Ministry

Busyness is the hymn of our age. Our mantra, our anthem, our expectation.  

Unless you’re Eugene Peterson. 

Peterson defines "busy" as the symptom not of commitment but of betrayal. Busy pastors are not demonstrating devotion; they are exercising defection [1]. 

Peterson first published these words in 1981, but ministry professionals have hardly heeded his counsel. As I think of the pastors I know and when I reminisce on my time in that role, I don’t believe there’s a more fitting descriptor for the state of the pastorate than busy. The demands of church ministry are rising, the focus of parishioners is dwindling, and the results of our disciple-making efforts are plateauing [2]. Is it any wonder then, that our typical response is to increase our labour and fill our calendars with more? 

Peterson reveals two causes for his own busyness and he describes each as ignoble: 

I am busy because I am vain 

Peterson draws a connecting line between busyness and the allure of success and his comparison speaks even louder today. In a recent United States study, researchers found that a busier person is thought to have higher status [3]. This may explain why free time is frantically consumed by fruitless activity—perhaps it is this perception that fuels our resistance to be still.  

I worked at a golf and country club for several years when I was a young adult. The course was only closed two days a year, so there were many poor-weather-days when I was left with almost nothing to do. But my boss loved to remind us that we weren’t being paid to do nothing, so I learned how to develop endless ways to appear busy. I once overheard my boss tell a co-worker, “You can’t just stand there even if there’s nothing to do. Do what Keith does—he always looks busy.” It didn’t take long for me to discover it was more valuable to look busy than to do something productive. If I don’t consciously fight against this false value, I fall into the trap of doing busy work instead of important work.  

I am busy because I am lazy 

Laziness breeds busyness despite masking itself as an unlikely precursor. Peterson explains that when pastors allow others to decide their schedule, they become slaves to unnecessary assignments that detract from their core responsibilities. Many pastors will accept these tasks as part of their jobs, but Peterson offers a different perspective: when pastors abdicate their essential work, it’s an indication of their propensity to cater to the desires of others and their unwillingness to stand up for the priorities of the pastorate. 

Note: This topic of strengthening prayer in your church is one of eleven essential elements for maximizing discipleship in your church described in Dr. Randy Wollf's video course, Developing a Discipleship Strategy for Your Church.

It’s five years from now. Amazingly, your church has grown incredibly in the area of prayer. People are setting aside time each day to pray. They’re worshipping Him throughout the day. You see life groups and ministry groups making prayer a central part of their group time. You see a church where God is doing amazing things as He responds to the prayers of His people.

Sound exciting? How do we realize this kind of vision? Here are nine ways to strengthen prayer in your church:

#1 – Enlarge People’s Vision for Prayer

How do we challenge people to grow deeper in prayer? Preaching and teaching on prayer can definitely help. In addition, here is an idea that can blow away people’s conceptions about how God can respond to prayer today. Tell people about some of the spiritual revivals that have happened over the past 300 years (for starters, see The Role of Prayer in Spiritual Awakening video or text version). Knowing how God has responded to concerted, extraordinary prayer in the recent past can inspire us to pray in focused and persistent ways today.

#2 – Equip People to Pray

Most Christians know how to ask God for stuff. Yet, do we truly practice thankfulness, confession, and adoration of God? Do we realize deep down that the goal is not just to pray for a set period each day (as good as that is), but to develop a lifestyle of prayer?

The game of Monopoly forces players to deal with the unexpected. The board offers several safe spaces, but it’s mostly packed with dangerous alternatives. Seven is the most commonly rolled number—my friend loved to repeat this stat throughout our games—but players must ready themselves for the worst possible scenario, even if the chances of this happening are low. If they don’t, they face the unfortunate task of choosing what to liquidate to pay off an overwhelming debt. 

In Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s book called Decisive, they explain that people are more often wrong than right when it comes to their guesses about the future. The reason? We are naturally overconfident. Instead of preparing our game piece for the likelihood of landing on New York Avenue or Indiana Avenue, we envision the triumph of landing on Free Parking! Our decision-making process is clouded by misguided optimism. 

A helpful tool to reverse this trend is offered by researchers J. Edward Russo and Paul J. H. Schoemaker (this is highlighted in a section of Decisive called "Prepare to be Wrong"). They have discovered that when people work backward from a certain future they are better equipped to create explanations for why the event may have happened. This approach is called “prospective hindsight.”

Why does this method work? The Heath brothers explain that prospective hindsight generates more insights "because it forces us to fill in the blanks between today and a certain future event." When we cease to wonder whether an event will or won’t happen, we can focus entirely on the task of considering why a future event would happen. This approach can be used to identify factors that might influence positive outcomes or factors that might lead to negative outcomes.

In Monopoly, the negative factors are easy to spot. You are destined to land on Boardwalk if your dice create the right combination or if you draw the dreaded Community Chess card. There’s not much you can do to withstand either situation besides stocking the appropriate amount of cash and hoping that luck is on your side.

But when prospective hindsight is used in real-life scenarios, we can generate many reasons for why a given situation might happen. Even better, we can identify the factors that pose the greatest threats to our goals and allocate resources to stall these out.