A Letter for the Disheartened – Confessions of a Small Church Pastor
When I graduated from seminary, I knew that vocational ministry would be hard. I was under no illusions. I went into this thing with eyes wide open. But, now well into my first pastorate, I must confess that I had no idea it would be this hard.
There have been times, to my dismay, when I have wanted to quit. And I am certainly not alone. Nearly half of all pastors have seriously considered leaving the ministry and, with student enrollment at seminaries at all-time lows, it feels as though the church is fast approaching a tipping point. The landscape of Christianity in the West is littered with churches* that were once great and new churches that will never survive, as church attendance has taken a precipitous fall post-COVID with the advent of a new generation of young people who find biblical Christianity to be an anachronism – irrelevant at best, virulently narrow-minded at worst. Being in the ministry at such a time as this is not just difficult, it is impossible.
(*When I say “churches” I mean of the genuine variety. We speak not of the faux variety that spew a health, wealth, and prosperity gospel in an ungodly effort to fill the pews every Sunday. They’re doing just fine – numerically and financially. But, so too are the two men punching each other in the face for the entertainment of the thousands in attendance and the millions worldwide. A crowd does not a church make. Seeker-friendly churches do attract seekers, but they never seem to make the conversion. Nor does that seem to bother them that much.)
Kinnaman once defined ministry as a vocation “where you control nothing and are responsible for everything.” This has made vocational ministry immensely difficult for me personally, as someone who grew up in a household where the operative emphasis was on achievement. And my upbringing was centered within a broader cultural context of honor/shame – a paradigm that is collectivist and familial by nature and defined largely by worldly measures of success. What came with this was pressure to succeed and pressure to conform to expectations because results were always evaluated at the extremes – success brings honor and failure brings shame – with no shades of gray. It was ultimately performance and achievement that were the measuring sticks and the gauges of success were calibrated not just to objective measures of performance, but also to relative ones, how one compared to one's peers. I am very thankful for this upbringing in many ways because it prepared me well for the world, but I'm afraid it has not prepared me well for pastoral ministry.
Success in pastoral ministry, to a large extent, is determined by one's impact in terms of a variety of objective measures of success (size of congregation, number of baptisms, size of budget etc.) that are then compared to the impact of other pastors. The problem is that I cannot control any of this. Nobody can. I know this because I've tried and failed. It really does not matter how hard I work, or how polished my sermons, there is nothing I can say or do that can bring the dead to life. I can cajole, perhaps even convince, but only God convicts.
What is a Christian ministry worker to do then? Endure.
I have penned the following letter to myself in an effort to help me to do just that.
Dear Pastor,
God has called you to His service. This is a singular honor and an immense privilege, of which you are entirely unworthy. That the Almighty, by His grace and for His glory, would call you to such a task is an unspeakable blessing. Always remember that. It is painful at times. Discouragement is par for the course. It is the hardest thing you will ever do. But, none of that is sufficient to serve as a valid excuse to quit. No such sufficiency exists. You must never quit. You must always endure. Be faithful until the good Lord calls you home and remember these four things.
Number One: Remember that Your Vocation is Impossibly Hard. It’s Supposed to Be.
You will face discouragement. You will be criticized, confronted and attacked. Make no mistake about this: When God graciously called you to vocational ministry, He called you to put yourself to the hazard. The suburban expectation of vocational ministry is unrealistic and, if you take a moment to think about it, wholly undesirable. Paul declares in Ephesians 6:12, “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
You are in a war and to the extent that you are not facing difficulty, opposition and pain is the extent to which you have slipped your foot off the gas and hunkered yourself down in a safe space somewhere, giving the enemy no incentive to engage.
Your life prior to ministry was almost completely devoid of any spiritual conflict. At least comparatively speaking. You were in the cheap seats then. You are in the trenches now. And you’re only being shot at now because you’re in the right places, doing the right things. So don’t give up. God chose you to do what is hard and it is right that it is hard. It should be hard.
As much publicity as Navy Seals BUD/S training has now received and as challenging and grueling as the program is, it is surprising that so many people still voluntarily participate. Perhaps more surprising still is the fact that so many, knowing how much they will have to endure when they sign up, quit when it gets hard. One Navy Seal veteran told a group of new recruits that to survive Seal training you have to take it one evolution at a time. In other words, the ones who quit contemplate the length of the program and how much longer they have to endure in the aggregate when they first encounter the pain. Those who survive make the commitment to never quit and they take the pain in increments and seek to only survive until the next evolution.
Your pain is temporary. But, your reaction to it is what will ultimately endure. Survive until the next evolution. Take it Sunday to Sunday if need be. The pain will eventually subside, but your reward never will. A man once defined courage as the ability to hold on. Be courageous.
