Page 3565 – Christianity Today (2024)

MOST DAYS AROUND 11:45 a.m., I turn on my screen saver, grab my gym bag, and walk two blocks to SportsMed, a gym owned and operated by a local medical practice. Sue or Brenda greets me by name and hands me a locker key and a couple of towels. A few old men, their workout finished, sit at tables and argue over coffee about why Chicago winters aren’t as tough as they used to be.

I change, then join the dozens already working out.

The faint strains of techno-pop come from the aerobics room, full of bouncing dancers, mostly women. The free weights are mostly unoccupied, while over at the Cybex machines, a guy who looks like the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island is getting pumped up. The Schwarzenegger types don’t seem to like the atmosphere here; they work out at some gym over on North Avenue called “Heavy Metal.” For the most part, we in this congregation are ordinary people with lumps and limps and laproscopic scars.

Some of the people sweating around me are staff from the clinic next door: orthopedic surgeons, physical therapists, and other support personnel using their lunch hour to work out. Sans lab coats, I can’t really tell the healers from the wounded.

We don’t talk much, I and the lunch-time crowd, but we know each other by sight and nod, affirming one another’s faithful presence. I imagine each person’s story, his or her motive for being here, the dreams.

Over by the mirrors is the woman I call “the Dancer,” thick through the middle, hair faded to white, gently moving her arthritic joints to a graceful heart song. A therapist with a clipboard is watching “Duck Boy” as he waddles around the track in a University of Michigan sweatshirt, dipping and pausing at each step. Fresh scars on both knees indicate his ungainly gait must be some form of therapy.

Several of the treadmills and bikes are loaded with recovering heart patients, moving slowly, but still moving. I climb on the only empty Stairmaster to warm up before I hit the weights. Next to me, “Black Widow” speaks: “Lookin’ good, Doll.”

Embarrassed, I stare straight ahead at the basketball court. Heavy makeup can’t hide the effects of more than half a century of loneliness. She’s ostensibly here on a manhunt. Every warm body with a trace of testosterone has felt her sights on his back.

Around us, on the hamster-wheel track, a guy in a full-body brace passes a creeping octogenarian jogger who looks like Walter Matthau. Nobody here but us rehab patients. Just working to reverse, or at least stave off, the inevitable effects of illness and inactivity.

I came to this place over a year ago with one goal—to make sweeping changes in the way I look. In my mind, I’m still as lean and athletic as I was at eighteen. But one look in the mirror betrays that sentimental image—the occupational hazards of adulthood have inflated and softened me.

I had other needs: A few flights of stairs would put me into a heart-pounding sweat. Too many hours in a chair had tightened my hamstrings and lower back to the point of chronic pain. Enough of this nonsense, I thought. A few weeks of work in the gym and I’ll be back in shape.

My goals? Simple: To regain the appearance of my youth.

I’ve been working out faithfully for over a year now. I lift weights three times a week. I run or get some other form of aerobic exercise at least three other days. There’s no question I’m enjoying myself. But am I making progress?

When I look at my fellow gym rats, I have to say I don’t notice much, if any, change in the way any of us look, though we’re here most every day. At least for me, the scale offers scant encouragement. My weight is still on the wrong side of 200. The mirror? At home, I never look in a mirror until after my shower when I wipe away just enough condensation to shave and comb my hair. But at the gym, wall-to-wall mirrors function like the Word of God held before me, my sins revealed in panoramic view.

If no one is watching, I flex my pecs or biceps, looking hopefully for evidence of growth. Some days I even start to believe I’m making progress, but most days I head for the showers, trying to reestablish faith in the power of exercise by muttering my mantra, “No deposit, no return.”

Is it worth the sacrifice when there is so little visible payoff? The cost of my membership strains our family budget. Taking this midday break means I must come to work early or stay late.

But still I come, and the question is why?

Inevitable slump

The apostle Paul told Timothy, “For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come” (1 Tim. 4:8, niv). If godliness is of value for all things, then surely preaching is included. Shouldn’t training in godliness be just the thing to improve my preaching?

Several years ago, I heard of a seminary classmate who prefaced his sermon with a public apology. He acknowledged that the previous week’s sermon had been especially atrocious, then offered this by way of explanation: “Usually, just before I come into the sanctuary to begin the service, I pray in my study. Last week I didn’t take the time to pray. Please forgive me.” He went on to deliver a message that he assured his congregation was undergirded by much prayer, but I heard it was still pretty bad. The person who told me this story suspected his lack of the preaching gift was a more plausible explanation than his lack of prayer. I have never revealed my superstitions about prayer and sermon preparation with my congregation, but I’m quite familiar with the expectation of my acquaintance.

Too often preachers may feel the necessity of spiritual disciplines, not as a means of drawing closer to God, but as sermon insurance. A long week, too little sleep, and too much tension cramp my study time, so I compensate by praying fervently, asking that God bless my message anyway. I can think, If I pray well, journal well, memorize Scripture well, the sermon will go well. If the sermon flops, I must not have done enough of the spiritual stuff.

Is that true?

In examining almost ten years of journaling, I can’t find consistent evidence proving that periods of spiritual vitality are directly correlated with sermonic excellence. If anything, they seem inversely related. I’ve preached some of the most fruitful messages of my life during spiritual droughts—periods of virtual prayerlessness. What am I supposed to do with that horrifying discovery? I hate the overriding sense of hypocrisy I feel when I deliver bold messages with a withering spirit.

I’ve discovered two types of sermon slumps, one visible to all, the other identifiable only by me.

About five years ago, I went through a six-month streak where every message seemed on target. But I was struggling with a lack of consistency in the spiritual disciplines, complicated by discouragement with some church conflict that refused to die. During that time, a friend and I were shingling his house. He kept talking about how he was shifting some major priorities in his life as a result of my last several sermons. Normally taciturn, on the roof that day he couldn’t keep quiet. The spiritual growth and confidence in God he was experiencing—that he claimed was a direct result of my preaching— was exactly what I was lacking. How could this be? I prayed. Lord, how can you give him something through me without me being affected by it as well?

This slump was internal, the result of spiritual entropy. I was the primary casualty.

On the other hand, I’ve also gone through a couple of sermon slumps, some short, some long, while in rich relationship with my Father. In early 1994 I was laboring through a series of messages, each focused on the hamartia, the fatal flaw of various Old Testament leaders, even as I was experiencing depth in my prayer time. In the midst of that slump, I attended a week-long retreat for pastors that continues to be a significant signpost in my spiritual journey. I returned home with an even deeper spiritual passion, yet for weeks I struggled to find my balance in the pulpit. Relief came only when I abandoned the series that I had lost interest in and started preaching from the Gospel passages that were engaging me every morning in my quiet time.

That second slump began internally but ended up external—my lack of interest resulted in lazy study habits—and the congregation suffered the consequences.

Experiences like these have led me to explore further the relationship between spiritual vitality and passionate preaching. I never think of abandoning preaching when vitality is high. But when vitality is low, I ask myself, Is it hypocrisy to continue to preach with conviction during times of soul drought? By managing appearances am I being deceptive?

If faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, then preaching provides me the perfect opportunity to grow in faith. When preaching well while feeling spiritually anemic, I can now see this as God at work in me. When preaching poorly, I place faith in the hope that God is at work making a difference in other people’s lives, even when I’ve failed to communicate well. Preaching, then, is an act of faith either way.

Scripture gives ample evidence that Paul was a strong preacher, and no one can doubt his calling to preach. One affirmation of his calling came right after arriving in Corinth, when God told Paul in a vision, “Do not be afraid; keep on speaking, do not be silent. For I am with you” (Acts 18:9-10, niv).

But the Corinthians were less than impressed. Paul acknowledged their stinging appraisal in 2 Corinthians 10:10: “For some say, ‘His letters are weighty and forceful, but in person he is unimpressive and his speaking amounts to nothing’ ” (niv).

In one form or another, what preacher hasn’t heard that criticism?

Perhaps he simply paled in comparison to Apollos, who had wowed the crowd with his rhetoric. Maybe Paul was in a major-league preaching slump during at least part of his stay in Corinth. First Corinthians 2:4-5 reads, “My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.”

Sounds to me like the words of a man who found God faithful even in the midst of a preaching slump. How encouraging to know that even when my sermons are not as wise and persuasive as I’d hoped, God’s power will still be manifested through his Holy Spirit!

