More on Christian Ambition

Nanci quoted it, and I'm going to as well. The blogger is Dirty Shame (great name for a blog, by the way), the post is Apologia:

I was raised a pastor's son, spent quite some time in my father's footsteps, and have lived the last few years, still credentialed, but off to the side. This is what I see - roadkill, the Church is strewn with it, the air acrid, the ground stained. But we just keep on truckin', pursuing the visions in our own heads, barreling down the highway in our pink cadillacs of missional love, forgetting what lies behind, no turning back, no turning back. Everyone seems heavenbent on being part of a movement, if not leading one. I'm sure they're out there, but I can't hear a single voice interested in a stop-and-back-up-ment, maybe a pull-over-on-the-shoulder-ment. If we just keep moving the cries are muffled, hardly a whisper. We've got places to go, busy, busy, busy.

This touches on what I wrote the other day concerning Christian ambition. We have a tendency to honor personal ambition--just like the culture--as long as it has a "missional" sheen to it. I know plenty of people who try to hitch these two--ambition and mission--and hope that the kingdom is served as well as the ego. In other words, hope that we can serve God and be "successful" (in the commonplace sense of that word) at the same time. But it seems to me the early disciples gave up ambition for mission. They didn't try to serve both at once. In no way were anyone of them a success-story, a model of the can-do spirit, etc.

Just thinking out loud here.

On our endless struggle to think well of ourselves

Here's a bit from an article called Pastoral Narcissism:

T.S. Eliot wrote, "Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm, but the harm does not interest them … or they do not see it, or they justify it … because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves."

Although our mission in Christ is to do good in this world, we will actually do harm if our deeper mission is to feel important and "think well of ourselves." Eliot's words forced me to ask, How much harm do I do to my family, my friends, the people I am supposed to lead, all because I want to think well of myself?

The article speaks of "the shadow side of ambition," but I'm just not sure there's a "bright side." The author wants to salvage ambition (it's part of our American creed, after all) and even suggests that Jesus, when he said that the first shall be last and the last first, was simply redefining ambition rather than, as I believe, undermining the concept completely.

But anyway it's a good and thoughtful article, and the Eliot quote is a keeper!