Delegation

This week is on Exodus 18:13-23:

The next day Moses took his seat to serve as judge for the people, and they stood around him from morning till evening. When his father-in-law saw all that Moses was doing for the people, he said, "What is this you are doing for the people? Why do you alone sit as judge, while all these people stand around you from morning till evening?"

Moses answered him, "Because the people come to me to seek God's will. Whenever they have a dispute, it is brought to me, and I decide between the parties and inform them of God's decrees and laws."

Moses' father-in-law replied, "What you are doing is not good. You and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out. The work is too heavy for you; you cannot handle it alone. Listen now to me and I will give you some advice, and may God be with you. You must be the people's representative before God and bring their disputes to him. Teach them the decrees and laws, and show them the way to live and the duties they are to perform. But select capable men from all the people—men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain—and appoint them as officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens. Have them serve as judges for the people at all times, but have them bring every difficult case to you; the simple cases they can decide themselves. That will make your load lighter, because they will share it with you. If you do this and God so commands, you will be able to stand the strain, and all these people will go home satisfied."

Moses was hoarding the blessing of being God's servant. He was the single point of contact between God and the Israelites. It worked well enough when the tribe was small, but it soon got to the point where he couldn't service everyone. He was burning out, and the people he was supposed to minister to were standing around all day waiting to be taken care of. It doesn't have to be like this.

God brought Moses' father-in-law Jethro in to give him a little leadership seminar. "What is this you are doing?!" Moses had the servant part of leadership down, but he was missing the reproductive part. Part of our role in God's kingdom is to reproduce ourselves and distribute the blessing. Jesus did it when he sent the disciples out in pairs to go do his work. He wasn't sick that day, or just too lazy to go out himself. And it wasn't like he thought they were going to do just as good of a job as he did on the first try.

Even the sharing of the loaves and fishes could be seen as an illustration of this principle of multiplication. God has the ability to produce food out of the sky. He did it with the gift of manna to the Israelites. Instead, he had the disciples distribute the food, breaking it and passing it on. We're supposed to take part in God's work. It's wonderful to have a role. I think of it like a mama duck and a bunch of ducklings. You never see the mama duck pushing the other ducks in a stroller. It's not natural.

I noticed something like this unfolding in my life a few years back. When we first started as a larval church, we were a student group on campus. There were only about ten of us at the core, so I got in the habit of providing connectivity, Internet services, and computer help to the body. It was a fairly light burden, and I was pretty efficient at bearing it. Years later, we became a grown-up church with a solid core of more than fifty people, the Internet probably had hundreds of times more stuff people expected from it, and I couldn't keep up. I wish Jethro had paid me a visit! It took me years to figure out that my blessing could be distributed. Now there are a handful of us taking part in God's tech blessing to his body. I expect that to keep expanding. We don't have that same ratio Jethro spelled out to Moses yet, and the burden isn't as light as Jesus promised. :)

Jethro said to pick godly people to help you out: people who are honest, hard working, trustworthy, etc. He didn't say anything about skilled. :) That part comes as a side-effect of the delegation. Did any of the disciples have the gift of prophesy or healing or skills at evangelism before Jesus sent them out? Was there a college of judges in Israel before Moses appointed his assistants? No! Heck, no! All it takes to be a good servant is fearing God and being trustworthy.

Show me a church where the pastor does everything, and I'll show you a man who is burnt out and doesn't know the blessing of servanthood. I'm lucky to be part of a church where delegation is baked into our tasty values and vision statements. If you are a leader in a church like that, take some time and look for trustworthy people you can share the burden with. Pray about it. Or if you're not a leader, make yourself available to help someone who is. The more people are awake and alive, the more efficiently God's blessing and message can permeate into the body and leak into the world around us.