When was the last time you gave some thought to what trajectories your ministry practice is setting?

Someone challenged me on this recently, and I found it a helpful way to really make me think hard about the patterns of life and ministry that are – whether I like it or not – becoming engrained into the way I conceive of what my working week looks like.

Last week I had the joy of spending two-days with some guys I trained with at theological college. We’ve committed to try and do this twice-a-year, to give time to ‘debriefing’ on our lives and looking out for each other. So on the train down to see them in London I tried to ponder this question of trajectories. I ended up grabbing a serviette and plotted out my ministry & life practices as if they were setting a course for my future.

And as I scribbled I realised that often I fail to think of my patterns in the present as a trajectory to the future, because I rationalise them instead. I explain them away (even if just to myself) as a unique ‘season’ that will soon change.

Picture the scene: you bump into a ministry friend at some conference you’re both attending. You know each other from way back and so you do the standard exchanging of formalities, and then they ask what sometimes feels like the dreaded question:

“So how’s it going anyway?”

First-off, your brain freezes. Good question – how even is it going? Ministry life feels like an endless to-do list and you’re not sure when you actually last did a pit-stop and got some perspective on it all.

But second, your memory slowly begins to remind you of all the things that aren’t so good about life and ministry right now. They come floating back up the surface of your consciousness like memories of a bad dream. Ok, there’s some things that are pretty much out of your hands, but then there’s all the others staring you right in the face with a fixed smirk that says, “Yep, you still haven’t dealt with me, have you?”

And so, thirdly – if you’re anything like me, that is – you then start to rationalise. Or to put it another way, you list the excuses:

“There’s good reason why things are the way they are right now…”

“We’re just in a particular season at the moment – it’ll slow down as soon as X is over…”

“I know that’s not ideal, but sometimes you have to compromise…”

I don’t know what it is you’re tempted to excuse, but I know what it’s been for me…

…my devotional life … my sermon prep … my prayer time for ministry … spending less time with people and more time in my office … quality time with my spouse or close friends … letting admin run riot over word ministry … trading off my theological convictions for convenience …

And in all these things I’m quick to reason the ‘season away’, rather than asking the much more illuminating and galvanising question of what trajectory I’m setting.

If things carried on the way they are, where would I be in 3 years time? 5? 10?

Or to put it more specifically: What would be the shape of my ministry? How healthy would my marriage be? How much will I have shifted from my convictions? What would be the state of my physical health? What kind of church am I involved in building?

And it’s not just that “what’s the trajectory?” is a ‘scarier’ question (and so more likely to produce change by showing you the end results). It’s also a fair question. My patterns in the present do become my default way of operating. Habits are hard to break. That’s just the way it is.

Like the stream that gradually wears down the stones, carving out a new pathway for itself and becoming near-impossible to re-route, so the habits we build up in the present become the course we take for the future. ‘Seasons’ becomes years, years become…

Of course, in all this we need to remember grace. The point of asking ourselves such questions isn’t to beat ourselves up. And there will be seasons. Genuine periods of transition or adjustment. A new role; taking on new staff; a new baby… But where unhealthy practices are building into unhealthy habits, it’s healthy to want to change – and I need God to help me do that. And what struck me in that train carriage last week is that the solution can’t be to always ‘reason the season’.

So have you found ‘what trajectory am I setting?’ to be a helpful question? And what are the areas you particularly focus on? What have I missed in the italicised paragraph above?

“I’m not sure I could do that…”

“Does God have a place for ordinary me?”

“But if we don’t do this, the church will just look so weak…”

Over the summer at our church we took some time to look at some of the so-called ‘heroes of faith’ listed in Hebrews chapter 11. And, hey, one of the preaching cards I got dealt was Gideon. You know, the dude with the fleece? Perhaps not your first thought when it comes to heroes of Scripture. I’m not sure if there’s such a thing as Bible Top Trumps, but I’m pretty sure Gideon wouldn’t be a particularly highly-prized card if there was.

