Striving toward Unemployment

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I'm only six weeks into my new career. After 16 years of slate & metal roofing, I have become the Director of Outreach at Proven Ministries, a sexual integrity non-profit organization. Most of our work involves assisting men and women break their addiction to pornography and live into lasting freedom in their Christian identity. This works best when local churches integrate our curriculum into their programming. As you can imagine, we also regularly come alongside marriages in crisis or restoration, parent/child relationships on the proactive or reactive side of things, ministers and lay leaders in need of urgent care. 

Several occasions since being in the office full-time, I’ve heard our Executive Director say, “hopefully one day we’ll work ourselves out of a job!” I hear him say this to pastors, self-identified strugglers, prospective donors. It’s one of his common refrains and already one of my favorites from him. The hope is that our ministry will one day achieve critical mass and overturn the sexual degradation that has come to identify our culture at large. At the very least, that God’s covenant-keeping people would once again become distinguished by their integrity in self-control. As it turns out, I had written almost that very thing in my notes for articles in this space about four years ago. At the time, my thoughts regarded ministers in any context – that they should strive to work themselves out of a job. 

“Would that all Adonai’s people were prophets!” 
*Numbers 11:29 

Too many authority figures enjoy their positions too much. Now, in the case of ministers, it is very often a thankless job. By no means do I want to throw any well-meaning shepherd under the bus of undue reproach. Nevertheless, I have grown up in church culture all 41 years of my life. So many pastors, deacons, elders, lay leaders, too many to recount, wear their badges and laude their own honors and flex their entitlements with too much delight in the authority with which they have been privileged. It’s not universal, certainly, but it is all too common. 

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In my view, the virtuous leader is the one who wishes that his people would surpass him. He should celebrate the day when his students matriculate from his care and go on to greater things beyond his abilities, however noble and capable he has been. The very best thing that he could accomplish: to find himself looking up to the generation that he had fostered. 

Anyone who relishes that they have subordinates is not to be trusted. That man has come into power which exceeds the capacity of his character. If we have crowns, we must wear them lightly; if we have thrones, we must sit upon them furtively; if we wield potency, we must utilize it minimally. Didn’t the Master teach nothing less than this manner of humility to His emissaries? 

I’ll be honest. I love my new job. It is so much more gratifying than my previous life in roofing. Yet I also experience a conflict, an internal dissonance, when a man in his 70s refers to me as his drill sergeant (his moniker for me, not something that I imposed). However, if that language helps him in the process, then I must allow it. 

But I’ll tell you this too... I’d love to have the problem of what might be my next-next-career. 

Photo by Jonas Canales on Unsplash