Professional Christian

Being Fully Yourself in the Spotlight of Public Ministry

Sarah Bereza

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781646982479
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Ministère chrétien

As church leaders, we live our lives within the spotlight of professional ministry. To best love and serve God and our neighbors, we aim to be the fullest, truest versions of ourselves. However, we often struggle to do so with integrity. What if our preaching or singing feels like a performance? Are we supposed to hide our imperfections and let people see only the shiniest parts of our lives? If you have ever felt like you're working under a microscope or that you've been put on a pedestal you don't want or deserve, know that you are not alone.

Professional Christian gathers the wisdom from fifty church leaders in a variety of roles (including Sandhya Jha, Jacqueline J. Lewis, Bruce Reyes-Chow, Nikki Toyama-Szeto, and Will Willimon) on topics such as authenticity, privacy, boundaries, doubt, self-care, and the challenges of being held to a higher standard. The stories, advice, and wisdom from these leaders help to show us that thriving in ministry should not have to come at the expense of our identity and relationships. Written by a church musician with over twenty years of experience in ministry, Professional Christian helps church leaders learn to flourish as an integrated person of faith living out their call to vocational ministry.

Chapter 1

THE FOUNDATION FOR BEING FULLY OURSELVES

We may believe in the importance of being ourselves in ministry, but in the slog of daily life—when we’re tired, overextended, and don’t want to kick up controversy—living into that fullness can feel impossible and irrelevant. How much easier to stay small, stay in our lane, check off our daily to-dos, and save our whole selves for another day. Yet when we don’t share ourselves in that God-made fullness, we are hiding our God-made light under a bushel basket. When we hide that light by consciously putting ourselves into settings that conceal it, we’re not only harming ourselves; we are obstructing God’s gifts to us and our neighbors.

You may agree with my premise that God made each of us good but question the wisdom of focusing on the pursuit of our fullest selves, because it could encourage our tendencies toward self-centeredness or be an exercise in navel-gazing that keeps us from leaning into whatever work God has called us to. This is the sentiment Cynthia G. Linder describes in her research on pastoral ministry and personal complexity, which she calls “multiplicity.” She finds that calling attention to multiplicity can feel selfish or peripheral to ministry. Maybe you have had an experience similar to that of the pastors she interviewed: “The practitioners themselves had often not recognized this ministerial multiplicity as resource or resilience, nor had this multiple-mindedness been sought, affirmed, or cultivated by the institutions that played significant roles in their ministerial formation.”¹

This multifacetedness—an integral aspect of being ourselves—enriches ministry, as Linder shows throughout her work. While her research focuses on ordained pastors, it seems likely that the same would also be true for other ministry leaders. The people I interviewed, both ordained and nonordained, experienced a similar strengthening of their ministries as they became more fully themselves. Summing up the relationship between personal complexity and pastoral ministry, Linder writes that the “pastors who ministered effectively in complicated settings were people who were themselves complex. They exhibited multiple interests and gifts, inhabited multiple roles, experienced themselves differently in multiple settings—and it was precisely this ability to move between roles and worlds nimbly and creatively that afforded insights and occasions for innovative pastoral practice.”² When God calls us to ministry, God calls the many facets of ourselves that inform how we follow that call, in all our personalities’ strengths and weaknesses, our interests and passions, and our personal histories.

To follow that call with all of our hearts, we must have self-knowledge and a willingness to grow as ourselves in Christ, develop close relationships where we can be truly vulnerable, and work in an environment that allows us room to be ourselves. The importance of these factors may seem obvious, but many of us know colleagues who lack self-awareness or whose personal growth seems to have ended in adolescence. We’ve seen what happens when people don’t have solid close relationships: unhappiness, oversharing, and inappropriate friendships. We’ve met people whose jobs hemmed them in instead of nourishing them. For the most part, these colleagues didn’t end up in those situations because they were dumb or naive, but because of how difficult it is to lay a strong foundation for being ourselves.

Even though we can spot the deficiencies in other people, we ourselves can easily end up in the same place. Maybe we rightly understand that our identity isn’t in our job, but do not realize how much the particulars of a job affect our ability to be ourselves. Maybe the question of how to be ourselves has been in the background—“the white noise of my life,” as pastor Jorge Acevedo describes it—as our actions flow intuitively from our values and personalities until we land in a setting where we must actively evaluate how to be ourselves. Maybe we begin professional ministry and then discover we can’t be vulnerable with as many people as we could before. Perhaps we just need a job (any job!) and then learn that, while it’s great to be able to pay the bills, being a square peg in a round hole is exhausting and leads to burnout. So we must be intentional in laying our personal and professional foundation.

SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND GROWTH

A child will naturally grow to their full potential height, unless stunted by specific genetic or environmental factors, but personal growth and maturity don’t happen automatically, especially not where public ministry is concerned. We develop our whole selves only when we are intentionally motivated by a belief in the value of self-knowledge. “Communicating yourself as a genuine person requires a lot of interior work,” notes homiletics professor Kenyatta Gilbert. He’s not alone in making this observation. The majority of people I interviewed mentioned the importance of tools like therapy and spiritual direction for intentionally gaining the self-knowledge we need to be ourselves. They also pointed to a rich engagement with their pasts to inform how they understand who they are today—what writer Rozella Haydée White describes as “going back to my creation story and making sense of it, not only as an individual but in my family and culture.”

This interior work entails a clear-eyed perspective on our flaws and a willingness to let go of those flaws, even if we think of them as part of our core identity. Being made in the image of God “doesn’t mean we’re going to be sinless” but, rather, “that we’re made in this image of greatness,” explains theology professor Lakisha Lockhart, “so we shouldn’t be afraid of greatness. We shouldn’t be afraid of the good we can do in the world.”

Yet sometimes we are afraid of that greatness, partially because of people who label their self-centered, obnoxious behavior as “just who I am.” Those people may not think they are perfect, but they seem to believe that being themselves necessitates hanging on to their worst characteristics and most selfish tendencies. You may have heard someone say, “Well, he thought I was rude, but I was just telling it like it is.” Or perhaps, “This is just who I am; so, she had better get over it or get out.” Often it is adolescents who confuse being themselves with weaponizing themselves, while adults fearfully swerve into the opposite lane with politeness and bland peacekeeping that they mistake for loving their neighbors.

If becoming our most whole selves means conforming more and more to the image of Christ, then being ourselves can never mean being a jerk or a doormat. As we come to terms with ourselves, we have to learn what our weaknesses are and grapple with our worst tendencies. In humility, we must open up ourselves to growth in Christ and the goodness we can bring into the world.

This growth is ongoing. It’s not as if we can figure out who we are and maintain that identity for the rest of our lives. Back in grade school literature class, I learned that some fictional characters are considered dynamic, and some are considered static. The dynamic characters change in the course of the narrative, while static characters remain the same. But in real life, we are all dynamic.

On the surface it might not seem intuitive that we change throughout our lives. Most of us can look back on the last decade of our lives and realize we’ve changed, but we may mistakenly think that now we are fully formed and won’t change much in the future. Researchers have termed this the “end of history illusion.”³ In the findings of Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson, “young people, middle-aged people, and older people all believed they had changed a lot in the past but would change relatively little in the future” in the areas of their personalities, values, and preferences.⁴ The research team found that, contrary to what people believed about their future selves, the study participants did change over time, regardless of their age.

Part of being ourselves is that lifetime of transformation. As homiletics professor Eunjoo Mary Kim succinctly put it, “Being authentic means every moment to be changed. Being authentic doesn’t mean just sticking to who I am now, because my Self is open to the future.” If we want to follow the Holy Spirit’s leading into the future—and I hope we all do—we can’t close our minds and hearts or harden our attitudes and assumptions. We must be willing to grow, change, and be transformed.

That said, this book is not about that kind of interior work, but about communicating our genuine, evolving selves in the context of professional ministry. It’s not about discovering who we really are, personality frameworks, letting go of the shame that limits many of us, unearthing and examining the family systems that have shaped us into our current selves, or any of the other tools that help us increase our awareness of who we are and who we can be as we grow in Christ’s image. This book assumes that we have already done that interior work to some extent and made an ongoing commitment to growth in Christ. We will discuss here the question of how we interface with our neighbors through our ministry relationships and public self-presentation.

Personality

When I began writing, I consciously solicited interviews from people in a wide range of denominations, ages, ethnicities, and so on. I couldn’t predetermine personality types—though it takes a certain kind of personality to say yes to an interview that delves into your experience of being yourself, especially if you don’t already know the interviewer personally. For some people I interviewed, being themselves came easily; if it didn’t, there was an external factor (like a wrong job) that, once corrected, eliminated the problem. Put this kind of fish into the right pond, and they swim with ease, without self-consciousness, seemingly without a learning curve. Many others told me one reason they said yes to my interview request was that they had had the experience of not always feeling true to themselves in public spaces. They had grown in this area, sometimes struggled in this area, or seen other people’s difficulties and tried to learn from them.

