This Sunday, my church's senior pastor presented a great challenge about service and hospitality. He made some great comments, including (paraphrased)
- Burnout is not a result of doing too much but of wrong motivation.
- Availability/life station should be a factor in our service, but not an excuse for not serving.
- We should not let our gifts pigeonhole us into a certain venue of service.
- Our gifts need development through use.
- The best way to discern our gifts is to start serving and see what people notice about us. (Could this be considered a genetic algorithm? But I digress provocatively...)
It occurs to me that, not only does the church struggle to put these truths into practice, but the university does, as well. Service is one of the "Big Three" when it comes to faculty expectations (along with teaching and scholarship), and faculty (Christian and non-Christian) also struggle with motivation-based burnout, a sense of unavailability, pigeonholing themselves, lack of development, and lack of self-awareness.
If Christian faculty proactively learned to adopt these principles in serving the church and the university, one can only imagine how it would revolutionize our example to other believers and our witness to the academy.
How have you struggled with service? How have you dealt with motivation, availability, self-awareness, and development?
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