Ambitious Like Jesus

If your ambitions aren’t worth your life, they’re not big enough.
Will Willimon

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

So my wife signs me up to participate in a research project at Duke that
was investigating the “effect of exercise upon Type A personalities who
had no previous experience with physical exercise.”

Why did she think of me as a subject for such a study?

A Duke psychiatrist had gotten a government grant to conduct the
research. As he interviewed me to determine if I qualified, he asked me
questions like, “Do you ever curse people who cut you off in traffic?”
Answer: “I’m a Methodist preacher. I would, if I were allowed, but I’m
not, so I don’t.” And, “Do you often think about people who have moved
ahead of you in your career.” Answer: “How do you define ‘often’?”

Finally, I said in exasperation, “Look. I’m here at Duke at the top of
the academic heap for the same reasons as you ¢â‚¬”I’m such a nice guy.
Ruthless ambition has nothing to do with it.”

Why did Leadership ask me to write this article? Just because I’ve been
elected as a Methodist bishop, have written 70 books and have a podcast,
that doesn’t automatically make me ambitious, does it?

You are right to be suspicious of anybody who claims to be free of
ambition. Pride is one of the Seven Deadlies, and I’ve never known
anybody who managed to get out of bed in the morning who did not do so
from some sort of ambition for something. Ambition is connected to the
sin of pride and is a breeding ground for the sins of envy, resentment,
selfishness, and vanity.

Yet it’s hard to imagine anybody who accomplished anything in life or in
ministry without a helpful nudge from ambition. Ambition is the engine
that drives some of our most noble accomplishments. Would Michelangelo
have suffered upon his back atop the scaffolding of the Sistine Chapel
if he were not (as many of his contemporaries judged him to be) an
insufferable, relentlessly ambitious pain in the neck who thought
nothing of stepping on every artistic rival in order to promote his own
work?

Recently a Methodist wrote me a letter in which she complained that her
pastor was “a pompous, dogmatic blowhard” who was also “insanely
ambitious.” Knowing her pastor, I did not dispute her complaints. Still,
when I responded to her, I said, “While not excusing your pastor’s
ambition, I must say that I know from personal experience how much
fortitude, brashness, and chutzpah it takes to enter a pulpit on a
weekly basis and attempt to preach the Word of God to sinners like you.”
It’s a profession that is not for the faint of heart or the shrinking
violet. Who would venture such a vocation without the aid of ambition?

Last week I visited a pastor who has a remarkable inner city ministry
that is an inspiration to us all. He has labored over a decade with a
meager salary and against impossible odds to bring the message and
mission of Christ to the most hopeless of our city’s poor. When he was
young, he dropped out of law school and headed for seminary, convinced
that God was calling him to turn his back on all the bright allures of
this world and go into the ghetto with Jesus.

Considering his self-sacrificial ministry, I thought him an exemplar of
the sort of moral heroism that occurs when someone has the guts to turn
his back on the temptations of ambition. Then he said, “My humble hope
is to be feeding and to have a personal relationship with at least five
hundred of this city’s poor before the end of this year.”

Thanks, ruthless ambition. He couldn’t have done it without you.

In seminary, we were sitting around one evening talking about our plans
for ministry after graduation. I said that I hoped to return to the
South and manage to preach the gospel without having a gang of South
Carolina farmers kill me for it. Another said that he hoped to obtain a
position as an associate pastor in a large church so that he could
continue to develop his own skills in ministry. Then this guy had the
nerve to say, “I hope to be a United Methodist bishop.”

We were aghast at his bald admission of his absurdly high ambition, so
much so that one of his fellow students threatened to slap him then and
there.

And yet, as I thought about it, I had to admit that all of us were, in
varying degrees and kind, ambitious. I also had to admit that more than
one of us hoped one day to end up toward the top of the clerical heap.
Compared with us, the would-be bishop should be commended for his
honesty about his ambitions. From what I’ve observed, the deadliest
ambition is that which dares not speak its name. Ambition denied can be
self-deceitful and eventually self-destructive.

I remember the older pastor asking me, when I was just starting out in
ministry, “Where do you hope to be in twenty years?”

I was shocked by his question. Me? Oh I just hope to be servant-hearted
enough to go wherever the bishop sends me. I just hope to be a good
pastor who loves his people.