Depending on your past experiences, you may assume that the people with personality traits like being more extroverted or gregarious were the people who found that being themselves came more easily. However, that’s not what I found as I interviewed. None of the differences in a person’s willingness to be themselves seemed related to personality features like introversion or extroversion or being more or less gregarious. Some of the people I talked with who appeared to be the most extroverted had relatively little to say about themselves in the sense of articulating what being themselves meant to them personally. The crest of energy many extroverts find in some aspects of public ministry, and the corresponding exhaustion it yields in some introverts, didn’t seem to cause or even correlate with their respective abilities or willingness to be fully themselves in those settings. Instead, the key factors were whether the individual had a foundation in their life that allowed them the room to be themselves and had an ongoing discernment of how to be themselves in the various situations and circumstances of their lives.

VULNERABLE RELATIONSHIPS

Let’s move to the second aspect of our foundation: relationships. You probably already realize how critical close relationships are—relationships where you can be completely vulnerable, relationships that hold your most complex and messy experiences, that care for your rawest emotions. The difficulty isn’t in realizing you need these relationships at all, but in recognizing how important they become when you are in professional ministry, and how, for those of us working in churches, particularly as pastors, those close relationships can no longer be with the congregants we serve, because of the power differential between us. If you were raised in the church, you may be used to your closest relationships growing out of the fabric of the congregation. Even though we can still be vulnerable and bring difficult experiences into that ministry space, our most vulnerable relationships are now outside of our congregation instead of within it.

Moving to the professional side of ministry can also make us more aware that Christian people are just people, with all the messiness that being human entails. Unless we grew up with deep ministry connections (such as having a parent who is a pastor) and have already grasped this fact, we may grow disappointed and burdened by the emotional weight of the pastoral care many of us give.

As a result, we need relationships of vulnerability coupled with counsel (whether formally, as with a therapist or spiritual director, or more informally with trusted colleagues), to make sense of this challenging aspect of ministry. Leah D. Schade, an ordained minister and seminary professor, tells me, “I have a place to go with whatever the residual is from this emotional roller coaster. And it’s not in a bottle of alcohol, and it’s not in a bottle of pills; it’s in a person that I can confide in and who I trust to help me work through this.” People rely on our counsel, and we need people who can be that counsel for us. “It’s their job to do for you,” Schade continues, “what you do for everybody else—listen, help you process, and offer guidance.”

This shift in how we relate to people who aren’t in professional ministry isn’t a form of deception, and it isn’t a way of making ourselves smaller. “It’s just being human and appropriately so,” explains musician Robert McCormick. By embracing the relational fullness that is part of being human, we emulate Jesus, our model of perfect humanity—Jesus, the one who went away from the crowds to be with his closest friends, who wept with Mary and Martha. Thinking of those stories, pastor Magrey deVega says, “I’m imagining Jesus in those self-contained, safe contexts with those disciples, just letting out another side of himself because he was fully human.” McCormick and deVega, like many others I interviewed, point to how they need these closer relationships to be in the fullness of themselves.

Close Relationships and Criticism

One important aspect of our close relationships is how those people can give credible criticism and critique of us and what we do. Criticism is always with us, and our fear of it—for many of us, more prominent than the fear of failure—can color much of our public-facing work. What kind of backlash could this sermon provoke? Will people think I’m dumb if I . . .? It takes bravery to show up and minister, knowing that simply doing our jobs, and doing them as ourselves, will provoke criticism that is truly of us, not a facade we’re hiding behind.

We may also experience others’ criticism of our public work as criticism for who we are. Easy as it ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Foundation for Being Fully Ourselves
• 2. Power, Pedestals, and Other Complications of Professional Ministry
• 3. Authenticity, Sincerity, and Other Ways to Imagine How to Be Ourselves
• 4. Communicating with Neighbors We Know—And Those We Don’t
• 5. Skewed Reality or a Slice of Life?
• 6. For the Sake of Our Neighbors
• 7. Sharing Our Valleys with Others (Or Not)
• 8. Fully Present Is Fully Ourselves
• Conclusion
• List of Interviewees
• Acknowledgments
• Notes