I am an amateur. I have been preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ since 1967, but I am an amateur preacher. I have been an ordained minister since 1982, but I am an amateur minister. I have been a pastor for 17 years, but I am an amateur pastor.
To be an amateur is not to be amateurish. Amateurish people are undisciplined, unskilled, and sometimes unmotivated. There is no place in ministry for amateurish people. While I always want to think of myself as an amateur (at least in one sense of the word), I pray that I shall never be thought of as being amateurish.
The old meaning of the word amateur is, as Os Guinness reminds us in his book The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life, the idea of doing something without pay simply because we love to do it. He says, “There are many things we do, not for profit, but for the sheer love of doing them. Whether we are doing it for our own sake or for the sake of others, we are happy to be doing it, even if nobody is watching us and nobody pays us.” The sentence which speaks to me the loudest is when he writes: “We do what we do in life because we are called to it rather than because we get paid for it.”
I have sought to explain to each congregation I serve that I am their pastor and preacher because I am called by God and, at that time and place, called by that particular congregation. They support me financially so that I might fulfill those callings. I am not paid to preach or to pastor (some have suggested that no one would go through the agonizing aspects of pastoral ministry for any amount of money); I am paid so that I might be able to preach or to serve as pastor. I fulfill my calling for the joy which comes in doing what God has called and equipped me to do.
Such thinking is quickly cast off by some as being too contrary to the American way of doing business. Profit and Power are kings in the marketplace. Others cower at the thought of the faith this sort of thing requires. Not just faith in God, but faith in those who make the money decisions. Those who hold the purse strings must view as sacred the trust that is placed in them to provide for the needs of those in their care.
It is not easy to be an amateur in a struggling economy, but there is no more empowering feeling than to preach the matchless Good News of Jesus for the sheer joy of it!
