Do we need to have it all figured out?

Bruce Reyes-Chow, an occasional blog correspondent, a pastor in the San Francisco area, and the current Moderator of the General Assembly of  the Presbyterian Church (USA), has a wonderful blog post up on “The pastoral secret that everyone already knows, but pastors keep trying to hide”:  namely, as Bruce puts it, that

pastors don’t really know what the heck they are doing.There I said it “out loud”. We all think it, know it and hard as we try to hide it, most of the folks we attempt to lead, pastor and influence know it too. We don’t really know what we are doing.I have always felt like somewhat of an impostor when it comes to this amazing role that I play in the life of a so many: my family, the congregation I serve or the denomination that I am part of. It is such an honor to be called pastor, but if we are not careful, we begin to believe our own hype and then driven by an insidious need for success, we get into trouble.

Lest anyone think otherwise, Bruce isn’t just speaking for himself or talking through his hat here; I don’t know that all pastors think this (there are bound to be some who feel they have a pretty good handle on what they’re doing and mostly believe they have everything figured out), but judging from the conversations I’ve had with colleagues (including some who’ve been pastoring churches longer than I’ve been alive), he speaks for many of us.  In fact, I just had this conversation recently with a few folks whom I respect greatly—when I expressed this sense to them, they told me not only that they feel much the same way, but in fact said they felt like they know less now than they did when they were young in ministry.The question is, is this a bad thing?I’m not at all sure it is (and again, I’m not alone in this).  When we think we know what we’re doing, we think we’re the ones doing it—and that we’re capable of pulling it off.  Truth is, we aren’t; our work matters as part of the process, but it’s the Holy Spirit who builds the church.  If we know what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, that means we’ve found something we can do in our own strength that “works”—which means in turn that we’re the ones doing the building.  That doesn’t necessarily rule out that the Spirit is also at work, because we can never really tell God what he can and can’t do, but in general, organizations that are built that way, while they may be wonderful organizations, aren’t great churches.None of this, of course, is to rule out the importance of giving God our best; he commands and calls us to do so, and he uses what we give him, and it does matter.  It would be just as wrong to use “trusting God” as an excuse for slacking as it is to try to build the church ourselves because we don’t trust God to do it right (i.e., our way).  But it is to say that God doesn’t ask or expect or even want us to understand everything and have it all figured out and all together.  Rather, what he wants from us, I think, is simply to serve him as faithfully as we can see to serve him in our given situation, in our given moment, and to trust him for the rest.  As Bruce says,

I firmly believe that we must all live in this tension between God’s yearning for us to simply embrace our BEING and the gifts that God gives us to get out there and do some serious DOING. Neither posture is better then the other, but must always be held in tension; for if we sway too much to one side, we lose out on the opportunities that the other may provide.So what do we do to balance this BEING and DOING that God demands and Christ’s calling requires?We listen, we pray, we discern, we act, we reflect and then we do it all over again and again and again and again.

And again and again and again, being faithful day by day by day, until Christ gathers us home.  The faithfulness is our work.  The rest is God’s.