By Joe Steinke

A very wise mentor friend of mine once said to me;  Joey, don’t ask this season of life to deliver more than it has to offer, because if you do, you may become deeply discouraged.  

I was in my late twenties working 3 part time jobs, cobbling together enough income to sustain our young family of 4 staircase kids who came 2 years apart. Yup, did that all before turning thirty. Angie and I were part of a big church on a 30 acre campus with 1500 members that sponsored a K-12 school and a daycare serving over 350 families. Guess what I did? I got a part time gig as a teacher in the school, volunteered my way into pioneering a part time role as a Middle School Pastor, ran the afterschool program for 150 elementary kids, led worship for Sunday night services, and yes, for a 2 year season, drove a school bus in the morning and afternoon.

In a certain taxonomy of Leadership Development Theory,  they call these years the Ministry Maturing Stage or as my friend Jon Petersen likes to call them, the Buffet Years. I kinda like the Buffet Years better as a description of the All You Can Eat menu from the ministry buffet that is a big local church. 

We were young and I was full of gregarious energy that afforded spending long days in ministry work and family life. I’d roll home around 6pm and eat dinner with Angie and the kids and promptly fall asleep in a post-food coma for half an hour until I got jumped on by one of the boys. We rode the ragged edge of life with 2 wheels in the ditch kicking up mud for many of those years, but to be honest, it was mostly a lot of fun. 

But there were some angsty days where I was corralling 50 elementary kids into a herd and rolling ‘em out to a chaotic afternoon of shouting, screaming, and busting up arguments about who’s in or out in the foursquare match on a hot black pavement parking lot, asking myself: 

Is this the kind of vocational call to ministry you got zinged at an altar forJoe? 

It wasn’t how I thought I’d be using my East Asian degree and street fluent Mandarin in some closed country, clandestinely preaching the Gospel creatively using the Trojan Horse of the arts and education. But these are the things you’re inspired to forecast when you let your imagination run into the future in your early twenties. It’s all so cinematic with you as the hero along with your adventuring friends, or better yet,  a heroine lover at your side! Yes, yes, that’s how we dream it!

And then you wake up on the eve of 30 something, tired to the bone, asking yourself some existential questions about how you got here, and something in the dissonance between your dreamy future and your daily dread starts to rumble on the faultline of your deep disappointment. And that rumble is unsettling, it’s destabilizing to your confident stance on the ground of your current life, and you’ve just entered your first vocational crisis…right on time. And you hear the voice of your mentor in your ear haunting you with words so true yet so relieving; 

Joey, don’t ask this season of life to deliver more than it has to offer, because if you do, you may become deeply discouraged. 

Taking this advice, let’s settle into these Buffet Years for a bit and see what this season of leadership development has to offer us. One of the keen insights of this theory is how it proposes that we, as ambitious and eager leaders, are running our ego’s hot while the work of God is secretly forging our character with spiritual fires that test our mettle. We think it’s all about what we are doing to make a dent in the world, while God is making a dented impression of the Jesus Way into the moldable places of our heart. 

So, here’s an invitation for us to settle into our Ministry Maturing  Stage¹ of life with grace.  The general timeframe for these Buffet Years is from our mid-twenties to our young forties.  I’ll offer a spiritual direction question as a companion to each of the following markers as a way to reflect on them as you take a few moments to walk with me through these essential insights for maturing into a healthy leader. 

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Ministry Maturing Markers

We are invited to serve and take on responsibility for ministry tasks and the challenges they bring to prove our motivation and submission. 

Q? Where am I finding resistance to the ministry tasks I’m responsible for? What is the invitation here from God? 

Ministry assignments come from the Lord, but often are in the context of a leader who begins to recognize our potential for servant leadership. 

Q? Who am I doing this for? Why am I doing this? 

Our idealism gets punctured and we experience what the beautiful letdown is all about by embracing failure as our tutor, instructing us in Jesus’ way of humility and meekness. 

Q? Recently, when and where was my ego bruised and how did I react or respond? 

Q? Have I failed at something that had a deep impact on my life? Was it a beautiful letdown or an ugly meltdown? Why? Is there anything more to learn from this? 

Key Paradigm Shift – Transactional vs Relational Leadership

Q? Am I being used for what I have to offer this ministry? Am I using others for what they have to offer? What might it look like for me to adopt a paradigm that says: The people are the work of the ministry, not the programs I run or the platforms I’m on? 

We begin to build a family of friends, who are our comrades, and learn how to make mutual commitments in a culture of trust as our covenant spiritual family. 

Q? Whom do I trust to walk with me through all of the turbulence and trouble life brings? 

