Persevering in Ministry and Publishing: A Podcast Interview

Every so often, I share a post on my blog about a recent podcast interview. This spring, my friends Josh Ott and Emily Gardner invited me to be on their show Church Chat. The three of us have known each other for the last twelve years because we are part of the same region in our church denomination, the Evangelical Free Church of America.

You can listen to the podcast episode here, “Persevering in Ministry and Publishing with Benjamin Vrbicek” (Apple, Spotify, and YouTube).

Their Church Chat podcast can be, admittedly, a little goofy. I actually like that about them. They started the interview with an extended game of “two truths and a lie.” This might give you the impression we never get to a more substantive conversation. But that would be wrong. We explored some of the hardest questions in ministry. For example, how do you keep going in life and ministry when you don’t think you can?

Many of my worst ministry challenges occurred in the first summer of Covid. Thankfully, nearly five years have passed since that difficult season. I did not realize the extent to which Josh, one of the co-hosts, had faced hardships in his church, which even led him to wrestle with his call to pastoral ministry. On one fateful Christmas Eve, Josh’s wife looked at him and said something like, “Why aren’t you getting ready?” Josh told his wife, “Because I’m not going.” He was supposed to preach at that service, by the way.

Josh did go to church and he did preach. But after that night, he took drastic steps over the next few months to pursue health.

If there is a common thread in each of our experiences of struggle and perseverance in ministry, it is the importance of churches having godly, volunteer pastor-elders. Were it not for the humility, kindness, and wisdom of the leaders at each of our churches, those seasons might have unfolded differently, and perhaps neither of us would be pastoring.

In the interview, I mention several ways my friend Mike Grenier helped me, a volunteer pastor at our church at the time. I did not get to mention it in the interview, but there were also several long phone calls with my dad during those seasons. He kept bringing up the ministry metaphor of an ox with too much weight on his shoulders. “The problem isn’t with the ox or the work of plowing,” he said. “It’s just there is way too much load on the kart.” The metaphor helped me and our leadership team reevaluate what a pastor should do amid all the work he could do.

In the interview, I also discuss writing and publishing, sharing my perspective on “starting small in publishing.” I affectionately, though typically only privately, refer to starting small as guerrilla warfare. The metaphor sorta works, sorta doesn’t. I’ll let you parse it out.

Before concluding this post, I would like to share a brief collection of other life and writing updates.

The last six weeks have been some of the most intense yet also meaningful times in recent years. My oldest daughter just graduated from high school; my wife and I completed another successful season of coaching track and field; three staffing roles changed at our church as we commissioned one associate pastor to take a new position elsewhere; I finished writing the first draft of my book; and in a few days, it’s our twentieth wedding anniversary. A lot of normal things occurred too, like cars visiting the mechanic, and another attempt by me to explore once again the chronic, mysterious pain I experience with food, this time with a new doctor.

Speaking of the book, I am incredibly grateful that after five years of hard work, I submitted my manuscript on the hope of Christ’s return. This will be my first traditionally published book. The manuscript is currently with the acquisition editor, and the initial feedback has been encouraging. I have already finished my part in supporting the marketing team, and they have begun developing the official title and cover. Sometime this winter, Baker Books will open the book for pre-order, and, Lord willing, you can have the book in the summer of 2026. Publishing has a long arc.

In the meantime, I am taking the month of June to reboot my website and email system. More on that later. I will also be giving away a short ebook that I’m calling Lord, Haste the Day: 49 Bible Passages to Fill You with Hope about the Return of Christ. During the research process, I had compiled a list of nearly one hundred passages related to the end times, and it was a blessing to spend a few months reading over them in my morning devotionals. I hope sharing the ebook will help others eagerly await his second coming (Heb. 9:28).

* Photo by John Nupp on Unsplash

Could It Be Time for a Pastoral Transition?

“All the time,” said John Piper, “I’ve been thinking about it for thirty years.”

What had Piper been thinking about for thirty years? A potential transition in pastoral ministry.

He said this around the time of his retirement from his long tenure at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minnesota. “I thought about quitting a lot,” he added. But then Piper mentioned the way God didn’t give him a chance to move at the same time he wanted to move. “Here’s the beautiful thing that I look back on with such thankfulness: the Lord never let those ‘ready-to-move’ feelings come when there was an opportunity to move. The opportunities to move came when I didn’t want to move. He timed it perfect.”

If you’re reading this post about pastoral transitions, perhaps you’re only doing so “for a friend.” But my guess is that you’re a ministry leader who might be in one of these ready-to-move seasons right now, the kind of season Piper mentioned. (If, however, you’re a member of a church, and you want one of your pastors to move to another church, well, that’s a different situation entirely! And if you’re a pastor who wants some of his members to move churches, that’s also another post, one I won’t be writing.)

As the summer ends and fall arrives, I suspect you might not be alone, as the fall is a common time for pastors to begin thinking about transitions. In fact, I’ve recently been writing a draft of an article for another publication about the blessings of not transitioning away, the blessings of what I’m calling “the ministry of staying put at your church.”

But if these thoughts of transitions are rattling around in your heart, I thought I’d offer a few things to consider. Because before you go looking for the tips and tools you need to transition well from one church to another, it’s worth backing up to ask the question: are you sure it’s the right time?

For some pastors, a looming transition is obvious. This is your last semester or two in seminary, and you’re ready to work in the field. You’re being influenced by both “push” and “pull” factors, not just one or the other. You’re being pushed out of seminary and pulled into a new local church. When this is the case, it’s fairly straightforward. Let the transition begin.

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Some of you, however, feel like you’re on a rollercoaster. You feel anticipation and excitement as your church grows in size, but then a loop-de-loop and a double corkscrew induce fear and instability. How do you know when your time is done? If you were terminated, others decided the ride for you was over. But what about when the decision is yours?

Determining God’s will is often tricky. Gideon used a fleece, but I’m not sure this was to his credit. So we probably shouldn’t try something similar.

When I was a kid, my parents gave me a choice about a summer vacation. I couldn’t figure out what to do. My parents told me I could go with them on a short trip to visit my grandparents or I could stay home with a friend to attend a local basketball camp. I had no idea what God wanted me to do. One morning I distinctly remember staring at a small bowl of cereal and asking God this very question. As I twirled the last few Lucky Charms with my spoon, I asked God to make the cereal into the shape of the state—either Missouri (basketball) or Iowa (grandparents)—to indicate what I should do. I’m not encouraging you to go and do likewise. After all, when I was a child . . .

Kevin DeYoung wrote a whole book about how to discern the will of God. “‘The will of God’ is one of the most confusing phrases in the Christian vocabulary,” he writes. “Sometimes we speak of all things happening according to God’s will. Other times we talk about being obedient and doing the will of God. And still other times we talk about finding the will of God” (Just Do Something, 16).

