Proclaimer Blog
Marriage & Ministry: setting priorities
I’ve written before about we can think wrongly about competing priorities in life and it’s worth thinking that through again. There is a school of thought which ranks our roles in some kind of order and then uses that as a grid to process our lives. It goes something like this: I’m a Christian first (responsibility to God), husband second, father third, pastor fourth.
There are two problems with this. First, it’s theological twaddle. Second, if acted upon it would give rise to some very odd behaviours and priority setting. Frankly I would spend all my time on priority number one.
But back to the twaddle. It’s simply incorrect to set things that God calls us to do well against our responsibility to him. They are not two things. I’ve been helped with this by something Christopher Ash wrote which never made it into his larger marriage book, but which is nonetheless helpful. It’s worth repeating in full and you therefore get the bit of the book no one else has got.
“The double-command to love God and neighbour is a unitary command rooted in love for the one God; Deuteronomy 6 is in Paul’s thought here (Rosner 1994:164-6). There cannot be conflicting demands on us arising from this one demand, or else the universe is at war with itself. ‘Hardly could a more frightful thing be conceived than that there might be a collision between love for God and love for the persons for whom love has been planted by Him in our hearts’ (Kierkegaard, in O’Donovan 1994:226). O’Donovan uses a cricketing analogy: ‘God does not stand in line waiting his turn at the wicket, not even at the head of the line. Rather, he brings this or that neighbour to the head of the line, and demands our best attention for him. And at another moment, perhaps, he closes the wicket, sends the whole line away, and demands to inspect our books’ (O’Donovan 1994:233).”
You get the point. Practically what does that mean? I can tell you what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that priorities don’t matter. Oh my, do they matter! And we have to make wise and godly choices about how we spend our time so we can be godly pastors, fathers, husbands. But we don’t set these things off against one another as though they are competing priorities that never serve each other.
For each couple this will look different at different seasons and with different ministries. But a starting point for each couple is to surely list what God calls us to do (try to do that using biblical language) and then prayerfully and carefully evaluate the time, energy and focus you’re giving to each one.
That’s a start, at least.