by Steve Moore
FROM SURRENDER TO ADVENTURE
In reading Amy's story you may have found yourself wondering, Why don't I ever have experiences like that? You may have asked this question more than once after interacting with a friend whose life seems to be rich with meaning and filled with passion. I believe everyone has the potential for a passion-filled life. Identifying your passions and pursuing them will enable you to begin to prioritize opportunities for service, which in turn will help protect you from information overload and compassion fatigue. Your journey as a Good Samaritan, taking the initiative to cross boundaries and overcome barriers to show God's mercy by serving others, will be streamlined by the heartlinks that connect you with your passions. You can't force a life-shaping experience such as Amy's on the doorstep of the tea shop or the orphanage in India, but you can increase the chances you will recognize them—truly “see” these life-changing frames from the film roll of your routine—quickly and respond properly. It begins with daily surrender to God that transforms everyday life into an adventure of obedience.
If you are hungry for the heartlinks of passion, I encourage you to try beginning your day with this simple prayer. There is nothing special about the exact words, but you might find it helpful to copy this into your prayer journal or put it in your Bible until you make it your own.
Father God, I surrender myself to You again today. I am Your servant, and You are my Master. I acknowledge all that I am and everything I have belongs to You. The longing of my heart, though well beyond my reach, is for every moment of this day to be a white-hot passionate pursuit of a straight path toward intimacy with You. I want my life to be centered, anchored, and rooted in You. I want everything I see, think, say, and do today to bring You glory, to be honoring and pleasing to You. If at any moment today my attention, my direction, or my focus turns even the slightest bit to the right or the left, please, Father, like the needle of a compass turns back to true north, turn my focus back toward You.
Father, I affirm that a central thread of my purpose in life is to join with You in blessing others, including those who are not like me, don't like me, won't thank me, and can't repay me. Make this day an adventure of obedience, and open my eyes to see what You see around me today. I am more concerned about missing an opportunity to bless others today than I am about looking foolish or being misunderstood or taken advantage of or putting myself at risk. I know life is not about preserving my comfort zone or eliminating danger. Lead me to the life-shaping experiences that will open the wellspring of passion in my life. Help me take the initiative today in crossing boundaries and overcoming barriers to show Your mercy by serving others. In Jesus' name, amen
Chapter 5
FOUR DOMAI NS OF PASSIONATE ENGAGEMENT
The greatest challenges of any moment in history cannot be adequately addressed by people who flutter from one cause to the next like bees in search of pollen on a hot summer day. People who jump on and off passion bandwagons like sports fans looking for the hottest team at playoff time could be better described as “fassionate” than passionate. They are naive idealists at best and “slacktivists” at worst, more concerned about making a name for themselves than making a difference in the lives of others.
Complex problems call for committed people. Chronic and epidemic challenges that generate sustained urgency, such as human trafficking, AIDS orphans, or the oppression of Dalits, will be resolved only by people who demonstrate high levels of issue-based passion over long periods of time. It is unreasonable to suggest only the individuals with physical proximity to these problems have the responsibility to deal with them. As we have discovered, God uses life-shaping experiences to establish heartlinks that enable us to organize and prioritize the most important answers to the question, “Who is my neighbor?”
As you begin to identify your issue-based passions, it will be important to recognize the need for focus over balance. You should not expect to give equal amounts of time, money, and creative energy to every issue that comes your way, but just because you can't do everything doesn't mean you can't do something. The value of allowing the God-ordained heartlinks established through life-shaping experiences to PageRank your passions comes by informing your decision to give priority to some needs over others. Passionate action will make you more like a river than a flood. Understanding this process is powerfully liberating; it plays a central role in overcoming the dangers of information overload and compassion fatigue. But it can also predispose us to another danger I describe as passion projection.
PASSION PROJECTION
The higher you move up the passion pyramid, from learning to engaging to influencing, even when it calls for sacrificing time, money, and energy, the more tempting it will become to evaluate the level of passion in others using your own journey as a benchmark. We tend to view people who are not involved with our issue-based passions as uncommitted, and people who claim to share our passion but employ a different strategy for action as misguided. When the line between passion and strategy is blurred, we more readily assume others who engage with a specific problem differently don't really care, aren't really passionate.
The reality is that God gives different people heartlinks to different passions so everything He wants to do gets done. God leads people with a diversity of gifting to different strategies for engaging the same passion because He knows it will take a multifaceted approach to truly make a difference. Take the challenge of abortion, for example.