Too often we feel as though we need to divine God’s will (say, with Lucky Charms). But DeYoung argues we should stop “thinking of God’s will like a corn maze, or a tightrope, or a bull’s-eye” (23). Instead, we need to realize God gave us brains and passions and mentors and friends and education and experiences and longings. As we listen to all of these—as well as when we adequately take into account our proclivity for sinful, mixed motives—somehow God shows himself faithful to lead us to where we should go.

In his book Before You Move, John Cionca explains thirty-five different categories to help pastors sense whether God is moving them to another ministry. He uses the metaphor of red and green traffic lights. The more red lights, the less likely God may be moving you, and the more green lights, the more likely he may be. So, if you get nineteen green lights and sixteen red lights, that makes things clearer, right? No, it’s not a simple math problem, and neither do each of the thirty-five categories carry equal weight.

Yet I do find it helpful how this approach forces one to think broadly about the situation. Often when a pastor wants to move, it might be that a few persistent annoyances have provoked his restless desire. It’s better to consider the whole picture.

I won’t list all of his thirty-five categories, but here are some I found especially useful.

Red Lights to Moving	Green Lights to Moving
Congregational Hunger	Congregational Apathy
Vibrancy and Growth	Stagnation and Decline
Good Giftedness Match	Poor Giftedness Match
Enthusiasm for the Task	Restlessness or Withdrawal
Good Opportunity for Impact	Limited Opportunity for Impact
Family Happy and Growing	Family Distressed and Stifled
Appropriate Compensation	Insufficient Compensation
Tenure Less than Six Years	Tenure More than Six Years
Compatibility with Staff	Poor Staff or Key Relationships
High Integrity and Credibility	Low Integrity and Credibility
Advisors Confirm Ministry	Advisors Suggest Major Change
Ideal Geographical Proximity to Extended Family	Less than Ideal Geographical Proximity to Extended Family

Again, these don’t provide a full-proof plan; they’re simply tools. If the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah had used these categories, the score would have been a shutout: 0–35. These prophets were certainly in one of those ready-to-move seasons. Often, a prophet’s congregation didn’t want to fire him but to kill him.

In fact, when God explains to Isaiah that his job description involved preaching until the pews were not only empty but until they were burned to ashes, Isaiah’s “Here am I! Send me” quickly became “How long, O Lord?”

For Isaiah (and many other prophets), faithfulness meant staying put when all the lights appeared to be green. Why? Because the voice of God became to them like Gandalf thrusting down his staff and roaring, “You shall not pass!”

If, however, God is telling you it might be time for a transition, I would bring several other trusted friends and ministry leaders into that conversation. Ideally, if your situation allows such disclosure, do this with someone in leadership at your church rather than blindsiding them later. Not all situations allow such honesty, however. You might not feel free to discuss this with anyone local until the process progresses.

In the meantime, if you’d like more help thinking through a transition—help finding the right job in ministry with excellence, integrity, and respect for everyone involved—then you might find helpful my book on this topic, Don’t Just Send a Resume: How to Find the Right Job in a Local Church.

* Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

Oh to Be an Unwavering Pastor: A Review of Jonathan K. Dodson’s Latest Book

The last few years have felt, at least to most people, anything but stable. And if we feel the instability generally across society, we certainly also feel the turmoil inside churches and among pastors. Into this context, pastor and author Jonathan K. Dodson published The Unwavering Pastor: Leading the Church with Grace in Divisive Times (The Good Book Company, 2022).

But what Dodson means by “an unwavering pastor” might not be what you expect. He does not mean a pastor chiseled from a block of granite, strong and indomitable against the storm, a pastor with Nehemiah-like fortitude to execute his vision amid detractors. Dodson has a different kind of unwavering pastor in mind, the kind of unwavering pastor that Paul became. In his final letter to Timothy, he tells his young protégé, “I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me” (2 Tim. 1:12).

Dodson points out that Paul does not waver in his final imprisonment and as he nears his execution, not necessarily because of “what he believed but who he believed in. He knew the God he trusted” (13–14, emphasis original). Dodson continues, “An unwavering pastor’s confidence doesn’t come from his command of theology, his experience in counseling, or his faithful spiritual disciplines.” Instead, he writes, our confidence “is derived from God’s unwavering commitment to his own gospel, to preserve, protect, and promote the grace of God in Christ through the Spirit for sinners. . . . If you believe this, then you too can become an unwavering pastor” (14). Oh to be more of this kind of a pastor, an unwavering unmovable pastor “always abounding in the work of the Lord” (1 Cor. 15:58).

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During the summer of 2020, however, I experienced a struggle we could classify as something more than a mere waver but something less than a complete breakdown. I think many people and pastors did, but mine had less to do with Covid itself and more to do with all that had happened in our church in the previous years. I’ve written about that elsewhere, so I’ll leave aside those details. But I will say that I can relate to the way Dodson describes the experience of wanting to quit even though you know God hasn’t called you away. He just felt, as I had felt, that “pain was pushing [him] out the door” (129). Indeed, Paul can relate to this, and so can most pastors who’ve done the job for more than a decade. To paraphrase the author of Ecclesiastes, nothing is new under the sun or inside a church.

The Unwavering Pastor has a short introduction and eight chapters that explore what this understanding of unwavering might mean for different areas of ministry. For example, what might it look like for an unwavering pastor to love those outside the church in an age of cynicism about Jesus and the church (Chapter 2: “Questioning Christianity”), and what might it look like for an unwavering pastor to preach God’s Word not only to others but his own heart (Chapter 6: “Preach the Word”). I read the book slowly over two weeks, reading a section or two each morning during my devotions.

Besides the biblical engagement and personal stories, Dodson sprinkles throughout the book lessons he’s learned along the way. After sharing that he’s been ambushed in too many meetings, he advises, “If a critical person asks for a meeting, don’t be afraid to ask them what they want to meet about” (76). Besides mitigating anxiety, knowing the nature of the meeting can guide your prayers in the meantime and help you know if you should bring someone along with you.

I agree with the comments Dane Ortlund, author of Gentle and Lowly, makes in the foreword: “We don’t need to be told what bizarre and perplexing times we live in. We know that. We need to be given guidance for how to negotiate these times as pastors” (9). Dr. Ortlund goes on to say the greatest threat to pastors and churches right now is not pastors formally resigning from their posts. Rather, he says, “the greatest challenge is more subtle. It is to continue collecting a paycheck from the church while shifting our hearts into neutral. It is to carry forward the ministry at the level of activity while quitting ministry in terms of our hearts and longings” (10). Or to put it the way a friend of mine puts it: the danger is to quit without actually quitting. He’s not wrong.