Frequently someone has thanked me for saying something in a sermon that “made a real difference in my life.” I appreciate such compliments. But sometimes I didn’t say what she said I said. I didn’t say anything close to what she said I said. But somehow, the Spirit spoke to her in spite of what I was saying. If such conversations happened frequently, I’d be tempted to forget preparation and just show up on Sunday, ready to wing it for the Lord. But I’ve been unable to control these experiences, or make the Spirit appear on cue. The Spirit works at God’s discretion.

It appears the Spirit is at work in me and through me whether or not I’m having my quiet time.

I have a friend who has been given powerful gifts of communication. He delivers messages in a way people inevitably describe as anointed. In just about any context, his preaching dramatically touches people’s lives. His church is often recognized by his denomination for evangelistic growth. He is invited to speak at large gatherings.

Yet he admitted to me once, during a time of uncharacteristic vulnerability, that the only time he prays is in the course of performing his pastoral duties. He said he has struggled to break out of that deficit for over twenty years.

I worry about how his spiritual void makes him vulnerable to temptation. He has come dangerously close on two occasions to compromising his integrity.

I also know a pastor who probably spends more than two hours a day, every day, in prayer. He regularly finds time for solitude and silence. He has committed large portions of the Bible to memory. His heart breaks for the hurting and needy. Yet those left in his dying church are ready to fire him, in part because he does not appear to possess the gifts of teaching and preaching. Both of my friends appear headed for tragic circ*mstances; both sophist and saint could meet with dismissal from ministry.

Many preachers, unfortunately, could side with my friends. Those gifted at communicating always live with the nagging suspicion they can get along pretty good without spiritual depth; the spiritually sensitive may believe they can be effective without good communication skills. Neither are true, and both inevitably hurt both preacher and congregation. Those of us somewhere in the middle are in even worse shape, for we wrestle daily with both temptations.

So let me ask a question that borders on sacrilege: If effective preaching is primarily the result of spiritual giftedness and the anointing of the Holy Spirit, if fervent prayer and daily adherence has little visible effect on my preaching, and if no one else will notice, why pursue spiritual fitness?

Why work out?

My faith heritage has trained me to avoid questioning such inconsistencies and merely apply the theology of Nike: Just Do It. We’re commanded by the Scriptures: “Flee the evil desires of youth, and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart” (2 Tim. 2:22, niv).

So Just Do It. “Set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity (1 Tim. 4:12b, niv).

That’s not the worst way to respond to the authority of Scripture. In fact, it’s the starting point. Obedience leads to righteousness, claims Paul. But how much more motivated is the one who understands the reasoning behind the order?

I spent four years in the U.S. Air Force. The it’s-not-just-a-job-it’s-an-adventure began in San Antonio, Texas, with basic training. Part of the genius of building a cohesive military unit is to dress everyone in fatigues and cut off all their hair. No longer were we black or white, we were all green. After the barber got hold of us, the rednecks, the hippies, and the pretty boys all looked alike.

We learned to obey the drill instructor without question. The reason for this is obvious: When someone screams, “Down!” those who stand around to argue or offer alternative suggestions are riddled with bullets.

But we didn’t start learning obedience on the combat course with bullets; we started with underwear.

Specifically, on day two we learned to fold our underwear and T-shirts into perfect six-inch squares. We did this because our drill instructor said so. No other reason needed. Come inspection time, woe to the man whose underwear measured six by six and one-eighth. It would be better for him if a millstone were tied around his neck and he were forced to listen to the all-night Barry Manilow radio-fest. But I digress.

If you disobeyed, you reaped the consequences. The old military saw goes, “Ours is not to question ‘Why?’ Ours is but to do or die.” Blind obedience. It must be learned before it can be improved upon. Once a person has completed basic training, though, he is thrust into a modern military environment that is quite different from basic training.

That’s because supervisors aren’t sent to the same schools as drill instructors. Supervisors don’t rely on the same box of tools as drill instructors. As a young sergeant, I received training in how to build unified teams in order to carry out the necessary tasks to reach our desired objective. That’s a far more effective strategy for empowering a fighting force than the constant threat of court-martial for insubordination.

The reason for the different emphasis?

Obedience and discipline are enhanced when they stem from want-to, not have-to. That insight into human nature did not come courtesy of Uncle Sam; it comes from a God who created us that we might partner with him willingly to accomplish kingdom purposes.

The want-to

The Nike philosophy works for rookies. But we old-timers need Paul’s philosophy:

I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Phil. 3:10-14, niv)

I want to know Christ.

No matter how effective my preaching might be for others, without knowing the love and warmth of Christ, the ice crystallized around my heart will bring hypothermia to my soul. Unless I know the power of his resurrection, cynicism overwhelms compassion. I start to believe that, given a choice, people will make the wrong one every time. Even if I communicate well, I preach as one without hope.

Weddings become merely the prelude to divorce court. Holy Week becomes a crushing season of duty. I tend to view the twice-a-year crowd as shallow consumers unworthy of my best presentation of our hope in Christ.

I want to know Christ.

Without sharing in the fellowship of his suffering, I can’t hope to survive the inevitable conflicts of pastoral ministry. Most of us would stand with courage and conviction before a firing squad before renouncing our faith. Yet the unrelenting shallowness of most congregational conflict and criticism rubs blisters on our souls until we either limp away in pain, or, over time, develop callouses to protect our vulnerable spots. Callouses ease the pain, but they rob us of the sensitivity needed to feel and respond to the hurt and insecurity behind most congregational conflict. Preaching takes on a harshness. Proclaiming truth, yes—but truth without sensitivity, not knowing or caring why our people bicker so.

I want to know Christ.

Without forging ahead, eyes focused on the heavenly prize, my ever-present temptation to compromise my message becomes too much. I begin grinding away the rough edges of the gospel to make it comfortably fit contemporary life, instead of grinding away the excesses of contemporary life until it fits the gospel. I avoid speaking to topics that offend, especially those that might offend our most generous givers. The desire to please my church overrides the desire to please Christ.

These are the sins of the prayerless preacher: cynicism, callousness, and compromise. They render our sermons impotent even when well-communicated.

I want to know Christ.

Without sitting at the feet of Christ daily, I can try to look like him without becoming like him. A certain tone of voice in the pastoral prayer, a concerned look, a knowing nod when others mention matters of depth—these are enough to make most people believe I’ve got the real thing. The ecclesiastical equivalent to a double-head-fake allows me to admit to spiritual struggles, knowing that most people will believe I’m just being modest. Nothing is easier to caricature than a preacher, and nothing is harder to build than the character of a preacher. No wonder some preachers go for style over substance.

The unpleasant reality is most listeners will never know if I’ve got the real thing. But I know. I’ve never been able to fool myself. That knowledge keeps me going even when I don’t have the want-to. I hate faking it.

Internal rewards

After a long, hard year of faithful exercise, not one person has commented, “Wow, where’d you get those muscles?” Yet I still work out faithfully. In spite of little visual confirmation, I know something is going on within me that scales and mirrors cannot validate.

Am I making progress? Without question.

My stamina is up, no doubt about that. I’ve shoveled enough snow this winter to bring on a dozen heart attacks, with not even a sore back. I can take the several flights of stairs from my office to the fax machines two at a time. My latest fitness evaluation showed my body-fat percentage was down and my flexibility, strength, and endurance much improved. And it has been a long time since I’ve had insomnia. I’ve come through another gray, dreary Chicago winter with only nips and growls from the dark dog of depression that haunts transplants like me who grew up accustomed to sunshine.

Those are all great benefits; they simply are not the results I most expected and wanted.

I want to know Christ, not because it makes me preach better, but because it allows me to preach with integrity. It allows me to preach with hope. With a sensitive heart and with conviction. And that’s better than preaching better.

Copyright © 1998 Ed Rowell

WHEN I WAS CALLED to my previous church, some gracious folks remodeled the pastor’s office. It was a spacious room, and they went all out with the fixtures: Double-pane picture windows with vertical blinds. Plush carpet. Matching walnut credenza, bookshelves, and a desk big enough to land Navy fighter jets. Color-coordinated stapler, tape dispenser, paper clip holder, and in/out trays.

My diplomas hung prominently on the wall, lest anyone wandering in should wonder about my credentials. A few comfortable chairs made it easy for people to sit back, relax, and keep Pastor Ed company.

An office is a nice place to do pastoral care and administration, but an office is no study. Accessibility desecrates a study.

So I went looking for a place to call my own. In our new sanctuary, behind the piano and up the stairs, just off the little room where candidates for baptism changed, I found that undefiled, sacred spot. An old lamp, a folding table, a chair, and an extension cord for the laptop. I was ready to get to work. It was several months before even the secretary learned the whereabouts of my secret hideaway.

