Monday, April 15, 2013

How to serve on church staff

I loved the time I spent on staff at a church. It ended painfully, however, and I remember visiting a new church on Sunday and watching the staff: the senior pastor, the ministers serving around the edges, the worship team. I wondered if they were genuine. Was it possible for anyone to serve on the staff of a church and be a healthy, likeable person?

I think so. When you are on staff, you put forward the best person you are in Christ. When you serve, you do so with the strength that Christ gives. You think about who He is, how patient, loving, and kind He was when He walked among us, and you greet people with the love He has for them. I set Angie aside, and let God love through me. That sounds kinda weird, but it just highlights that I'm not the point. God is great, and the people coming to worship or serve or learn are very precious. The way you smile, the way you make eye contact, the words you choose--all of these communicate His care for each and every one of us. I can love each person I talk with because I know I am incredibly loved and accepted, despite my faults and hangups.

When you are on staff, you are a leader in the body, and the way you function helps set the tone for the body. My favorite tone is "genuine." I want to be genuine; I want people around me to be able to be genuine. Ministers can go from one conversation of celebration to a conversation of tragedy or desperation within five minutes. God is able to move that fast (even faster!), but I cannot without His Spirit in me. If you greet each person with love--not happiness or enthusiasm or excitement, but love--then your heart will hear what they are needing: a word of encouragement, a hug, some advice, a prayer. Love adapts; cheerleading is focused on the organization you represent. It's fine to be excited about what is happening on a given day, but it is better to love each person you encounter.

Sometimes, a staff member awakens on Sunday morning with their own burdens: not feeling well physically, some kind of discord, worries from a non-work area of life. The church where I served always gave me the freedom to minister to me. I arrived early on Sunday to have time to pray, to settle my own heart before the Lord. Any given day, before work, I could spend time in the Word or slip off to the worship center to quietly sit before my Father. When you serve on staff, you represent Christ. If you are not ministered to by Christ, if you are not more in love with Him than anything else, if you are just stuffing your own problems instead of laying them at His feet, resolved or unresolved, then you can't minister. You can't be filled with the Spirit.

Dying to our own selves is a lifelong process, but you have to be actively engaged with Jesus in order to lead. And those places where you are struggling? Sometimes, I surrender a problem to God, take it back, realize I'm worrying over it, surrender it again, and so on. Trusting God is more work some days than others. As a minister, you tap into this struggle when someone comes to you struggling. You don't share it if the person you are talking to doesn't need to know. But your struggle is a strength to someone who is also battling.

1 Peter 2:1-3 tells us, "Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good." As a preschool minister, I used to say that the preschool truths were the greatest of all: God made me, God loves me, and Jesus wants to be my friend forever. When you understand this pure spiritual milk, you can grow up in your salvation, to love and lead others around you.

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