Year In Review – Positionless

While you’d be really pushed to hear it from his own mouth, my dad was a pretty decent footballer in his younger days. He played for Victoria in the old “Teal Cup” under 19′s competition, but eventually reached a point where he had to make some hard decisions about how much effort to put into football versus the rest of his life (including my mum), and chose the other stuff. But when he was playing, he was mostly listed as a utility – a term not used that much any more, but it basically means that you’ll play just about anywhere on the field. I can remember Dad telling me about a season where he had literally played in every position on the field.

For the last few years, I’ve had a pretty solid position in “my church“. I was “the junior youth guy” – looking after the year 7 – 9 high-schoolers. But then early this year, we felt that God was calling us out of youth; at least partly with an expectation that we needed to be “just christians” for a while, and rediscover what that looks like. Not even a “utility”, I’m in the unusual place of being positionless.

It’s been interesting, and I think it’s actually resulted in me having a bit more space to just think about things, and not get so tied up in constantly “doing”. At the same time, having to make the effort myself to actually “do” anything has been a bit of a challenge as well. Unfortunately, stepping back from leadership has in some spots (not completely intentionally) meant stepping back a little from our church community.

But there’s been some really good stuff going on, including seeing a bunch of guys step up and into the youth ministry arena – who partly just needed to see that the need was there. And it feels like there’s still some big new stuff on the horizon; which will no doubt look like more changes. If only I wasn’t so hyper – perhaps I could have a year without changing too much!