What are you willing to give up?

In his classic book, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You (10th Anniversary Edition), John Maxwell discusses The Law of Sacrifice which teaches us that "A leader must give up to go up."  There is a price to be paid if one wants to be successful in ministry, in business, in family life, or every other area of life.  The more success we want to achieve the more it will cost the leader and the organization.  Think of the President of the United States and the personal costs associated with that position.  The president's every move, every word, and every inaction is scrutinized by everyone and criticized by many.  Millions of people are impacted by decisions he makes, and for some of those impacted it is truly a matter of life and death.  For the rest of his life he will live with a lack of privacy as he will continue to be protected by Secret Service agents.  For many, including myself, those are costs they are not willing to pay.

As a bivocational pastor the differences between being a pastor and a worker were quite obvious.  My factory job required me to be there 40 hours a week and do my job.  For eleven years I worked on the assembly line, so for those years I attached parts to a diesel engine as it came down the line.  I worked on various machining lines during my years with that company, and I would simply go in and operate my machine.  There was very little pressure associated with any of those jobs.  I had few decisions to make, and my job was protected by our union.

As a pastor my role was much different.  Each week, regardless of what else was going on, I had to spend time in sermon preparation.  There were meetings to attend and administrative decisions that I had to make.  People went into the hospital and expected their pastor to visit while others needed advice on how to deal with personal and family related matters.  And, as a Baptist pastor, I was never more than one business meeting away from being asked to resign if people became dissatisfied with my ministry!

There is no doubt that I had to make many more sacrifices as a pastor than I did as an employee of a manufacturing company, but these sacrifices are all maintenance type activities.  Everything I just described is just basic Pastor 101.  To take one's ministry to another level more sacrifices are going to be required.  As Maxwell writes in the book, "The Law of Sacrifice maintains that one sacrifice seldom brings success.  James Allen writes in As a Man Thinketh, "He who would accomplish little must sacrifice little; he would achieve much must sacrifice much; he who would attain highly must sacrifice greatly."

Too many ministers are satisfied with doing the basics believing that is all that is really required of them.  I would imagine that these basic pastoral roles are all they were taught in seminary, so when they accomplish them they feel they have done their jobs.  But, if a pastor wants to lead his or her church in doing great work for the Kingdom, more will be required.  Both the pastor and the church will have to make much greater sacrifices than many are comfortable making.

I can't tell you what those sacrifices would be because they would be different for every pastor and church depending on the ministry needs of the church and community.  It may be the death of some sacred cows that haven't produced anything of value in years.  It may be a significant investment of time and money in a new ministry that is needed in the community.  It may require investing time in learning some new skills.  Perhaps the church needs to give up its current meeting location and move to a new place that will provide it with better ministry opportunities.  The list is endless, and each ministry leader and church must prayerfully decide what they need to give up in order to go up.