There I read. I prayed. I thought and wondered. I wrote. I preached passages aloud to myself. Sometimes I even cried. Mostly, though, I asked myself a lot of questions.

Scientists need laboratories. Surgeons need operating rooms. Artists need studios. Mechanics need garages, and welders need shops. Preachers need studies. The study is a place to experiment, to grow, to mend and create, all for the medium of the sermon. Here our passion is restored as we soak in God’s Word.

All professions have their instruments, tools of the trade. Ours are bound stacks of paper, filled with lines of words and few pictures. Preachers acquire books like squirrels hoard nuts, filling our nests even when we have enough to last through the winter. We try to sneak more of them into our homes, even when our spouse has laid down the law.

“What’s in that bag?”

“Nothing.” Be cool, now. She can’t possibly know. Don’t look guilty. “Uh, leftovers from lunch.”

“There’s something else in there. Did you buy another book?”

“Well, there was a sale. …” It’s sad, really, what we become.

My wife, Susan, won’t let me read magazines or newspapers first, because I tear out illustrations and statistics, fodder for the sermon. I’ve stolen magazines from the doctor’s office, justifying my actions by asking, Won’t this story accomplish more good in one of my sermons than moldering on this table?

These days, though I have an office at work, my study is at home—just seven feet wide and ten feet deep. My study is both monastic retreat and prison cell. When we first looked at this house, I was able to overlook the smell of pet urine, the sight of stained, orange carpet, avocado-green wallpaper, and the filthy appliances (that could all be remedied), because I spotted a little area off the family room behind the stairs that looked like holy ground. All I needed to do was build a wall for privacy and some bookshelves.

Here, I thought, I can meet with God, midwife sermons, and tinker with words.

No stained glass or polished wood in this sanctuary. This is a workshop, where I keep the tools of my trade. An old metal desk holds a coffee mug full of pens, a laptop and printer, and stacks of Bibles, dictionaries, and thesauruses. Next to the desk is a 1950s-era filing cabinet, big as a bomb shelter. There my illustration files are nestled alphabetically by topic, safe from nuclear attack. Sermons are in portable files, easily rescued in case of fire.

Over on the west wall is the bookshelf, floor to ceiling. The preaching books are eye level, left side; theology on the right. Commentaries and novels are on the top shelves, notebooks and old textbooks on the bottom shelf. In case of flooding, the stuff I’d most hate to lose is up high.

Hanging around on the walls is some of my favorite junk: A bridle, a rope, a pair of spurs. A certificate for finishing Grandma’s Marathon sits on the shelf in front of commentaries on the Epistles. A bulletin board I found in a dumpster holds crayoned art masterpieces by my girls and a calendar to remind me of deadlines. Fly rod, vest, and waders hang on a peg in the corner. In the opposite corner, a guitar stands ready; I only play it during my really small group of one.

I have no windows, but distractions aplenty. Just outside my door sits the television and VCR. When my two young daughters are downstairs, their choice in videos allow purple dinosaurs and dancing broccoli to wander in and say hello. About two feet from my right ear, separated only by Sheetrock, sits the piano where my wife gives lessons to second- and third-graders. Even though no one is playing right now, a halting rendition of “My Grandfather’s Clock” is bouncing around in my head.

Mostly I’m in here early and late, when the girls are in bed, the TV and piano silent. The pipes rattle at me, a musty smell rises from the crawl space, but it’s mine. I listen for God, pray, read, write. And I wrestle with persistent questions.

Questionable preaching

For about the last five years, I’ve had a 3X5 card taped to my desk with a bunch of questions on it. I ask these questions every time I preach. An airline pilot runs through a checklist before taking off; a lot of lives are at stake. I approach my task with the same idea.

Wrestling with these questions helps for several reasons. First, they simply make for a better sermon. But the biggest reason I wrestle with them each week is that they keep me from succumbing to the inherent temptations of the study.

For all my talk about my study being holy ground, it’s also a wilderness of temptation. Temptations await me even before I arrive. Laziness hides behind the door, jumping on me the minute I walk through it. His twin brother Procrastination whispers, “You have plenty of time,” while their evil cousin Distraction tempts me to straighten piles of books, trim my fingernails, or even clean out and organize my drawers.

But these are bush-league temptations. Concentration and the sure knowledge that Sunday is bearing down like a charging bull are usually enough to help me break free from them.

I beat off my persistent adversaries and begin another wrestling match, this time with the text. If it’s a familiar passage of Scripture, I impatiently want to start throwing up walls before the foundation is completed. Get on to the commentaries, flesh out the body of the message, find those illustrations, whispers Hurry.

Not yet.

I read and reread the passage. If I learned one thing in my seminary preaching class, it’s this: I can’t open another resource until I know the big idea of the text.

The study process is like working a high school math problem; the answer is in the back of the book. Back then cheating, looking up the answer first, was useless, because the teacher wanted to see how we arrived at the answer. Cracking the commentaries too soon may give me answers, but the way I work the problem is even more important.

Get specific

So I work with the text and wrestle with my biases and with God until I get it. Once I’ve done my biblical spadework, I break for caffeine, then start in with the first question. I ask these questions every time I prepare a sermon.

1. In one sentence, what is this sermon about? When, on Tuesday, someone asks, “What are you preaching about Sunday?” I hope I can answer with one clear sentence. It may be similar to the big idea of the text, but it’s more relevant.

I recently preached on the Lord’s Prayer, using the text in Luke 11. The idea of the text was “Jesus reveals the secret of his rich prayer life.” My one-sentence description of the sermon was “Prayer charges our spiritual batteries.”

2. What theological category would this fit under? Am I being theologically faithful? If the sermon is not theological, on some level, what is it?

I once preached a Father’s Day message from Psalm 15 on the characteristics of a godly man. It was biblical, but not particularly theological. If pressed, I would justify the message as illustrative of our redeemed ontological nature or some such blather.

I wish I had preached the message on Psalm 103:8-12 by Jim Nicodem in a recent issue of Preaching Today. It was entitled “The Father Heart of God.” It was also a sermon for Father’s Day, but it was a theological exploration of one aspect of the nature of God. Every father who heard it learned something about being a better dad, but the focus was Godward, not manward. Increasingly, I’m moving from the anthropocentric message toward the theocentric.

3. What do I want my listeners to know? This question causes my sermon to engage the mind. What information does a listener need to know before he or she can act?

In a recent sermon on forgiveness, Robert Russell, minister of Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky, wanted his congregation to know that forgiveness will set them free from a variety of emotional and spiritual maladies. More specifically, he wanted people to know there is a reward for doing the painfully hard work of forgiveness.

4. What do I want them to do? This is the application question, which focuses on my listeners’ hands and feet. I must be as specific and practical as possible. In Robert Russell’s message, he asked specific questions not easily deflected by the heart: “What about your boss, who denied you a raise, even though you had a more productive year than the year before? Will you forgive her? What about your dad, who left you and your mom when you were eight? Are you ready to forgive him?”

5. What do I want them to become? Now I’m going for the heart. What attitudes, priorities, and adjustments in lifestyle will this sermon address?

This question is often the hardest to answer, and for that reason I’m tempted to ignore it. It’s easy to say, “As a result of this message, I want people to become more effective and consistent at prayer.”

But what do more prayerful people look like? Will I know one when I see one? If Rick, our sound technician, put these principles of prayer to work in his life, what would he become in his work, his home, his church?

Naturally, some sermons, by nature of the text, are primarily knowing, doing, or being sermons. Yet I want to identify some element of understanding, action, and regeneration in each message I preach.

6. How does this sermon fit with the larger vision? This question helps me focus on the long view: How does this week’s message move us toward our long-range goals? How does it fit into our church’s vision statement? Am I providing this flock with a healthy, balanced diet of preaching? Is there a cohesiveness with what I’ve previously preached? A sense of direction?

Answer the skeptics

Sermon preparation would be a lot easier if we could just send our congregations to seminary. But since chat won’t happen, I have to be relevant. I have to face the pragmatism and skepticism of the age. Two questions help me do that.

So what? That is the relentless question of pragmatists: So what if the Philistines stopped up the wells dug by Isaac’s father, Abraham? I didn’t sign up for a class in ancient Middle Eastern history.

