Copyright: This article is reprinted from Leadership: A Practical Journal for Church Leaders on the Lift Up Your Hearts web site http://www.worship.ca/ with the permission of Christianity Today, Inc., 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. Copyright 1994. All rights reserved. The article is owned and licensed for use on the world wide web. It can be downloaded for personal use only and not for reproduction.

Pneuma is a journal on spiritual direction and formation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada.

Warning: Trying to be a godly leader can be hazardous to your spiritual health.

Perhaps the most subtle of self-righteousness is described by Eugene Peterson in his book "The Unpredictable Plant":

"In our ministerial vocation we embark on a career of creating, saving, and blessing on behalf of God. . . . It is compelling work: a world in need, a world in pain, friends and neighbours and strangers in trouble -- and all of them in need of compassion and food, healing and witness, confrontation and consolation and redemption."

"At first it is nearly visible, this split between our need of the Saviour and our work for the Saviour. We 'feel' so good, so grateful, so 'saved.' And these people around us are in such need. We throw ourselves recklessly into the fray."

Our ministries begin to deteriorate from there, says Peterson, so that it isn't long before we end up identifying our work with Christ's work, so much so "that Christ himself recedes into the shadows and our work is spotlighted at centre stage. Because the work is so compelling, so engaging -- so 'right' -- we work with what feels like divine energy. One day we find ourselves (or others find us) worked into the ground. The work may be wonderful, but we ourselves turn out to be not so wonderful, becoming cranky, exhausted, pushy, and patronizing in the process."

In substituting our power for the power of the Holy Spirit, our goals for the goals of Christ, our all-too-human work for the work of God, we've succumbed to pride -- at its most subtle, perhaps, but also in its most malevolent disguise.

Graceful Attention

Hypocrisy and self-righteousness, then, are the special sins of ministry, so it shouldn't surprise us that these were the sins that most concerned Jesus. When he criticized religious leaders -- really the only people he was severe with -- he never chastized them for sloth or lust. Indeed, he pointed to their hypocrisy and pride, the dangerous sins.

Part of the reason they're dangerous, of course, is that spiritual sins are not easy to defeat. They cannot be attacked directly. The more we make humility our aim, for instance, the more we're tempted to become proud of the humility we attain. One step forward, two steps back.

There is a more excellent way. The key, at least according to the church's best spiritual guides through the centuries, is graceful attention to our souls. Some have called it "spiritual direction,"others "spiritual contemplation." In any case, Eugene Peterson notes, it's the antidote to pride, and its cousin, hypocrisy: "The alternative to acting like gods who have no need of God is to become contemplative pastors."

Contemplation includes prayer and worship, but more centrally, it means taking time regularly to pay attention to what God is doing within and around us. To practice it effectively requires two things.

First, we need to find time to be alone, no small achievement for the modern pastor. Still, it is a minimum requirement. In the classic, "The Imitation of Christ," Thomas a Kempis writes, "Whoever intends to come to an inward fixing of his heart upon God and to have the grace of devotion must with our Saviour Christ withdraw from the world. No man can safely mingle among people save he would gladly be solitary if he could."

Later he adds, "Our Lord and his angels will draw near and abide with those who, for the love of virtue, withdraw themselves from their acquaintances and from their worldly friends. It is better that a man be solitary and take good heed of himself than that, forgetting himself, he performs miracles in the world."

Second, and even more critical, we need to practice a graceful contemplation. The spiritual sins are not conquered with gritted teeth. The harder we try to conquer them, in fact, the more we'll despair. A baseball player doesn't break out of a slump by swinging harder and harder.

Instead, contemplation, in the classic sense, is a "graceful" attention to our lives. For instance, let's say I've made a vow, as I often have, not to live a hurried life. I want to manage my days so I have time for prayer and for people and for the many interruptions that may be divine opportunities.

A phone call one afternoon, though, leads me to teach my son's mid-week Bible study class. Sunday, I agree to join a task force planning the new Christian education wing. The next week, I promise a friend I'll help him move.

Soon, I've packed my schedule as I always pack my schedule. I find myself rising early not to pray but to get to work. I don't chat with coworkers but stay huddled in my office. At home, I snap at my children and am cool with my wife.

Then I remember: I wasn't going to do all this! So I start browbeating myself: "You idiot! How did you get talked into all these commitments? What were you thinking? Now you're hurried, you're impatient, and you're angry. Some Christian!"

I've become impatient with my impatience, and angry with my anger. I had somehow imagined that I could, by a mere act of the will and in a few weeks, conquer a lifelong pattern. That's pride multiplied.

Instead, graceful attention means gentle recognition. Gentle because we're noticing something that a gracious God knew all along. Since he didn't condemn us for it, neither do we need to condemn ourselves.

"Well, Lord, I see I've packed my schedule again, and there is hardly time for prayer anymore, let alone the important people of my life. This was certainly foolish. Forgive me. Help me to sort out exactly why I do this. Help me to accept my foolishness and your grace."