Most Christ followers would agree that abortion, which snuffs out a life when it is most vulnerable, is wrong. For many the pro-life cause has become an issue-based passion; they are self-motivated to learn more about it, engage in activities to stop it, influence others to join the cause, and pay a price for all of the above. But among those who are passionately pro-life, some believe the best strategy is to protest clinics and take nonviolent emergency steps to stop the killing. Others, equally passionate, feel inclined to provide practical help to single moms and those with unplanned pregnancies who are most at risk to have an abortion. Some feel the best strategy is to work the political angle and do everything possible to change the law. Still others believe eliminating abortion altogether is ideal but unrealistic and want to help solve the problem by finding ways to reduce the number of abortions.
In reality, all of these strategies are important and should be pursued simultaneously, albeit with grace-awakened initiative, recognizing that without love our words and actions are as unwelcome as the creaking of a rusty gate (see 1 Corinthians 13:1, MSG). The different approaches are complimentary, not contradictory. Yet too often high levels of issue-based passion cause activists to devalue the contribution of others, especially when they approach the problem from a different direction.
FOUR DOMAINS OF PASSIONATE ENGAGEMENT
My experience in coaching people toward a focused life, fueled by issue-based passions, has led me to believe there are four domains of passionate engagement:
Service, focused on meeting a need
Justice, focused on righting a wrong
Discovery, focused on solving a problem
And advocacy, focused on promoting a cause
The bigger and more complex the issue, the more likely it will require passionate engagement from all four domains to make a lasting impact. Devaluing the contribution of others who share your passion but are operating in a different domain is to have zeal without wisdom (see Proverbs 19:2). It is as foolish as the head telling the feet, “I don't need you” (1 Corinthians 12:21).
Four Domains of Passionate Engagement
These four domains of passionate engagement should not be viewed as rigid categories. But they can be helpful when seeking to find your own sweet spot for engagement and recognizing where you will need to be intentional about enlisting the help of others. There is no hard and fast formula that suggests certain combinations of temperament, strengths, or gifts will automatically place a person in one domain or another. And yet people with the strength of empathy as we
ll as the gift of mercy or serving often gravitate toward the service domain with a bent toward meeting practical needs. Those with “word gifts” such as teaching or the strength to woo others may gravitate toward advocacy. People with a bent toward analytical thinking may find themselves repeatedly asking why, with a focus on solving a problem in the discovery domain. Still others will have strengths that point toward righting a wrong in the pursuit of justice.
It is common for people to feel drawn to more than one domain, but there is almost always a greater affinity for one over another. I was explaining the four domains to a friend over breakfast, and he listened with enthusiasm, affirming my categories while lamenting the fact that he was equally invested in all four. Yet he had just finished explaining a book project he was working on about sharing Jesus with others. It was clear based on what he had told me about the book that he was operating dominantly in the discovery domain with a focus on solving a problem. He was concerned about the fact that many Christ followers struggle to have natural conversations with others about Jesus. He had spent lots of time asking the why question and was passionate about solving this problem. On further reflection he agreed that at least for this particular passion he was operating dominantly in the discovery domain and secondarily in the advocacy domain.
OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THE FOUR DOMAINS
Almost everyone begins to engage issue-based passions in the service domain with some attempt to meet a practical need. Amy Carmichael started out serving young girls in her neighborhood and later rescuing temple girls in India. While her ministry with the Dohnavur Fellowship continued to provide a place of refuge for temple girls, she eventually gravitated toward the justice domain, seeking to right a wrong by making the practice of selling a girl child to a Hindu temple illegal. You can expect to begin your journey toward action in the service domain, but don't be surprised if eventually you find yourself moving toward one of the other three domains.
People who begin in the justice, discovery, or advocacy domain will need some experience in the service domain in order to remain credible with others. Celebrity spokespersons who can't share anything meaningful from the grassroots domain of service will be left with borrowed stories that eventually leave the people they want to influence wondering about their depth of commitment. Similarly, people operating in the justice and discovery domain will need input from the service domain to ensure their work is pertinent and relevant.
Not every issue-based passion will call for activity in each domain, or at least the need for engagement in the justice and discovery domains may not be as obvious. Passions that are more associated with a means as opposed to an end can be one step removed from the justice and discovery domains. For example, one of my passions is leadership and leader development. But leadership is not an end in itself; it is a means to some other end. For me the end beyond the means of leadership is the Great Commission, Jesus' command to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). I'm passionate about developing leaders because I know you can't even start a new small group without a small group leader, not to mention planting a new church or engaging an unreached people group. When viewed in this light, leadership connected to the Great Commission, it is easier to understand how the four domains of passionate engagement come into play. For this reason I believe leadership is actually an interest-based rather than an issue-based passion. The same could be said about politics or business, coaching, or training, along with other issues that are more associated with a means or method instead of an end or cause. Interest-based passions are important and can interact powerfully with issue-based passions. We'll look at how in the next chapter.
