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. (more…)
This Lenten season has me thinking about the ways in which the attitudes long recognized as the seven capital vices can poison and sabotage our ministries. We’re looking at each of the vices in a series we’re calling The Seven Deadly Sins of Youth Ministry. By way of review, the traditional list of seven capital vices includes:
