Healthy Leadership and the High Cost of Caring
Here I was perfectly content in “tuning out” when the voice of the stewardess came across the loudspeaker and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I know many of you have already had a long day and that you are tired, but if you would be so kind as to set aside your reading materials for a few brief moments, we would like to cover some important safety information with you.”
This at least prompted me to pull the corner of the newspaper back a few inches and glance up into the aisle. To my surprise, there was a flight attendant standing just a few feet away smiling at me with that “look.” Here I was going to teach on ministry-oriented stress and I was swimming in it at the moment. Of course, I put down the paper, sighed, and smiled back.
In the middle of the preflight announcements, I heard the following—which I have heard many times before, but usually gloss over.
“If we should experience the sudden loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will deploy from the ceiling above you. If you are traveling with small children, please put the mask on yourself first and then assist the child.”
Why are passengers instructed to put on their own masks first, before helping others?
The Holy Spirit immediately began to shake me awake regarding this profound truth. Why should parents put on their mask first? One would tend to think it would be more humane, loving, and compassionate to help the children first. However, because children are probably more vulnerable and less able to take care of themselves in the moment, then the most responsible course of action is for parents to make sure they are in a position to help and facilitate care. To do that, they need to be stable and breathing in the oxygen themselves. The same is true for us as ministry leaders. When people bring their hurts or are in the middle of a crisis, they are typically less mobile, less resourced, more incapacitated and anxious, and perhaps less able to discern the voice of the Lord at the moment than we are (at least in theory). If we want to ensure that we are “available” to the Lord and to others, we must take care of ourselves first—appropriately and in a balanced way—or we risk becoming ineffective and at times, even a hindrance to what God is trying to accomplish.
When you entered into the ministry, you probably expected to be successful. Most people do not feel passionately called to something, only to fail. One common distortion is that many leaders define success primarily by quantitative measures (e.g. buildings, budgets, and baptisms) and not by qualitative measures such as those that make a difference in someone’s life by helping them become more Christ-like. There is a strong temptation to develop a comparative “bean-counting” mindset. We can set increasingly unrealistic standards that have less to do with trusting God and walking in faith, and more to do with how we compare to the church or ministry next door. If we evaluated Jesus using this paradigm as a sole criterion, some might deem His ministry to have been an abject failure.
Countless pastors and ministry leaders accept very difficult job descriptions and few other vocations have such a broad range of “plate spinning” demands. A good friend of mine was candidating at a new church and during the interview with the pastoral search committee (twenty-three individuals—some of you are smiling), he was first asked about his own vision for ministry if he were to be called. Following a dinner meeting, he went around the room and asked each person what they were expecting and looking for in a pastor, all the while, taking notes. As he flew home from the interview, he began to read over what he had written down and counted 106 different expectations from the group and yet, they all seemed somewhat reasonable in their own way. Here is an important principle when it comes to ministry: the individual expectations might be legitimate, but the composite expectations can be all encompassing and at times destructive.
Category: Fall 2011, Ministry, Pneuma Review
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