Brennan Manning the author of “The Ragamuffin Gospel ” died this week after many years of declining health. We never met and unlike thousands of others, I’ve not read the book. But in the last several months a number of his quotes have been sent to me by friends. He wrote a good deal about the dangers of thinking less of yourself than God does. But he also wrote about “thinking more highly of yourself than you ought” as Paul said in Romans.
Because I have been watching the effects of younger ministry leaders being constantly pressured to build larger and larger “platforms” for their brand and message,” I remembered something Manning said while addressing a retreat of evangelical pastors of large churches: “The greatest idol I find in leaders is ambition.”
While that was quite a few years ago and his audience was megachurches, he could have been talking about how start-up ministries and nonprofits today are saturated with advice and consulting on how to expand their influence and followers. By now it’s common knowledge that you need an established platform for sales before a publisher will consider working with you. So this means a great deal of time is spent making the rounds of conferences, retweeting any mentions of something you have said and hoping for the big break.
The temptation of building a platform is, ironically that it seems a perfect fit for the idol for which it is designed. By the time you’ve built it, the ambition required to do so has shaped your soul. Our platforms become the gallows upon which our humility is hanged.
Brennan said something else about the idol of ambition: “Do the truth quietly without display.” How difficult that is when everything in the world is asking you to trumpet your successes and digitally display everything you are doing to change or fix the world.
The world does not reward obscurity, does it?
These are not temptations reserved for the young. Even now for the older ministry leaders, the attraction of great places, platforms, and recognition is strongly tempting. In some ways even more so. We feel we have less time remaining to make an impact or leave a legacy. I understand that completely.
Still, I return more often now to the passage in Peter where he says we are to humble ourselves under God’s mighty hand and in due time we will be lifted up.
Doing the truth quietly without display – and still trusting – will take you in a different direction from the idolatry of unhealthy ambition.