I work part-time for Gospel-Centered Discipleship, a Christian website and publishing company. The company takes its namesake from another book by Dodson, a book recently re-released by Crossway as an updated ten-year anniversary edition. So, you could say, I should promote his book since, after all, Jonathan K. Dodson is my boss’s boss.

But I’m confident I would like The Unwavering Pastor even if I had no context for Dodson or Gospel-Centered Discipleship. In fact, being closer to the organization might have given me a better window to appreciate the struggles he writes about.

I remember during the recent low point in Dodson’s ministry, the one he talks about so candidly throughout the book, and how I texted my boss at GCD a screenshot from Dodson’s Instagram feed and asked if he was going to be okay. From my perspective, it seemed like two things were true at once: Dodson was struggling under the weight of pastoral ministry, and simultaneously his church and elders had rallied to support him as best as they could. To use the word he uses in the book, even as Dodson’s heart had become uncoupled from his church, his church’s heart toward him grew more coupled. Having this context made reading The Unwavering Pastor more visceral. In an age where so many people will do whatever they need to do to sell books, it helped to know Jonathan hadn’t feigned pastoral fatigue just so that his book would come across as “more authentic.” When he says he was tired and hurt by the church, he really was tired and hurt.

I’ve liked all of Dodson’s other books too. I was blessed by Here in Spirit as he describes his openness to the dramatic work of the Spirit and yet also the biblical grounding. And I love the transparency and moral courage of Our Good Crisis, a book that explores the meaning of the beatitudes for our present day. As an aside, I typically find the genre of “book trailers” underwhelming, but the trailer for Our Good Crisis has one of the best book trailers I’ve ever watched (here), second only perhaps to my perennial favorite of Zack Eswine’s The Imperfect Pastor (here).

I’d recommend The Unwavering Pastor to any church leader, whether the waters around him feel calm, whether a storm sits on the horizon, or whether his boat already threatens to capsize. I’d also recommend this book for teams of elders to discuss. The book would even bless the Christian in the pew who wants to gain a better appreciation for the weight and joy of Christian ministry in our divisive times and how the Chief Shepherd who safeguards his church amid the storm neither slumbers nor sleeps.

* Photo by Maria Teneva on Unsplash

Shepherd & Sheep: The Preface from My New Collection of Essays

I recently returned to church after a summer sabbatical. My family and I used the time to rest and play. I also used the time to work on several writing projects. It was a surprise for my church, but I gathered up my best writing about the local church and collected it in one place, a book called Shepherd and Sheep: Essays on Loving and Leading in a Local Church.

If you like, you can grab the book on Amazon. We gave away 150 copies last Sunday at church. Below is the preface to the book and the table of contents.

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Preface

Of all the apps on my phone, my favorite is Strava. It’s the fitness tracker app I’ve used to log all my workouts for the last ten years. Every trip to the gym, every mile run on a road or a trail, and every mile ridden on a street or a stationary bike are all stored in my fitness history. With all that information, Strava creates what they call a “heatmap.” Overlaid on a map of the world, Strava uses a system of colored lines with various thicknesses to show the areas an athlete has traveled most. The heatmap resembles a diagram of arteries and veins. My heatmap shows thick lines up the back of Blue Mountain Parkway in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a climb I’ve ridden well over one hundred times. It’s a 1.59-mile climb to the top, with an average gradient of 8.4%, making it a Category 3 climb, although that probably only means something to cyclists. My quickest time was six years ago, which required just under eleven minutes of enjoyable suffering. I rarely check the leaderboard, but of the nearly two thousand attempts to summit the climb, that attempt is ranked forty-fifth. Not too bad.

A certain satisfaction comes not only from looking at individual excursions but also from seeing the aggregate of all the runs and all the rides in one place. Analyzing my heatmap, I notice the routines, those places and pathways I return to again and again. Some people might rather call these routines “ruts.” But the difference of word choice between routines and ruts is more than the difference between “you say to-may-toe, and I say to-mah-toe.” Ruts signify unthinking drudgery, a continuous grind from which we cannot pop loose. Routines signify, I like to think, the places my heart, and thus my feet, gravitate toward without much thinking. Routines signify the places we love to travel, even when we know doing so might involve eleven minutes of suffering. Or to say it in biblical language, where our routines are, there our treasure is also.

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This summer my church graciously offered me a sabbatical after seven years together. The sabbatical plan had been in place for a long time, but with all the unrest in the world and in local churches, it seemed like following through with the sabbatical this summer might be unwise. Sometime in early winter, however, the Lord began to give our church a fresh supply of stability. So, when the time came, my church sent me away, and I left. I left to rest and read and write and exercise and date my wife and play with my children for fifteen weeks.

In the early weeks of my sabbatical, I happened to look over some of the essays I’d written while at our church. There are over three hundred on my blog and another seventy-five published elsewhere. Like analyzing my Strava heatmap, I began to notice routines, those themes I tend to return to again and again. I hadn’t realized how often I alluded to The Chronicles of Narnia or how influential Zack Eswine’s book The Imperfect Pastor has been to me. (Well, maybe I did know that one already.) As I looked over all the words, the largest cluster seemed to revolve around life in a local church, the relationship between pastors and parishioners, shepherds and sheep. That makes sense, of course; pastoring is, after all, my day job.

But pastoring a local church is far more than a job to me. The local church signifies the place my heart loves to be, even though I know being here will often involve more than eleven minutes of suffering. So, as a gift to our church and for the joy of collecting the best of the essays in one place, I put together this book, my writing heatmap, if you will. Perhaps a half dozen of these articles were first published on my website, but most of them appeared elsewhere, places such as Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, 9Marks, For The Church, Gospel-Centered Discipleship, and Desiring God. If you’re interested, you can see the note at the end of the book for the details of where each entry was published.

I subtitled this collection Essays on Loving and Leading in a Local Church because I like to think the two go together: loving and leading, if not in my actual shepherding, at least as an aspiration. But I gave it the title Shepherd & Sheep as a way to remember that every shepherd is first and foremost a sheep in the fold of the Good Shepherd. As the apostle Peter shares, each local shepherd is an under shepherd of the chief Shepherd (1 Pet. 5:4). And praise God that the chief Shepherd loves the sheep he leads and leads the sheep he loves. Loving and leading go together with him.

May the congregational lives of local churches, the routines of local shepherds and sheep—our heatmaps—be to the praise of the glory of the Chief Shepherd’s grace.

