Excellence and Success

Answer # 1

Modern notions of ambition, excellence, and achievement are very slippery indeed. They assume you're 'more OK' if you 'get to the top' than those not-so-OK who don't. 'Ambition' arrives from the Latin 'ambire' = to proceed around (canvassing for votes). It's what politicians do. It's the massaging of one's ego by power or adulation. It loves something other than the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul and strength. It's a preoccupation with my destiny rather than the pain of my sister or brother. It's a desire to surpass others, to have more than they have, to be more than they are - i.e. to be more like the devil than Jesus. Our enterprise in life is not to get ahead of other ones, but to get ahead of ourselves. Selfish aspiration produces chronic disquiet, so 'anxiety decrease' is big enterprise today. Often persons with the most gifts, money or power have the most anxiety.

Excellence

Here's another slippery idea. Maximizing your effectiveness, developing and utilizing your gifts to the full, being helpful as well as decorative is satisfactory, but for whose glory? A brilliant life for the glory of self is a trashed life. An obscure life ministering to enhance that of other ones is eternally successful. Arthur Miller states of Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman, 'He is writing his title in a block of ice on a warm day'. 'Do you request great things for yourself? Search them not' was the Lord's phrase to Baruch (Jeremiah 45:5). Chuck Colson says he read the Bible through three times and couldn't find 'God assists those who help themselves'. On the other hand, as Anthony Campolo put it so well, 'two dangers intimidate the survival of Christendom. The one is mediocrity; the other is success…' Mediocrity, he says, has come to characterize the behavior of most people in most institutions. 'They live out their Christian firm pledge in a mediocre fashion inside the context of places of worship that have mediocre programs… Holiness is excellence, so there is no apologies for mediocrity. Success is worldly, so there is no apologies for Christians chasing it'. (Ahead to Christian Excellence: alternate to achievement, by Jon Johnston, Baker, 1985).

Success

The species 'pastor' does not effortlessly endure either success or failure. We (Western) humans have an inordinate need to illustrate our worth by performance. We strive to be luminaries, rather than letting our light shine. We are what we do and achieve. And we have an insatiable appetite for acceptance: much of the way we behave is a veiled means of soliciting praises. Paul Tournier describes a universal comical performance of innumerable individuals all inspired by the intense desire to appear in the best likely light. 'They are habitually on the watch, lest their weaknesses, their obvious errors, their ignorance be found out; troubled to distinguish themselves, to be observed, to be adored, to be commiserated with. Some do it in an open way and naively, and are advised vain. Others conceal it ...