The Ambition Factor

Sometimes I wish I was a euphemism guy. You know...one of those guys that always seems to find a way to beat around the bush and craft a nice way to say something not so nice. Think the guy who somehow successfully navigates the "does this make me look fat" question from his wife. I am just not that guy. God seems to have blessed me with a special condition that I tend to call a strong appreciation for truth; my buddies have been known to refer to it as, "a profound lack of tact." This "condition" is not exactly high on the list of desirable characteristics of a pastor. I mean, who in their right mind would intentionally participate in a church where the pastor's lowest score on every spiritual gifts test that he has ever taken is mercy and compassion?

That said, it is healthy for us to occasionally be exposed to the ruthless and unfiltered truth about ourselves. The only other options are self-deception, denial, and pretending, all of which are deadly. The truth is, when I began to seek the unfiltered truth about myself, I learned some very interesting things. The first of which was that I am not cool...nor have I ever been. This will come as no shock to anyone who knows me, but I was caught off guard a bit when I discovered that, not only am I not cool, I am in fact a big nerd. I should have gotten a clue about my nerd status when people began to snicker every time I told them that I Tivo every episode of Jeopardy.

Not all of my discoveries about myself were comical. In fact, some of them caused me great depth of sorrow and have become continual matters of prayer that I regularly bring before the Lord. One of the most profound things I learned about myself is that a great deal of my ministry has been motivated more out of an ambitious quest for identity than out of love for Jesus and his people. One of my mentors once told me, "too often you have been the hero of your own story, but there is only one hero in our movement, and you are not him." I found that I had become "The Missions Guy," and not a guy Jesus loves who happens to do some missions work. Though these sound quite similar, they are in fact, nowhere close to the same thing. It is dangerously easy for our identity to become rooted in our service for Christ and not in his love for us. I guess the question we have to ask ourselves is, "if we could no longer effectively serve Christ and his mission, would we still have any relationship with him?" Because, if our relationship with Jesus consists of only our ministerial service, then there is almost certainly a deep fracture in our souls that when it has run its course will produce a viciously ambitious legalism. 

For those of you who think that I made too big of a leap just then, I want you to consider a couple of things. First, why is there such a bloated emphasis on bigness in American Christianity. For some of us, pursuit of bigness is a subtle, almost subconscious idol; but for others, the bigness of the three B's (buildings, butts in the pews, & budgets) serve as the boundary markers of our Christianized caste system--the bigger the better. It just becomes part of the way we speak about things..."you should listen to this guy...his church is running six thousand" or "God is really at work over there, they just built a new $45 million dollar facility." Listen, I am not a bigness hater. In fact, I think almost all of the criticism of mega-churches and the like is motivated out of good old-fashioned jealousy. My point is simply that our excessive preoccupation with bigness is more indicative of the presence of unbridled ambition than it is the presence of the Holy Spirit. 

Second, what is the deal with our ridiculously competitive need to argue about who is laboring in the hardest mission field? No matter where God has placed us, why do we feel the need to abuse the superlative to describe our ministry circumstance. This is the "most unchurched city..." We are in the "third poorest..." This is really nothing more than foolish competition, and it is a telling indicator of the presence of ambitious legalism. Think it through; every time we attempt to prove the validity of our ministry by appealing to these kind of superlative descriptions, we all but invalidate the ministry of hundreds of thousands of faithful ministers, because they are less likely to be shot at or mocked in the local press or whatever horrific thing that comes with ministry in our circumstance that makes us feel good about taking one for the team.

I was just in Guatemala for a week. We were blessed to work with some great people, and really see God's grace in action. One of the guys we got to spend some time with was a guy named Joel. This guy had more energy than three energizer bunnies. It was his job to expose us to the 11,000 people living off of the Guatemala city dump (a sobering experience to be sure), and several other incredible ministries around the city, all of which were beautiful portraits of the body of Christ serving a hurting city. I don't want to pick on Joel, because, he is a great guy, with an incredibly huge heart; but about twenty times during our day with him, he busted out the superlatives to validate these ministries. "This is the hardest..." "This is the most difficult..." I suspect that his heart is clean in the matter and his intentions pure, but is it really necessary for us to appeal to people's ambition to get them involved in ministry. This kind of competitive appeal does little but tarnish a really incredible work of the Spirit.

If ministry is only valid when faced with incredibly difficult circumstances, surely a very "average" guy like me is not up to the task. Is it any wonder that we have such difficulty getting the average Christian to step up to the plate when we make ministry the task of superheroes? I am not pretending that I am free from the grip of this ambitious competition, but I sure wish that I were; and as with every element of our walk with Jesus, confession is step number one.