WHEN we sense God’s call on our lives, we stand, like Moses, on holy ground. We experience God’s closeness. We are encouraged as well as terrified. Whether we are called to a vital ministry in our church, or to a more widely authorised form of ministry, my question is this: are we being called to strength or weakness?
My experience of vocation, ministry, and living with chronic ill health has led me to question some of my own early thinking, as well as many of the expectations about ordained ministry which emphasise the need for stamina, robustness, and resilience.
Two abilities are essential to the discovery and exercise of our vocation, serving God with authenticity where we are in the Church and in the world.
First, we offer our availability. Sometimes, it is just about seeing a need for which you have capacity and resources to offer.
As a new Christian, I returned from university to my home village to discover that new work had begun among young people. I wanted to serve God, and that seemed an obvious place to begin. It gave me my first opportunities to begin to discover where my gifts lay. With youthful eagerness and confidence brimming, I still had much to learn about ministry in weakness rather than strength.
When called to the last post I held, leading a new city-centre project, I wondered whether it was my qualifications, experience, leadership skills, pastoral ability, or track record that prompted the invitation. Later, however, I discovered that I was only in the running because two other people had been offered the post and then declined it. It was a challenge to my ego and to my understanding of calling that, 20 years on, the overriding ability that I brought to the position was still that I was available and willing to give it a go.
Of course, this availability cannot be without limit. That young Christian in a small village church found himself very much in demand. Over the next six years, I had a crash course in different lay ministries: home-group leader, PCC member, occasional leading of services and preaching, and even a year as a not very good churchwarden. It was a wonderful training ground for the ordained ministry that I then moved on to, but with plenty of warning signs about being too available.
And there were still lessons to learn about the dangers of building ministry on strengths and gifts (and sometimes even using them to disguise weaknesses and vulnerabilities). But these have a way of finding their way to the surface.
The Revd Paul Swann
As an assistant curate preaching on bereavement to a congregation about to lose its much-loved vicar, I became visibly overwhelmed by unresolved grief in my own life. It felt like a disaster, until the opportunity came at the end of the service for people to tell me previously untold stories of their own experience of loss. Perhaps there is power in weakness, too?
In Ian Morgan Cron’s book Chasing Francis: A pilgrim’s tale (Zondervan, 2013), Brother Thomas speaks to the central character who faces a ministry crisis: “Everywhere I go, people . . . tell me about their . . . failures. You’ll never be able to speak into their souls unless you speak the truth about your own wounds. . . All ministry begins at the ragged edges of our own pain. . . Tell your story with all its shadows, so people can understand their own. They want a leader who’s authentic, someone trying to figure out how to follow the Lord Jesus in the joy and wreckage of life.”
Ministry of any form stretches and tests us in the deepest place. We are inclined to hide behind strengths, but what if the better way is to make the choice to live with the courage of being ourselves?
I use the word “courage” in the sense of its Latin root, which is about allowing our speech to reveal our heart. It means showing up and letting our true selves be seen. That will include totally countercultural things such as:
- asking for help (yes, really)
- admitting fear (even among our peers)
- showing our emotions (both joy and sadness)
- sharing stories of imperfection (in contrast to tales of success).
It is hard to take these risks, but those who do so find that this courage has a ripple effect. The American academic and author of The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown, says: “Every time we choose courage, we make everyone around us a little better and the world a little braver.”
In the end, the greatest gift you can be to the people you are called to serve is to offer the real you.
I was committed to ministering in this way, but I’m a slow learner, and, like many, not alone in preferring to work from strength. But I was learning that that can be both a distraction and even a burden, because the more I rely on strength, the more I am building my ministry on sandy foundations.
The biblical examples are there, too: Moses, responding to God’s call by saying Lord, “Please send someone else”; Gideon being called while hiding away from the enemies he would have to defeat, among many more.
It is not by accident that the accounts of the miraculous catch(es) of fish are placed both at the disciples’ first calling (Luke 5), and at their post-resurrection recommissioning (John 21). Both times, the disciples are invited to acknowledge their failure to catch any fish, before Jesus can show them where the real catch is.
I have to confess that, in spite of all this, it took years for me truly to embrace a calling to weakness rather than strength — to discover that God requires us to bring, too, this second ability: the awareness of our own inability.
It took the onset of physical weakness to drive this message home. The first summer that I was ill, I took a break in the hope of recovery. When I returned, I felt a huge expectation to announce my healing. It was tempting to fake something.
But, instead, I spoke truthfully, announcing that I was no better than before. But then I asked: “Who else has a prayer which remains unanswered?” Of course, there were many. We spent time praying for those living in the mystery of waiting for God. It was a time to remind ourselves of this vital test of ministry, and to learn the willingness to say: “Lord, our nets are empty, but we will do whatever you say.”
When we reach that point, often through painful circumstances, sometimes through a sort of stripping away of resources, we finally experience a sense of relief, the expulsion of air from tensed-up chest, the glimmer of a new mindset. This isn’t all about me after all. This is about the God who calls us to be with him, and to bear his fruit. It is about following the One who was born into all the frailties of human flesh and journeyed his way to the place of ultimate victory, not on a battle field but on a cross.
I spent many years avoiding this place, giving whatever it took to bring all my strengths to the table, working all the hours available, and drawing on reserves of stamina, robustness, and resilience until, literally, I could do no more.
This is why the offer of availability alone will not, in the end, see you through. I simply ground to a halt. Body, mind, and spirit poured out to such an extent that there was nothing left. And there, when my own resources ran out, I found that to say, I cannot do this, was actually to begin a whole new vocation journey — from transparent weakness, rather than camouflaging strength.
This is the way of ministry that I am still learning to model. It may take an intense battle with pride and ego, as well as with the well-meaning encouragement of those who say: “You can do this.”
But, in the end, it’s a lot less weight to carry. It is a yoke that can be shared with the one who invites us to bring all our weariness to him. It’s the way of Paul, who discovered that in embracing his weakness lay God’s perfect strength.
To offer our availability while living in the knowledge of our inability is a new way of responding to our vocation: to serve Jesus and his people, without having to pretend what we can and cannot do.
Of course, we’ll still need to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty much of the time. Certainly, we will find that our training, experience, and gifts come naturally into play. But none of the disciples’ training appears to have focused on capability.
Jesus wanted those who followed him to know what it meant to be led to the place of powerlessness, which invites us to do the riskiest thing of all: to admit our lack and put our trust in him — and then to see what happens next.
After a short career in marketing, the Revd Paul Swann was ordained deacon in 1990, and served in two parishes in the diocese of Worcester. In 2005, he began suffering from ME/CFS, which ultimately forced him to take early retirement in 2009. A period of remission from 2012 enabled him to begin a new ministry. He served as Diocesan Adviser on Spirituality, offered spiritual direction, wrote a book, delivered training, and led retreats. Since 2019, a period of relapse severely limited his energy once again. His book Sustaining Leadership: You are more important than your ministry is published by BRF at £8.99 (Church Times Bookshop £8.09); 978-0-85746-651-8.