The Pastor Took The Test Too

They did it as a team, which was the right call, and he was the one who said so.

Eight of them in the side room with the tall windows and the sandwiches that come in a tray with the plastic lid you cannot get off. Somebody had brought good coffee from home because the church coffee is what it is and everyone has stopped pretending. The associate had made a joke at the start that landed so well it kept coming back all morning.

And the man who leads that staff, nineteen years in, filled in the same forty questions as everybody else, because you do not ask a team to do a thing you are exempt from.

His top result came back and it was fine. Leadership, with shepherding close behind. Nobody was surprised, including him. Two people said out loud that it was obvious, in the affectionate way, and he laughed and said something self-deprecating that got a laugh back.

And then he sat at the back with his sandwich and looked at the sheet in front of him and had a thought that he would not say out loud in that room or any other.

That is a description of Sunday morning.

That is the man who stands up at ten thirty. That is the man who is good in a crisis and steady at a graveside and clear at a meeting. That man exists, he is not a fraud, he is genuinely there.

He is just not the one who wakes at four on a Tuesday with his heart going, or the one who sat in his car in his own church parking lot for eleven minutes last November before he could come inside.

Nobody scores that man. There is no box for him. And the specific loneliness of a good staff day, if you are the one leading it, is being described accurately and completely at the same time.

Before anything else

Let me say what is not coming, because you have read a lot of things like this and you are ahead of me.

Nothing here is going to give you a better result. No corrected word, no deeper assessment, no more honest instrument that would finally catch the four in the morning man. I am not going to describe you closely enough that you can take it as a diagnosis, and there is no list at the end to find yourself on.

And nothing here is going to make the exercise the villain. It was a good day. You were right to do it as a team, and the associate was right that it was useful, and the tool did exactly what a tool can do.

You are not being underserved by an instrument, and there is no more accurate word out there that would finally do what you were half hoping Saturday would do. That is not me managing your expectations. Scripture is what says it, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a man to be scored before He would deal with him.

God says name, not function

Here is the sentence I want in front of you, and it is said to a man who was carrying a whole nation and had nothing left.

And the LORD said unto Moses, I will do this thing also that thou hast spoken: for thou hast found grace in my sight, and I know thee by name.Exodus 33:17

I know thee by name.

Not I know what you do. Not I know your capacity, your gifting, your effectiveness or your fit for the role. Moses at that point in the story is the leadership result personified and God does not mention any of it.

Name is the word for the thing about a person that does not change when their function does. It is what your mother used and what your wife uses and what nobody at a staff day uses in quite the same way.

You are known by name by God, which is a different and deeper category than anything a page can hold about your role. I am not stretching that. Exodus 33:17 puts name where a reader expects usefulness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it in a man at the back of a room with a sandwich.

And the reason it matters is what Moses had just said

Read the verses before it, because the context is the whole point.

Moses had just told God, in effect, that he could not carry this and would not go on without Him. It is the least impressive moment of his leadership and it is where the sentence lands.

God does not answer the crisis by reaffirming the office. He does not say you are the leader of my people and you will manage. He says thou hast found grace in my sight, and I know thee by name.

The knowing turns up exactly where the function has run out.

You have been known most precisely at the hours when you are least useful, and that is not a consolation prize, it is where the word puts the sentence. That is Exodus 33 in its own order, and the Spirit who inspired the placement of it is not somewhere out there waiting to meet the Sunday version of you.

What the result was really being asked to do

Now the honest thing, and you can leave it if it is not yours.

Nobody at that staff day was under any illusion. Everyone knows a questionnaire has limits, and you said so out loud when you introduced it.

But when a man has been leading for nineteen years, something quietly accumulates, which is the experience of being known publicly and constantly for the part of you that works. And a result that names the working part with cheerful accuracy will land, in a tired man on a Tuesday, as one more confirmation that the public version is the one that gets seen.

That is what made the sheet heavy. Not error. Confirmation.

You are not the sum of what functions, and the four in the morning man has never once been outside the knowing. The word says He knows by name and He knew the man who had just said he could not do it, and the same Spirit who searches all things is not restricted to Sunday morning hours.

And this is not a reason to go and say all this to your staff on Monday. It might be. That is between you and God and it is not this page's business. What is settled here is smaller and it is enough.