The story of Isaac and the wells in Genesis 26 has relevance for anyone who has felt the undeserved enmity of another. I heard homiletics professor Miles Jones use this text recently to call his fellow African-Americans to remove the dirt of racism from the wells of their souls. Even though they may not have initiated the racism, said the speaker, they were responsible for digging out of it. “We’ve got to dig deeper, ’cause deep won’t do,” became his refrain. He answered the “So what?” question beautifully.

Oh really? Many people are conditioned by life to discount every promise they hear by about 90 percent. I try to imagine the broken promises and empty assurances people have had to face: the large woman and her larger husband, for example, who for more than twenty years have tried to lose weight. Fad diets, pills, expensive health club memberships—they’ve been there, done that. Just last month, an infomercial guaranteed a revolutionary piece of exercise equipment would transform soft-and-flabby into hard-and-healthy in just minutes a day. The behemoth contraption maxed out their credit card, takes up half the family room, but hasn’t taken off a pound. The woman hangs clothes on it while she’s ironing.

“Oh really?” will be their reaction to a sermon entitled “Six Easy Steps to Spiritual Fitness.” This question saves me from trite preaching.

Analyze my condition

Recently I attended a concert at our county fair by a country singer who has been recording hits for twenty-five years. Her band was technically precise, her gestures polished, her vocals on pitch. But as she sang, I asked myself, How many rinky-dink fairs and rodeos has she been to over the past two and a half decades? She’s not only tired, she’s bored out of her mind. After five or six other songs, Susan and I rounded up the kids, ready to go. I’m sure the performer wished she could leave early as well. On the way home, I sang her songs with more gusto than she had. I’d hate to think of my congregation doing the same with one of my sermons.

So I wrestle with a couple more questions.

Do I believe this message will make a difference? Without this question, I could drift a long time before I’m conscious of growing cynicism or hopelessness. I can fake sincerity pretty well, but contrived passion is ugly to watch. I need to wrestle with my faith every week: faith in God, faith in the Word, faith in the foolishness of preaching.

Has this sermon made a difference in my life this week? By this stage of preparation, I’ve spent many hours engaging the text and thinking about its implications for life. If it has not yet touched me, dare I believe it will touch anyone else in the thirty minutes I’ll be in the pulpit?

John Calvin said, “If a preacher is not first preaching to himself, better that he falls on the steps of the pulpit and breaks his neck than preaches that sermon.”

Have I earnestly prayed for God to speak through me? As my friend Dennis Baker says, “Even a church service can get pretty interesting when God shows up.” Have I met with him in the study? Am I expecting him to show up this Sunday?

Have I used the material of others inappropriately? Access to the sermons of great communicators is easier than ever. Plagiarism isn’t just about what it takes from the person I stole it from. It’s about what it does to the level of trust with those who will hear me. They may not be able to articulate this, but my listeners come with the expectation that what I’m sharing came through honest, prayerful work.

Have I tried to make myself look better than I am? Who else besides us preachers can tell stories about ourselves without getting interrupted? If I’m not careful, I can abuse the privilege and select excerpts from my life that make me look smarter, funnier, and kinder than I’ll ever be.

A heart for Nick

Years ago I preached a sermon series on “Who We Are in Christ.” My text for one message was Romans 8:1-2: “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death” (niv).

In the study that week, I thought a lot about Nick, a recent convert, who was still held captive by a lot of destructive habits. He agonized over them, ashamed, for example, by his need for a cigarette between Sunday school and worship. I pondered the text: What are the implications for Nick? He’s come so far, but he’ll have a tough time growing in Christlikeness if he’s under the burden of condemnation. Lord, what can you say to him? After several moments, other faces came to mind, and I pondered their situations as well.

Something, I don’t remember what, came up that week that made me fall behind on my sermon preparation. Looking in my file from that Sunday, I preached with just a sketchy outline and this firm conviction: Whatever else I do or don’t do, I can’t preach this text with even a hint of condemnation in my words, attitude, or actions.

Sometime later Nick and I sat together at a church potluck supper. He was not a man who expressed himself well, but through a mouthful of macaroni and cheese, in a roundabout fashion, he thanked me for not hassling him about smoking. He ended his rambling with, “You’re a h—— of a preacher, you know that?”

Of all the questions I agonize over during the week, the one that may be the most important is “Will my listeners know I care about them?” Love covers a multitude of pastoral sins. If my church recognizes my voice as that of a loving undershepherd, they will listen with ears of trust and faith. They’ll know instinctively that I have their best interests at heart.

And there’s an added benefit: They’ll think I’m a better preacher than I really am.

Copyright © 1998 Ed Rowell

IT WAS THE LAST ELK HUNT of the season. Three of our four clients had been successful early in the week, and we were hunting hard to make sure the other guy didn’t get skunked. No luck. On the next-to-last day of the season, the snow came: wet, heavy, and deep. Alex, my boss, made the judgment call: “We’ve got to get these guys out of here. We’ll ride out today, then you and I will come back and take down camp.”

We loaded their gear, meat, and antlers on the pack mules and started out. The mules U-shaped feet were better prepared for this winter work than their equine half-brothers. Snow balled up in the horses’ rounder hooves until they were walking on stilts of packed ice, making them prone to stumble—not a good thing on the narrow trail that switched back across several deep canyons. It took most of the day to get down the mountain to Willow Creek, where the trucks and horse trailer were parked. From there we had forty miles of dirt road to navigate before we hit the pavement, then another thirty-five miles to our homes in Apache Creek.

Ten animals would never fit in the trailer, so we left the four mules and one horse behind in a nearby Forest Service pasture to be picked up the next day. We drove most of the night in four-wheel-drive low gear, sliding off the road on two different occasions, having to winch ourselves out of the drifts. We said good-bye to our hunters as we dropped them off at the Rode Inn motel, drove home, caught two hours of sleep, ate breakfast, then started back up the mountain. During the night, the snow had stopped, the sky cleared, and the temperature plummeted. The snowplow had been up the mountain past Rainy Mesa to the Gilson ranch but had turned around about ten miles short of where our animals were. We knew we could never drive back into our camp in the Gila Wilderness under those conditions, but somehow, we had to get those animals out.

So we started walking, carrying halters and lead ropes.

Were I to design the ultimate aerobic exercise machine, it would simulate walking in knee-deep, wet snow at high altitude. This was in the days before synthetic fibers, and our clothes were soon soaked with sweat. We trudged on, stopping only to ease our pounding hearts.

When we finally made it to Willow Creek, the mules were their usual stubborn selves, refusing to be caught without playing hard to get. They were not broken to ride, so we took turns riding the lone horse, bareback, while the other man walked—each leading two half-wild mules. The sun was already setting in the pale, winter sky as we started following our tracks back down the old logging road.

The way back was somewhat easier than the way in; we were going mostly downhill, and the person walking had the benefit of the rider and other animals tromping down the snow. But we were wet, cold, and hungry—perfect candidates for hypothermia. We both ended up walking, it was too cold riding. Hours passed. The moonlight reflecting off the snow created a surreal world in which time stood still. I wondered what death would feel like, imagining it to be warm and restful. We staggered on, falling too many times to count.

The sight of that truck and trailer made us nearly weep with relief. After loading the animals, we climbed into the truck cab and cranked up the heater. Uncontrollable shivering helped keep us awake long enough to get home. Alex’s wife fixed us pancakes, bacon, and eggs while we cared for our hungry and thirsty pack string. A hot meal, hot shower, and fourteen hours of sleep later—I was good as new, except for the frostbitten ears that plague me even now when winter comes to call.

Spiritual fatigue

Acute fatigue is also a reality of pastoral ministry. The busyness of the Christmas or Easter season can put the hurt on us every year—but it passes. And the all-night youth lock-in (which, I’m convinced, is Satan’s tool to drain the small-church pastor) can be brutal—but it’s only one night.

Tougher to shake are the nights in the emergency room with a family while a loved one struggles between life and death. Those periods of intense pastoral care can sap every bit of strength we possess, especially since these events invariably happen late in the week when a sermon must be delivered before we can recharge.

I still grow weary remembering the weekend that began with a Friday funeral, followed on Saturday by another funeral and a wedding, then of course, Sunday. At least the wedding and the sermon had been anticipated. Such experiences can suck pastors dry, and steps must be taken to rest and lay low for a while. Acute fatigue can pass fairly quickly if proper steps are taken.

Far more treacherous is the chronic state of fatigue that sneaks up on us while we are enjoying ministry. It wraps its cold tentacles around us. The slow squeeze begins, and we find ourselves gasping for breath, wondering why we are losing our passion for preaching.