Benjamin Vrbicek
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Summer 2021

Table of Contents

               Preface     ix

1             Bending the Covid Bow of Bronze     1
2            The Day That Darrin Died     10
3            “Pastor, Why Aren’t You Preaching about What’s Happening?”      13
4            Redeeming Pastoral Ambition      22
5            Spring Loaded Camming Devices and The Expository Sermon      27
6            When My Church Was Washed with Butter      32
7            Ministry Morning, Noon, and Night      37
8            Was I Betraying My Church by Interviewing Elsewhere?      44
9            The Greatest Enemy of the Church      48
10          Pastor, Strive to Learn Their Names      52
11           Pastors Need Healthy Boundaries      56
12          Do Not Despise a Gentle Nudge      60
13          Don’t Let Sexual Shame Move You from Christ’s Mission      66
14          The Truth Is Always Positive      71
15          Light for Those Who Sit in Darkness      76
16          Two Ways Every Christian Can Be Pastoral      80
17          On Pastoral Prayer      84
18          The Wrath of God Should Come to Our Minds More Often      91
19          When Ministry Success Becomes an Idol      97
20         How Much Does a Pastor Work?      102
21          Congregations of Bruised Reeds      110
22         Come to Me All Who Have Covid Weariness      114
23         Sometimes God Just Closes Doors      119
24         Dear Twitter, I’m Leaving You for My Wife      123
25         My Heart Is Full      128

               Publication Note      133
              About the Author      137

Where Does Long-Term, Faithful and Joyful Ministry Come From?

Pastors and churches go through seasons; times of prosperity and abundance, and times of scarcity and decline.

In many ways, even surprising ways, throughout the Covid19 lockdown and financial upheaval, our church did far more than limp along; we continued our work with enthusiasm. But for me personally—as the lead pastor of our church—the spring of 2020 was more of a long spiritual winter. The cooler spiritual temperature began a year ago when a key staff member moved away. When he left, I strapped my boots on tighter and went to work harder than before. I read Fernando’s book in the midst of the spiritual dryness—the frenetic activity at church had worn my soul thin. Jesus Driven Ministry came at just the right moment.

Jesus Driven Ministry focuses on aspects of ministry that featured prominently in the ministry of Jesus during his earthly life. The chapters cover topics you would expect such as prayer, the Word of God, and discipling young leaders. But Fernando also covers overlooked though important aspects of ministry, such as having a sense of God’s joyful affirmation, visiting homes, resting from ministry, and ministering to the sick and demon-possessed.

The Blessing of Perspective

Western readers will find Fernando’s work a helpful exploration of biblically principled ministry in an international setting. His work often references ministry challenges that westerners have rarely faced. For example, Fernando is familiar with war and hardship in a way I am not. In many places in the book he alludes to a civil war in Sri Lanka that existed in the background and sometimes the foreground of his ministry. “As part of their strategy,” he writes, “militants often come to the south where I live and plant bombs in strategic places” (25). He explains how these challenges created unique ministry challenges and opportunities. The war was so bad in 1989, he notes, that “there was never a time when a body was not floating in the river at the edge of our city” (96). Fernando ministered to people who saw human carnage almost daily.

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In another place, Fernando notes that because his organization does not pay bribes, some initiatives they wanted to accomplish never materialized (26). I’m currently overseeing a renovation project at our church, but I’ve never had to wrestle with the temptation of paying a building inspector to make a certain problem go away.

Perspectives from church leaders in international settings can challenge, correct, and encourage our own ministries. Of course, simply reading books by fellow pastors outside the US isn’t the same as pastoring in a foreign city but books like Jesus Driven Ministry can help us sift true Christianity from cultural attachments and help us discern between what is wheat and what is chaff.

The Blessing of Transparency

Fernando’s transparency on the difficulties of Christian ministry are also encouraging. In ways that didn’t come across as self-serving, the book was a show and tell of ministry scars. As the Apostle Paul could write of bearing on his body the marks of Jesus (Gal. 6:17), so Fernando showed how he bears the marks of Christian ministry on his soul. These struggles often led him to consider quitting. “This is why in my twenty-six years as director of Youth for Christ in Sri Lanka, there have been many times when I have wished to resign from my job. A few times I even wrote a draft of a letter of resignation” (67).

Further, Fernando deftly analyzes how anger can build up over the course of a ministry: “When I turned fifty, I made a list of the biggest battles I face in my life and ministry. High up on that list was the battle with anger over the way people have treated me. One of the saddest sights in the church today is that of Christian workers who are angry—angry over the way they have been hurt by others, by circumstances, and sometimes, they feel, even by God” (111). Anger, like rust on the chassis of a car, can build up over the course of a ministry. It weakens our effectiveness and threatens our fidelity to the gospel. Fernando’s record of his struggles in ministry reminded me I’m not alone. His remedies for discouragement and anger are soul-stirring and worth considering if you’re a discouraged pastor.

The Building Blocks for Ministry for the Long-Haul

Ultimately, Jesus Driven Ministry considers what propelled Jesus into ministry and what sustained him in it—and how those same things should sustain us. This emphasis on longevity comes through in Fernando’s prayer for his book, namely, that men and women “commit themselves afresh to those vital basics of ministry that make for long-term ministry that is both fruitful and joyful” (16).

* This originally appeared at 9Marks.org

** Photo by Shavin Peiries on Unsplash

The Exhaustion of Pastoral Ministry: Bending the COVID Bow of Bronze

A few weeks ago our national church office reached out to me, asking if I’d be willing to write about the coronavirus from the perspective of pastoral ministry. I did not want to do it.

But I’m glad I did.

Putting into words the struggles I felt brought more healing than I expected it would. Several pastors told me just reading it did the same for them.

“Bending the COVID Bow of Bronze” is the most extended and personal essay I’ve ever had published. I didn’t share it on Facebook because I almost preferred not having people read it. But since it’s been out a few weeks, and I’m doing better than before, I thought I’d share some of it here. Even though it came out second, it’s really the prequel to a related article I wrote that many people seemed to find helpful (“Come to Me All Who Have COVID Weariness, and I Will Give You Rest”).

If you know pastors or others in full-time ministry, perhaps you’d consider sharing this essay with them.

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Bending the COVID Bow of Bronze
One pastor’s struggle toward hope in God

Despite the numerical growth and spiritual maturity our congregation experienced, I presented my dilemma to the elder board. Something had to give. Now that I had been the lead teaching pastor for a while, I told them, I have learned one of two things: either I’m not called to pastoral ministry, or I’m doing it wrong. What other option could there be? I asked. Ministry should not be so hard.

Calm and lovingly, the elder board listened. This meeting, by the way, was a month before most pastors had heard of the coronavirus.

