Your identity is not your ministry.
Your ministry is an overflow of who God created you to be, but it’s not who you are.
Your identity is separate, and it stands alone, fully autonomous from your ministry.
This is a simple concept, and yet it’s one of the most difficult pieces of knowledge to live out in everyday life. Especially if you are raising support for your ministry.
Keeping my ministry and my identity untangled is something I’ve messed up in every single season of my life, but thankfully the God I love is extremely patient.
We learn some lessons suddenly and other lessons we learn slowly, making mistake after mistake, and gradually finding a better way. For me, learning how to separate ministry and identity has been a long, grueling journey.
Balance in this area is what I swing through on my way from one mistake to another. But, like a rope swing, gradually losing velocity from an initial push, each mistake is a bit less extreme and each swing a bit closer to center.
I started my first full-time paid ministry position right after I turned 23. I had just finished University and the door opened for me to be a youth minister at a church.
Even though I had no idea what I was doing, I dove into the job with reckless abandon. I worked all the time. It wasn’t just my job or my ministry, it became my life.
It was at that point in my journey that ministry and identity started to co-mingle.
Instead of identifying myself as ‘Morgan – Child of God,’ I was ‘Youth Director Morgan.’
Youth Director Morgan was always thinking about the job. She didn’t take breaks. She wanted to be known for how well her ministry was going, and loved it a bit too much when people thought of her as a leader, teacher, and minister.
All false identities are built on a foundation of sand, so, after a while, my false identity started to crumble. ‘Youth Director Morgan’ began to fall apart.
She couldn’t handle criticism because her identity was woven into ministry, and, if one failed, they both went down.
She collapsed under the tension of outward expectation and inward pride.
Because of the constant mental focus on work, she descended into burnout, and that road was filled with mercurial emotions and mistakes.
‘Youth Director Morgan’ was my identity, so I started to look at anyone who gave me the advice to rest, take time off, or even quit my job, as an enemy.
There were days I would sob, alone in my office, wondering if it would ever get better.
I remember a night when I yelled at a student.
And, the time I was pulled into a meeting by a group of concerned individuals who were trying to help, but I thought they just wanted to get rid of me, so I started fighting.
And, the evenings after youth group when I would return exhausted to my empty condo and have a few drinks just to take the edge off.
At that point, I couldn’t see the good in anything, and I wasn’t sure how to go on with my life.
It wasn’t a pretty end. When I finally decided to quit my job, I was devastated. I drove home from my last pool party wondering who I was and what I was going to do with the rest of my life.
I considered myself a washed-up failure before my 25th birthday.
But, God was kind, and step by step God began to rebuild my identity on a more solid foundation.
I started working a temporary tech support job that I didn’t understand and didn’t care about at all. I still can’t believe they hired me. When a client asked if having one megabyte was enough for the program, I told him he needed at least 10 gigabytes.
In an effort to forget the demands of my 9 to 5, my friend and I trained for a triathlon.
Slowly my identity and my ministry started to untangle.
I started the lifelong process of learning who ‘Morgan – Child of God’ was.
Then, I applied for the World Race, which at the time, was an unheard of year long mission trip. I got so excited when I was accepted. As I traveled that next year, God used the time. He used it to tear down, rebuild, and ultimately send me on the path that led to The Cause.
Wherever you are at in life, I encourage you to ask these vital questions…
Is your identity found in who you are or what you do?
What holds together the foundation of your identity?
If your ministry or job was taken away from you in a moment, what would be left of your life?
If your answer is “I don’t know” it might be time to ‘Find Your Gun’ and start asking God if there is a way to begin the painful, yet beautiful process of untangling your ministry and your identity.
Your life depends on it.
