Five Characteristics for Flourishing in Ministry
From The Forum Magazine, Winter 2014 - view the full issue here
What are the gifts of personality that might lend themselves to ministry? What are the characteristics that would mark the kind of person who might be interested in different aspects of Christian service? Put differently, what might be the pastoral skills given to us that the Holy Spirit could make most use of in terms of flourishing in ministry?
Life is so much about God’s grace, about our accepting ourselves as who we are, and knowing this well. Knowing our strengths and our weaknesses is a large part of figuring out whether we might be fit for ministry. Here are five characteristics that are invaluable for anyone who answers a call to ministry.
Requirement #1: Know Yourself (Characteristic: Self-Awareness)
An essential characteristic for flourishing in ministry is the spiritual discipline of self-awareness.
John Calvin had a comment about this. He said, “If you really want to know yourself … you have to know God.” And then he flipped it around: “If you really want to know God, if you want to understand who God is and what God is like, you’ve got to know yourself.” To know God is to know ourselves; to know ourselves is to know God. There is an inherent connection between going deep into ourselves and understanding who God is. It is in the depths of our human experience—in the depths of our souls—that is where we learn about what God is really like.
Think of self-awareness in terms of how we have been blessed—that is, what are the gifts that other people have pointed out in us? Comments such as, “I like how you present yourself. You listen well. You have a knack for talking with people. I like how you did that meditation at the campground the other night.” When other people give us feedback, it is wise to take it seriously. A call to ministry is not simply something that comes from inside: in the polity of the Christian Reformed Church we are not really called to ministry until the church confirms our calling; therefore, we must pay attention to the feedback we receive from those who make up the church.
But there is the other side of the story: what about the negatives? What about the spiritual discipline of self-examination? How well do we know ourselves with regard to the ways we’ve been hurt? How much do we know about how we have packed away the injuries of life? How easily can we pinpoint the parts of our personality that rub others the wrong way? Seminarians consistently present themselves in such a positive light, and understandably, we’re most often defensive about our weaknesses. It is hard to look at our hurts; it is hard to look at what is not well with us. We may struggle with anxiety and be so caught up in our own performance that we cannot have a calm heart and know the peace of God. Or perhaps our struggle is with fear: fear of failure or fear of expressing our anger about a situation. We may need to learn the true meaning of forgiveness. Are we able to we be honest with ourselves?
Requirement #2: Hold Yourself (Characteristic: Differentiation)
Being secured in ourselves as followers of Jesus gives us the freedom to stand alone. The Holy Spirit gives us strength to resist both the vainglory of praise and the despair of criticism. A second valuable characteristic is something called differentiation. If we are well differentiated we are going to do well in ministry; if not, we are going to get into trouble—that is how high of a value we put on this idea. Differentiation is the ability to be yourself—to hold onto yourself—in the presence of others, especially people with whom you disagree. Jesus tells us to love our enemies. Do we realize how hard that is? It is hard to love people who have hurt us. We really cannot do it well until we understand why they needed to injure us in some way.
In ministry we have to be able to hold onto ourselves in the presence of others. We have to be able to hear feedback without being defensive. In a counseling class that I teach, I ask each student to make a critical comment about my teaching, out loud, in front of everybody. Their mouths get dry, their throats tighten up, and it is especially difficult for students who come from cultures where it is almost insulting to say something negative to your teacher. And yet, I ask them to do it in order to become more aware of what differentiation is.
Differentiation is the ability to hold onto yourself when you are anxious and to say, “This is how I see it; this is who I am.” It is critical for ministry. What if the prophet Amos worried about what other people thought, had he not been well differentiated? Would he have the confronted Israel about her wayward ways? Would he have told Israel what to do? If ministry is a popularity contest, we are sunk. Sometimes we have got to be able to tell someone in our care, “You’re out of line. You shouldn’t be behaving this way. You’ve got to change some things in your life.” And often, that will not go well because what people think of us sometimes matters too much to us. Love your enemies, especially when they are on the church council.
Requirement #3: Leave Yourself (Characteristic: Empathy)
Caring about people as Jesus would demands that we enter into their life experiences in some way. That is, in order to be pastoral to others, we must first leave ourselves in some way. We start here by saying what empathy is not: empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is literally sympathos, “feeling with.” It often comes off as feeling sorry for someone. “I feel bad with you because of the car accident.” I feel bad with you, but I am talking to you about “me.” I feel bad. Sympathy is “I have feelings of sadness because of the tragedy you have gone through” or “I am joining you in being sad because I am bringing my sadness to the story so that we have it together.” Sympathy is commiserating--two people joining together in sadness. Sympathy does not have much pastoral muscle. Empathy, on the other hand, is leaving yourself. Empathy is getting into the skin of somebody else and wondering what it is like to be that person, to walk in his or her moccasins. It is a gift of the Holy Spirit. It is saying, “I am not you. Please tell me what it is like to be you.”