Q? Do I have a safe and confidential place to be seen, heard and known and still be loved? 

We get insights into the structures and systems that need to be challenged and changed and learn how to speak to those who hold power in a way that is both prophetic and compassionate. Oftentimes this invites a Leadership Backlash which is so important for our development. I call it –  Meekness Training.² 

Q? When have I experienced a Leadership Backlash for trying to speak my mind on something I felt needed to be addressed? How did this go? 

Q? What might it feel like if I find myself mumbling under my breath;  “Yet not my will, but Yours be done” when I’m having that imaginary argument in my head with this person? 

We discover the nature of working in a team and the relational dynamics that are fraught with potential conflict. We learn to harness conflict as a transformational presence in our closest relationships. 

Q? I call up and remember a recent scenario where there was conflict on my team. How did this make me feel? What might be an invitation into transformation for me in this situation? 

We learn through disappointing others how to exercise our authority in a way that honors the value and voice of those we lead. 

Q? What are the power dynamics at play in my ministry relationships? Am I aware of how I impact others with how I exercise this power? What might God be saying to me about this? 

During the ministry maturing years, there can be a sense of climbing the ladder of ministry success, seeking More as the modus operandi of Ministry in ‘Merica. More fruit. More influence. More numbers. More money. More fill in the ______________!

It needs to dawn upon our hearts that God is not preparing us for more ministry, but ministry is preparing us for more of God.  

As is the theme in almost all of the biblical stories about who’s in charge of anything in the world and the universe, there’s always someone making a big claim on a piece of it somewhere that God has a way of addressing their delusion in due time. Well, for us, it’s the idol of ministry that needs to be torn down. God will not suffer the Kingdom to be claimed by eager hirelings seeking a name and place for themselves. So, the Spirit will lead us into the desert where we are stripped of all of our familiar comforts and our flattering companions, and speak tenderly to us there.³ This is for our good and for our future well-being, so we can be restored as original lovers who know we are the beloved, who have a submitted heart, and who claim no rights to anything but our life hidden in Christ in God. And then, we come home to our true selves in Christ alone, The Beloved One. 

Q? Gosh, am I climbing the ladder of ministry success? Have I made an idol of my own ministry and the applause I receive from it? I pause to let this question and the paragraph above have some room to roam around in my thoughts. 

If we’re in a healthy network, or invited into new relationships that offer a culture of acceptance without fear and judgment, we may gain a better understanding of the Body of Christ through experiencing various relationships outside the boundaries of our current setting. Some of these will be positive and some negative, but they help create a sense of who our people are and we find ourselves graduating into what is called; The Conversion to the Church. ⁴

Q? How do I see the historical Church? The current global Church? Is the network or denomination I’m in limiting or expanding my view and participation in the global Church? How do I feel about this? 

Most emerging leaders don’t recognize this, but we measure our ministry by productivity, activities, and accomplishments.  But God is quietly, often in subtle and unusual ways, trying to get us to see that we minister out of who we are more than what we do. It is the lessons learned during this unveiling-the-cracks-in-the-foundation season of life that lend spiritual authority and authenticity to who we are becoming and how we approach what we do. 

Q? Are there any remaining cracks in my foundation? Are there things that just keep creating a troubling fault line in my path as I traverse my journey of life? 

I invite you to consider how these markers and questions might invite a deeply reflective and honest conversation with a trusted friend. Better yet, why not explore these with a qualified spiritual director who can hold these things with compassion and care for your soul. These are the kinds of things a spiritual director is really good at, holding a mirror up to your life and helping you see yourself in the light of who you truly are in the loving presence of God. If you’d like to have a conversation with us to explore what this might look like, please contact us and we will follow up with you. Contact us here: Soul of the Shepherd.

Much grace to you as you navigate the terrain of your inner life, knowing that you are in the care of the Good Shepherd, whom you can trust.

1. There are 6 stages of leadership development proposed by Dr. J Robert Clinton in his book: The Making of a Leader . 1.Sovereign Foundations 2. Inner life Growth 3. Ministry Maturing 4. Life Maturing 5. Convergence. 6. Afterglow  ↩︎
2.  See the Series: Stories from the Meekness Training Files where I develop this theme further. ↩︎
3. See Hosea 2 for a saucy allegorical take on this idea. ↩︎
4.  This is a prime time of life to graduate from a Me/My/Mine adolescence to a We/Us/Our adulthood in our faith development journey. Some graduate, others don’t. This Conversion to the Church awakens us to hold our individual opinions and particular practices with an epistemic humility that honors a beautiful vision of unity and diversity within the historical and global expressions of the Church. ↩︎