For those of you who are in ministry either as a lay person or full-time, I have a question to ask of you. In my profession, we speak often of developing and achieving competence and excellence. We speak of clinical expertise and what it takes to become an expert. I know many of you are passionate about your respective ministries. You demonstrate this with blogging, attending seminars and summits, reading, reading and more reading, thinking, reflecting and striving each day to become better and better at what you do. My questions are these:
1. Do you think it’s important to strive for excellence in your vocation?
2. If so, how do you do this? How do you define or describe competence or excellence?
3. IIB has become a hotbed for book reviews? Why is it so important to read, to study, to reflect?
4. For those who have been in ministry for many years, at what point in your careers did you feel competent in what you were doing?
5. When you think of “experts” in the field of ministry/church planting/pastoral ministries, what descriptors would you use to describe them as experts?
Reason I’m asking is I’m at a point in my career where I’ve got some decisions to make. Your responses will help me navigate through these decisions. I recently attended a Symposium on my work in Montreal which discussed these issues but I would love to hear from all of you about whether excellence has a place for us as Christ followers. What does the Bible have to say about this issue?
November 25, 2008 at 7:15 pm |
Hmmmmm. I guess I’ll be the first to take a stab at this. To be honest, I don’t know where I stand on this idea of excellence.
One side of me thinks “Of course it is important to strive for excellence and I do.” I’m one of those who reads a lot and goes to too many conferences. I like to stay on the edge of new ideas in the field in which I work and even pride myself in that.
But the other side of me thinks “But it is not the same as striving for excellence as a professional pastor or business person.” To me that side of excellence is striving for efficiency, for slick business promotions, punctuality and that sort of thing. To be honest, most of that give me same feeling as fingernails on a chalkboard.
So the excellence I think of in my ministry is more like an artist…striving to re-think things, in my case the ancient idea of religion….striving to re-conceptualize the idea of people coming together as followers of Jesus. What do they do and why? What is essential? What do they need? How can it be fresh and creative, yet meaningful and fulfilling? Just as marketing and graphics are constantly changing…so this will constantly change. The basics are always there: fonts, pictures, colours / praying, reading, eating, serving….but there is striving to be done to find the right blend or mixture at this time and in future times.
To try to say it in another way: I recently read the book TRIBES by Seth Godin. He describes the difference between a manager and a leader. He says that “management is about manipulating resources to get a known job done. Managers manage a process they’ve seen before.” So management can be about efficiency, excellence, etc…but I’m not interested in this.
Leadership, on the other hand according to Godin, “is about creating the change you believe in.” Leaders dare to “do something remarkable”. So I want to strive to be a true leader that creates remarkable change. This may seem messy and unorganized, even un-excellent at times. But personally I prefer this 1000 times to being an excellent manager or being an excellent pastor of a well run church.
So am I striving for excellence, for competence? I think so but it may not look like the excellence of someone else.