Include Integrity on Next Resume

If you don't get caught, then why not fudge a little on your resume. Throw in a fake title here, add a few years there, who's really going to check anyway? We like to catch the politicians in fibs about braving gunfire, or their pretended combat service in Vietnam, and well we should. But lying on a resume is not any better. Printed resumes, just like viral speeches, are difficult to undo.

When I took my first pastorate as a student in a North Carolinian mill town church, I doubt anyone in the parish really cared that much about my resume. No one indicated that they were impressed by it if they had even seen it. They were more concerned that I drove a car with Ohio plates, I had a beard and pony tail, or in the ACC culture, that I attended Duke Divinity School.

Like sermons on humility, the best resumes are concise. "Elaborating" to make your body of work look better only fractures your integrity. Even if no one notices the little extra you imagined, you're only diminishing, not enhancing, yourself. It says, "I'm not enough as I am so I will embellish the truth with something more." Reality sells.

Unlike potential extension ministries, there seems to be an amazing lack of interest in United Methodist congregations about pastoral resumes- maybe because so much is filtered through bishops and their cabinets. If "mission based appointments" will ever exist, then real, not imagined, records for both pastors and churches would be a great place to start for appointments well-made.