Ray Evans on how God prepares us in ways we might not even notice
It is good to look back.
As you do, it is often possible to see that the various experiences the Lord allows can all be used by him to make a potential leader for his people.
Scouts
For me, on reflection, being in the Scouts was formative. I lived on a small RAF camp as a boy. The Scout troop consisted of just ten boys. There were two patrols, each headed by a patrol leader (PL) and an assistant, leaving three others per patrol.
With my friend John, I had been there the longest, and now that we had a few more boys we could form a ‘proper’ troop; so he and I became PLs by default. Before I even realised it, I was in a place of leadership. I had to make sure the patrol came up to scratch every week. Did everyone have clean hands and fingernails? Was everyone’s wog-gle straight? I used to worry about getting it right, as there was fierce but friendly competition between the two patrols for coveted points. At the time it seemed painfully unnecessary – why couldn’t we just get on with Scoutcraft, games and sports – yet the repetition of patrol inspection week after week formed in me a habit that became useful in the week-by-week demands of Christian ministry.
Maybe you can see something in your own life that has similarly helped you.
The ‘1st Headley’ (Headley Court) troop also taught me about ‘awkward man’ management. Unbeknownst to me I was learning to motivate, guide and unify a group of people who were all ‘volunteers’. Hiring and firing doesn’t come into play in a Scout troop. If they don’t like it – or you – they will leave. A lot like church, really. So here was a key skill being developed without me being aware of it.
School
School was another formative time. Let me tell you of just one of my memories. Learning the discipline of revising for and taking tests was, for me, a bugbear. I must have taken thousands of them.
Being a classic firstborn – anxious, introverted, shy, conformist, easily embarrassed, conscientious and feeling out of my depth much of the time – I used to study hard for tests. Of course there were many times as I got older when I wondered: ‘What’s the point of all this?’ But at school you just have to keep ploughing on as the tests get more serious in consequence.
Years later, with a well-trained memory as a result, I and the church I serve have reaped huge benefits from what I misjudged as many fruitless hours.
It may have been ‘playground rules’ that shaped you. Most children probably realise before they are five that some people are bullies and that you need to learn how to deal with them. How to befriend new kids, how to share things, how to let others have their way but also being able to say what you want – these are lessons to learn that are all relevant in church leadership.
Reflect for a few moments about your main memories of school, and ponder how they may be used to advantage by the Lord to make you a better leader of others.
Further education
Many have the privilege of going to university or college. What did you learn there? Two lessons stand out for me – relative loneliness and anxiety about the unknown. That sounds weird when it is meant to be the time when you make good friends and have a great time. Well I did both, but, underlying it all, those emotions and thoughts stand out.
The first was because of the realisation that no one was going to do any of it for you. Just getting out of bed and to lectures was entirely your own responsibility. If you didn’t turn up, no one was going to come looking. One day I was really ill, and I was struck by how isolating uni can be – I didn’t see a soul all day long as I kept being sick in my room. But what all this meant was that the ‘self-starter’ mechanism was being deepened within. And that is a key quality in Christian ministry.
What about anxiety at university? Ever felt it? I did, right from the beginning. Everyone else seemed so mature – in my first few days, I thought most of the people I saw must surely be in their final year. They seemed so über-confident, so clever, so at ease compared to me.
Anxiety didn’t easily go away as new worries piled in: the first essay being roundly critiqued; then, all too quickly, the first set of exams – ‘Preliminary to Part One of the Geography Tripos’ (which didn’t feel very preliminary to me); and then the first ‘proper’ girlfriend – who became my wife!
Anxiety can be a negative and destructive thing. We are told to cast all our care upon him, for he cares for us (1 Peter 5.7). But there is a ‘concern for all the churches’ (2 Corinthians 11.28) that is right and proper. That concern was far more onerous than the physical pain of toil and trouble Paul lists. Where did he develop an instinct for dealing with a harmful anxiety (Philippians 4.6) while keeping the proper concern which leads to a caring, pastoral approach (e.g. 2 Corinthians 11.2-3 / 1 Thessalonians 2.6-12)?
I picked up a lot on how to handle anxiety at uni. I learned to distinguish between the things that matter and those which really don’t; between the things you must do something about and those which you can’t control.
Anxiety has also been a blessing when it comes to people awareness. Looking out for the ‘needy, new and neglected’ is a pastoral staple. You always have to be concerned for ‘sheep on the fringe’.
Jobs and career
You may still be at uni, or you may be in the middle of a career. What are you making of it? Have you seen the leadership lessons God is teaching you? Or are you assuming that nothing like that is happening? God doesn’t waste anything in forming you to be like Christ and making you useful to his work.
Most of us work for someone, so already you may have seen how key the boss is to everyone’s well-being. It is reckoned that 80% of people don’t leave a job when they move on – they leave a boss! Now that is a key lesson. Humanly speaking, the quality of leadership in a church is a KPI (Key Performance Indicator), to use jargon from work.
You may have already sensed that good leadership is a combination of competency in two areas: good at helping people and good at getting (often repetitive) tasks done. Reflect on how this is seen in your present job and think about how this can go well – or badly – at church. You can see how a business or a service provision can be marred by a serious weakness in either zone. The church is no different.
‘When I’m cleaning windows’
What other leadership lessons is your job teaching you, which God can use to bless his people through you in the future? For me, an enduring one came in a strange way. For a while I was a window cleaner. It would take too long to explain why, with two Cambridge degrees, I was doing that, but there I was, roughly dressed, carrying a heavy wooden 21-foot extension ladder, armed with the all-important ‘scrim’ (the best cloth for cleaning windows). My ‘real identity’ – Christian – was hidden, as was my educational background. One person I worked for was a fairly famous author of Christian books. I don’t want to sound harsh or judgmental, but I felt a bit ‘looked down on’ by the body language directed towards me. It didn’t enamour me to the customer. What if I hadn’t been a believer and had known who the person was? Could that have damaged the cause of Christ?
How many times might I have done far worse myself? I realised how easy it is to falsely judge others; and how important it is to treat everyone with great dignity, for all are made in the image of God (also see Hebrews 13.2). A good company or organisation will know that it is very hard to change that first impression. It is a lesson well worth learning for church leadership too.
