“All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”
Matthew 5:37 (NIV)
I sat with a worship leader on a phone call last spring. She had taken a new position at a church about 90 minutes north of mine. She was three months in. Her plate had filled up the way plates fill up at potlucks. One spoon at a time. No single addition seemed unreasonable.
I asked her what was on her plate now.
The list was:
Lead worship every Sunday.
Run the band rehearsal on Wednesday night.
Schedule the vocal team on a six-week rotating cycle.
Coordinate with the production volunteers.
Lead the youth band on Sunday nights.
Lead a weekday women’s bible study because nobody else stepped up.
Coordinate the Christmas Eve service production.
Run the church’s social media accounts because she “was already on Instagram anyway.”
Three counseling appointments a week with worship-team volunteers going through hard things.
Recruit for an open audio position the church couldn’t afford to fill.
Be the on-call backup for the kids worship team when the kids worship leader was sick.
She had been there twelve weeks.
I asked her which of those she had said yes to.
She said, all of them, but I didn’t really say yes to any of them. They were just there.
That sentence is the whole devotional.
What “I didn’t really say yes” actually means
Jesus says it in the Sermon on the Mount. Let your yes be yes and your no be no. Anything beyond this comes from the evil one.
I used to read that verse as a verse about honesty. It’s not just about honesty. It’s about clarity.
A yes that you did not consciously give is not a yes. It’s a drift. It’s an erosion. It’s something that landed on your plate while you were looking at your phone, and you accepted it because saying no would have required a conversation you didn’t have energy for.
The drift is what fills the plate. Not the yeses. The drift.
The drift is the volunteer audio guy quitting and the position not getting backfilled and you “covering for now” for fourteen months. The drift is the youth band needing a fill-in leader and you doing it once and then never having a conversation about who would actually own it. The drift is the women’s bible study leader leaving and the senior pastor mentioning at a meeting that “Sarah does worship, maybe she could pick this up” and you not pushing back in the moment.
A worship leader who joined TCC last year answered the question about her biggest challenge with this line:
“Saying no. I like to learn, and I like to be of help, but it can lead to being asked to do more, and I feel guilty for saying no.”
Read that again. The thing that gets her in trouble is not selfishness. It’s the opposite. She likes to learn. She likes to be of help. The yes mechanism is downstream of an actual virtue. The problem is that the virtue runs unattended.
The same yes mechanism that helps you serve generously will also fill your plate until you cannot lift it. The yes itself isn’t the problem. The unconsciousness is the problem.
What it costs when the yes goes unconscious
A few things start to happen when the plate fills up by drift and not by choice.
The first thing is that you stop saying no to your family. Because if the church things on your plate are not optional in your mind (you said yes, you have to follow through), then the only things you can pull back from are the things you actually chose. The kid’s bedtime story. The walk with your spouse. The dinner. The Saturday afternoon.
The second thing is that you stop asking what God is asking of you. Because if everything on your plate is mandatory and the calendar runs on autopilot, the question of vocation becomes the question of survival. You don’t have time to ask, what am I called to, because you have to ask, how do I get through this week.
The third thing is that resentment starts to grow in places you can’t quite locate. You feel it on Saturday afternoons when you wish you weren’t bracing for Sunday. You feel it Monday morning when you don’t want to look at Planning Center. You feel it on Sunday when a volunteer asks you a question you’ve answered fourteen times and you have to keep your face neutral. The resentment is a signal. It is telling you that you are giving from a place you did not choose to give from.
Saying no is the wrong frame
People talk about boundaries in ministry as if the work is to say no.
I don’t think that’s the work.
The work is to make your yes conscious. Once your yes is conscious, your no usually takes care of itself.
The question is not, can I say no to the women’s bible study request? The question is, did I consciously say yes to leading worship every Sunday, scheduling the vocal rotation, running rehearsal, leading the youth band, doing the social media, and three weekly counseling appointments? Did I sit down and say yes to that, knowing what it cost, knowing what it pushed out, knowing what it does to my marriage, knowing what it does to my fifth year in this role?
If you didn’t consciously say yes to those, you don’t have a no problem. You have a drift problem.
The fix is not to learn to say no harder. The fix is to actually say yes on purpose, then let the no follow.
A practice for the week
Take 20 minutes this week with a piece of paper. Write down everything on your ministry plate. Not what you wish was on it. What’s actually there. Every recurring meeting. Every volunteer team you coordinate. Every counseling appointment. Every Sunday role. Every text thread you’re the de facto coordinator on.
Then put a Y next to each one if you consciously said yes to it.
Put a D next to each one that drifted onto your plate.
Look at the D’s.
Pick the one D that has been on your plate the longest with the most cost. Just one.
Take that one to your senior pastor or your board or your spouse this week. Don’t ask for permission to drop it. Tell them, I never said yes to this, and I’m naming that now because I think it’s costing me my engine. Then let the conversation be what it is.
You may not get to drop it. The church may have a real reason for asking. The reason may be honest. But the conversation has to happen, because as long as the D sits on your plate without ever being acknowledged as a D, your no mechanism will keep failing on the next ask.
The question for the week
What is the one yes that was never actually a yes?
Until you name it, every future yes lives in its shadow.
You don’t have to fix it this week. You just have to name it.
Let your yes be yes, and your no be no.
Ryan
Going deeper: Paul on learned contentment sits upstream of this, in I Have Learned (Philippians 4:11).
This devotional is part of The Church Collective’s free 52-week worship team devotional series. Get the first 12 as a free PDF and a fresh devotional in your inbox every Monday morning.
The Monday That Decides Sunday