At the time, I had just finished reading and resonated with what tennis legend Andre Agassi wrote in his transparent memoir, Open. Agassi tells of repeatedly hearing his gruff father bellow, “Hit harder, Andre!” as they practiced grueling hours on their backyard Las Vegas court. Seven-year-old Andre was forced to return balls shot out of a cannon he called “the dragon” until he grew to hate the sport that made him famous. And from his youth matches to winning Wimbledon, that voice never stopped shouting. Hit harder. Hit harder. Hit harder.

Working hard or hardly working

I often hear voices telling me to try harder and do more, sometimes from the closest allies. In a recent Twitter thread about how pastors can serve their churches, one of my favorite authors said, “quarantine = overtime,” adding that if a pastor thinks the quarantine means part-time, then he’s “asleep at the wheel.”

Okay fine, I mumble under my breath. I’m sure some pastor somewhere needed that salvo, just as Jeremiah needed to be chided about competing with horses and surviving in the thicket of the Jordan (Jer 12:5). But what if a pastor feels drowsy at the wheel for reasons other than laziness? Sitting in the driver’s seat nine months behind a short-staffed church has exhausted me—and that was before a global pandemic hit.

Between March and June, we are attempting 20 new or re-tooled ministry initiatives to serve our church during the crisis and prepare us for when we return. We’re rebuilding our website, recording video sermons and worship songs, making phone calls to members and attendees, and posting daily Facebook videos throughout May.

Yet, for every three phone calls I make to church members, I feel guilty for not making ten. My theology tells me only the Chief Shepherd is omnipresent and omnipotent, but still I try to be everywhere at once, doing ministry fast and famously, as Zack Eswine critiqued in The Imperfect Pastor. I hear Jesus whisper that all who labor may come to him for rest. But for some reason, my sin and psyche assume “all” can’t include pastors; someone has to drive his sheep.

I know I’m not the only one who feels overworked. Our fridge holds a massive daily calendar to help coordinate the schedules of everyone in our large family. On day 21 of the lockdown, I stood behind my wife as she scratched a black X on the calendar. She looked at me and said, “That’s 63 meals.” We’re now on day 60. Comedian Jim Gaffigan once said, “You know what it’s like having a fourth kid? Imagine you’re drowning, then someone hands you a baby.” We have six kids, and the older ones can eat more than me.

// To continue reading this article, please click over to the Evangelical Free Church of America’s website (here).

* Photo from EFCA NOW blog post.

My Heart Is Full: A Miniature Memoir after Five Years of Ministry

John Piper has said that “God will hide from you much of your fruit [from your ministry efforts]. You will see enough to be assured of his blessing, but not so much as to think you could live without it” (The Supremacy of God in Preaching, 25).

I’ve found this to be true. I hear enough encouragement in ministry that I don’t want to quit—most of the time. But I don’t tend to hear so much encouragement as to become proud—at least I hope I haven’t become proud.

But the receiving of encouragement is not always so balanced of a thing in the short run. It’s a lot like gaining and losing weight. When you are, on the whole, losing weight, you still gain weight each time you eat, even if the total calories you burn create a weekly deficit. And when, on the whole, you’re gaining weight, each time you exercise or do any movement, or make no movement as you sleep, your body burns calories. Encouragement and discouragement in ministry are like that, something in constant flux.

It’s fair to say that encouragement didn’t come my way often when I first arrived at my current church five years ago. Early on, I never really wanted to leave, nor did I feel like anyone especially wanted me to leave. But I sort of had this sense that if I did leave, no one would miss me too much. People didn’t love or hate my pastoring; they seemed indifferent. That might be overstating things, but it’s how I felt.

I’m not sure of all the reasons I perceived these feelings of indifference. In hindsight, I believe the largest contributing factor was my change in role. At my former church, encouragement dripped into my inbox like it was hooked up to an IV bag, and the encouragement was broad and steady.

But at my last church, I was an associate teaching pastor not a senior teaching pastor. Church members seem to like rooting for an associate pastor, especially if he’s trying hard and improving. I’d preach an okay-ish sermon one week, but then a few months later I might preach a sermon that was a little better than just okay. People would let me know ways I had improved. They’d show me notes they took during the sermon. Then, eventually, I’d preach a few sermons that could almost be considered good, at least by associate pastor standards. A few times near the end I might have even preached well. That was fun. Again, the congregation rooted for me. Who doesn’t want an underdog to win?

When five years ago I came to Community Evangelical Free Church no longer an associate teaching pastor but a senior teaching pastor, someone also pulled the IV out of my inbox. It’s not that anyone ever said this outright, but it almost felt like people were thinking, Hey, you’re a senior teaching pastor now; we sort of expect your sermons to be good, and the same goes for your counseling, discipleship, Bible knowledge, administration, and everything else you do.

For whatever deficit of encouragement there was in the first few years—whether it was an actual deficit or it was just perception, only the Lord knows—I certainly know now that my church is rooting for me. Last weekend my church gave me a big dose of encouragement as we celebrated my five-year anniversary. A few members of the original search team, staff, elders, my small group, and a few other friends, gave up an evening to share ways that my wife and I have blessed them through our ministry here. They even prayed over us. My heart is full.

In one note, a dear friend wrote,

I see you in the trenches week in and week out wrestling with the Scriptures, honing your preaching craft, writing for the edification of God’s people, centering (and re-centering) your work, ministry, and family on the gospel. . . . Over the last five years you’ve made gospel-centeredness tangible.

That note and the other notes hold more life-giving encouragement than I feel comfortable sharing here. I don’t want my reflections to be considered self-serving. But one thing stood out as people around the room shared: the wide cross-section of life that pastoral ministry occupies. For one couple, I had officiated the weddings of two of their daughters. For another couple, I had visited them in the hospital while they sat beside the bed of a dying parent, once for a father and once for a mother. I had also prayed with new mothers and fathers in hospitals when their children were born. With others, we’d shared tears and prayers and pans of brownies in homes during countless small group meetings. And all of them had endured my preaching. Speaking of preaching . . .

My best friend, Mike, had a raffle of sorts to see who could guess how many sermons I had preached in the last five years. My co-pastor and I alternate preaching, so it wasn’t difficult to do a little math and make a decent guess. My guess didn’t count, but I thought it might have been around 110, which turned out to be a little high. In a few seasons, like last year when we renovated a building, my preaching frequency slowed a bit. The answer was 104 sermons in the last five years, which amounts to something like 400,000 words. That’s a lot of words.

