What is the role of ambition and self-promotion in the Christians professional career?
This is one I struggle with, and I’ll have to defer to Mr. Butt, a wise man. He talks about this in terms of healthy ambition and unhealthy ambition — which he compares to healthy and unhealthy competition. As he says, if your ambition is about becoming the best person you can be with the gifts and talents you’re given, that is a very healthy kind of ambition. For example, I am a writer. As a writer, I need to be ambitious in that. I need to seek an audience. Otherwise the writing is not reaching people, which is what writing is supposed to do. And there’s no shame in that ambition. There’s no shame in wanting to have a powerful website that reaches a lot of people. Yet it’s not as though I’m out to compete with Patheos, or self-promoting in a way that is false and not based on relationship. When self-promoting builds a false community (with 25,000 followers on Twitter or something), that is not helpful to anyone, and it’s not even good promotion. But self-promotion like I’m doing now