Number Two: Remember that Your Horizon is Eternity
Hans-Georg Gadamer once wrote that a person without a horizon exaggerates the value of what is immediately present, whereas the horizon enables an individual "to sense the relative significance of what is near or far, great or small." "A horizon means that one learns to look beyond what is close at hand – not in order to look away from it, but to see it better within a larger whole and in truer proportion…. [F]ar away facts…are more effective than near ones in giving us true bearings." Pain tends to force us to make this temporary life the horizon. And the result is the tendency to magnify the suffering that is immediately present and to value that which is provisional as if it were permanent. And it is difficult to look beyond suffering and it is so easy to feel justified in acting as the ultimate arbiters of what is good and what is not even before the appointed time for such judgments. But, your horizon is eternity. This life is a vale of tears. Heaven is your permanent home, and when you get there God will wipe away every tear and all of the pain and all of the struggles will be engulfed in glory. 2 Corinthians 4:17 declares, “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” And it is in this that we as the faithful find our true bearings, by fixing our gaze upon a horizon that stretches to eternity – world without end.
Moreover, please remember this: you are in the business of the eternal, which means you cannot properly assess the success or the failure of your work utilizing measurements that are temporal. Much of the fruit of your ministry is unknowable this side of eternity. You are planting seeds now, the harvest from which you will largely see in the hereafter. So, keep your eyes fixed on the proper horizon.
Number Three: Remember that Your Reward is On Its Way
Matthew 25:14-23: “14 For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property. 15 To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. 16 He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and he made five talents more. 17 So also he who had the two talents made two talents more. 18 But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master's money. 19 Now after a long time the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them. 20 And he who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five talents more, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me five talents; here, I have made five talents more.’ 21 His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ 22 And he also who had the two talents came forward, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me two talents; here, I have made two talents more.’ 23 His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’”
Please notice that the man with the five talents and the man with the two talents received the exact same reward and the exact same commendation.
Barbara Hughes writes in Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome, “We have come to understand that, as we minister, God our Father sees us and our success in ways we cannot readily see ourselves. An experience from our time as parents of young children helped us see something of this. The school was presenting its annual Christmas program. Two of our children had parts in their class plays. Holly, our eighth-grader, had the lead of Della in O’Henry’s The Gift of the Magi, and our fourth-grader, Kent, had four lines as a Wise Man in the Christmas pageant. Holly’s play came first, and she was terrific! She had her lines down cold and she articulated them perfectly, projecting them so that the whole auditorium could hear. And she was dramatic – moving about the stage as a perfect nineteenth-century heroine, at times her hands extended imploringly, then her wrist to her head in a dither. She stole the show. And when it was over, we proudly joined the chorus of applause. Later came Kent’s play. He had been working on his four lines since Thanksgiving and had found it difficult to remember them. Not only that, but he was terrified of the stage. Still, we shall never forget the moment he stood in his shepherd’s costume with his black tennies showing beneath the hem of his white robe, his eyes saucerwide with stage fright, and his hands repeatedly flexing at his sides. We held our breath as we heard him say, ‘Strange feelings come upon me though I know not why. The night is still around me, the stars shine in the sky.’ There was no way we could applaud. It was the middle of the play. But our hearts applauded and applauded. How pleased we were – with both of our children! And so we came to better understand that God is not so interested in our being the star of the show as much as he is that we do our best with the part he has given us.”
Pastoral ministry is hard. Impossibly so. But, know that God remembers. You may labor in obscurity now as one of the dregs of society – the offscouring of all things – but you have a Heavenly Father who sees, who faithfully keeps receipts and who will one day reward openly. Just keep your head down and grind knowing that what God wants is faithfulness and that He rewards constancy and devotion with a salary and not a commission.
Number Four: Remember that Your Service to the Church is Grounded in Your Love for Christ
In John 21, Jesus asked Peter three times if he loved Him. When Peter replied in the affirmative, Jesus responded all three times with “Feed my sheep.” Faithful service to the church is predicated upon, and indeed a reflection of, your love for Christ. Do you love Jesus? Then love and care for His sheep.
Christ loves His church. He died for her (Ephesians 5:25). You have been granted a stewardship – given the unspeakable privilege of caring for and loving upon that which is most precious to Him. Exercise that privilege responsibly and do it out of love for the One who gave everything for you. Christ died for you. You live for Him.
Conclusion
Faithfulness in ministry is the success. And for those who are struggling in the dark, toiling in obscurity, and seeing no fruit to your labor please know this – you have been granted a great privilege to strive for success to a degree not granted to everyone. Many have known nothing but sunshine. Many minister in a place of prominence and serve in the limelight. Faithfulness in such circumstances is easy, to the point of abstraction. They have not been given the opportunity to succeed in the ministry to the extent that you have because fidelity is birthed in pain and genuine dedication and commitment is born in the struggle.
Faithfulness is never tested in fair weather.
Be faithful – to God, to the task, to the text – until the job is done.