Do you remember those arcade games with a mechanical bar that slides back and forth, continually nudging a huge stack of coins resting on a shelf? You play the game by dropping in coins and hoping the mechanical bar will nudge the stack in such a way that some eventually fall off the ledge. That’s often how I think about preaching and pastoral ministry. Preaching is a series of tiny nudges. There are the granular nudges in 400,000 individual words and the aggregate nudges in 104 completed sermons. With most nudges, nothing seems to happen. So in faith you reload again. And again. And again.

But then sometimes the nudges connect. Change happens. People are helped and healed. I’m thankful my church cared enough about me to show me the fruit from a few of my ministry nudges.

My heart is full.

* Photo by Amanda Herrold Photography

Most of Life Is Not Lived at a Subspiritual Level: A Quote from Eugene Peterson

Yesterday morning, after a long obedience in the same direction, Eugene Peterson went home to be with our Lord. He was 85.

Peterson is best known, perhaps, for his paraphrase of the Bible called The Message. I often turn to The Message when I am preparing sermons to see what insights come alive in his fresh retelling. Peterson authored many books, some written to help the wider Christian audience and others to help his fellow pastors.

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Russell Moore, wrote a kind piece yesterday about the way Peterson only preached one sermon, despite his many sermons and many books. “[Peterson] had many things to say to us, and he said them in a wide spectrum of ways,” Moore writes. “But, really, he was just pointing our imaginations away from ourselves and toward awe and wonder—in the Bible, in the universe, in the local congregation, but all of it really pointed to awe in the presence of the One who holds it all together, a Jesus who loves us and is, in ways we can’t adequately piece together now, calling us homeward.” Well said.

Below is an extended excerpt from Peterson’s book The Contemplative Pastor. In it, Peterson reminds us that the small things should matter to pastors because it’s in the small things that most of our lives are lived unto God.

My pastor, during my adolescent years, came often to our home. After a brief an awkward interval, he always said, “And how are things in your SOUL today?” (He always pronounced “soul” in capital letters.)

I never said much. I was too intimidated. The thoughts and experiences that filled my life in those years seems small potatoes after that question. I knew, of course, that if I ever wanted to discuss matters of SOUL, I could go to him. But for everything else, I would probably do better with someone who wouldn’t brush aside as worldly vanity what it felt like to get cut from the basketball varsity, someone who wouldn’t pronounce with scary intimations of hellfire on the thoughts I was having about Marnie Schmidt, the new girl from California.

Pastoral work, I learned later, is that aspect of Christian ministry that specializes in the ordinary. It is the nature of pastoral life to be attentive to, immersed in, and appreciative of the everyday texture of people’s lives—the buying and selling, the visiting and meeting, the going and coming. There are also crisis events to be met: birth and death, conversion and commitment, baptism and Eucharist, despair and celebration. These also occur in people’s lives and, therefore, in pastoral work. But not as everyday items.

Most people, most of the time, are not in crisis. If pastoral work is to represent the gospel and develop a life of faith in the actual circumstances of life, it must learn to be at home in what novelist William Golding has termed the “ordinary universe”—the everyday things in people’s lives—getting kids off to school, deciding what to have for dinner, dealing with the daily droning complaints of work associates, watching the nightly news on TV, making small talk at coffee break.

Small talk: the way we talk when we not are talking about anything in particular, and we don’t have to think logically, or decide sensibly, or understand accurately. The reassuring conversational noises that make no demands, inflict no stress. The sounds that take the pressure off. The meandering talk to simply express what is going on at the time. My old pastor‘s refusal (or inability) to engage in that kind of talk implied, in effect, that most of my life has been lived at a subspiritual level. Vast tracts of my experience were “worldly,” with occasional moments qualifying as “spiritual.” I never question the practice until I became a pastor myself and found that such an approach left me uninvolved with most of what was happening in people’s lives and without a conversational context for the actual undramatic work of living by faith in the fog and the drizzle. (Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor, 112–13)

* Photo Bono & Eugene Peterson | THE PSALMS

Is the Engine of Your Team Healthy?

Local churches mentioned in the New Testament always had more than one pastor. They always had a plurality of pastor-elders. Numerous passages in the Bible indicate this. For example, see Acts 20:28; Ephesians 4:11; 1 Timothy 4:14; 5:17; Titus 1:5; and 1 Peter 5:1–5. This is why the leadership of our church is carried out, not by one leader, but by a team of spiritually qualified men.

The pastor-elder team at our church includes two “staff pastors” and six “non-staff pastors.” We typically meet every other Wednesday night for 3–4 hours. We share a meal, pray for each other and our church, and discuss things related to the health and direction of our congregation.

During the meal at our pastor-elder meetings, we often discuss a book we’re reading together. We spent significant time at our last three meetings discussing Dave Harvey’s latest book Healthy Plurality = Durable Church. The book is short, sweet, and full of thought-provoking questions and ideas. It’s the kind of book you’re thankful for even if you do not see every point the same way.

Harvey begins his book with a thesis: “The quality of your elder plurality determines the health of your church.” In my own experience, although far less extensive than Harvey’s, I’ve found his thesis to be true, especially over the long-haul of a church. This means working on the health of your elders is a nearly constant priority. As with healthy eating, you can take a break for a meal or two, or even a week or two, but bad things happen if you eat hot dogs and Cheetos and sticky buns and drink Mountain Dew and IPAs for a year.

In an appendix of the book, Harvey lists several questions he finds helpful for an elder team to consider as they evaluate the health of their team. I’ve included these questions below. But you don’t have to be an elder board to find these questions helpful. I suppose with only slight modifications here and there, they could apply to most teams that are committed together in Christian ministry.

If you’re a pastor, I encourage you to grab this book and discuss it with your team because “the quality of your elder plurality determines the health of your church.”

*     *     *

Four Indicators for Inspecting the Healthy of a Plurality

1. Agreement: Do We Agree with Each Other?

• Is the doctrinal basis of our unity as a team well-defined?
• Do we have a statement of faith, and if so, do we all affirm our statement of faith?
• Are we growing together theologically through study and discussion?
• Is it clear to me that you have worked hard to understand my positions and can represent them without exaggeration or misrepresentation?
• Is dissent sufficiently principled and coming from a heart that honestly believes this decision may contradict our values or harm the church?
• Will you wisely represent the position of the plurality to others, whether you agree or disagree?

2. Trust: Do We Trust One Another?

• Will you be loyal to God’s Word by being completely honest with me?
• Will you judge me or exploit me when I show weakness?
• Will you be patient with me in areas I need to grow?
• Can you be discreet once you really know my temptations?
• Am I confident that you will not share what I confide with anyone who should not know?
• Do you have my back?
• Will you be humble if I risk correcting you?

