Hello. This is Michael Charles Olson coming to you from the front room of the Jacksonville House.
This post is written for folks who are on the front end of feeling a tug into the ministerial life as well as those who are in the middle of the wrestling match that comes with living it. I guess, in its purest form you can never really graduate from it. It’s particularly for those who will brave the waters of ministry for their vocation (meaning it will be how you make a living), but I believe it will be a beneficial for all of us, including me. It’s called Used by God: A New Perspective on an old Prayer.
I have pictures of myself as a five your year-old standing on the platform of the quirky Pentecostal church in which I was raised holding a corded microphone with one of those brightly colored foam windscreens. I’m wearing what my mom considered my Sunday best. The bright windscreen makes the microphone look like a giant strawberry ice-cream cone perched right in front of my open mouth in the picture. In truth, my mouth was open because I was singing songs to the gathered congregation about the love of Jesus. They ate it up and responded with great charismatic expression, even applause. Fast forward 20 years or so. I have another picture of myself standing at the altar in cap and gown on the day of my Bible College commencement ceremony. It was held in the church where I would start my ministry career months later. The shot was taken by my parents who were seated up in the balcony while a prayer of commissioning was being prayed over the graduating class by one of the faculty. I remembering moving myself as close as I could to the pulpit where the prayer was being offered up and lifting my hands to heaven to receive whatever blessing was to come.
As I type this, I am now 47 years old. Roughly 25 years removed from the latter photo and 42 from the former. I’ve spent the last 25 combined years in both the Christian music industry as an artist and contributor as well as in leadership in the local church. For the last 16 years I’ve served two of the fastest growing churches in the country leveraging my energy, passion, and skill to build worship culture, teams, and environments for large groups of people at an extremely fast pace. The particular field in which I’ve worked happens to be a highly subjective one adding further complexity and color to the experience. Along the way I’ve experienced immense blessing, true comradery, and great joy. I’ve also been wounded deeply by people in whom I placed trust. I’ve played the part of the one doing the wounding as well. The journey has been wonderful, costly, and complicated.
When I was younger—even a boy—I remember praying earnestly, asking God to use me.
“Use me, God…for Your purposes, for Your will.”
What a prayer to pray, and at such a young age! Who’s to say whether it was born of nature or nurture? Probably some mixture of both, I suppose. I want to believe that the lion’s share of it came from the movement of the Spirit of God in my soul fleshing itself out in what some would refer to as calling, something I believe in deeply. Echoes of Isaiah’s “Here I am, send me” reverberated in my inner person, even Paul’s vision of the man of Macedonia. At the time it was beautiful and simple. Now, my observation is that the life of vocational ministry is indeed beautiful, but it is anything but simple. It may even be everything but. In truth, it is an amalgamation of identity, desire, strength, discipline, compensation, spiritual community, organizational complexity, and beyond, all inside and alongside the trappings of human brokenness—and this all mashed into one. True discernment is difficult to achieve while walking this road. I don’t know many accountants or actuaries personally, but on the rare occasion I get the chance to interact with them and the subject of vocation comes up, I get the sense that the relationships we have with our working lives are distinctly different.
There is a great irony that comes with entering the life of vocational ministry. The irony is this: it requires great investment and vulnerability on the soul level for one to be effective in it, but that very soul investment and vulnerability make the one giving it susceptible to taking on a deep wound. In fact, the reality of human brokenness in the presence of the family of faith nearly ensures that in some form or facet injury will occur in varying degrees. In a way, it feels very much like love, or free will. The presence of risk adds to the potency and value. In our modern church context, we make the attempt to dress this sort of thing up with corporate methodology and jargon, but the fundamentals of the world of ministry life and that of corporate realities are vastly different. The more alike they become, the less potent the ministerial heart becomes. It can be incredibly polarizing, like trying to serve two masters.
At times in my experience, I have relied on my own sense of dedication to the task at hand to keep afloat. When difficulties arise, I find myself quoting the apostle Paul’s speech to the Corinthians:
“Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers…”. (2 Cor. 11:24-26 ESV)
“Whoa,” I think. “That’s a lot.”
