on being an expert

I've been thinking about my vocational history lately:  I began as a paid youth intern in 1995, taught Bible and History in a private secondary school from 1996-98, served as youth pastor from 1998-2005, was a seminarian from 2005-08, and have been laboring as a lead pastor for the past 2.5 years.  My career has spanned 17.5 years, with five different titles, at four different churches, and in three different states.

So what does this make me?  What am I an expert in?  Ministry?  Theology?  Church?  Lock-ins?  If I were to write a book, what would be my thesis be?  How could I encourage and train other laborers?  On what subject would ministries, churches, and conferences call me to speak on?  I have worked diligently in all facets of youth ministry, with local and international missions/mercy projects, trained adults for church leadership, preached the Old and New Testaments, traveled the world in the name of the Church, and humbly prayed with the sick and sore - but what is my expertise?

Sometimes I feel that my true reality is that I am not really an expert in anything.  So, in lieu of this affirmation, I would love to state that I've discovered the depths of humility and write that my true expertise is floundering in my sin and my only move is to fall prostrate on the floor and beg for forgiveness - but I have not even reached that.  I don't say this hoping that I fall flat on my face and reach the end of myself - though I am keenly aware after two decades of conversing with fellow spiritual pilgrims, that coming to the end of oneself is often the most glorious of journeys.

No, I write this out of a perplexed feeling of averageness.  I love my job, the people I labor with, the saints and sinners of our community, and even the idea of my calling but perhaps after 17.5 years I am at a stage in life where I need to seek particularities for the next season of my vocation.  I remember in 2005 as I was working in youth ministry and I had a bit of a revelation (or perhaps a web of revelations). It was my eighth year in the same community and I was at ease with my job.  I adored my senior pastor, I had a healthy relationship with staff and leadership, I had freedom to do my job, I loved living outside Denver, yet I wondered if this was all that it was supposed to be.  I awoke one day to realize that this was my profession though I had never been formally trained, I awoke one day to realize that the things I felt I needed but could not attain in my context were never going to be achieved, and I awoke one day with an internal, nagging feeling that I needed to let go of the ease of my life and seek a narrower path.  My decision: seminary - that seemed exclusively narrow.  I moved cross country, I enrolled in an academically challenged seminary, I took a break from student ministries, and I immersed myself in the great unknown of future possibilities.  In the end, I was able to come to terms with the internal itch to move to something new - perhaps, there is another itch that needs to be scratched.

God has called me to lead a beautiful community in Southern Ohio - and I want and plan to be here a while - my itch, this time, is not to go somewhere else, but along the way, to take on something else.  Maybe it's writing, maybe it's training, maybe it's speaking, maybe it's opening a much needed coffee shop in town with good espresso and fine pastries.  I don't know.

What I do know is that my expertise is not to be average.  In my first years of youth ministry, I had a mentor who told me that the two worst words together in the English language were "good enough."  I don't want to be "good enough," I want to be lasting.  I want to be stretched beyond being the status quo - and yes, I do realize, that by stating this and posting this, I am setting myself up for something beyond my control.  Somehow in the midst of my dilemma, control has something to do with it: on the one hand, I want to control my future trajectory, on the other hand, I want to let go and rely on the Divine to guide me.  Thus I find myself in what Robert Benson called "between the dreaming and the coming true" - I sincerely hope what is true for me thrives and swells beyond the average, and who knows, perhaps I'll pen a memoir about it someday...