Finally, the service domain on the top left of the diagram is more of a grassroots, bottom-up engagement that involves direct activities that make a difference. Advocacy, at the bottom right of the diagram, is more like a mountaintop engagement utilizing indirect activities. Almost everything in the service domain starts in the trenches and directly engages the problem at the grassroots level, whether it is feeding the homeless, removing trash from an open space, or showing God's love to prostitutes in a seedy part of town. Almost everything in the advocacy domain starts at the 20,000-foot level, raising awareness about the need and seeking to mobilize others to get involved. Both the discovery and justice domains can bend either way, toward bottom-up engagement at the grassroots or indirect engagement that is more top-down.
Four Domains of Passionate Engagement
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By purchasing this book you receive a one-time FREE access to www.MyPassionProfile.com, developed by Steve Moore in partnership with Growing Leaders. MyPassionProfile.com is an online assessment designed to give you a model and a framework for (1) exploring areas of issue-based passion, (2) reality testing the level of passion you have for up to three issue-based passions, and (3) providing common language about passion that enables you to connect with an online community of like-minded and like-hearted people. For information on how to access your one-time free assessment, send an e-mail to [email protected]. You will receive an auto-responder message with all the information you need to get started.
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I realize for most people passion is a lot like quality; it's hard to define, but we know it when we see it. My attempts to demystify this subject by identifying the two streams of interest- and issue-based passion, the pyramid of progression from learning to engaging to influencing and sacrificing, as well as the four domains of passionate engagement, can make the mysterious appear mechanical. But I believe these labels and principles can become keys that unlock the ability to see passion in yourself and the people around you. The more you understand how passion is forged in the crucible of life-shaping experiences, the better positioned you will be to PageRank your heartlinks and focus your initiative, crossing boundaries and overcoming barriers to show God's mercy by serving others.
I have found the breakthrough in applying these principles to one's own journey often comes by looking out the window as opposed to in the mirror. We are more inclined to see the principles of passion at work in the lives of others first and then in ourselves. Look with me out the window of history into the journey of one of the greatest examples of passion-fueled action in the service of others.
The life of William Wilberforce is one of the most powerful illustrations of level-four passion, demonstrating a commitment to learn more about, engage in, and influence others toward an issue, even when it called for personal sacrifice. Beginning in his twenties, Wilberforce continued to press forward for over two decades with his commitment to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire. Engaging this great cause was hardly a campaign strategy to get noticed in a crowded political field. Wilberforce could not be accused of being “fassionate” about the slave trade in an effort to leverage favorable winds of political fortune. Yet he was by no means the first person to arrive at this dance with destiny, and he did not undertake the journey alone. Even a casual review of the story confirms it would not have been successful without a team of partners operating in all four domains of passionate engagement.
THE CHICKEN OR THE EGG?
In his biography on the life of Wilberforce, Amazing Grace, Eric Metaxas states, “The events that launched Wilberforce in his historical quest are as impossible to sort out as whether the proverbial chicken can be said to have laid the proverbial egg or to have been hatched from it.”1 There are some obvious heartlinks in Wilberforce's journey, not the least of which is his relationship with John Newton as a middle-school-aged child. Newton's autobiography, An Authentic Narrative, had been written a decade before and was still wildly popular; if Wilberforce had not read it himself, he certainly knew the story. It may have informed an essay he wrote at age fourteen, “in which he decried the business of slavery.”2
Whatever the heartlinks in his childhood years, Wilberforce reflecting on his first year in Parliament said, “I had been strongly interested for the West Indian slaves, and I expressed my hope,
that I should redress the wrongs of those wretched beings.”3 In his own words, William Wilberforce, at age twenty, describes a self-directed interest in the issue-based passion that would dominate his life and a preference for the justice domain, focused on righting a wrong. But in taking his place in the justice domain, he would be coming alongside, or perhaps standing on the shoulders of, Granville Sharp, who was his elder by twenty-four years.
JUSTICE AS A GATEWAY TO PASSIONATE ENGAGEMENT
Granville Sharp was a contradiction of talent and eccentricity. He was a renowned musician living on a floating barge with most of his family, who formed a band that played primarily for people of privilege, including royals. He was well connected, with a brother who not only played in the family band but also served as the official surgeon to the king. In 1765, Granville Sharp encountered a young African slave on a street in London. The young man had been beaten within an inch of his life and discarded. No doubt hundreds of other people saw the severely wounded slave but passed by on the other side.