Self-knowledge for godliness and ministry (Part 2)

I’ve argued in a previous post that self-knowledge is critical for anyone who is serious about pursuing godliness and serving others. It is the junior partner to the knowledge of God, but it is still essential. As I stated there, the basic reason for this conviction is theological. However, I also think that self-knowledge is important because of observation. Over the years, I have witnessed people come unstuck, and it often appeared to me that many of these cases were because they didn’t have a good understanding of themselves.

One can see the importance of self-knowledge with people engaged in formal ministry roles. I’ve seen pastors of churches who were extremely gifted for relatively rare roles such as full-time evangelists, but passed such opportunities up to struggle as jack-of-all trade senior pastors—a role they weren’t overly suited for. And I’ve seen people who would make great pastors keep trying to take on roles that are highly specialized. In both cases, part of the issue seemed to be a lack of self-knowledge.

In many ways, ministry is not about landing the perfect position for oneself. God opens some doors and closes others, and we prayerfully seek to maximize the opportunities providence hands to us. So I’m not one of those who think that we’ll see some great revival if ‘the church’ can be more creative in creating niche roles for people. Ministry, like godliness in general, is fundamentally about doing what one can to love the actual people one is in relationship with in the specific situation one finds oneself in.

But I do think that a recurring problem is people just not seeing themselves as clearly as they could. And there are two recurring areas it seems to show up in ministry. One is people not recognizing their strengths for what they—either that they have certain strengths that they don’t recognize, or that their strengths are greater than they think they are, or even that a perceived strength isn’t really that much of a strength at all. The other is people not recognizing their weaknesses for what they are—either not being aware of weaknesses they have, or misjudging how significant they are by rating them too strongly or too lightly.

Such a lack of self-knowledge can weaken the ministry someone can do. In ministry, like in most areas of life, all other things being equal, we get the best results by playing to our strengths and finding ways to keep our weaknesses from debilitating us. Misreading one’s strengths means we miss opportunities, and good works that could have been done go undone. Misreading one’s weaknesses means we find people are unnecessarily harmed—that the good works we do are, in some sense, subverted.

While our situation creates the basic context for love and ministry, we usually have a certain amount of discretionary freedom within that context, and some of us have freedom to enter a whole new situation—by choosing a different paid or unpaid ministry position, for example. Misreading ourselves can result in poor decisions as we use those freedoms and pursue strategies and goals that are unwise for us.

It is similar when it comes to how we treat people. A big part of godliness is keeping our desires in check and self-consciously choosing right over wrong. But for many of us, there are more systemic issues at work in our relationships with other people. We often cause a certain level of harm, or miss out on the opportunity to concretely love others as much as we could without any conscious decision being made. Things just play themselves out more or less automatically as we ‘just do our thing’, often not even aware that that is our thing. We just see that type of behaviour as normal and obvious. And so we act and behave, oblivious that there are even other options for us in our concrete relationships and in our specific situation.

A certain level of self-knowledge gives us the ability to not be dictated to by our own ingrained tendencies and ways of seeing the world. It gives us the chance to catch a glimpse of ourselves in the web of our relationships. And this in turn can help us grasp how we might pursue different paths—ones that lead to more good and less harm—than the paths we will travel if we never reflect upon ourselves.

Over the next two posts, Jennie and I are going to discuss personality theories in light of this concern for a self-knowledge that promotes wisdom in life and ministry. It’s not because we think such tools are the great key; it’s because we think that they are a form of wisdom that can act as a useful starting point to pursuing the goal of self-knowledge. It’s not meant to be the law of the Medes and Persians, but a kind of worked example of these concerns applied to a certain facet of what it means to be human—a facet that keeps on fascinating people in our context.