s philosophy of ministry. The week before that… well you get the idea.

In each of these situations, my friend was confronted with a series of issues that were performance related and seen by the people doing the surprising as harmful to the overall organization. In other words, in each case, my friends job is at stake. Each of these friends are very competent individuals who are extremely motivated and pretty darn good at what they do.

The performance issue might be related to lacking communication, lacking vision, lacking proper planning, or a few kids leaving a ministry. The people who called the surprise meeting list the offenses. Depending on the organization, depends on how organized the list is put together. Often it’s documented in a multi-page letter of some kind.

Then my friend explains point by point how the offense is a misunderstanding, or how there’s more to the story than they have heard. Which often brings up more offenses or accusations from the people who called the meeting.

So far this isn’t new news to you I’m guessing. But there’s something important to recognize if this kind of thing happens to you. As the conversation continues, you might notice that no matter how reasonable your response to the specific issues, no matter how clear you are, and no matter how insightful you are, your points seem to go both unvalidated and seem to be seen as irrelevant to the other participants. Your confusion grows as you articulate your side of the story only to be met by a change in subject, or another problem they have with you.

You, my friend, are unreasonably committed to reason. You have mistaken the situation to be dialogue in which concerns are brought up and then addressed. You have the reasonable expectation that the surprising party actually wants to resolve the issue the same way you do.

In these situations you’ll find that the people who called the meeting are surprisingly resistant to new insight and information. They seem un-reasonable.

This is because you have made a fatal mistake.
You see this as a reasonable discussion about issues.
But it’s not.
It’s an emotional meeting. Emotion is what matters here to the people who’ve called the meeting. Emotion is the impetus behind the meeting being called in the first place. Someone was upset. (Emotion) Someone wants to quickly satisfy the upset person. (emotion) Communities are emotionally charged places. Leading in an environment like this requires an ability to buffer yourself from the initial emotional blast, and each subsequent attempt to get you emotionally involved.

When emotion is at the heart of a surprise meeting, the quantity of reasonable arguments or the clarity of your communication are irrelevant. You can’t partner in solutions with people who aren’t looking for partnership. In Oklahoma we say it this way. “You can’t push a rope.”

The issues these folks bring up, are not the real issues.
The real issues are related to the communities emotional stability, your point leader’s inability to keep an emotional buffer from the emotionally charged environment, and the way your community has learned to deal with conflict.

Chances are, you can’t change any of these things. So you’ll have some decisions to make about your future.

The response isn’t engaging the emotion yourself. This will make the whole thing worse. Much worse. Being more reasonable by constructing documentation proving your side of the story might be helpful in the short run, but probably not in the long run.

Thoughts?

I once hear that the very skills it takes to break an addiction are the very skills prolonged addiction destroys. That is to say, that addiction to drugs, alcohol or sex are hard to break because the addiction atrophies the disciplines or abilities it takes to stop using drugs, alcohol or sex. Thus, addicts often aren’t simply physically connected to their problem, they are connected mentally as well. Anyone heard this before? Want to add thoughts?

I bring this up because there are addictions beyond drugs, alcohol, sex and cigarettes. Relationship can be addictive. As can a role we play in a family system. As can the role we play in a global system.

I might as well go ahead and say it.
We all have addictions when it comes to our understanding of the church and how we interact with it.

It seems there’s a growing addiction more and more common in the church.
Church leaders are more and more addicted to experts giving them practical steps for ministry.
20 years ago the cry for the practical really took off. The language of life application began to take root and drum the “contemporary churches” of the 80′s and 90′s were beating. This was a reaction against the stereotypical sermon of the day, in which people complained, that church had little to do with real life.

As this drum kept beating in new churches being planted in the late 70′s and mid 80′s make this a core value of theirs. It only made sense, that these churches who make things practical for their congregation, to teach others the 5 easy practical ways, steps, or purposes for their church.

The world was certainly changing at the time and they church plants became teenagers, who began to dictate what success looked like as a church. Pastoral ministry language was set aside for the language of leadership. There was a lot of good done in these days, but there are some consequences for what became an addiction to the practical.

Expectations have risen exponentially for staff to deliver a quality product.
The role of pastor has shifted to something the New Testament might hardly recognize and the burden for being the church shifted. In some ways it shifted in healthy ways. Others only fuel the addiction.
As expectations have risen and diversified i increased both the demand from pastors to find practical steps to solve problems their church used to face together AND fueled the desire for applicable, practical church teaching as well.

15 years ago I heard Rick Warren speak at Saddleback and it was quality stuff. 2 years later as I looked for a job, several pastors send me tapes of them delivering sermons. I kid you not, the sermon was almost word for word the same as Rick’s. The same outline, the same illustrations everything.

Who has time to write a sermon with all the demands on a pastor these days anyway? Or develop a model for ministry? Or a structure?

Our culture demands quick fixes.
The problem with an addiction to the practical is that is becomes a barrier to doing the actual work of ministry, of discovering your voice, or ministry style. It is always the tail wagging the dog trying to live into someone else’s story.

Of course the people who provide the practical advice and the 5 easy steps aren’t bad people. They have amazing intentions and they have a strong desire to teach others, and support pastors in their ministries. It is because of the crazy expecations and busy schedules and limited time of a pastor that they created the tools in the first place. (or actually the second place, because most of the tools were created for their particular church, it’s context and people at that time, then retrofitted to you.) (Of course this is increasingly less true as video venues attempt to make context completely irrelevant withholding any specific geographic specfics such as streets, stores, or communal landmarks believe that the void of context allows for a richer experience…. which is a wholly other thing for a different blog post)..

Regardless, the dealers of all things practical have big hearts. If you are a dealer of these tools, I’d encourage you to step back and survey the landscape a bit. I know there is a high demand for what you are offering, but it might be that you’ve cultivated a bad habit in people who buy from you. What might you be enabling? What are the consequences of offering the practical? What are assumptions we carry that might be wrong?

The key reason addiction to the practical is devastating is because is erodes the very competencies it takes to be creative, to be present in the uniqueness of a context, and of a people. Addiction creates barriers to very creativity it takes to pastor people.

Pastors, publishers, convention planners, non-profits who work with people. Are you a deal of the practical? What price are you willing to pay to stop enabling people?

Everyone – Are you addicted to the practical? Do you constantly seeks outside solutions to problems that arise within your church? What are the consequences of always looking outside the church for problems within it? What might it look like to learn from the people in the room? What might be your role if you could redefine it?

What say you?

“The guaranteed commercial success,” on the other hand is an overstructured, overcomplicated, overpopulated assault on the physical senses that bears no relationship to life whatsoever. This writer is mistaking kinesis for entertainment. He hopes that regardless of story, if he calls for enough high-speed action and dazzling visuals, the audience will be excited. And given the Computer Generated Image phenomenon that drives so many summer releases, he would not be altogether wrong.
Spectacles of this kind replace imagination with simulated actuality. They use story as an excuse for heretofore unseen effects that carry us into a tornado, the jaws of a dinosaur, or futuristic holocausts. And make no mistake, these razzle-dazzle spectacles can deliver a circus of excitement. But like amusement park rides, their pleasures are short-lived. For the history of filmmaking has shown again and again that as fast as new kinetic thrills rise to popularity, they sink under a “been there, done that” apathy.”

Robert McKee – Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting (p. 24)

enjoy