THE SUBTLE SIN OF ERGOCENTRICITY
Calvin Ratz
October 1, 1986
From around the corner I heard raised voices. "Don't your kids do anything but play basketball?" It was our women's leader, not normally shrill of voice. "Surely you know we're preparing for a missions banquet. We expect to raise $10,000 for an orphanage in Zaire. Our banquet has priority over a silly basketball game!" "This is no silly basketball game!" countered the youth leader. "We've been planning this for two months. I've got a Christian pro basketball player coming to speak. We're expecting more than fifty non-Christian teenagers to be here. What do we communicate to teens if we cancel an opportunity to evangelize here so we can send money to Africa?" There they were, two department heads in the same church, both genuinely loving the same Lord and trying to serve him, yet both shouting at each other. Through an office error, both had received approval to use the gym on the same evening. Their arguments interested me. They didn't try to determine who'd booked the gym first or who was at fault. The question was: Whose work is more important? Which ministry has priority? What is more significant: raising $10,000 for an orphanage in Zaire or reaching fifty teens with the gospel? The disease I detected was ergocentricity—the attitude that says, "My work is more important than yours." Self-centeredness and self-sufficiency surface in many forms. The egocentric person, caught up with himself, says, "I am more important than you are." The ethnocentric person says, "My culture is more important than yours," which is an attitude missionaries wrestle with as they try to understand Christian lifestyles overseas. Ergocentricity is perhaps less understood. It's the attitude that surfaces when we're so engrossed in our task, when ...
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