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When talking to your parents about full time ministry (FTM), all sorts of issues are going to be raised to the surface. You will do well to do some preparation beforehand for a conversation. And the way you’d prepare for such a conversation is exactly the same way you’d prepare for any negotiation!

 

When I was at IBM I booked myself in to a negotiation skills training course. And what follows is general information about negotiation that you will pick up from a negotiation skills training course – yet the principles apply quite well to the situation of talking to your parents about FTM.

 

The first important thing about negotiation is to know what you want out of the negotiation – and also to have a backup. In negotiation language, this backup is called your BATNA – your Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. This helps you to know what you’re aiming at, and what you’re still happy with after having traded your concessions.

 

So what do you want in talking to your parents about full time ministry? Well ideally, you’d want their support, their encouragement and prayers, their backing you 100% in your ministry decision. That’s your goal. But your BATNA is actually quite low – you don’t really need their support and encouragement to go into ministry. All you really need from them is for them still to be talking to you so that you can work at your relationship – they are your parents after all!

 

This is important for you to know, not so you can settle for your BATNA and not work harder for something better, but so that you’re not shattered if you don’t get their 100% support and backing and encouragement! Even if your parents are disappointed with you, you can still be happy because you still have your relationship with them.

 

But if the first important thing in negotiation is to know what you want, the second important thing is to know what the other party wants. Sometimes you can’t know, but you can take a pretty good guess. In negotiation, this is helpful because you can know which concessions to give up, and when. And as their son or daughter, you’ve had more opportunity than most to observe their life and what is important to them.

 

What sorts of things do you want to think through in preparing for your ‘negotiation’? Well they would include questions like the following:

 

Don’t settle for simple answers here. Sure, at the surface level what’s important to them is that you keep working as an accountant! But underneath that, what’s important to them might be your financial security. Or the prestige of your job. Or their ability to live comfortably off your support in their retirement. Or that they are ‘losing’ their child to the influence of other people.

 

You see, it could be a lot of things – perhaps several of them! And as you work through these questions carefully, you’ll find yourself in a much better position to understand what kinds of things you can say to comfort them. What sorts of things you can do to reassure them. How you can be praying for them! The idea here is not for you to try and cover everything – some of them may be illegitimate desires, and you may not want to reinforce those things. But the idea is to have a better awareness of where they’re at, so you can better approach them.

 

Now while this is a lot like negotiation, there is one important difference with negotiation. In a negotiation, you’d only give up concessions if you really had to. You give them away slowly and painfully – like pulling teeth. However, this is about your relationship with your parents – and you would do these things for them because you love them!

 

[ PS: if you're in the workplace, make the most of the opportunities you have to go on training courses - particularly the ones which may come in handy later on! ]