And yet the more you dig into Gideon’s life the more you see he’s a fantastic lens to understand the way God works. In fact, his life is a pretty surprising insight into what faith actually is all about.

When we first meet Gideon in Judges chapter 6, he’s basically threshing wheat in a wine-press (6 v11). Now, because most of us don’t do much wheat-threshing on an average day, there’s a chance we miss what’s being implied here. The Dummies Guide to Wheat-Threshing would be quick to point out that you don’t tend to thresh wheat in a wine-press. That’s because a wine-press is basically a hole in the ground. When you want to thresh wheat you get out into the open space where the breeze can blow the chaff away. The point is Gideon is hiding in a pit. That’s how scared of his enemies Gideon is.

Then, just a few verses later, after Gideon’s given his first mini-mission from God, he basically chickens out of confronting his own family, despite getting a full-on Gandalf-esque sign from God in advance. He ends up doing the mission by night so no one spots him (6 v25-27). He’s weak.

And so we quickly build up a picture of Gideon as a bit of scaredy-cat. That’s to put it mildly. In fact, his own self-assessment is that his family are the biggest pile of losers going and he’s the weakest of the lot (6 v15). He is, as Jonty Allcock puts it in his brilliant little book, a self-confessed loser.

Later, his infamous bartering with God over the whole damp/dry fleece debacle (6v 36-40) is described – not as some model for how to approach divine guidance (as it’s sometimes taught), but rather to demonstrate loud and clear just how weak Gideon was. Despite God’s word being clear (“as you have said,” v36 & v37), it was still a complete struggle for Gideon to trust God and his promises.

So if there’s a strapline for Gideon’s life in the book of Judges it could be something like this: God chooses a self-confessed loser to show that it’s all about Him. It’s all about God.

The account has its crescendo in the battle between Gideon’s army and the Midianites, the enemies of God’s people. And the bizarre series of events through chapter 7 is all about God whittling down Gideon’s prospective army from some 32,000 to just 300 blokes. And it’s completely arbitrary how God makes the final cut: like how you drink your water! Since when did you get asked to do that at Sandhurst? The point is that God wants it to be really clear that he is the one who is responsible for the victory.

The key verse comes in 7 v2:

The LORD said to Gideon, “You have too many men for me to deliver Midian into their hands. In order that Israel may not boast against me that her own strength has saved her…”

And there you have it. Spot it? Weakness is God’s calling card because it’s in our weakness that it becomes clear to us that the power belongs to God.

Is it just me, or does that change everything?

You sometimes hear phrases that go like this: “Any great work of God begins with…” – and we fill in the blank with whatever it is we’re championing at the moment. But maybe we’d do well to remember that any ‘great work of God’ might not actually feel so great to us. It’ll probably feel pretty weak, in order for God to show us that he’s the one we need to be behind it. Weakness is God’s calling card.

So how does this relate to Hebrews chapter 11? Why do we have this self-acknowledged loser given a star-studded space in this apparent faith ‘hall of fame’?

Faith in Hebrews is always future-focused. That’s Hebrews 11 v1 right there: faith trusts God’s promise about the future, despite the reality of the present. And Gideon as a case-study gives us a particular flavour of this. Faith is all about acknowledging present weakness and resting in God’s power and strength.

In other words, faith stops looking at ourselves and starts looking at how great God is.

That’s the Christian gospel: I have nothing but Jesus gives me everything.

And thousands of years after Gideon we read of another man trusting God enough to become weak and going to a Roman cross, dying a gruesome and humiliating death. Though it seemed the definitive weak moment, the first Christians understood it as the moment of God’s power and wisdom in action.

The legendary Christian writer Jim Packer recently published a collection of personal reflections looking back at his life in light of 2 Corinthians. Tellingly he calls them, ‘Weakness Is the Way’. And I think that absolutely nails it. Weakness is the Way.

Weakness is the way when it comes to faith. And so it’s the way when it comes to what the Christian life will look like. When it comes to what church-planting will feel like. When it comes to how the Church will be perceived in the culture.