Philippians 2 captures this idea so well. What did Jesus do when he came to earth? The passage uses the Greek word kenosis. It is to empty yourself, to give yourself away. Empathy is emptying yourself in order to enter the life of another. It is from that place where you bring people into the presence of God as the Holy Spirit leads you and works through you to understand the life of another.
Jesus emptied himself to enter our life experience—that is what God is like. Jesus entered the world, he entered the lives of broken human beings, he literally got into our skin, and when Lazarus died, he really wept. When he looked at the city of Jerusalem, he really cried. He turned over the tables in the temple because he really was angry. Our capacity to understand the experience of the person next to us is the beginning of our ministry to that person. An important tool in pastoral ministry is such empathy—the capacity to know the heart of another person. Entering the lives of others just as Jesus did is critical to good ministry.
Requirement #4: Deny (Forget) Yourself (Characteristic: Unselfconscious)
Consider the refreshing delight of being un-self-conscious. Being un-self-conscious means that we are so secure in who we are—someone who loves Jesus Christ and who is loved by Jesus—that there are things we do not worry about because we do not even think about them. Every minute that we are thinking about ourselves, we cannot think about our husbands or wives, we cannot think about our children, we cannot think about our parishioners, we cannot think about God. This becomes the idolatry of self. Well, one of the hallmarks of the Christian walk is un-self-consciousness. Appearances are on the back burner of awareness. What we drive, what we wear, with whom we associate—all of these do not matter much because we are more concerned about the lives of others.
Jesus Christ, by the presence of his Spirit within us, gives us the capacity to be un-self-conscious. “Deny yourself, take up your cross, follow me,” do not worry about what things look like. Do we see the freedom in not being self-conscious? When we preach a sermon, can we get past our own nervousness to see the power of the gospel and forget about who we are? If we really know ourselves in Christ, we can forget about ourselves. As long as our own needs and our opinions of what matters keep popping up on the front burner, we cannot be un-self-conscious, we cannot get into the world of another person, and we cannot truly be with people as Jesus was.
Requirement #5: Reform Yourself (Characteristic: Be open to change)
A final characteristic that is essential for good ministry is being open to change. We need to be reforming ourselves! We need to always be listening for the Spirit’s leading. This discipline is sometimes called “progressive sanctification” which means that God’s Spirit keeps working on us, and we find ourselves able to change our minds, able to change our approach to people, and able to change some of our thinking because our relationship with God is a living one. In such a living relationship, there is growth and change, and much of the time, the growth and change come out of conflict. It is not our nature to sit down in a chair and say, “Well, what should I change about myself?” Change usually happens when we are up against a wall. We have to rethink the way we have been living because we have new information; that new data may come from somebody sitting in front of us in tears. We may have brought offense to someone in ways we didn’t understand, and so we may have to take another look at the way that we are presenting ourselves and the way we are thinking about things.
We get some sense of this idea from Paul. Wasn’t Paul the one who was always saying, “Be all things to all people for Christ’s sake”? Have an open mind, not in any way that would compromise the basic truths of Scripture, but in a way that makes us wonder how we can change to be more Christlike. Listen for the whisper of the Holy Spirit. How can we change to do a better job in ministry? How can we change so that God can make more use of us? Some of that will be easy for us, and some of it will be hard. Doing the dance of ”I am who I am, but I want to be changing to be more conformed to Jesus Christ” creates a tension. We want to hold onto our identity but there are things about us that need to change.
This idea is now part of the Calvin Seminary experience. We, too, are reforming. We have sometimes thought of seminary education for the most part as an exercise in downloading theology. When we had the five loci of systematic theology in place and we understood the historical redemptive themes in the Scriptures, and we had a working knowledge of the Bible, then we graduated. That is the old way. The new way to think about the seminary experience is as “formation for ministry,” a common phrase around CTS these days. We must not only fill our minds, we must also shape our hearts. It’s not just our theological perspectives that matter, it is also the persons that we become as followers of Jesus who are gifted by His Spirit that impacts ministry work. Our focus is more and more upon the whole person. How are we going to use our stories for ministry? We are challenging our students to think of who they are as persons in ministry. And so, the relational part of life in the body of Christ really starts to come to the front burner.
Reforming is moving away from being defensive and moving toward being more open. Paul says this to the Ephesians (4:22-24): “You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” This last phrase is be a life-long goal for all of us, especially those of us in ministry—that we put on the new nature created after the likeness of God, in true righteousness and holiness in order to be good news and spread the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
(Ron Nydam, Professor of Pastoral Care, emeritus)
