Pastor Ryan Gaffney

I get asked this question a lot as I meet Christians from various groups and programs I interact with. The answer is that I’m a member at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Austin… But the reality I sometimes leave out is that I haven’t been there for service since Easter last year.

I work Pulpit Supply (which is where I preach those sermons you see on YouTube) and that means that I go to a different church every Sunday to preach a sermon as a sort of “substitute pastor”. I made it to church on Easter because it was a sunrise service at 6am and it gave me time to be at a tiny chapel in Cheapside at 11 to preside over Easter for the ten people there. But there is more to my inattendance than that…

Even when I’m not on pulpit supply, like this summer when I was doing Hospital Chaplaincy, I just don’t make a very good church member. I’m too critical, I don’t follow instructions well, I know too much about what goes on behind the curtain. My girlfriend and I tried to stick to a Church this summer near her place down south (since I was in San Antonio). By the tenth week I was pulling my hair out over how much differently I would have done things.

We actually addressed this in seminary (I’ll paraphrase it as best I can). “There comes a time” said my professor “When you realize that you know too much you have crossed the point of no return, and you can no longer abide to sit quietly in a pew. Every Reference to the Old Testament is now cross referenced in your brain against your education in Biblical Hebrew and the pastors theology includes a telltale sign of that heresy you learned about in Christian History. You can try at this point to not be a pastor, but you can never again be just a congregant” he concluded for the semester with “You might as well face it you are addicted to church”

And it is an addiction. It’s a compulsion. Something I can’t not do even if I want to or bad stuff will happen. It’s often frustrating, and overwhelming, and all-consuming, but I have no choice. I have to preach, I have to write, I have to engage big ideas with little people. It’s who I am, it’s what I’m about. I feel sorry for those of you who just have to sit there and watch me have all the fun.

I think the word "Passion" is misused on our circles to the detriment of people who are trying to follow advice about engaging one’s passion. Someone approached me the other day and wanted advice because he did not feel like he had any passion. No job he really loved, No idea what to do with his life, just a bachelors degree and a need to feed himself. He wanted help finding his passion. This is what I told him:

We pretend like it’s something you really really enjoy doing, something that fills you with glee that you would do in your spare time just for fun. That’s not what a passion is.

It is actually a religious reference. The Passion is the crucifixion of Jesus. That doesn’t mean that Jesus loved getting crucified, that means that he cared enough about what was going on in that story (the perceived will of God) that he was willing to suffer, and suffer mightily in exchange for it.

So the adage holds true "do something as a career, you would do for free" but not because you enjoy it so much. Do it because you care about the results of it being done so much that you would endure it even for no money. Do it because it is your passion. Your crucifixion.

You may hear people who say their passion is video games, or ponies. You may hear businessmen joke that their true passion is Golf. Those people are idiots…. Unless of course the businessman means that he loves golf so much that he would do it every day, in the snow and the rain, that he would neglect his marriage and his children and spend long hours on the course until the blisters on his hand become unbearable because he has not yet perfected that dogleg shot. That is very rare.

More likely you care about something that matters more than golf. Something like human progress, or justice, or cross-cultural engagement. Maybe you hate it whenever animals are mistreated, when children are neglected, or whenever the truth is hidden from the masses. Maybe you would be willing to sacrifice to make one of those situations better. Do that.

Or, on the off chance that there really is nothing you care about, nothing that matters to you, nothing that grabs your attention because of it’s intrinsic value rather than what it pays, then you need to spend some time growing as a person. Get an easy job that pays enough to live on, don’t work more than half time, and spend the rest of your time learning to love deeply and analyzing with a professional what mechanism is broken inside you that previously prevented you. Because living without any passion is no way to live.