A Defense of Mediocrity

While J.D. is away traveling, I (Ike Miller) will be posting a smattering of his greatest hits, thoughts on Church Philosophy and possibly some guest blogs.  J.D. also will be posting intermittently with thoughts and updates from his trip so be sure to check in for those. 

Below I am posting a guest blog by Summit's very own Sharon Hodde.  Sharon is a college minister in North Carolina who is especially passionate about women's ministry and articulating its importance for the future of the church.  For more from Sharon, see here own blog at "sheworships.com".

At least once a week, I consider dropping out of ministry.

I’ve heard Mark Driscoll refer to this kind of weekly day-dreaming as “bread truck Mondays”–every Monday he wakes up and thinks about quitting his job and driving a bread truck. Why? Because driving a bread truck gives you just enough distraction to be stimulating, without requiring you to really think at all.

I can sympathize.

For me, there is a myriad of reasons why I consider quitting ministry on a weekly basis. Some days I’m burned out, some days I feel overwhelmed, and some days I feel unappreciated. And then there are the days when someone blesses me out and calls me everything short of the anti-Christ–those are the days when my friends and family have had to actively stop me from running away and never coming back.

But the MAIN reason that I often consider quitting the ministry, the one reason that I would ever seriously give heed to, is this: my motives for doing ministry are wrong.

There is a misconception that Christians get into ministry to resist the rat race of the secular business world. It’s well known that ministry doesn’t pay well, plus ministry is all about helping people, so it would seem to attract those individuals who are denying the temptations of the American dream. To go into ministry, we must be intentionally forsaking the idols that so many Christians chase after in the secular realm.

This is false.

For many, ministry is merely a Christian version of the worldly ladder of success. While that is not the primary reason that most ministers pursue their vocation, there comes a point at which the lines become blurry. You DO want to reach the lost and you DO want to love the world for the glory of God, but you also want to do it BETTER than everyone else. You want to be great. You want to be remembered as having done something truly remarkable in your generation.

Some ministers veil this desire with language about “doing something great for the Kingdom of God.” They don’t want to look back on their lives and regret their mediocre life’s work. They want to know that they left a mark on the world.

And while I don’t doubt that many of these ministers’ motives are pure, I must admit that mine often are not. I have that exact same passion–I want to do something truly great for God–but I am frequently measuring “greatness” according to the world’s standards, not God’s.

In doing so, I make the strenuous climb up the Christian ladder of success–I put pressure on myself to have a booming ministry, to be a great speaker and a writer, and to compare myself with those who do it better. And when I fail at these things, I feel like an inadequate minister. It doesn’t matter that I spent the whole week meeting one-on-one with students and teaching them to love Jesus more. That sort of ministry isn’t impressive. That sort of minister doesn’t get articles and books written about them.

If all you’re doing is meeting with students and your ministry is small, then you would seem like a pretty mediocre minister. You have the kind of ministry that many pastors would “despair at the thought” of spending their lives leading.

So it is on these days when I feel the pressure to out-perform my teammates, to be the best, the most successful, and the most original minister, writer, speaker and thinker–those are the days when I consider quitting. I think about leaving ministry behind and working at Subway, not because ministry is too hard, but because my call has gotten so thoroughly mangled. I think about quitting the ministry to intentionally take a job in which there is no ladder of success, and purge myself of the desire to serve God for any other reason than my sheer love for Him.

And maybe one day I will. For now, I am learning to be ok with mediocrity–not laziness, not complacency, or apathy–but mediocrity according to the world’s standards. Maybe I won’t have a ministry that the world judges to be a tremendous success. Maybe I won’t be able to tally up thousands of people who prayed the sinner’s prayer because of me. Maybe no one will remember me when I’m gone.

But those standards are not to be found in God’s economy. Sure, God wants all people to experience salvation–you see mass conversions all the time in Acts. But not everyone is a Paul, and God only asks that we do the best we can with the gifts we have. We are to love others radically, we are to speak boldly about Jesus, and we are to live a life that testifies daily to the Gospel. Nothing less, but also nothing more.

So even if you are mediocre according to this world, such a label does not matter as long as you are a good and faithful servant to God. This is hard for me to remember as I stand in the shadow of so many successful pastors and writers, but it is in those moments that I am reminded that worldly success, even when it’s achieved in a Christian context, will all be burned away. The big church buildings, the millions of books–they will all pass away come eternity. Those things can certainly be effective tools for God’s Kingdom, but they do not distinguish the sheep from the goats.

Comments

[Jason]

Sharon,

Amazing thoughts and a great encouragement to us all. Thank you.

"We are to love others radically, we are to speak boldly about Jesus, and we are to live a life that testifies daily to the Gospel. Nothing less, but also nothing more."

Loved that insight. Thank you.

[John Wallace]

Great thoughts, Sharon. I suspect that many faithful lifelong servants have been judged mediocre by the world, even by the church. It is a tremendous encouragement to see at Summit many young adults who are actively seeking to invest their whole lives in the Kingdom. Many from my generation spent the first half of their lives pursuing worldly wealth and pleasure and then turned to God. The church has tended to makes examples out of these because their pre-Christian exploits are impressive and their conversions often dramatic. Of course we praise God for them. Yet the fact that we barely notice the many who have served God from youth betrays our motives. We really do value worldly success.

[seekhimdaily]

In my experience, those who tally up 'thousands of people who prayed the sinner's prayer because of me' usually don't say it that way. They say, "got saved by me" (I swear, I've heard it), or "were saved through my preaching", or any of the other many ways to say the same thing. They say this as if the number saved is a knowable number. IOW, they say this as if they think they are God.

The word the New Testament uses for "mass conversions" is "many believed". "Thousands believed." The point being that Scripture says "even the demons believe", intellectually speaking. But those who "endure to the end will be saved." In fact, John records a mass conversion after Christ's sermon where, not a few short minutes later, the recent converts attempted to kill Christ.

Romans 10 tells us that saving belief is something that occurs in the heart and comes forth from the mouth. However, James tells us intellectual belief can also come forth from the mouth. There is now way to immediately tell the difference between mere intellectual belief and heart belief. Nonetheless, these professional mass-converters tally up for us, immediately after the service, how many people just "got saved." Don't be jealous. Honestly, I sometimes wonder how many of these mass-converters are being saved.

[Mike]

There seems to be a ladder of success in just about every job. But I'm all about encouraging any professional pastor (ie one who is is in a formal "I'll take X amount of pay to pastor you" agreement) to get a 'secular' job and do the pastoring on a volunteer basis. There is nothing sinful about professional pastoring. But it does add a lot of temptation toward sin into the equation, and it does look bad to the curious unbeliever.

[Susan David]

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