When I got inside, I peered at the box, but my reading glasses weren't on me, and the label was just the sort of blur that most things are when you're well into middle-age. "Hey honey," I yelled. "Were you expecting anything?" She wasn't, so I figured I may as well just open the thing up. I popped my knife out of my pocket, and did so.
Inside...books. My books, as it happened, fresh off the press from my publisher. Oops. Guess I wasn't going to make the now-obligatory Author Unboxing Video.
The Prayer of Unwanting is my first swing at a devotional, a tart, playful little read that recenters the Lord's Prayer as the heart of the Christian prayer life. The book pushes back against the dominant prayer ethos of American Prosperity religion, which pushes prayer as a means by which we get what we want. We pray for material attainment, we pray for success, we pray to get and to have and to manifest, for shine and for fame and for glory.
This paradoxically carnal spirituality has nothing at all to do with Jesus, and everything to do with consumer culture. What Jesus wants us to do is set all of that aside.
This is why the prayer he taught has not a danged thing to do with having anything more than what we absolutely need. It's not about getting what we want. It's about changing what we want, conforming us to God's grace rather than feeding our bottomless hunger for [stuff] and fame and power.
The challenge, now, is that I'm expected to market the book, to leverage my platforms to maximize the reach of the book. So...how do I do that?
Firstly, it ain't like I'm oblivious to the irony of marketing a book about not desiring material success. I'd like people to read the blessed thing, of course. But the moment I'm grasping about it, the moment my pride and my desire for recognition and lucre become the impetus for my efforts, I'm in a difficult place.
It's a tricky wicket.
And secondly, I'm fiercely aware that desiring the "platform" that is such a prerequisite for success for Christian authors these days is the enemy of my calling as a pastor. Celebrity pastors and Jesus-influencers are in a dangerous place spiritually, as the siren song of growing follower counts and maintaining influence can easily supplant the dual demands of humility and servanthood. To stay relevant, you need to get into every theological fight, you need to court controversy, you need to pitch out hot-take after hot-take...and wisdom and grace slip from your fingers.
As a committed servant of small congregations, I think this is doubly true. Small church ministry demands that you set aside the trappings of platform and get your hands in the dirt, honoring and supporting the spiritual gifts of your sisters and brothers. Again, you're not to desire a platform. You may have a pulpit, sure, but it's more for the convenience of your congregation's sightlines than a marker of your exalted status as the Most High Jesusy One.
As small church guru Karl Vaters put it in his fierce little volume De-Sizing the Church:
"..when we elevate leaders through their ability to become celebrities, giving them power over our feelings and decisions while having no genuine proximity in our lives, that celebrity culture always elevates, alienates, then devastates its prey. When you have power but no proximity, you have little to no accountability. And power without accountability always--absolutely always--leads to an us/them, have/have-not, rich/poor dynamic that ruins everything it touches." (p.83)
But celebrities and influencers actually sell books. In an era when the publishing industry struggles to survive, it's hard not to walk their path, because it does kinda sorta work.
So it's a balancing act, as one treads upon that high wire strung between idea and actualization, wobbling between a failure to use one's gifts and the failure to stay in the Spirit.
All the more reason to keep oneself centered in prayer, eh?
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