Passionate preaching is itself physically draining. To invest so much energy and emotion in study, then to funnel that distillation of soul into a single event is to invite an emotional and spiritual crash. Delivering the message two or three times in multiple services simply raises us to a greater height from which to fall later that day.

Common sense tells us to go home immediately after the service and crawl back into bed. If we can manage to work in a nap, experience tells us that someone will call just as we slip into a coma. Our conditioned response, even while still mostly unconscious, is to pick up the ringing object and hold it to our ear, then exhale a hearty “Hello!” in a chirpy tone that says, “Of course I wasn’t sleeping!”

The grating voice on the other end of the line informs us that Mrs. Albright won’t be returning to our church because she was offended by the behavior of two children seated in front of her, and if that’s the kind of chaos that passes for worship, well, she’ll just find another place where people understand that worship means silence and reverence, and people have enough Christian values to discipline their children, and why doesn’t Ruth Peabody sing anymore? Am I upset that her husband now works for the state lottery, and do I think I’m better than anyone else because I. …

Someone’s mad. At me. For something. Again. Major or minor, all gripes feel major in the fog of post-sermon fatigue.

Sunday naps for most pastors are in that same fantasy realm as the call from the megachurch search committee and the heartfelt apology from the deacon board. Sunday is the day ripe for connecting with folks who slow down just a little more on this day than any other. More Sundays than not, my wife and I had dinner guests or were dinner guests.

Churches of my faith tradition have long held that attendance at the Sunday night service is the measure of the true believer. (They even expect the preacher to show up!) For the pastor who has just done battle with the principalities of darkness in the heavenly realm, it’s hard to do much better than a bad imitation of Sunday morning in the evening service.

When I become the Protestant Pope, I’ll declare the Sunday evening service, as it still exists in many churches, anathema. But for now, many preachers still have to stumble back to the pulpit, feeling grateful if they’ve managed to scratch out an outline during the football game. That’s a best case scenario. I’m convinced the majority of pulpit plagiarism happens between two and six on Sunday afternoons. We’re driven to it by our fatigued state.

Why, then, are we so surprised when Monday dawns and we struggle just to stand upright and not drag our knuckles on the ground? Coffee—strong, black, gallons of it—jacks us into an induced state of semiconsciousness.

Just as we’re starting to feel like living another day is an option, the old Steve Miller Band tune runs through our heads: “Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future.” We stare at the calendar and begin to blubber uncontrollably, because even in a numbed state, we recognize another Sunday is just 144 hours away—and the clock’s ticking. Worse, in many cases, we are expected to bring an inspired word from the Word at the Wednesday evening service, a mere 60 hours from now.

Just as chronic fatigue will kill sexual passion, it can stifle spiritual passion. Worse, fatigue makes maintaining intimacy with God almost impossible. In a desperate state, we start coming to God’s Word for sermon fodder, not to fill our souls.

Passion dies. In its place is either a void, or a hastily constructed, unconvincing facsimile of the real thing.

A thousand times while growing up, I heard my parents or grandparents yawn, stretch, and say, “There’s no rest for the wicked.” To which the conditioned response was always “And the righteous don’t need any.”

With all due respect to my ancestors, what idiot thought that one up?

Even as a kid I knew that maxim was stupid, but a cursory review of my life’s work habits reveals I have come to believe it on some level—either the lack of rest in my life was punishment for my vile ways or the inevitable consequence of doing the Lord’s work.

For the past twenty-plus years, I’ve either had jobs that easily expanded to fill all available hours in the week, or worked two jobs, or had multiple part-time jobs while working on a full-time education.

When I left a full-time pastorate to join the editorial staff at LEADERSHIP, I had daydreams about a Monday-through-Friday, eight-to-five schedule. Within weeks, I was as busy as ever, working late into the night rehabing an old house, supply-preaching many weekends, hustling free-lance writing projects, and hosting and attending barbecues to get to know our new neighbors.

For years I told myself the reason for my fatigue was the pressures of the pastorate. Now I have to face the fact that the problem is somewhere in me.

I have friends who are professional rodeo cowboys. In their quest to make the National Finals each year, they push themselves to compete in more than a hundred rodeos over ten months, often driving all night to get to the next one. As one said to me a few years ago, “It’s not the bulls that will wear you down, it’s seeing too many sunrises through the windshield of a pickup.” Like other professional athletes, most rodeo cowboys see their careers end sometime around their thirtieth birthday.

Preachers make it a little longer, but the comparison is valid: It’s not the sermons that wear you down, it’s the failure to allow the body and soul to recover from the trauma of preaching.

Several attitudes prevent us from pausing long enough to refuel:

1. Too unrealistic. During the 1997 NBA Championship series between the Chicago Bulls and the Utah Jazz, I watched Michael Jordan play an incredible game while suffering from a gnarly case of either flu or food poisoning. Yup, I thought. That’s the way we champions perform, never letting the inevitable ups and downs of life keep us from playing at the top of our game.

That thinking is nothing more than another trip to Fantasy Island. I’m not Michael Jordan, and the inevitable ups and downs of life will keep me, at times, from playing at the top of my game. As much as I love preaching, during some stretches I was simply unable to preach as well as I would have liked. Following the births of both of our daughters, the priority of preaching went into a freefall for a couple of months while I focused on my family. During a year-and-a-half bout with a baffling illness, getting better was my main concern, not homiletics.

I’ve had preacher friends who struggled to keep their marriages intact, others who have had to deal for years with a prodigal son or daughter. Is it reasonable to expect anyone to care passionately about a sermon in such difficult circ*mstances?

Solomon wrote, “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.” Authentic, passionate preaching may not always be possible when chronic life issues pin us to the mat.

2. Too demanding. They say that self-employed people work for the most demanding bosses. Most preachers face their toughest critics when they look in the mirror. Even more relentless than the ever-approaching Sunday are personal expectations. Those who become chronically weary often swing for the fence every time they preach.

Our best motives are fueled by a genuine passion to see people become passionate about their relationship with God. Unfortunately, our motives are sometimes mixed with grandiosity. This is essentially a theological problem, evidence we aren’t clear about the role of the Holy Spirit, whose job is not up for grabs.

We can forget the efficacy of consistent preaching intentionally focused over the long-haul. Effective sermon planning not only relieves the week-to-week panic of what to preach, it allows us to plan to say in many weeks what we cannot hope to say in only one. While one sermon may occasionally be the catalyst for change in someone’s life, more often lasting change is the result of a steady diet of biblical challenge and encouragement.

3. Too driven. Few books have shed light on the chronic fatigue of ministry like Archibald Hart’s Adrenaline and Stress. 1.I now understand that adrenaline, that necessary and welcome component of passionate preaching, has an hangover effect that can cripple our effectiveness—something I failed to recognize for years.

For much of 1993 and 1994, I lived with a level of fatigue that depressed me and perplexed my doctor. After much blood work to rule out everything else, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a neuromuscular syndrome that results in chronic muscle and joint pain, sleep disorders, and depression—symptoms I still endure on an off-and-on basis.

But after reading Adrenaline and Stress, I’ve wondered more than once if my symptoms were (are) the inevitable result of living too long in an adrenaline-saturated state. If only I had planned for the Monday adrenaline hangovers, if only I had allowed time to dry out between Sunday binges—if only I had taken the Sabbath seriously.

Sabbath yearning

For me to promote the necessity of a consistent Sabbath is like Mick Jagger pounding the pulpit for abstinence from sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Who could listen without laughing? That’s why I encourage every pastor to read Eugene Peterson, former pastor and now professor at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia.

To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, it’s not that the Sabbath has been tried and found wanting; it is that it has been tried and found difficult. Everyone who fights the passion-draining work of ministry instinctively knows that the Sabbath is the solution. But it seems like a solution beyond our ability to grasp. Compressing the necessary work of a congregation into six days seems an amazing feat, yet research shows many pastors manage to take a day off each week.

How do most of us spend it, though?

Changing the oil in the car, mowing the lawn, reading for a D. Min. course, coaching the youth soccer team, taking down the Christmas lights, giving the dog a lift to the vet to get neutered, and, inevitably, spending just a little time on the next day’s sermon. What separates this day from the other six is not the cessation of work but the focus of work. Work is work, not rest. A day away from ministry is necessary, and may even be enjoyable, but it’s no Sabbath.

The Sabbath restores energy, hope, and passion. Observing the Sabbath means refraining from the work that saps us of energy, hope, and passion. Sabbath means putting the myth of “busy is better” to death. It means a new way of thinking about time, priorities, and recreation.

