Reconciling my calls

Through most of my high school and college experience, I wrestled with what I now recognize as two calls; one to ministry, one to psychology.  I chose to study psychology at a Christian college as a compromise between the two, but I felt towards the end of my senior year of college that I had to choose ministry over psychology, for a variety of reasons, one of them being a pretty drastic lack of connection with the faculty in my department and a fear that I would not meet the more exacting standards for admission to a graduate program at a university.  However, in the past year and a half I have gained a new appreciation for my former course of study, and come to embrace a unique call to both psychology and ministry.

Now, any minister worth their salt will tell you that a good deal of any ministry lies in one-on-one relationship building, leadership development, and counseling.  Often in ministry these three are blended together so totally that its difficult to tell when one stops and another begins.  My heart as a youth minister is to latch onto the lost and the hurting kids - and as a psychologist, I can tell you that I think they are ALL lost and hurting on some level.  And usually, the problem kids - that is to say, the ones who are hurting badly enough that they can't mask it and play to expectations like the "good kids" do - have problem parents.  If there is one thing I could tell the parents of the kids I work with, it would be that you cannot underestimate the ways in which the things you do - especially the things done behind closed doors, even the things you think your kids don't know about - affect the way they relate to every other person and situation they encounter.  Parents have incredible power to help or to harm, and sometimes the difference is as small as the inflection on a statement.  This is, I believe, my call - to help hurting kids, to help confused and overwhelmed and hurting parents, find a place where they can connect and become the family that God created them to be.

I also believe that youth create their own family within the church structure, and we need to recognize the power of what we do.  I have seen and can testify to the changes wrought by relentless loving on the part of youth leaders for a wayward child.  Once, that wayward child was me.  Now, I have wayward children of my own, and I understand how Herculean is the task set before us - to love others fearlessly, to allow our hearts to be broken by them because God's heart is also broken for them, to give of our time and our resources so sacrificially so that our students can be filled with love, can begin a journey to wholeness of identity and self.  And that - that sounds like a journey worth the taking.

Be Yourself?!?

This weekend I had the opportunity to attend the Simply Youth Ministry Conference in Chicago - after a 12-hour drive through a snowstorm to get there, which is a whole other blog post on our call to perseverance :)  However, once I got there, I attended an 8-hour intensive "deep track" with Chap Clark titled "Thinking Theologically In Youth Ministry".  During the four sessions that comprised the course, Chap had a lot to say about some negative blogging press he's been receiving (and capped off a detailed description of his detractors and their problems with "but of course I don't care about any of this" - riiiight).  So I decided that I'd give him some positive attention on the Interwebs, specifically about the portion of the 3rd session dedicated to the call of Christian leadership.

(What follows is a very brief summation of what he had to say.  My notes may be inaccurate or incomplete - I apologize to Chap and Fuller Seminary if I have misrepresented his work.  On the other hand, since I was the intended and actual audience for the lecture, if I misrepresent his work, he may need to rethink some things.  Just sayin'.)

The first point Chap makes about call is that it needs to be "thick", or multilayered.  When we look at call in the Old Testament, we see that call was a defining force for those touched by it; call was nothing short of a radical change in personal and corporate identity.  The four layers of call Chap identified were:
1) Individual summons, a la John 15:1-8
2) Call to a new family of faith (John 15:9-17)
3) Call to holy living (Phil. 5:1-3)
4) Call to live in the Kingdom by being yourself! 
Chap goes on to mark the difference between job and vocation as God's presence and our acknowledgment of God as our audience.  Within those parameters, he says our call should also contain or be defined by an unquenchable thirst for growth - not necessarily in numbers, but in depth and strength (my notes here have the Olympic motto - "higher, stronger, faster").

This last point is a sticker for those of us in professional ministry.  I have watched nearly a dozen pastors of churches I've attended or worked at over the past decade struggle with how to relate to their congregations.  Some choose to put up walls, to keep their private lives behind closed doors and to maintain emotional distance from those they serve.  Others get right in there alongside their congregations, build relationships, share confidences - only to have a doubly difficult time extricating themselves when they are (inevitably, in the United Methodist system) reappointed.  Most try to walk a tightrope line in the middle - allowing their personality to flavor their ministry and interactions more than some, but not getting as emotionally invested as others do.

Two weeks ago I began a paid ministry position as a youth director for a midsize church about an hour away from where I live.  I haven't gotten to spend a whole lot of time with my youth and youth leaders (being in Chicago for four days somewhat hindered being present in Maryland), but already I'm wondering, as a staff member with no other history with or connection to the church, how close the congregation will let me get to them - and how willing I am to let them get close to me.  In my experience, with youth especially, you have to allow your church, your youth, your family, to get under your skin if you have any hope of being an effective minister.  It's not said nearly enough, but service in ministry is a dual transformation - a transformation of the people we serve, and a transformation of us as ministers as we learn, grow, succeed and fail.  As Jake says in "To Save A Life" - what is the point of all this if you don't let it change you?  If our ministry is not transformative, we're not doing what God has called us to do - and it can't be transformative unless we allow ourselves to be an organism, open to change.