Because as we feel our own weakness, we recognise we’re completely dependent on God’s strength. The spotlight is on him, not us.

But sometimes I wonder if the way we respond to our weakness suggests we’ve forgotten that’s how God works. We hide weakness. We try and get away from it. 

And yet weakness isn’t the problem. We don’t need to get away from weakness.

So, feeling weak?

Feeling like this Church-in-the-21st-century thing all just feels so fragile?

Feeling like you just can’t do this?

Weakness is God’s calling card, so welcome to the Gideon Club.

This term I’ve been trying something new.

It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, and it’s certainly not rocket-science. To give her credit, it’s the Mrs that finally made me get round to it.

Here it is: I’m trying to make sure there’s always one particular part of the Bible where I’m wading deep.

Those involved in Bible teaching and preaching are often having to dip in and out of different parts of the Scriptures at fairly break-neck speeds, all in order to prepare the various talks, sermons and Bible-studies that are fast approaching.

I think back over the last two or three weeks and I realise I’ve had Philippians, John, Mark and Jonah open – all for a plethora of different events and occasions. And it can feel pretty breathless.

Of course a perennial concern for those who are teaching the Word is that we slip into no longer really letting God speak to us through those passages that we’re preaching and teaching to others. That’s probably not a hazard unique to when we’re teaching from a bunch of different parts of the Bible in close succession; after all, I can ‘professionalize’ my preaching even if I was preaching through just one Bible book! But maybe having different talks ‘on the go’ does make it slightly harder to genuinely ‘speak as those who’ve been spoken to’?

But there’s another concern that I’ve been working through as I reflect on the past year of ministry: my Bible preparation becomes merely fire-fighting. I’ve just got to get on and prepare the next thing. The first day of the week comes along and that’s the moment I have my first look at the Bible passage for next Sunday. Ok, so what’s the reading this time? And how many hours do I have to give to it this week? Right. Bish, bash, bosh. Done. Next?

I don’t go deep.

(And that’s not to mention where I find the time to prepare for the various other occasions where I might be teaching: small-groups, one-to-one, one-off talks, etc.)

So it’s probably for that reason that some wise but not-quite-that-old sage once gave me the recommendation that it’s good for preachers to always have one particular book that they’re taking a few months to be ‘wading deeply in’.

(To be honest, they may not have used that metaphor, but it’s stuck in my head now.)

Choose a book of the Bible and spend some time wading deeply in it.

In other words, open up the contents page of the Bible and pick yourself a ‘book of the term’. Maybe a Bible book that feels somewhat unknown. Or maybe one that’s all too familiar, but in that surface-level kind of way. And then really get to know it. Spend time slowly wading through it in your devotional time or on a monthly retreat day or for a couple of hours every Friday afternoon.

Go deep enough that you let it go over the top of your wellies and you feel it slushing around your toes.

To change the imagery, make that your book and just camp out in it for the next few months.

And so I’m giving it a go.

It’s early days, but I think I’m starting to feel the benefits:

Time and focus brings depth. It’s the chance to learn and listen and think. Of course we all come with expectations about what a particular Bible book is about. We may have heard some sermons on it – or at least on parts of it. But how does it all fit together? What’s really going on? Why has God given it to us? And how do we begin to bring that to bear upon life in the twenty-first century. Really pushing myself to think through those questions has got to be good for my on-going growth both as a disciple and as a minister of the Word.

Not so I can say I’ve mastered any particular book, but so that I can go deep enough to let God by his Spirit really master me.

But this isn’t just for the preacher’s benefit. In most fields of study, going deeper brings greater clarity. In the context of preaching I’d add to that richer conviction and more perceptive application. This is where you’ve got to love the idea of the ministry stipend. It’s essentially the gift of time, and ultimately it’s being given so that we can steward that time to bless others. Wading deeply in the Bible should be part of that.

What do you reckon? Is this something you’ve tried? Did it go well or fall flat? What was your routine for making it work. We will see how it goes!

And, in case you’re wondering, for me this term it’s Ecclesiastes.

Right, time to get the wellies back on.