My theological default setting is on Legalism. My first thoughts on Sabbath are that it must be spiritual, a day spent on my knees in a prayer closet, pouring out my sins, my grief, and my anguish to God. A few years ago, at the point of a critical decision, a friend let me use his mountain cabin, where I spent forty-eight hours in prayer and fasting. I counted those days as my days off for that week. While it was a significant time, I came home exhausted. It took weeks to get back to normal. On reflection, I’d say that time away was a necessary and welcome spiritual exercise but no Sabbath.

In the days prior to the technological age, work for most people meant physical labor. The idea of Sabbath rest for those people meant a cessation from physical labor. The normally taboo options of sedentary activities or even inactivity were lifted for one day a week. The mind was set free from the mundane business of labor to explore theology, music, and conversation.

For pastors, as well as many others whose work is defined by physical inactivity and mental flurry, perhaps the Sabbath should involve sweat and sunshine and the cessation of reading, thinking, counseling, and relating.

During my years in Arizona, I found Sabbath in the most unexpected source, by getting back into the cowboy sport of team roping. Once or twice a week, I’d practice for a couple of hours with some of the other local ropers at the Silver Creek Sheriff Posse arena. Most Friday nights or Saturdays throughout the summer found me competing somewhere in northern Arizona. My first published piece of writing was for Super Looper, the official magazine of the United States Team Roping Congress.

In the summer of 1991, my Sabbaths were interrupted when a horse fell with me, and I suffered oblique fractures at the left wrist of both the radius and ulna, chipped the navicular bone at the base of my thumb, and split my chin wide open. I preached the following Sunday with fourteen stitches in my chin and a cast to my armpit. Over the next three months, the cast kept getting progressively smaller. I cut away much of the palm of the short cast, so I could hold the bridle reins and the coils of my rope in the left hand, and got right back, literally, into the swing of things within about six weeks.

From the beginning, I took a lot of grief about roping from a handful of church members. Rodeo cowboys have a sometimes deserved reputation of being shiftless, unfaithful drunks. Several were especially concerned that their pastor was frequently seen in the company of such vermin.

I had no one to tell how much I appreciated the unpretentious relationships I found among those men. They all called me “preacher,” and though it was not my primary goal, I had ripe opportunities for ministry while hanging around the roping chutes. But just as important, my soul was refreshed. Tensions melted. Anger subsided. Worries were put into perspective. I laughed. Joy was renewed. And more times than not, I went home with a warm heart and a joyful spirit.

When I lived in the Chicago suburbs, I had a hard time finding anyone to play cowboys with me. I experimented with different ways to recharge. I ran, fished, and went for long walks on the Prairie Path trail. Today I continue to look for ways to integrate the Sabbath elements of laughter, solitude, submission, worship, and recreation into my life.

Sneaking around

You’ve heard the old jokes about pastors sneaking off to find a Sabbath: The golfer who told his secretary he was going to visit the Greens; the fisherman who named his boat Visitation, as in “I’ll be out on Visitation for the rest of the day if anyone calls.”

I’m not advocating sneakiness; it bothers me that the disapproval of a handful of cranks can make us resort to such behavior. But if people could only hear us preach with a fresh spirit, in contrast to the sermons we preach when we’re chronically fatigued, perhaps we’d never again have to resort to sneakiness.

I waited for years for someone to notice and say, “Pastor, we’ve been watching you work, and it’s making us all tired. We’re so concerned about your physical and spiritual well-being that we’re going to insist that you ease up enough to recharge your batteries. You can count on us to pick up the slack.”

Another episode of Fantasy Island.

So I started giving that little speech to myself every week. At least the first part. And no one noticed. I couldn’t believe it. I cut my workload by 20 percent, and no one complained. I still showed up when it counted, made myself visible at strategic times and places, and, most every week, preached with the passion that comes from being fresh.

Archibald Hart, Adrenaline and Stress (Dallas, Tex.: Word Publishing, 1995)

Copyright © 1998 Ed Rowell

SOME PEOPLE PAY a bigger price to minister than others. Take my friend Tim, for example:

After Bible college, he went to work for a para-church ministry. He was completely sold out to the cause; the organization’s membership requirements were so stringent, his friends wondered if he had gotten involved in a cult. His job involved doing all the front work for an evangelistic team.

My buddy would arrive on a college campus the day before an event, often bribing the security guy with a box of donuts before he could set up the stage, lights, and sound. The next morning, he would crank up some loud music while a crowd gathered. The main speaker was a name you would recognize, a popular guy who literally wrote the book on apologetic evangelism. Sometimes he would preach, other times he would debate some professor from the philosophy department. Either way, it was always interesting. The organization saw some people get saved, made a whole lot of people mad, even got in a few fights.

In between passing out flyers, going out for coffee and sandwiches, and running the lights and sound, Tim very occasionally got on stage to share his testimony. But then, while the speaking team was on a flight headed home, Tim was left behind to pick up the mess and smooth over relationships with the local ministers.

After a couple of years, Tim had had enough of the itinerant stuff. He longed to settle into a local parish and minister out of the limelight. Tim’s mentor dropped his name in the hat of a big suburban church that had gone through a couple of pastors in quick succession. Informed sources described the church to Tim as “having lots of potential.”

When the search committee came calling, Tim answered.

He didn’t have the boxes in the garage unpacked before the fecal matter hit the rapidly revolving cooling unit. The church’s troubles started at the top. A number of the elders and deacons were of questionable moral stature. They were noted in the community for their lack of scruples. Their marriages and families were in shambles, and several had problems with substance abuse. With few exceptions, their wives were vicious gossips.

Tim sized up the situation pretty quickly, and on his third Sunday he blistered them with an angry sermon on character and holy living. They politely ignored him on their way out the door, but to one another they said, “That’s one.”

Then there was the matter of a couple of popular Sunday school teachers who could really draw a crowd. The only problem was their definition of orthodoxy was broader than the San Fernando Valley. One guy, for example, taught a class on comparative creation myths. He had a Powerpoint presentation with cool graphs and charts that compared and contrasted the Genesis account of the flood with the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. He had one slide of Noah and Utnapishtim squaring off in a wrestling ring, just like Hulk Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior. People loved it, but attenders left class each week believing one was as fake as the other.

Tim had a much higher view of Scripture. He drew a line in the sand, requiring teachers to sign an agreement of basic doctrinal standards.

“That’s two,” they said in the parking lot after the meeting.

The church constituency was sophisticated, highly educated, and loaded with dough, which, frankly, intimidated Tim. They were giving zip to missions and community outreach, and that, frankly, infuriated Tim. He knew firsthand what it meant to be down and out. He had grown up in a trailer park in the stereotypical small town: Tastee-Freeze at one end and farm-equipment dealer on the other. His dad was a trucker who, not long after Tim’s birth, quit coming home. His mom raised him on a waitress’s salary, with a little help from Grandma’s pension.

Tim couldn’t stand the thought of such an affluent church with a core value of miserliness. He took on the budget committee, asking it to ante up 20 percent of the budget for missions and appointing a task force to investigate community needs, especially to single mothers.

“That’s three” went the conversation on the prayer chain that week.

In addition, Tim was quite a bit younger than the majority of his congregants, and he was also cursed with a baby face. His mentor had told him once, only partly in jest, that he needed two things to be successful in ministry—gray hair and hemorrhoids. The gray hair, he explained, would make Tim look distinguished, and the hemorrhoids would make him look concerned.

Tim was forced to minister without the benefit of either.

Though the search committee and elder board assured Tim the reason they wanted a younger pastor was to reach young families, they insisted he do it with a worship style that had ceased being culturally relevant just after the war. Tim would not acquiesce; he blew them away one morning with a worship band. To make it worse, the drummer had a ponytail, and was known to work nights in a local bar band.

Just how the upright church members knew this, no one could say, but one thing was sure—that was four.

What do you do when you’ve used up all your downs and you haven’t moved the football even a yard?

Tim first got an ulcer, then he e-mailed his mentor—”I’m dying out here. You gotta tell me what to do.”

As it happened, the old guy was taking a hiatus from the road and promised to come as soon as he could. In the meantime, he took the time to write from his new residence. Here’s the word that came back from AposPaul@jailbird.com:

Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching. Do not neglect your gift, which was given you through a prophetic message when the body of elders laid their hands on you.

Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress. Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers. (1 Tim. 4:13-16, niv)

I know Timothy. I feel for Timothy. Man, I am Timothy. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, the souvenir cup, the scars, and the ulcer. When I read Paul’s counsel in 1 and 2 Timothy, I feel like these letters were intended for my mailbox. I’ve dealt with every issue Timothy faced in Ephesus, and like him, I had to stand in the pulpit every week and face the crowd, sometimes not knowing for sure who was friend and who was foe.

I’m probably most qualified to discuss how not to preach during church conflict. Almost half my years in the pastorate were spent in a congregation whose predisposition to conflict was in its genetic code. Much of what I have to say about preaching with passion in the midst of conflict I learned by doing the wrong things first:

• I’ve stood up and pretended everything was okay when everyone knew it wasn’t.
• I’ve confused the crowd by making thinly veiled references to conflicts only a few knew anything about.
• I’ve hid behind the pulpit and said things I wasn’t brave enough to say in board meetings.
• I’ve rooted through the Scriptures selecting heart-seeking missile texts to preach with specific targets in mind.
• I’ve lost my focus on reconciliation and actively pursued retaliation.

I’ve probably done all of the above on the same Sunday. Time and again God has graciously brought me back to Paul’s advice to Timothy. In times of conflict, I’m sorely prone to ignore the gift of preaching and to watch everyone’s life and doctrine but my own.

Here are several lessons I’ve learned in those times of rebuke:

1. Keep public-relation promotions out of the pulpit. During one stretch of conflict, while confiding in an old seminary buddy who pastored half a continent away, I described the parties behind the conflict, their ungodly motives and their Philistine tactics, then moved on to assert my own dovelike innocence and Christlike conduct. My buddy stopped me.

“Now hold on just a minute,” he said. “I’m having a hard time believing those people are as evil as you say, and I know you ain’t as full of sweetness and light as you just described yourself. Think maybe you’re overstating the case a bit?”

Of course not.

But I’ve noticed others tend to sanitize and saintize their motives. If I were to magnify the purity of my own actions and motives, I’d pay attention to the kind of personal illustrations I used in preaching. And I’d be sensitive to the temptation to use the pastoral prayer to underscore subtly but surely my spiritual and moral superiority. I knew I had sunk to a new low when I caught myself directing my prayers toward the people listening in and not to the Father.

In conflict, the ever-present temptation to use the pulpit to make ourselves look smarter, funnier, and kinder than we really are increases, but the pulpit is no place to conduct a public-relations campaign.

A few days after the death of Princess Diana, Queen Elizabeth made a short but memorable address to her bereaved nation. While such a speech was unusual, some reporters said the Queen’s uncharacteristically personal speech was delivered primarily to counter the perception that the House of Windsor was cold and uncaring. Prince Charles allegedly told his mother if she didn’t speak out, that would be a public-relations nightmare for the already beleaguered royal family.

Crocodile tears usually reveal crocodile teeth. Self-promotion is seldom effective.

2. Get it out of your system before stepping into the pulpit. Most often, preaching will not be the primary means by which we solve conflict that revolves around personalities; that is a private matter best settled face-to-face. Matthew 18 indicates public discourse is the last resort in a reconciliatory process.

Unless there is a rampant corporate sin that affects a majority of people, my goal during conflict is to preach as I would under normal circ*mstances. The temptation to vent is just too enticing. Angry preaching is a mutation of passionate preaching, but not the kind of energy I can run on for long. Anger is the high-octane fuel that burns white-hot, but it always causes damage. When angry, I usually deliver the kind of message I long regret.

In a recent Leadership article, Calvin Miller, former pastor and writer-in-residence at Southwestern Baptist Seminary, recalled the time someone preached a message in seminary chapel entitled “Are There Any Fat Cows of Bashan on Seminary Hill?” It seems that just about everyone on campus showed up to find out if there were any and left convinced that there were, but they personally were not counted among the bovine.

That response is typical. Too often the people I’ve wanted to blister from the pulpit either don’t show up that Sunday or don’t seem to recognize when I’m talking directly to them. By venting in the pulpit, I run the risk of alienating those who have yet to jump into the fray.

3. Spend time with both enemies and friends. I tend to vacillate between introversion and extroversion. When things are going well, I draw energy from people, but in conflict I can become a recluse. Not wanting to run into the opposition, I’m tempted to stay behind the books. And since I’m not that good at hiding my feelings, I’m equally afraid of running into a friend who might ask, “So, how’s it going?”

When I gave in to my inclination to hide, my preaching inevitably suffered. There is information in the opposition. And there is encouragement and support from those who aren’t participating in the current round of fighting. In one church, my cross to bear was an electrician named Wally. He was both a church leader of considerable influence and a habitual liar. The first couple of times I realized he wasn’t shooting straight with me, I gently confronted him.

His denial was so vehement I backed off—maybe I had been wrong. But then I began to watch how others in the church reacted to him. Suffice it to say: this was a sick family system, and Wally had surrounded himself with enablers who aided and abetted his frequent inexactitudes.

The only way to discover what was reality and what was reality only to Wally was to spend time with him. As I continually made excuses to be with him, I found out he was generous, talented, and actually pretty likable. But he lived at such a high level of overcommitment that he was constantly lying to get himself out of a pickle—at work, at home, at church. I learned how to get information from him without forcing him into a corner where he had to lie to cover his failure. And I always gained some information that I could take with me to the pulpit.

As an influencer, he had the inside scoop on the other long-term families of the church, and I gleaned many insights into the motives and methods of my antagonists. Those insights helped me apply my preaching in ways that dealt with the issues behind the conflict.

For example, I found out that one couple who made life particularly hard on me was living with the guilt, anger, and shame of a son who had adopted a promiscuous hom*osexual lifestyle. That family was on my mind on occasions like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. The Sunday I preached about the Prodigal Son, though the text is primarily about Father God as the seeker of lost children, I was able to acknowledge the pain of parenting a child who rejects the values of his or her parents. I live with the hope that the emotional iceberg blocking our relationship melted just a bit on those days.

In that same church was an elderly couple who honestly believed I was the heir to Billy Graham. Every Sunday, I knew just where to look to find their smiling faces and a nod of affirmation as I preached. During several periods of congregational uproar, I made a pastoral visit to their country home. Though we never discussed the conflict, over pie and coffee they affirmed me, prayed for me, and sent me back into the fray. I would never have found that source of hope and encouragement if I’d stayed sequestered in the study.

4. God has charged me to love these soreheads. When hampered by a handful of church soreheads, I’d like to have a comeback like Elijah did in 2 Kings 2. The prophet was being harassed by a crowd of baggy-pantsed kids with odd hair and body piercings. They kept circling Elijah on their skateboards, making fun of his follicularly-challenged condition. The Bible says he turned around, looked at them, and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths.

What I want to know is, where exactly is that curse found?

I’m not balding, but I think knowing how to call down a curse in the name of the Lord would come in handy in all kinds of situations, especially during periods of church conflict. But since I can’t do that, the next best thing would be to preach the text with the implication that I know how to call in the bears, so people better not mess with me. I’m just kidding, of course. Mostly. At times I’ve wondered if that noted theologian Al Capone was right when he said, “You can get a lot farther with a kind word and a gun, than a kind word alone.”

A preacher’s chief antagonists, however, will not be strangers.

They will be the people to whom God has charged the pastor to love and develop, often people in whom we have invested significant amounts of time and energy. When a fight breaks out, there is no more crucial time to demonstrate publicly the love of a pastor’s heart.

In The Reformed Pastor, more than 300 years ago, Puritan preacher Richard Baxter said:

If ministers were content to purchase an interest in the affections of their people at the dearest rates to their own flesh, and would condescend to them, and be familiar, and affectionate, and prudent in their carriage, and abound, according to their ability, in good works, they might do much more with their people than ordinarily they do.… Labour, therefore, for some competent interest in the estimation and affection of your people, and then you may the better prevail with them.1

Baxter’s right, of course. While Al Capone enjoyed a certain amount of success in his chosen profession, he would have made a lousy preacher.

Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor (Carlisle, Pa.: Banner of Truth, reprint 1979). First published in 1656.

Copyright © 1998 Ed Rowell

THE SUN WAS JUST ABOUT TO BREAK over the ridge of Turkey Feather Peak as we rode toward the edge of a large meadow ringed with aspens turning orange and gold. As if on cue, we heard the eerie bugle of a bull elk in full rut.

“Get down,”I whispered to my companion. “We’ll sneak up on him from here.”

“What the (expletive deleted) was that noise?” yelled the fat man on the horse behind me.

