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Love Your Lord? Love Your Staff!

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I once worked in professional ministry.

There, I confessed. 😉

People paid me to show the light of Christ to others. And while I’ll add to the lament that the pay seemed to amount to little more than the change from a vending machine, it was pay nonetheless.

Where there’s one paid employee, there’s usually more. I worked in camping ministry for several years, Your typical summer camp staffon staffs of about a dozen to almost three hundred—a half dozen staff experiences in all, split between mainline Protestant camps and Evangelical.

If I learned one truth during my tenure in professional ministry, it’s you can’t be a Christian organization and not have some kind of hierarchy of ministry focus. In my years as a paid Christian camping professional, I saw two different ministry focus hierarchies:

1. Our ministry focus is on God first, people who fall into our ministry objective second, and staff third.

2. Our ministry focus is on God first, staff second, and people who fall into our ministry objective third.

Let me tell you about the places I worked that employed that first hierarchy of ministry…

When you work at a Christian ministry that puts everyone else before staff, you discover that about halfway through your ministry objective timeline the well’s run dry. So much time has been spent pouring the life of the staff into the lives of the people they’re ministering to that in a few months time your staff’s inner lives resemble the Sahara Desert—during a drought. And with a plague of locusts, too.

Leaders of ministries who follow a staff third ministry model succeed in doing one thing exceptionally well: creating ministry burnouts.

The problem for leaders comes from always expecting staff to pour themselves out, while not lifting a finger to refill their earthen vessels. In the end, everything about the ministry fails. It may have started ministering by the Spirit, but when people dry up—and they will in this environment—they start ministering with the arm of flesh. And we all know what that means: failure.

One of the camps I worked for had a nationally-recognized name, multi-million dollar budget, and several hundred people going through its gates every week. But they also had a bizarre curfew on Sundays during the summer that made it nearly impossible for summer staff to make it to church and back under the curfew. As a result, a lot of staff had no chance to worship.

I worked on year-round staff. Because of some special skills I possessed, I transitioned from my regular duties into the summer duties and found myself bound by the curfew. My response? Start an in-camp worship service for staff on the one night of the week we all had free.

Seems reasonable enough.

But you’d be astonished at how much persecution came down on our worship—from the camp leaders! No, I wasn’t an ordained minister, but this was a Protestant camp right? Martin Luther, priesthood of all believers? And yes, we did offer communion, too. Or was that wrong, as well?

Honestly, I felt like the leader of an underground church right there in Evangelical land. But you know what? The folks who came to that worship service left filled. And those who begged off and complained stayed empty and later burned out.

The worship service persecution was just one of many ways that camp kept pouring out its staff and giving nothing back. The list went on and on. In fact, it could be the poster camp for how to grind up and spit out a staff.

And they LIVED for the staff third hierarchy. Practically engraved it on the walls of every cabin in the camp.

I worked at another Evangelical camp (see the trend?) that had strange rules in place, such as A-level staff couldn’t associate with B-level staff outside camp. I had no idea such a lamebrained rule existed until I told the camp director in passing that I was planning on taking the mildly-retarded camp janitor, who had no friends on staff that I could tell, out for an ice cream so he could get away from camp and talk with a real person. From the pummeling I received for merely attempting to minister to another staff person, you would’ve thought the whole idea was part of a scheme to murder the guy!

The sum of all the rules at that camp added up to a legalistic tangle of nonsense that proved…well, anti-human. In time, I feared I might be subjected to forty lashes minus one for ministering to the wrong person. Or the right person in the wrong place. Or the wrong way. At the wrong time, or—oh, the heck with it.

Conversely, the mainline camps I worked for—you know, liberals—went for the staff second approach. Their leadership perpetually worked to meet the spiritual, mental, physical, and social needs of the staff. They paid better. They threw special parties for staff. They celebrated milestones for everyone on staff, even the summer-only folks. They routinely asked each person on staff how his or her relationship with the Lord was going. They treated staff like real people and not underlings.

And they actually allowed staff to minister. To the visitors. To the other staff. To anyone.

Their success came from understanding that people cannot be perpetually poured out without something being poured back in. Yes, people can have a devotional life that provides some of that refreshing, but anyone in leadership knows that real leadership means giving something back.

Let’s be honest here. The amount of personal time we devote to interacting with the actual subjects of our ministry may pale compared with the amount of time we spend with other staff. Any wise person leading a ministry realizes that the lives most likely to be changed by the ministry are those who actually work for it. Yes, a ministry that works with the poor may very well touch the lives of the poor to whom they minister, but it’s far more likely that the ministry will forever change the staff that works in that ministry.

And I’ll go out on a limb and say that’s true for every single ministry on the face of this planet since the Day of Pentecost.

If you’re the leader of a ministry (doesn’t matter what kind), my charge to you is to lay down your life for your staff. Christ laid His down for the ones who follow Him. If your ministry model has been staff third, shred it—now. If you don’t, rather than building your staff, you might very well be creating burnouts who never darken the door of any ministry again. If you don’t believe me, I’ve got the e-mail addresses of a couple hundred ministry burnouts I can send you.