3. Care: Do We Care for Each Other?

• Is it clear to each of us that our state of soul matters to each other as much as (or more than!) our performance?
• Are conversations more likely to encourage or critique?
• Can we point out specific times where we talk about our lives, families, struggles and/or temptations (something apart from ministry!)?
• Does my feedback on your performance include encouragement?
• Does someone on this team know where I am vulnerable to temptation?
• Would my wife feel free to call you if I was tanking? Why or why not?

4. Fit: Do We Enjoy Each Other and Know Where We Fit?

• Does my personality appear to mesh with these men?
• Are we able to work together in ways that deepen our relationships rather than strain them?
• Do I know my role and what is expected of me?
• Have we clearly defined how we will evaluate one another and what determines success?
• Am I aware of the specific and regular contexts where we will evaluate our fruitfulness as a team?

How Much Does a Pastor Work?

I have no idea how much “a pastor” works. I’m sure a few pastors don’t work enough, while many others work way too much. I did some reading recently about why pastors leave the ministry, and the authors cited an interesting study. In the 1950s the average pastor worked 69 hours a week, while in the 1990s the average pastor worked between 48–55 hours (Hoge and Wenger, Pastors in Transition, 226). That’s a significant drop, and a healthy one if you ask me.

What Counts as Work?

Deciding what counts as work and what doesn’t count is not as obvious as you might think. Much of my job involves the kinds of things you expect it to involve, the kinds of things easier to track. Pastoring includes counseling, administration, overseeing staff health, hospital visits, officiating weddings and funerals, leading and attending meetings, preparing and preaching sermons, and so on.

But pastoral ministry sometimes involves less expected things, things such as hosting a 4-square tournament; arranging the stage before and after a wedding and then vacuuming up all the glitter stuck in the carpet after the wedding; washing church table cloths after a memorial service luncheon; graphic design for our welcome booklet, coffee mugs, and posters; helping the random guy who just needs gas money to get home; talking for 30 minutes to a church member at a swimming pool on my off day when I was there to play with my kids; occasionally shoveling icy-slush from the church walkway, plunging a church toilet, and painting the church foyer; and so on.

This isn’t a campaign for sainthood. It’s normal-pastor stuff.

Some of these tasks fit in the typical 9-to-5, but much of it doesn’t. And this is what makes it difficult to figure out how much, and how hard, we pastors work. Pastoring is more of a lifestyle job—an it-goes-with-you-everywhere-you-go job—than a punch-the-clock job.

Recording Hours Worked

Rewind the clock with me two and a half years. At that time, I had been at my current church for just over a year. Perhaps in the hopes of doing a good job and perhaps because of my sinful inclinations to be a people-pleaser, I said “yes” to everything. And—big surprise!—my schedule got out of control. Over one particular month, I remember working in the evenings five or six nights a week. You can’t work both first and second shift for long without problems. I was having problems.  

Talking about this with a great friend and fellow pastor-elder, he helped me to prioritize activities. Also, per his encouragement, I began tracking every hour worked.

I had previously resisted tracking ministry hours, though, for two main reasons. First, I resisted because when I was formerly an engineer, for almost six years I had to bill every half hour of work to a particular job. My time sheet was complicated and frustrating to keep accurate. When I traded the calculator for a Bible, I never wanted to record my hours again.

The second reason I resisted was because, as I said above, the nature of pastoral ministry makes it difficult to track hours. Sometimes it’s hard to know if the prep work to host 20 people for dinner at your house counts as “work,” or if it’s just cleaning your bathroom, mowing your yard, and scrubbing your floor. And sometimes it’s not clear whether the dinner meeting was a “work meeting” or a “friend meeting.” (Please don’t take this the wrong way, church; I’m just trying to be honest about the issues of pastoral ministry.) And after the 20 people leave, do the 45 minutes of clean up count as “work”? And if I bought the food for the meal with my church credit card, does my family get to eat the leftovers tomorrow?

Putting aside these musings and reservations, for the last 27 months I’ve done it. I needed to know how much I was working, especially how many evenings a week I was away from home. You can see the numbers below, but the average is 46 hours a week dedicated to ministry and around 2–4 evenings a week away from home.

What about “Writing Time”?

Tracking ministry hours is further complicated by the calling I feel to write. For the last three years, I’ve been treating this calling as an unpaid, part-time job. I don’t often tell people that, but that’s how I look at it. I do most of my writing early in the mornings between 5:30–7 am, and sometimes also on Friday afternoons from 2–4 pm.

Let me talk about the “unpaid” part of this for a minute. Writing has not been lucrative. So far this year I’ve worked on my writing projects an average of 10 hours a week, which is over 300 hours. This includes all the time required to research, write, edit, and publish blog posts and books. So far, I’m almost $1,200 in the red! You can see a detailed list of my expenses below. This financial investment in my writing would be greater if it weren’t for a few kind donations recently given.

About $300 each year is for blog hosting and email services. Most of the extra cost this year, however, comes from paying editors and mailing books. (Quick aside: I’m working on a book to help pastors find the right job in a local church. I’ve mailed almost 100 “beta versions” of the book to pastors in the hopes of securing 50 interviews for research. Later today I’m doing my final interview. Nearly all of these interviews have been on “writing-time” not “church-time,” by the way.)

So far I haven’t been too worried that writing has become an expensive hobby. Maybe someday “losing a few thousand” will become “making a few thousand.” But regardless, it feels obedient to the Lord to work at improving my craft, to work at growing my ability to write words that help people find joy in God. And besides, I enjoy writing.

But here’s the question: where do these extra 10 hours-per-week fit in relation to my 46 hours-per-week? Is writing a hobby, in which case the hours don’t count at all? Or is this writing work so related to ministry that these hours do “count” as work? I mean, with each blog post I work on getting better at communicating Christian truth, which I’d say is something closely connected to pastoring.

I’m not going to share my answer to these questions here, the question of how writing hours do or don’t add up to work. I have my guesses, but they are only that. In the near future I hope my elders can help me think more deeply about these questions.

Why Am I Sharing This?

I am not sharing this because my confidence is high that I do everything the way it should be done. In fact, I don’t really know. I’m doing the best I can. I try to listen to my wife and the council of other men I respect.

I’m writing this post for the same reason I share one post each year about how many books I’ve read: I share it to keep me accountable. It wouldn’t be healthy or honoring to God for me to work 32 hours or 82 hours. Working 46 hours of “work-work” and 10 hours of “writing-work” seems to be an okay amount. When it’s not okay are the weeks I officiate a wedding. In those weeks I can’t seem to figure out how to work-work less than 55 hours.

But as it is, this schedule has me with my family for almost every dinner, almost every breakfast, and almost every sporting event for my children. I do wish I went on more dates with my wife, but I can’t blame work for the infrequency. That’s more a function of lack of effort on my part (and having a large family, and living far from extended family) than it is too many evenings away.

