God Never Requires Resumes

Finding Your Value In Ministry Beyond Human Limitations

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Weighing in at three-hundred and twenty pounds, standing at 5’ 10’’, with a vertical leap you could barely slide a credit card under, benching only the bar, and a forty-yard dash time that simply reads “error”, it’s time to accept the harsh reality the Seahawks will never have your number on speed dial.

The NFL combine has become must watch tv over the last few decades with fans salivating over which new prospect dawns the cape for their team’s future. It’s a meat market on steroids…legal, figurative steroids of course. Every player is graded on athletic prowess with every statistic meticulously examined in determining their potential value on the grid-iron market.

‘God can use anybody’ is a clarion call that repeatedly reverberates off the walls of any given church auditorium. Many grasp hold of the hope unpacked in its words with the belief that God will use their weakness as a conduit for His unmatched strength. Songs, books, devotionals, and most of all the Bible, act as a megaphone blasting how God can take the least suspecting and unqualified, propelling them upward, quieting any cymbal crashing from the critics.

Head-hunting has a dark and storied history in ancient cultures, with the Celts believing that the head housed a person’s soul. Fast forward to the 20th century, where the practice evolved from taking heads to stealing talent. Corporations retained the services of ‘headhunters’ to find individuals with a particular set of skills, employed elsewhere, enticing them to sign the dotted line of their corporate predators.

“But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.” - Bryan Mills

In the corporate world, your value is based upon the skillset you provide a company to profit from. Your stat-sheet is your value. The practice of headhunting exploded in the 90’s & 2000’s with the emergence of tech companies engaging in bloody talent wars over who could gain an edge in acquiring the nerdiest of talent. Certainly, we would never see anything like this in the church world?! Hold my communion cup.

The church in America has a long, sorted history of hiring talent based off resumes, rather than investing the time to hear the same voice Samuel heard in Eli’s temple. Headhunters exist in the church, scouring the religious marketplace looking for David’s older brothers with the exact skillset a church needs to launch into the next level. Whoever has the best stat sheet wins the highest prize. Just to be clear, there are people, whose full-time job, is to find the highest qualified church talent on the religious market, presenting them on a silver platter for your clergy pleasure. Additional Skills: Relationship with Jesus. Find us our king!

Here’s where this might get controversial for some: The church has no problem using
God’s unqualified to serve in voluntary roles, but the moment you add dollars to it, everything changes. Now, like everything else, there are exceptions. Nepotism can bypass being unqualified. Volunteering long enough to work out the bugs can be effective as well. For the most part, however, churches search for someone with a particular set of skills and overlook those who lack them. Samuel didn’t.

A church was searching for a Lead Pastor and received several resumes, with one flashing in different shades of neon. The candidate was from a large church and well educated, even holding an MBA. He was perfect. He lasted less than a year and was terminated, leaving a wake of damage in his path. Sounds a lot like the king God replaced with David.

When we allow the corporate mindset to creep its way into the kingdom, we hinder God’s ability to use the ‘Anyones’ for his Glory. David would’ve never been king, Moses should’ve never led the Israelites, Elijah was too depressed, Abraham lied, Jesus was from Nazareth, Peter wasn’t loyal, and Paul held coats. Imagine interviewing God’s Hall of fame in our culture today?

“So, Moses, we see that you led Israel through the Red Sea and that’s commendable, so what makes you qualified to preach every Sunday?”

Moses: “Um, Ah Ah Ah All I kn kn kn know, is thuh thuh thuh that God cuh cuh called me and I I I I obbbbbbeyed.”

“Peter, first, we just want to thank you for taking the time to fill out our questionnaire. We know fifteen pages seems like a lot, but we just wanted to be thorough. Reading through it though, we really liked that miracle from Acts 3 thing ya did, but do you think you’ve worked through the whole “betraying Jesus” issue yet?”

We like shiny stats on paper, after all they reduce risk and increase ROI. We pursue putting people on a stage who meet the right metrics and check the right boxes, without being concerned what their prayer closet looks like or if they ever go in them. In a stat-sheet culture, all that matters is performance, metrics and meeting deliverables. If you look like you can get us to the next level and execute essential objectives, you’re hired. If you’re obedient, teachable, and called, we always need chairs stacked.

We pursue putting people on a stage who meet the right metrics and check the right boxes, without being concerned what their prayer closet looks like or if they ever go in them.

We’re appalled when someone’s reality doesn’t match their resume, identifying discrepancies with righteous indignation and the lack of a mirror. Their calling doesn’t matter, and they know it, so they embellish on a human made form, hoping to meet man-made requirements, to fulfill their God inspired calling. Maybe they did lie, maybe the church cued them, maybe this whole resume thing needs to be sent back to HR where it came from. Please tell me your church doesn’t have an HR department…

If you’re at a church where your value is based upon meeting certain corporate driven criteria, then it’s time to find a different church. It’s easier to regurgitate corporate jargon than home in on the voice of God for the right people.

God has been in the business of calling people who would never even make it on a draft board or in an interview room and using them to change the world. He takes broken, unqualified people to carry out his perfect plan of spreading His grace and love all over the world, even the corporate one.

Here’s a hiring plan every church should adopt: Be still, let God speak, don’t hire until he does, ask for discernment, let God lead the process, and be willing to find the David no one else sees. Our value isn’t found on a stat sheet; it’s found in our creator.