For a long time now, I have wondered about the parable of the talents. It was a disturbing parable to me as a child, because I couldn't make sense of it. I understood the principle at work that the one who did much with his talents would be given more. He'd proved himself faithful.
What I didn't understand was the idea that the one who did little with it would have what he had taken away and that it would be given to another. I just thought him a bit timid, but at least he hadn’t lost it or squandered it, right? He wasn’t the prodigal, spending it on whores. He just buried it and gave it back. What was wrong with that?
I think about this as I approach middle age in the ministry and reflect on what I am really pursuing.
Ministry called to me at the end of my freshmen year in college in 2005 and I immediately, instinctively started to hunt around for models. At that time, Rob Bell and Mark Driscoll were both podcasting, neither had gone off the rails in their respective directions, and both were fun to listen to. Both had planted churches that grew significantly. They were reaching the lost. They were writing books about Jesus that spoke to people my age. They set a model for a certain type of millennial considering a life of ministry:
- train (or don’t)
- go plant a church somewhere in a city
- grow it through preaching
- write books
- change the world
Later I realized that I needed to listen to someone with gray hair (or no hair) who didn’t encourage my natural tendency to yell. I found Tim Keller. And yet, in my mind, he still followed that entrepreneurial trajectory: train, plant, grow, write. He just did it later and better. So that was my hope.
I think that was the hope for many men my age going into seminary or early career pastoral jobs. Many of us had this vision of ministry that was a mix of millennial optimism (we’re gonna change the world), evangelical pragmatic entrepreneurialism (if you build it shiny and hip, they will come), and revivalist celebrityism (if they come because of your anointing or talent, this reveals you are blessed by the Spirit). And in the middle of it were some godly desires to see people come to Jesus, have his name lifted high, and see the church flourish.
In any case, over the years a lot of that blew up. It got blown up for good reasons and bad. Some of it happened due to us simply reflecting on the nature of ministry and scriptural descriptions of the pastoral office. We were seeing godly, overlooked men who nevertheless served faithfully without the flash and were coming to recognize how much folly there is blended into youthful ambition. We came to realize how many of our ambitions for God’s kingdom were really hopes for our own little carveouts within it.
We also saw a lot of our heroes fall. Sexual infidelity, financial mismanagement, abuse, lying, falling into gross heresy, or falling into publicly acceptable and culturally popular heresy. I don't have to name all the names because even if I wrote them down right now, by the time you're reading it another one may have bitten the dust. Fill in the blank.
And so our ambitions shrunk.
Now, I still think I will have lived a good life if I manage to retire without blowing up my church, cheating on my wife, causing my children to hate me, or failing doctrinally. Those are good benchmarks. I think it is good for us to have had many of our ambitions chastened, humbled, purified, and transformed. I think recognizing the glory of ordinary, local, unsung ministry is right.
I am reminded of one of the scenes in C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce. Lewis describes a woman named ‘Sarah Smith’ who was glorious to behold in heaven—one of the “great ones”—and part of her glory was that her way of loving those around her made her a spiritual mother to nearly all that she met. That said, she was not well known on earth. But in heaven she is famous, surrounded and trailed by those she mothered on earth. Recognizing that there will be saints in heaven whose praises are in short supply on earth but who will nevertheless be famous among the angels and the redeemed is right and salutary.
And yet, I do wonder if all the chastening I have seen is godly humility and the godly realization of the hidden, spiritual, mustard seed nature of the kingdom of God.
At the end of Voltaire’s great satire Candide, after all the great trials and sufferings of the book, Candide and his friend Pangloss and their company of travelers meet a Turk who spends his life with his children cultivating his garden and that this keeps them from “weariness, vice, and want.” Candide takes this to heart and makes it his resolution to live out his days not worrying about the wide things of the world. Rather, with his friends, he acquires a plot of land and sets himself to “cultivate his own garden.”
There is a way of embracing the local, shunning the spotlight, avoiding the lure of Evangelicalism’s celebrityism, platform-obsession, and so on, of cultivating your own garden in hope because you you know that God really is in the day of small things (Zech. 4:10).
But there is also a way of doing so because you lack hope.
It is a way of settling for small things that really are small because you have no hope that God wants to do anything big, or if he does, he certainly does not want to do them through you, your efforts, your Spirit-empowered energy. This is not humility. This is faithlessness. This is burying your talent because you have believed hard things about your heavenly Father. You have made him a cold master in your heart who is unconcerned about your faithfulness, who doesn’t care to preserve you, who might not sustain you. Best to hunker down, keep things running, don’t risk too much, don’t attract the wrong kind of attention.
Weirdly enough, this kind of cultivation of your own small garden, not worrying about doing great things for God, can be its own form of self-centeredness. This happens if you’re still thinking of the church as your garden. If the earlier attitude was a youthful and naïve hope to build your kingdom by means of the kingdom of God, the latter could be described as a jaded “hope” that God will allow you to tend your little garden undisturbed as long as you keep it small enough, “humble” enough.
But neither of these attitudes are actually faithful. The first fails to recognize it when the master gives you talents they are there for you to use on his behalf. It is his kingdom you’re focused on multiplying. The latter neglects to use them at all or with all the alacrity and energy you have because it mistrusts the heart of the giver.
This has especially been on my heart because of the recent conversations I've seen around the lack of young people entering the ministry. Nobody knows quite what's going on, but there seems to be a degree of passivity or anxiety about pursuing the work of the pastorate among many young men who otherwise might have been wrestling with a call. Or among the percentage of those young men who do, there are fewer willing to take the risk of entering church planting. It’s even there among mid-career pastors who are worried to make the jump to a riskier, more challenging spot that might call forth and demand more from them.
Again, my point is not to commend one kind of job over another, or suggest that remaining and sticking in the same place in your career in the church is some lesser option. It's not. Nor is it to deny or ignore some of the changing socio-economic and cultural pressures that have contributed to that shift. I see them too. It is simply to encourage us to wrestle with our motives for doing so. Are we operating truly out of a humble desire to be faithful to the call to which he has given us, or out of a fearful sense that he will not back us in anything else?
I have not arrived at some perfect third way or balance in my own heart and mind. I’m still figuring out how to embrace wholeheartedly the realization that we are here to cultivate his garden. For that is what the church is. And in that case, we must do absolutely all that we can with the talents he's given us to do the best that we can in the plot of the garden he has seen fit for us to oversee. There is a place for godly ambition to see his Kingdom grow through our efforts. Otherwise, there is really just no way to make sense out of any of Paul's letters or the book of Acts.
At bottom though, I think this is going to have to involve relearning a trust that God actually wants to see his Kingdom built and God is actually for you in your efforts to serve him. God is not a stingy, miserly, harsh master. He is instead your Father, who out of love, gave his Son in order to bring you out of darkness into the Kingdom of light and out of his grace has given you a calling, along with the Holy Spirit who indwells you and empowers you to serve him.
And this is something I think many of us need to recover and pass on.