The hardest part for my family, it seems to me, is not the number of hours I work or the pay. The most difficult part is that too often I don’t turn off work when I’m not working. I keep thinking about a certain marriage that is imploding or the sermon I don’t have written yet, the person who is mad at me and vice-versa. At home I keep thinking about how to keep all the work-plates spinning.

Carrying the stress of work to one’s home is not only an issue for pastors, but I should have less of an excuse; the theology I preach, is the same theology I should live. Rest is about faith that God is God, and he is the one who builds his church. When looked at this way, the anxiety I too often carry is evidence of my lack of faith, not my love for the church.  

If you feel inclined to pray for me (or to pray for your pastor), you can pray this: Pray that we would work hard for the Lord and not man, but when we are not working, we would not unduly carry the work home in our heads and hearts.

If there’s a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to figure out how to stop working when work is over, let me know. I could use it.

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A graph of the number of hours I have worked over the last 27 months. (Click to enlarge.)

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A table of the the writing expenses I have incurred this year so far. Numbers in red are expenses and numbers in black are income. (Click to enlarge.)

[Picture by Nick Hillier / Unsplash] 

THE IMPERFECT PASTOR by Zack Eswine (FAN AND FLAME Book Reviews)

Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015. 272 pp.

The title of Zack Eswine’s book, The Imperfect Pastor, reminds me of a line from the movie A Few Good Men. During the iconic courtroom scene, Jack Nicholson’s character speaks about “danger.” To this, Tom Cruise’s character asks, “Grave danger?” Nicholson responds, “Is there another kind?”

The Imperfect Pastor, huh? I stare at this title and like Nicholson’s character ask, Is there another kind?

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There is, of course, just one perfect pastor, but you’re not it, and neither am I. Nevertheless, too often this doesn’t stop us from shepherding with the illusion that we are perfect, and when we do, we wear a harsh yoke and pull a heavy load, one never meant for our feeble shoulders. Balsa wood, no matter the color we paint it, will never be tempered steel.

Eswine is a pastor at Riverside Church in St. Louis, the author of several books, and a part-time faculty member at Covenant Theological Seminary.

Early in the book, he tells a story about meeting with a young pastor for lunch. The eager-beaver declared to Eswine his desire to “go all out for the ministry.” After some pauses, Eswine responded, “If the ministry is what we go all out for . . . then how we define ‘the ministry’ seems important, you know?” (p. 23).

In this conversation, we see the heart of the book: a book about definitions. And definitions are important, aren’t they? We evangelicals opposed the redefinition of marriage, and rightly so, but I wonder how many of us are as concerned about the redefinition of ministry. The Imperfect Pastor critiques the view that prizes all things “fast and famous” (a phrase used frequently), while offering a better, more biblical way to do ministry. “Christian life and ministry,” Eswine writes, “are an apprenticeship with Jesus toward recovering our humanity and, through his Spirit, helping our neighbors do the same” (p. 35).

Eswine uses the whole book to flesh out that definition, and as he does, I found it very convicting. I could list dozens of sections from the book that poked my pride and revealed my sinful misconceptions about ministry. Take this one for example: “To the important pastor doing large and famous things speedily, the brokenness of people actually feels like an intrusion keeping us from getting our important work for God done” (p. 28). Ouch. Someone hand me the sackcloth.

For Eswine, his own ministry and marriage have not been without a few bumps, some of them quite significant. As he talks about these struggles in the book, we believe him when he writes, “I know firsthand the beauty and arson of ministerial desires” (p. 19). In this way, we might say the book has translucence; he doesn’t hide his faults from readers. And speaking of readers, though geared towards pastors, any thoughtful Christian engaged in ministry shouldn’t feel left out.

After that young pastor had told Eswine he wanted “to go all out for ministry,” Eswine attempted to say a few things to expand his definition of ministry. To this, the young man responded, “I don’t know where to start with all that” (p. 25).

Where to start, huh? Perhaps you feel this way too. If so, reading The Imperfect Pastor would be a perfect place. In the years to come, I know I will certainly return to the book to throw off the yoke of perfection and find joy in my dependence upon Jesus, the only perfect pastor and the only one with shoulders of steel and a gospel of grace.

[Picture by Sam Carter / Unsplash]

This Quote Terrifies Me

I remember when I heard it. I was riding my bike listening to the audio of a panel discussion. I couldn’t keep pedaling. It’s a quote from D.A. Carson at the 2011 Gospel Coalition conference.

I sometimes tell students at the seminary that I have learned during the last thirty five years that most of the students do not learn most of what I teach them. What they tend to learn is what I most emphasize; they tend to learn what I come back to again and again—what I put at the center.

Therefore, if it is a broad sweeping discipline that I am trying to pass on to them, only a few of them will pick that up—the other eggheads like me. But on the other hand, if at the heart of a teacher’s ministry is a passion for the gospel, a passion for men and women, even while they are teaching advanced Greek grammar and that sort of thing, it does shape their priorities and values beyond the discipline itself.

(D.A. Carson, speaking at The Gospel Coalition: Training the Next Generation of Pastors and Other Christian Leaders, Panel Discussion: R. Albert Mohler, Jr., Mark Driscoll, David Helm, Don Carson and Ligon Duncan, The Gospel Coalition 2011 National Conference, Apr 13, 2011; quote at 25:00-25:30 minutes)

You may be confused why this quote terrifies me. It terrifies me because I teach for a living. And as a teacher, I too emphasize all sorts of different things. And Carson’s comments terrify me because they force me to evaluate what I prize at the center of all that I teach. What do I come back to again and again? What is at the heart of my ministry? Is it the gospel—a passion for the fame of Jesus Christ?

Consider what you are really passionate about—the thing behind all of the other things in your life. What is it that you think about when you are just sitting around or driving across town? What do you day dream about? If I spent the week hanging out with you, what would I remember most?

These are scary questions.

A great example of keeping the “main thing” central in one’s teaching is seen in the fatherly advice from Proverbs 1-9. Over and over—and just before and just after everything else that the father talks about—the father in Proverbs calls his son to treasure the supremacy of wisdom and the commands of God (cf. 1:20-33; 2:1-22; 3:5-8; 4:1-27; 5:1-2; 6:20-23; 7:1-4; 8:1-9:18). I think the takeaway is that there are 1,000 pursuits in life—but above them all and through them all—we are to seek to know God in wisdom.

It’s so tempting in the teaching ministry of a church or in a seminary, or in life generally, to be pulled into 1,000 separate noble pursuits. But what I learn from Carson and Proverbs is that we have to keep the main thing, the main thing— since everything else will probably be forgotten.

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