I’ve even used Paul’s speech to conjure up a sense of personal mission to motivate me in arduous ministry seasons. This seems logical because, if you believe it—I mean, really believe it, then what could be a higher or greater cause for motivation? After all, we are talking about souls and eternity—not to mention the glory of God. At times I’ve even compared myself with Paul. “Well, if he could tough it out, I better suck it up. I don’t have it nearly that bad. This is Paul we’re talking about; he is for sure the example,” I say. “After all, I did ask the Lord to use me.”
Use me—I’m given pause and reflection.
I go back through the rolodex of experiences in my own past. Boyhood songs in front of the congregation at the quirky Pentecostal church. The cap and gown hands-raised commencement prayer. Then there were the hundreds of hours spent trying to write anthems for both the local and big C church, and the letdowns that came when they didn’t land like I thought they should with the team. Or the heart and soul investment in church building over the span of decades and the pain that happened when it didn’t end like I thought it should. What about the bizarre no man’s land of trying to separate my passion and identity from my vocation at its season’s end when it was clearly those things that made me effective in it in the first place? There are these experiences and so many more. They are confounding. So, did God answer my prayer?
Well, if I’m honest with myself, when I prayed the prayer so many times and so long ago there was something lurking just beneath the words. I couldn’t recognize it at the time. The most discerning of us can’t. That something was me.
Ambition is a funny thing. It’s sneaky. You can easily dress it up so that it looks like mission. If you allow yourself to go far enough, you can give yourself license to operate in an immense amount of perceived freedom with it, pursuing your dreams in the name of God. People just might clap for you while you’re doing it. You can even use bible verses in the process. I did all of this. But, in the end and by grace God has and will continue to bring the slightest of the darkness in me into His glorious light. The two cannot coexist, so says John’s first epistle. To some this line of reasoning may seem counterproductive, like hair-splitting legalism. It stimies momentum and is itself the fruit of selfish thinking, especially in the world of fast paced ministry. They may be right. But here’s what I’m learning where I am now. I would offer it to those of you may find yourselves in the same wrestling match in the days to come.
There is only one ambition that can stand under the weight of who God is. It is not the ambition to be used by Him. It’s not that he doesn’t want to do this. It’s just that he wants to love you first. Here me: the only ambition that can stand under the weight of who God is, is the ambition to be loved by Him. That’s it. This is the greatest desire one can have. When everything fades away, and it will, it won’t leave. In my view, it’s what John knew so well. It oozes out of his canonical pen toward us even today. And I believe that if you asked Paul, the perceived high-octane, enneagram 8, elite apostle what he most treasured in his life at its end, he wouldn’t dare answer you with his missional accomplishments. They would drift to the side. I believe his mind would race back to the first time he heard Jesus call his name on the Damascus Road and the three years he spent discovering the depth of God’s love in Christ before he began his work. It would be the grand fountainhead from which his ministerial life flowed. I think he would consider his “light and momentary troubles” and all his effort and suffering to be miniscule compared to love he encountered in the heart of Christ for himself. It’s my hunch that with every missionary journey embarked upon, every community established, and every sermon delivered he discovered Christ’s love anew. It became his highest aim. Having this primary desire made him no less missional, nor would it make you or I less missional. What it will do is bring things into proper focus and make us correctly missional—salty to the world around us. Here’s the crazy thing: the people that enter the Kingdom in the wake of our experience with God’s love won’t ultimately be paying attention to us anyway. They’ll be too busy being caught up in the same Person we are.
So, here is a new perspective on an old prayer. Fellow minister, aspiring minister, or average joe Jesus follower—I wonder if you would join me in making it your own. We may find ourselves moving slower, yet bearing truer fruit:
“God, my prayer is not solely to be used by You. My prayer is be loved so deeply and completely by You that it can’t help but spill out to the world around me. Don’t ever let me get ahead or outside of your love. Don’t ever let me get too big or important for it. The moment I do would you allow me to see the fruitlessness of what will come from it and pull me back even closer to your heart.
In Jesus name. Amen.”
