October 6, 2009 | A fellow minister told me recently that a Sunday School class had asked for his help. “I was excited when a group in my congregation wanted to grow!” he said. Unfortunately, he said, they seemed to want him to give them the right answers -- some type of magical ministerial formula.

My friend, however, knows that ministry isn’t magic. And he had worked with enough groups to know that he couldn’t give this group pat answers. So instead of talking about curriculum, furniture arrangement or the thermostat setting, he went deep. He asked, “What are you willing to do to make this class grow?”

Questions can be more powerful than answers. Quick answers, however, remain a temptation. Aren’t we the professionals? What if people discover how lost we can be? So we pop off answers, jump on command and eventually burn out. But instead of answering others’ questions, perhaps we need to ask a few of our own.

I was fortunate to learn this lesson as a young minister when I went to the Young Leaders Development Program sponsored by the Center for Congregational Health.  Like many young pastors, I wanted to have all the answers. Fortunately, I stumbled across this program, designed for “ministers who are ready to ask the right questions.” Fourteen years later, I continue to ask myself the key questions I learned there:  Who am I? Where am I? What am I doing?

Who am I?

We all have a story, and that story affects our ministry. What you don’t know -- especially about yourself -- can hurt you. Whether in our preaching, pastoral care, daily interaction or other aspects of leadership, our story leaks out. Like the nose on our face, we can’t see it, but others see it clearly.

Ministerial education explores the biblical story, but often you can be blind to your own narrative. Before we can help others, we need a keen sense of who we are and why we are in ministry.

There are many ways to explore this question. To paraphrase the book “Smart Things to Know about Knowledge Management,” education is a great way of learning “what we know we don’t know.” Pastoral counseling or other forms of therapy can help us realize that “what we don’t know, we don’t know.” Coaching can help us discover that sometimes “we don’t know that we know.” And, I would add, a spiritual director also can help us discover “what God wants us to know.”