If you love the Lord, then love your staff. Show it in practical, tangible, life-changing ways. The Lord demonstrated that kind of love to His disciples, the ones He called friends. We can do no less for those people with whom we minister.

Speed Kills the Christian Soul–Part 2

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Q1: What is the chief end of man?

A1: Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.

— Westminster Shorter Catechism (1674)

My small group met this last Friday and the theme that came out in prayer requests and other revelations was simple: folks are struggling under a load of things to do. FranticPeople are going to bed at 4 AM and getting up at 7 AM. Homeschoolers are scheduled to the max trying to pack requirements in every day. Life has become a clumsy dance of “do this, then do that” and our days have come to resemble little more than a succession of nags.

One mom wondered what would happen when her lone hour a day to herself went away come August. Too many of us know exactly how she feels.

In the last few weeks, I spent

  • Eight hours on the phone trying to schedule a plane flight for three people
  • Three hours trying to get information on my phone service (and still no response)
  • Several hours trying to enroll my son in a state-approved homeschooling program (and I’m still not done)
  • Cramming six errands spread across the city into two-and-a-half hours
  • Mowing the grass to the tune of nine hours
  • Switching my entire Web presence to a new host, new domains, and new software—untold hours
  • Switching from Eudora (after twenty years of use!) to Thunderbird, and laboring through all the bureaucratic importation nonsense that went with that switch
  • Attending six worship band practices
  • Dealing with car maintenance issues
  • Spending a couple hours wrangling on the phone with a service company that didn’t perform the service I asked of them
  • And, sadly, finding very little time to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

There are countless unmentioned experiences in that list, but suffice it to say, my candle’s had more than two wicks burning at the same time. While this may sound like whining, I suspect it’s a whine all too common in most people’s lives. The pace of life continues to speed up.

One commenter to Part 1 said the answer was in moving to the country. Well, I already did that and only found a new set of problems. The issue is not so much where we live, but how we live.

When I look at what consumed most of my time the last few weeks, much of it had to do with the following:

  • Bureaucracy, usually made concrete by the endless filling-out of forms or jumping through hoops
  • Technology, our new master
  • Maintaining possessions, the things we own that ultimately control us
  • Lack of personal community, wherein we must individually do what the community used to do for us collectively

Those four issues form a quadrilateral in no way like Wesley’s, yet they’re just as spiritually significant. Not only that, but they feed off each other. We have bureaucracy because we no longer live in communities of trust. Our lack of community leads us to self-sufficiency, the stepfather of technology. Our bureaucracy safeguards our possessions, of which an increasing number are technological. We ultimately replace people with items and then call our lives good.

Modern Man’s dilemma is not so much that we cannot make time for ourselves, but that the things we’ve created to make time for ourselves ultimately consume all our time and destroy relationships. Not only relationships with flesh-and-blood human beings, but with God Himself.

It’s difficult to imagine not having a car in the United States, but how hard do we have to work to buy and maintain that car? In my own case, it seems not a month goes by that I don’t have something to do related to vehicles: oil changes, tire rotations or replacements, licensing, insurance, various bits of maintenance, and working hard enough to afford the cost of $3 gas alone. With gas that high, every trip becomes a logistical nightmare. How many errands can I run in one sprint into the city? When? How? And what if something comes up that upsets that delicate balance? The dentist wants to reschedule? Ugh.

Cars are a simple one to question. There’s the bureaucracy of simply owning one, with all the titles, government regulations, and yearly paperwork. It’s technology, and it’s gotten so technological that no one can service his own anymore. I can’t get my 13-year old truck an oil change at many oil change centers because they don’t have the right wrench to remove the specific kind of plug that’s on my oil pan. Multiply that by several million cars and you’ve got a tech nightmare. And you thought computer operating system differences were a hassle!

Cars also mean insurance, because in our litigious society no insurance means no legal way to drive in most states. That’s an added—costly—hassle. And as I mentioned earlier, there’s expensive maintenance. And community? Well, there’s not much personal community in a car. Most of us don’t carpool, and it seems odd to even have a neighbor or friend in our cars. Our cars are meant to hold our nuclear families and that’s usually about it.

But unlike Europe, which developed in self-sufficient burghs, America is a vast, spread-out place that astonishes non-Americans. Almost every Japanese I’ve met in America is swift to comment on our interstates and the amount of time we spend on them. And we have to spend a lot of time on them because everything sprawls in this country. A few weeks ago I asked how many of you lived within fifty miles of extended family and I would say that 90% of you did not. So we depend on cars to get us there—if we want to see extended family, that is.

Multiply cars, phones, jets, computers, insurance policies, and the like. My eight hours on the phone trying to schedule a flight is the length of the flight there and back. Hmm. What gained then? And for a family reunion, too. Isn’t family supposed to be nearby? If 90% of us have none within fifty miles, then I guess not.