Only when grace is the first and last word of contemplation can the scars left by spiritual sins be healed. James I. Packer, in his book "Rediscovering Holiness," writes, "Pride blows us up like balloons, but grace punctures our conceit and lets the hot, proud air out of our system. The result . . . is that we shrink, and end up seeing ourselves as less -- less nice, less able, less wise, less good, less strong, less steady, less committed, less of a piece -- than ever we thought we were. We stop kidding ourselves that we are persons of great importance to the world and to God. . . . We bow to events that rub our noses in the reality of our own weaknesses, and we look to God for strength quietly to cope."

Two Areas to Contemplate

Everything is open for graceful contemplation, for the omnipresent God can meet us anywhere in our lives. We can examine our motives and desires. We can reflect on the language we use to describe our ministry to others. But in particular, here are two areas worth examining regularly.

Pastoral Activities

In "The Minister and His Own Soul," Thomas Hamilton Lewis writes, "The minister's daily routine, so comforting, so helpful, so blessed to his people, may be his own spiritual vampire. The surgeon becomes increasingly insensitive to suffering in his intentness upon removing it. And that is well for the surgeon and for us. But it is not well for a minister to become dulled in his spiritual sensibilities by ministering so constantly to keep alive the sensibilities of others."

The most troublesome state comes when a pastor, "praying so much for others finds his prayers not moving his own soul, preaching so much to others and bringing no messages to his own soul, serving constantly at the altar and failing 'to offer up sacrifices first for his own sins.'"

As a fresh graduate from seminary, having just arrived in the community I was to serve, I met the local Episcopal priest. I was taken aback.

He denigrated preaching: "Don't get your hopes up, young man. It doesn't make much difference."

He made fun of one of the parishioners in the hospital: "Maybe he ''learn a little humility."

He made jokes about Communion, which I won't repeat.

As I was to discover, he was a pastor who administered efficiently the many programs of his church. He visited his people regularly in hospital. He was a fine preacher. But he had pastored so long, had done these holy tasks so often, he was oblivious to the sacredness of his calling.

Pastors spend a lot of time with the holy: reading the Bible, performing baptisms, serving Communion, praying here, there, and everywhere. The old adage applies: familiarity breeds contempt, more so when it comes to handling the holy.

The only way to throttle familiarity is to pay attention afresh to what has become familiar. Many pastors, therefore, periodically use their own messages to inventory their spiritual lives, or their denomination's prayer books and liturgies as devotional guides. Others meditate on the sacramental elements of water, or wine and bread. Others contemplate the mystery of words, how such intangible things can connect people and God.

God's Presence

When we start paying attention to what is going on in and around us, we start to become aware of God. All contemplation is, in the end, a fresh discovery of God's activity in one's life.

"Spiritual direction is the act of paying attention to God, calling attention to God, being attentive to God in a person or circumstances or situation," writes Eugene Peterson. "A prerequisite is standing back, doing nothing. It opens a quiet eye of adoration. It releases the energetic wonder of faith. It notices the invisibilities in and beneath and around the Visibilities. It listens for the Silence between the spoken Sounds."

One warm summer night, I lay awake, restless, and lonely for my wife and children, who were away. Rather than picking up a book or writing or watching late-night TV, my first three lines of defense, I went outside and lay on our lawn. I started to pray but then decided just to pay attention to what was going on around me.

I decided to look up. I spent most of my day just looking at my level and below. I see doors and windows and people and cars and the bottom half of buildings. So I consciously tilted my head and looked up. I saw the branches of our maple trees swaying, swaying against a sky dotted with a thousand stars.

I decided to listen. I spend most of my day in my head, listening to my own agenda whirl away, or at best, hearing the words of others. Now I listened to the wind, to rustling leaves, swooshing, brushing, rushing here and there.

I decided to feel, which I rarely have time to do. The warm air glided over my skin. Grass tickled my neck. Firm ground pressed against my back.

Suddenly, and for no more than a few seconds, mystery and beauty were manifest. The universe seemed so fragile, like a glass ornament, yet so wonderful, like a best present of all. I felt insignificant. Yet loved pulsed, through me, around me. The glory of God. I lay there for many minutes, nearly in tears.

I relate this experience not because it's unusual, but precisely because it is so very usual. Not that it happens to us everyday, but most Christians have had these little epiphanies. The great spiritual teachers of the church tell us that though we cannot control such encounters, we can lead lives -- of graceful attention -- that can prepare us and make possible such epiphanies.

Paying attention is more than an exercise in moral vigilance. It is not the making of resolutions and willful activity. It is mostly making room for God, and making room for love. The first commandment is not to obey God or to be righteous. It is to love God, which means first to be loved by him.

Only then will we have the courage to contemplate our hypocrisy and gently probe the pride that snakes its way into our souls. Only then will we obtain eyes to see God in, with, and under us, even the ugly us. Only this love makes the moral demands of ministry bearable, even joyful.

"Love is a great and good thing," writes Thomas a Kempis, "and alone makes heavy burdens light and bears in equal balance things pleasing and displeasing. . . . The noble love of Jesus perfectly imprinted in man's soul makes a man do great things, and stirs him always to desire perfection and to grow more and more in grace and goodness."

In the end, the right, reasonable, and ridiculous call to pastoral holiness is mostly the call to know and share this love.