Well...maybe you don't. Probably you don't. But just in case...
There’s a wickedly hilarious book that I’ve been reading lately—Jon Acuff’s “Stuff Christians Like,” which is based on his blog by the same name. As the title suggests, it is a knockoff of Christian Lander’s “Stuff White People Like,” and like Lander, Acuff is funny precisely because what he writes is completely, utterly true.
One such entry in the book is “Thinking you’ve been called to ministry.” That is to say, every REAL Christian (said 100% tongue-in-cheek) at some point in their lives will wonder if they have been called by God to ordained ministry, to go from an amateur weekend warrior to professional Christian. For many, many folks, this ends up being nothing more than a phase, in the same way that as an eight-year-old kid, I wanted to be a professional dinosaur hunter.
Then there’s another, much smaller, group of people who actually conclude that this bizarre desire to work on almost every Sunday morning for the rest of their lives might actually be for real, and they decide to enroll in a seminary but realize after a year or two (or after having to take Greek, Hebrew, and The Systematic Theology of Eggplants During the Papacy of Clement II) that God isn’t really calling them to ministry after all. False alarm there, Big Guy. Or Big Girl. I hold nothing against such people—it takes guts and either deep pockets or a willingness to take on substantial debt to sacrifice a year or more of your life to attend God School.
Finally, there is the class of whackjobs like me, who not only respond to the voice of an apparently needling, meddlesome God who wants me to specifically do THIS, but to follow all the way through and graduate from seminary. We have not only drunk the Kool-Aid, we are drunk on the Kool-Aid, because we still want to do this for our lives in spite of this very true list written by an anonymous churchgoer from Oklahoma* (I have changed the language in places to make the wording more inclusive).
*Seminary friends: If this passage sounds familiar to you, it is because I used it in a lecture that Andrew Hybl and I held in our Angels Fear class about clergy burnout. Now on to the actual list:
"They know more of the personal problems of more people than does any gossip columnist, yet they tell no one but their Creator.
They must generate group enthusiasm as does a cheerleader of a disappointingly slow ballgame.
They feel the pressure to produce a winning team, as does the ball coach.
They are given the responsibility of leading but always from a servant position.
They must give three or more speeches each week to the same general group.
They must not be repetitious or boring. They must have fresh, up-to-date materials and data. They must do it without a speechwriter or research team.
They must be approachable at all times regardless of their own personal desire to be left alone.
They must teach from a book studied and read by their students, yet must be fresh and informative.
They must continually sell themselves, their company, their produce and, most importantly, their Boss, with the realization ever before them that to fail produces death.
They must never get behind in paying their bills; they must dress well; they must drive a clean car; they must have tools to do their job; they must be a leader in their gifts to charitable causes; they must entertain and they must do it on a salary, which is, most of the time, inadequate.
They feel the responsibility of having a morally healthy family as much as the physician does to have a physically healthy one.
They must be willing to listen to people by the hour, to not know how to enjoy an uninterrupted meal with their family, yet handle their own frustrations over lack of time for their spouse and children.
Their work is so much a part of themselves that they cannot separate the two. A criticism about their congregation is a criticism about them. A rejection of their group is a rejection of them.
S/he is a walking, talking, loving person of God, of men and women, of a family who is called “Pastor.”
They are trained to preach, to pastor, to administrate, but somewhere someone failed to give them the magic word, which changes them into “Captain Marvel.” S/he is a person, a good person, but just a person. Without the grace of God their load would be too great and they would break…
Some do anyway.”
Amen.
Yours in Christ,
Eric
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