We live in a transient culture, and most of us will have several jobs and live in different places over the course of our lifetimes. I often hear from younger Christians seeking wisdom in weighing opportunities for career advancement, or young pastors wondering when it’s time to move on from their current place of ministry. What is the role of ambition? Does a move make sense on a pragmatic level? How do you know if your heart is in the right place? Where might pride be getting in the way?
Sometimes present-day clarity comes from looking backward, and the Council of Nicaea provides an interesting lens for these questions. We just celebrated the 1,700th anniversary of the most important creed in church history, but not to be forgotten are the other decisions that came out of that council. And one of them speaks directly to the question of ministry ambition and pastoral transition—whether a potential move is truly from the Lord and for the Lord.
Why the Church Forbade the Moving of Ministers
Reviewing the Nicene canons is fascinating because it transports you into another era of church history. Some decisions feel familiar and eerily relevant—qualifications and stipulations for those in ministry, for example. Others feel foreign, no longer enforced in any wing of the Christian church, because the problems they addressed were temporary. Then there are canons that are somehow both—familiar in the temptation they’re trying to resist but foreign in the solution offered.
The best example of this familiar/foreign canon is the prohibition of a bishop, priest, or deacon moving from one church to another. Although several of the men present at the Council of Nicaea had left their first bishopric to take another, the council as a whole forbade future moves of this nature.
There were logistical and bureaucratic reasons for this prohibition, but also theological ones. The church fathers worried that ambition would run rampant if transfers were allowed. Bishops in smaller, less desirable sees would start cozying up to influential people in larger dioceses, angling for a better position. Athanasius went so far as to compare a bishop’s relationship to his diocese to marriage. Leaving it for another was akin to divorce and adultery!
This rule didn’t hold.
In rare cases, a bishop’s home diocese was destroyed by invaders, leaving him no choice but to relocate. In other cases, a church council compelled a gifted bishop to leave a smaller diocese for a much larger one where his abilities were urgently needed. That’s what happened when Gregory of Nazianzus was moved to Constantinople. Exceptions were present from the beginning (John Chrysostom being a famous case), and by the late fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus noted that the rule had been so frequently bent that custom had effectively overridden it.
The Temptation the Council Was Resisting
What the fathers at the council were opposing was a kind of ambition that leads to worldly ladder-climbing in the rungs of the church. Their discomfort with ministers moving from one place to another is plain to see. They wanted the exceptions to be moments of pressing necessity—someone forced into service for the broader church’s needs, not someone maneuvering for a better platform.
This reminds me of something Francis Schaeffer writes in No Little People. After reviewing all the threats that come against the church—secularism, socialism, rationalism, persecution, revisionism—he puts his finger on the greatest problem facing God’s people: “The church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually or corporately, tending to do the Lord’s work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them.”
This leads to Schaeffer’s famous admonition of doing “the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way.” Whatever ambitions we may have as followers of Christ who desire to do great things for his kingdom, we aren’t to “press on to the greatest place” unless Christ himself “makes it impossible to do otherwise.” Schaeffer describes the great temptation we face:
All of us—pastors, teachers, professional religious workers and nonprofessional included—are tempted to say, “I will take the larger place because it will give me more influence for Jesus Christ.” Both individual Christians and Christian organizations fall prey to the temptation of rationalizing this way as we build bigger and bigger empires. But according to the Scripture this is backwards: we should consciously take the lowest place unless the Lord Himself extrudes us into a greater one.
By that word “extrude,” Schaeffer means being “forced out under pressure into a desired shape.” Christians should choose the lesser place until God extrudes them into a position of more responsibility and authority.
Remaining Quiet Before the Lord
Over the years, as I’ve entertained the idea of different places of service—in both churches and Christian organizations—one of my prayers has been that the Lord would preserve me from leadership roles that would diminish my love for Jesus or my love for his Bride. Schaeffer warns about losing the ability “to be quiet before the face of the Lord”:
If by taking a bigger place our quietness with God is lost, then to that extent our fellowship with him is broken and we are living in the flesh, and the final result will not be as great, no matter how important the larger place may look in the eyes of other men or in our own eyes.
He then laments what he sees happening again and again in evangelical circles:
Someone whom God has been using marvelously in a certain place takes it upon himself to move into a larger place and loses his quietness with God. Ten years later he may have a huge organization, but the power has gone, and he is no longer a real part of the battle in his generation. The final result of not being quiet before God is that less will be done, not more—no matter how much Christendom may be beating its drums or playing its trumpets for a particular activity.
No Little Places
Schaeffer’s warning is that we not go out beyond our depth—that we resist the egotistical pressures and selfish ambitions that war inside us, even if we never completely escape them this side of heaven. “The size of the place is not important,” he says, “but the consecration in that place is.” In God’s sight, “there are no little people and no little places. Only one thing is important: to be consecrated in God’s place for us at each moment.”
Schaeffer’s words remain prophetic. And in a way, they echo the concern of the fathers who gathered in Nicaea 17 centuries ago—even if the proposed solution looks very different. What we should all wrestle with and want is to be wholly committed to God in the place where God wants us: “Being what he wants me to be, where he wants me to be.”
O Lord, help me to see myself in your sight, so that pride will wither, decay, die, perish. Humble my heart before you, and replenish it with your greatest gifts. As water rests not on barren hill summits, but flows down to nourish the lowest valleys, so make me the lowest of the lowly, that spiritual riches may abound in me. When I am tempted to think highly of myself, grant me to see the crafty power of my spiritual enemy. Help me to stand with clear vision on the watchtower of faith, and to cling with determined grasp to my humble Lord. If I fall let me hide myself in my redeemer’s righteousness, and when I escape, may I ascribe all deliverance to your grace. Keep me humble, meek, and lowly. Amen.
(Adapted from The Valley of Vision)
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