“Be careful son,” the wise old man advised. “When you won’t admit your
ambition, you are setting yourself up for future disappointment when
your unacknowledged, unsought ambitions are unrealized or when this sort
of lying becomes routine.” Ouch.

So I can’t think of any reason why we clergy shouldn’t admit ambition,
shouldn’t examine and strategize on the basis of our ambition, shouldn’t
acknowledge and then realistically critique our ambition. I can’t think
of any reason why ambition should not be embraced as a natural, ever
present partner in our ministry ¢â‚¬”except Jesus.

The main reason ambition is a tough subject is not because we pastors
tend to be self-deceitful about our real motives but rather because of
Jesus. The one who modeled ministry by kneeling before his disciples and
taking up a basin and towel is the one who is determined to make
otherwise healthy, normal, virtually unavoidable ambition our enemy.

When his own disciples got into a squabble about their ambitions in
signing on with Jesus (Mark 10:41), Jesus rebuked them in the harshest
possible language, calling them no better than a bunch of
position-grabbing pagans: “For the Son of Man came not to be served but
to serve.”

Jesus modeled a style of leadership that we pastors are called to
emulate. Not only that, but Jesus seems to have a decided preference for
those who were not wise, not powerful, not rich, in short, just the sort
of people who were flops in the game of ambition. Even worse for our
ambitiousness, he said repeatedly that we are to deny ourselves, take up
his cross, and follow him in his own path of downward mobility. If we’re
to follow Jesus and exercise our perfectly human, understandable
ambitiousness, then we’ve got to be ambitious for what Jesus cares about
rather than what the American Way tells us to lust for. Surely this is
what Saint Paul meant when he said that he was a better slave to Christ
than anybody, “And that’s why I boast.”

“And when I am lifted up,” Jesus says in John’s Gospel, “I will succeed
in drawing all the world to myself.” Of course the irony is that Jesus
has a very odd, decidedly countercultural definition of what it means to
be high and lifted up.

“Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” says the heavenly voice. And in
every age, a few outrageously ambitious souls have responded, “Here I
am. Send me!”

The trick, it seems to me, is not to forswear all ambition but rather to
pray for the grace constantly to align our ambitions with His. Just as I
don’t believe that conversion to Jesus stifles our passions but rather
redirects them toward their proper object ¢â‚¬”passionate love for God ¢â‚¬”I also
believe that Jesus plays to our ambitions, reworking what was our
natural ambition to promote ourselves into a supernatural ambition to
please God.

To that end, we pastors ought to pray for the honesty to admit to our
ambitions, and then prayerfully to examine our goals and our means for
achieving those goals. Are we ambitious for that which the world cannot
deliver? Are our ambitions unworthy of disciples of Christ? What would
it take to make us think that we have arrived at something worth living
and dying for?

I remember Richard Neuhaus, in his wonderful book Freedom for Ministry,
saying that the most important decision a young pastor could make is to
write down just how much money he needed in order to consider himself
successful, otherwise you might be tempted to sell out for too little.

Neuhaus also quoted community organizer Saul Alinsky, in a meeting with
young clergy, asking them, “How many of you would like to be a bishop?”

A couple of hands were raised. “Well, you can leave now because that’s
probably all you will ever be,” said Alinsky.

We ought to submit our ambitions to the critique and the reformation of
Christ. I aspired to be the sort of pastor who could form a faithful
church, bring everyone in the congregation along with me, and be loved
and appreciated at the same time. Then an older woman said to me, as I
chastised myself for my failure to successfully lead during a
particularly stormy church board meeting, “Young man, you shouldn’t
attempt to be more successful in ministry than our Lord himself.”

From what I’ve seen, it’s not necessarily a sin to be ambitious for a
large salary, or lifelong job security, or a 40-hour work week. These
aspirations are worthy goals. What’s stupid is to be ambitious for these
goals as a Christian pastor.

I write all this as a simple, Bible-believing country pastor who never
intended to be a bishop, someone who just wanted to be used by Jesus for
the good of other people.

Yeah, right.

Will Willimon is bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United
Methodist Church and formerly dean of the chapel at Duke University.

Copyright  © 2010

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