From Sampler to Sower

The answer is 42.  But unlike Douglas Adams, I know not only the elusive answer, but also the question.  Are you ready?  The question is, “How many times, while laying on cold, wet concrete under an old, rusty bus blooding one’s knuckles on the cold, hard frame, will a youth pastor think to himself ‘This isn’t in my job description‘?”  And it didn’t even take me 10 million years to come up with the question.  Just three hours one slightly snowy November morning, lying underneath the aforementioned bus.

Why, you might wonder, was I under said bus?  I was attempting to remove the seats from the bus, so that one of our parishioners who owns a metal fabrication business can replace the rotting floor.  The bolts which held down the seats pass through the floor.  And the nuts which had to be held stationary while the bolts were loosened, were accessible only to someone lying underneath the bus — a job which unfortunately fell to me because my considerable girth is slightly less considerable than the guy helping me accomplish the task.  (In other words, while wide, I am not too wide to get under the bus.  But J-Dubs is.)

Every time my knuckles were scraped along the “rust proofing” (note the quotation marks, employed to denote just how rust-proof that rust proofing was) I found myself muttering under my breath something to the effect of  “They don’t pay me enough for this.”  Or “There’s a reason I didn’t go to school to become an automechanic.”  Or more often than not “This isn’t in my job description.”  It really isn’t.  If you don’t believe me, you can see for yourself here.)

I find myself thinking that a lot as a youth pastor.  Anyone who’s been in this position can tell you, there are a lot of things that I do that don’t fall into the neat categories laid out in my job description.  From cleaning the youth center, to fixing networking problems, to hanging out with K-Reb.  Oh wait, that last part is in my job description.  I just wish it wasn’t.  (Just kidding Caleb!)

There’s nothing that can poison one’s job satisfaction more than dwelling in the land of “It’s not my job.”  And while we cannot ever fully control the things we are asked or expected to do, we can control the way in which we respond to those things and the attitude we have while doing them.  I suppose it’s also true that we can control what we are expected to do by simply delegating all those things that we’d prefer to pass off to someone else (like, say, crawling around on cold, wet cement, underneath an old, rusty bus).

And while from a managerial viewpoint delegating would probably be the smart thing to do, I’m not sure that from a ministerial viewpoint that is always the case.  I’ll tell you why after the jump. The thing I realized while I was lying under the bus was that while taking these seats out wasn’t in my job description, it wasn’t in J-Dub’s either.  Josh is a school bus driver, and he runs his own landscaping and lawn care business.  In between routes, he’s typically pretty busy.  And while by mid-November most of the lawn mowing in Central Indiana is done, this time of the year he’s cleaning out gutters, raking out hedges, getting rid of fallen leaves and the like.  Yet whenever I need a hand, he’s eager to help.  When I need a driver, he’s typically willing.  When I’ve got to take seats out of a old broken down mini-bus, he’s right there with me.  About the only time he tells me no is when he’s already told someone else yes.  He’s the world’s greatest volunteer, and I’m not going to tell you his last name for fear you’ll try to steal him away from me.  And none of the things he does for me are in his job description.  He doesn’t get paid for a single one.  He does them all above and beyond his regular 40 (actually more like 50 or 60) hour work week.

And I figure if Josh can work and still find time to volunteer for the church, so can I.

It reminds me of my ordination.  It was July 16, 1999.  I was at the District Assembly for the Illinois District Church of the Nazarene.  Dr. Jerry Porter, the General Superintendent in jurisdiction, was meeting with me and the other candidate for ordination that year.  After examining us in light of the qualifications and duties of the elders’ orders, he said he wanted to charge us with two additional requirements.

The first was was that should I ever do anything that would disqualify me from ministry and bring dishonor to my calling, I must willingly and voluntarily surrender my credentials to the Church without forcing her to remove them by disciplinary action.  The second was, should I claim to serve the church full time, I must be willing to serve at least 60 hours a week.  He pointed out that as ministers we regularly ask volunteers to serve the church above and beyond their 40 or 50 hour work weeks, and I must not ask anyone else to do something that I myself would not be willing to do.

I remember thinking at the time that was some of the most profound wisdom I had ever heard.  It challenged me to be not only a faithful servant of the Church, but also her willing volunteer.  Of course, I already knew that I could regularly work 60 hours a week and still not complete everything in my job description.  It wasn’t much of a sacrifice to ask me to do what I had already committed to doing.

But what about all those things that aren’t in my job description?  Why should I spend any of my sixty hours on things that aren’t covered by it when sixty’s not enough to get through all the stuff that is?

What I learned today under the bus was that it’s just as important for me to work alongside our church’s volunteers as a fellow volunteer.  And if all I’m doing is helping them do the things that are already a part of my job description, I’m not really volunteering.  I’m getting them to help me do what I’m being paid for.  It’s just as important for me to freely give my time to do something outside my youth ministry bailiwick as it is for our parishioners to volunteer.

And if I can see serving in these ways as willingly giving of my time to work for the common good rather than being forced to do something that I’m not being paid to do, it changes my entire outlook on the task.  The work becomes more fulfilling and less demoralizing.  And I really learn to do what I ask my volunteers to do all the time. Besides, it’s been a long time since J-Dubs and I laughed as hard as we did today.  We both needed a good laugh.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go see if I can get this rust grit out of my eyes, and then I’ve got to finish up the work I didn’t get done while I was busy volunteering.