I’m getting snarky here and I apologize. Already this post has failed my usual test for quality. But still I must ask, What has all this bought us except hectic lives that go full throttle 24/7/365?

And what about God? Do we even have time for Him, much less to truly enjoy Him?

It bothers me that it’s the hardcore green liberals that are asking the question that Christians should be asking but aren’t: Is our daily existence dictated by evil, rather than by good? In our case, we understand that God is the good here, but the problem does not go away by defining good.

On this issue, I took Al Mohler to task over his non-answer when he usually has one. Perhaps that was unfair. To Mohler’s credit, he does quote Francis Schaeffer’s book title. Schaeffer asked, “How then shall we live?” in that eponymous book, and it’s a valid question.

I believe we are living in an evil construct. There is no good to be found in much of our activity. In past posts I’ve wondered aloud where the Christians are who are envisioning communities that eschew pharisaic bureaucracy, man-handling technology, devotion to things, and a lack of devotion to people. A few are cropping up, but not nearly enough to make a dent in the dialog in our churches. Mostly, those folks are seen as cranks or environmentalists or some other irritant not worth engaging. That’s too bad.

Not only are our lives being stolen by bureaucracy, technology, possession maintenance, and lack of community, but I genuinely believe that there are demonic components behind those four issues. We dismiss too easily and laugh at the notion, but could there not be a better way, a way that more fully expresses the life of God in the individual rather than the individual at the mercy of his surroundings? I believe that reality exists and is possible, but only if better people than me start working toward it.

In Song of Solomon, it says:

Catch the foxes for us, the little foxes that spoil the vineyards, for our vineyards are in blossom.
—Song of Solomon 2:15 ESV

Our vineyards today are overrun with little foxes, but we are not catching them. In fact, we take them for granted, have made our peace with them, and then no longer wonder why we aren’t fruitful. We take barrenness as the natural state of living.

If we desire to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, something has to give.

Speed Kills the Christian Soul–Part 1

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If you’ve been a longtime reader, you know that one of my pet peeves is the speed at which our lives today fly by us. Too many Christians are caught in a perpetual hamster wheel of activity. None of that benefits us, the Church, or the Lord.

But what to do about it?

Al Mohler asked the same question earlier this week, lamenting the “sound byte-ing” of classical music. Even on a classical music station, you can’t hear an entire symphony anymore, just its best passages. As a classical music fan myself, I know exactly what he means. Speed KillsStations have ratcheted up the speed to fit leisurely classical music pieces into hectic schedules. Next thing you know, they’ll be time compressing the “Moonlight Sonata.” You can read his post here.

I blow hot and cold with Mohler, though. While he’s a big name in the Reformed Baptist camp, his posts and writings usually tell people what they should be doing, but without the means or info needed to do those things. Again, consistent readers know that I loathe that kind of “do this, but don’t ask me to help you do it” mentality in so many parts of the church.

But Mohler, usually quick with an answer, has no response to fixing the blatant hurriedness quagmire we find ourselves in. That’s also pretty typical of large swaths of the Church in America—recognize the problem, but offer no way to deal with it other than to say that we need to slow down.

Part of the problem here is that the Church, at least in this country, may have created the problem—or at least abetted it.

I’ve long contended the way to fix our issues with time is to correct the way we work. Ten hour days with additional two hour commutes is a good place to start repairing. People can’t have normal lives devoting twelve hours a day to work far away from home. Sadly, the very Protestant work ethic this country was founded on powers our work ethic today.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the Protestant work ethic that arose from the Reformation’s freeing of workers to know that their work honors God. Where it goes astray is when it is removed from local economies and translated into the typical “drive downtown to the office” kind of work we grew used to working during the Industrial Revolution. If you’ve read my series on “The Christian & the Business World“, you’ve got the basis for understanding the depths of the problem. (Read the series—you won’t read anything like it anywhere else in the Godblogosphere.)

So here’s what I recommend to Al Mohler. He’s a big name and has a large readership, far larger than mine. The plea:

Dr. Mohler,

Please use your considerable base of readership to start challenging the entire concept of how Christians should work. Throw out every assumption about work that’s been foisted on us by “The System.” Start asking what a genuine expression of Christian work should look like in the 21st century. Start asking how we can revitalize local economies and restore the simpler joys of working cooperatively with our neighbors. Read a book by Wendell Berry and ask if even a single thing he says makes sense for Christians today. Take the “red pill” and help others break out of the Matrix.

Don’t just concede and say, “It’s a tough problem and I’ve got no answers.” Christians are supposed to have answers. You expect your readers to have answers to the questions you raise and to solve those issues you point out in their own lives. Why not expect it of yourself?

Help us to institute the kind of life God desires of His children from the very first day He placed them in the Garden and gave them the command to work and steward the Earth.

Thank you. May God give you and other Christian leaders the vision to help us break out of the rat race and live life like the human race, the life God intended.

Speed Kills the Christian Soul—Part 2.