Strengths and Weaknesses

  I remember reading a quote once for Oscar Wilde.  I may not have it exactly right, but it was something like “I love criticism, as long as it is unadulterated praise.”

Whether we’d admit it or not, most of us are like that.  We’d much rather hear praise than criticism.  I know that’s true of me.  When I ask Wanda what she thought of my sermon, I’m hoping she’ll say something complimentary.  I want to hear her say it was a good sermon, or it made her think, or it helped her in some way.  I don’t like hearing her say that she didn’t understand it, or it didn’t make sense to her, or she thought it really didn’t come together very well.  I may need to hear that, but I don’t like it very much.

This came to mind when I went to the School of Ministry meetings a couple of weeks ago.  A lot of what we heard from the speakers was what the church is doing wrong, what the conference is doing wrong, what pastors are doing wrong, and what congregations are doing wrong.  Now, some of the things they said—many of the things they said—were true.  There are certainly things that all of us do wrong.  I’m not a perfect pastor, I don’t have a perfect congregation, I don’t belong to a perfect conference, and the United Methodist Church is not a perfect church.  We all have plenty of room for improvement.

There are a few things about that, though.  On the one hand, if we’re going to improve, we definitely need to be willing to hear constructive criticism.  Pretending problems don’t exist won’t solve them.  On the other hand, if all we hear is what we’re doing wrong, well, that’s kind of discouraging.  We also need to hear some positive news.  We need to get the sense that we actually can improve, that our problems are not insurmountable problems.

And I can report that we did hear some of that, too.  We heard about ways we can improve.  We heard that we need to strive for excellence—as a church, as a conference, as pastors, and as congregations.  If we want to reach more people with the gospel of Jesus Christ, we need to strive for excellence.  The Lord expects nothing less.

Striving for excellence is a good thing.  We should all do it.  On the other hand, very few of us are excellent at everything.  Most of us have strengths and weaknesses.  We can and should try to strengthen our weakness, of course, but the chances are we’ll still have some.  

         It’s like sports.  There are a very select few players in a sport who are excellent at all phases of the game.  Those are the true superstars, and there usually aren’t more than about ten of them in any sport at any one time.  The rest of the players have strengths and weaknesses.  They have things they’re really good at and things they’re not so good at.  They try to improve the things they’re not so good at, but they’ll probably never become excellent at them.  So, they and their teams try to find ways to maximize their strengths while hiding their weaknesses.

        Jesus understood that.  Look at the people he chose as his disciples.  They weren’t perfect people by any means.  They weren’t people who were excellent at everything.  Some of them don’t appear to have been excellent at anything.  For that matter, look at the people the Lord chooses now.  People like me.  I have some things I'd like to think I’m fairly good at, but I’m certainly not excellent at everything.  And I never will be.

        Now, again, we need to be able to hear criticism.  We also need to strive for excellence.  But we can’t let our failures discourage us.  We need to keep trying and keep striving.  And when something does go right, we need to celebrate that, while still trying to do better.

        We should all strive for excellence, but we don’t have to be superstars to serve the Lord.  Jesus did not put together a team of superstars.  Let’s maximize our strengths, work on our weaknesses, and work together to serve God.