“Shut up!” I whispered as loud as I dared. “It’s what you came here for.”

What about Bob?

Over twenty years ago, I was guiding elk hunters for an outfitter in New Mexico’s remote Gila Wilderness. At 8,500 feet above sea level, our fingers were numb from the cold, though it was only the first week of October. My dude for this five-day, trophy-bull hunt was Bob, an accountant from Pensacola, Florida.

We had picked up Bob and four other clients in town the day before. During our trip to camp, two hours in the truck and two more on horseback, I discovered that grumbling Bob had never ridden a horse, slept in a tent, or fired the gorgeous Ruger Model 70 rifle he had purchased for the trip. As we talked about his liabilities, Bob repeatedly stated, “But if I can just get one decent shot, I’ll be happy.”

Though it was almost dark when we got to camp at Turkey Feather Park, we managed to sight Bob’s rifle in. After supper, I explained a few rudimentary facts about aiming for a clean kill. He limped off to bed, already saddlesore: “All I’m asking for is a shot. Just one good shot.”

I smirked at Alex, my boss. “You’re going to have your hands full with that guy.”

The next morning, Alex took a father and son from Dallas down toward the East Fork trail; Chuck took two Border Patrol officers from El Paso on a big circle back toward Willow Creek; and I, chicken little in the pecking order, was stuck with Bob.

Well, all he wanted was a shot.

I knew the whereabouts of a nice, five-point bull near the top of the mountain. I’d been planning to save him for myself; my tag was for the following week of elk season. But after less than twenty-four hours with Bob, I was ready to make sacrifices. I’d get him an easy shot and then he could sit in camp the rest of the week and nurse his sore behind.

That’s how we ended up on the mountain that morning.

One decent shot

I had already dismounted and tied my horse. Bob was entangled in his reins, lead rope, camera, binoculars, canteen, and thermos—all tied to his saddle horn and rattling together as he tried to get off his horse. He finally swung his right leg over the horse’s back, put it on the ground, and fell flat on his back, his left foot still in the stirrup. His mount, old Buford, looked down at him in disgust. Had it been any horse in the string besides this gentle senior citizen, Bob would have been stomped into a mud puddle, and I could have ridden back to camp in peace.

I managed to get his foot loose, certain by now the elk were somewhere in Arizona. Bob ran around behind Buford and jerked his rifle from the scabbard. He then opened a saddlebag and started slinging sandwiches, Twinkies, toilet paper, and a first-aid kit, digging out a box of .270 cartridges from the bottom of the bag. He jammed shells into his bolt-action rifle, shaking and mumbling, “Just a shot. I just want a shot.”

I was about ready for a shot of something myself.

Finally, we started creeping up to the meadow. Amazingly, the bull bugled again and was answered by another bugle. It looked like we might have ringside seats for one of nature’s grandest battles, two massive bulls battling for the love interest of an ugly and largely disinterested cow elk.

I could see our quarry thrashing some saplings on the other edge of the meadow. I tried to get Bob down on his hands and knees, but he just didn’t bend that well. We finally got behind a deadfall fir tree. When I peeked over the log, the adrenaline rush almost took off the top of my head. There, just over one hundred and fifty yards away, stood a massive six-by-six bull. His antler beams must have been as big around as my forearms. When he threw his head back to bugle, his symmetrical tines reached his flanks. This one might make it into the Boone-and-Crockett record book.

I looked at Bob. He was watching another bull edging into the meadow from the south. Smaller, but still a keeper, he was raising his rifle to shoot when I pointed out the big daddy. Bob grinned and shifted around to face the big bull, now standing broadside to us. Bob steadied his rifle across the log, laid the scope’s crosshairs on that little swirl of hair just behind the front leg that points the way to a clean heart-and-lung shot, took a deep breath, held it for an eternity—and squeezed the trigger. Click.

He’d forgotten to put a bullet in the chamber.

Bob cursed and jacked the bolt of his rifle, putting a cartridge where it should have been in the first place. Both bulls looked our way, threw their heads back, and trotted off into the thick brush that covered the west side of the ridge. We’d seen the last of those two.

I was so enraged I couldn’t speak. Keeping my mouth shut was not due to any innate self-discipline; it had mostly to do with the fact that this guy had paid my boss a thousand dollars to be here, and I wanted to keep my job. I knew of a couple of other places where we’d likely see some elk, but I couldn’t stomach the thought of a repeat performance. I wasn’t going to waste my effort on someone who would blow a gimme shot like that.

We rimmed around the mountain, largely avoiding prime elk habitat for the rest of the day. After ten hours in the saddle, I hoped Bob would be so sore he’d beg out of tomorrow’s hunt.

After supper that night, around the campfire, two of the other hunters shared their success stories while I stewed. Everyone else talked about what they had seen and done that day, and Alex finally asked the wrong question, “Bob, how did your day go?”

Bob didn’t tell the group what an idiot he was. He just scowled at me and responded, “I’ll be happy if I can get just one decent shot.”

It’s a miracle I’m not serving a life sentence for murder.

Cynics anonymous

Until I got into ministry, I thought hunting guides and dude ranchers were the most cynical people on the planet. My buddy Bob has many friends, and they all want to go on a western adventure. It can be hard for people who have spent their entire lives around horses, mountains, and guns to tolerate the relative incompetence of those who will pay so handsomely for the privilege of being cold, wet, sore, and hungry. The misery of pleasing an aggravating client is eased only by the chance to tell the story to one’s peers.

It may not be much different for pastors. We’re well educated. We’ve spent a good part of our adult lives in study. We attend conferences to keep sharp. We can spend hours in prayer and reflection if we so choose. And on a frequent basis, we are asked to be a spiritual guide for people who, without benefit of our background and experience, can blow the simplest spiritual challenges.

So we gather at the Monday lunch meeting of the ministerial association.

Tales of prima donna musicians, rebel teachers, and perennial soreheads are shared before the salad is even served. Black humor comes with dessert, piping hot with no cream or sugar. “Just blowing off steam,” we say. “Just laughing to keep from crying.”

But there’s a deeper cynicism, the suspicion at our soul’s core that the sermon we prepared and delivered with such hopeful anticipation went largely unheard. Maybe the big joke of the universe is they’ve all gone largely unheard.

I was so proud of my first inductive sermon. I built the tension throughout the message, painting the congregation into a spiritual corner from which there appeared to be no escape. Finally, in the nick of time, I brought the Word of God to light in a way that, brilliantly, in my opinion, made the sanctifying work of Christ make perfect sense.

On the way home, my wife, accustomed to and happy with my usual deductive, linear approach, said, “I couldn’t follow you very well today. What were your points?”Perhaps her comment was payback for the times she spent a good deal more time than usual on a special meal or on redecorating a room, and I failed to notice. But such comments make us stop and ask, Does preaching really matter?

Sometimes the doubt comes and goes like a mountain spring shower; other times cynical moods settle in like a gray, claustrophobic Chicago winter. In spite of the “nice job”and “good message” heard at the door, sometimes you look around and wonder, Is anyone’s life being changed around here? Are we really making progress?

Even if there is evidence of change, is preaching really a part of his transformation? Or is it mostly because of his twelve-step group? You know good and well that most people would rather lie like a rug than hurt your feelings.

It’s not hard to reach a toxic level of cynicism. I can come to believe that I am preaching to fools who just don’t get it. Worse, maybe I’m the biggest fool for wasting my life preparing messages that don’t make one slight bit of difference in the lives and hearts of people. While I’ll never breathe a word of such doubt to a soul, that is my deepest fear, my greatest insecurity.

As I read the first few verses of Ecclesiastes, I realize I’m not the first preacher to fall into cynicism. “Meaningless!” says the preacher. “It’s all meaningless!” Even when I read his conclusion—”Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.”—I don’t get the sense he has purged cynicism from his soul. To me, he sounds like someone who knows the right answer and says it, even though his mood is still foul.

Fools all around

If preaching is pointless, then all preachers are fools, and I am their king. That much from the apostle Paul can be determined:

The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.… God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe … but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. (1 Cor. 1:18, 21, 23, niv)

Who can dispute that the people with whom we share the Word can act in ignorant and foolish ways, much like hunter Bob? In 1 Corinthians 2:14, Paul says, “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned”(niv).

Why then hike deeper into the wilderness of preaching when you’re pretty sure that, given another opportunity, people will repeat their foolish mistakes?

I had been in a sermon series entitled “Moving Toward Maturity” from the book of James for seven weeks. In just 108 verses, James uses the imperative verb form more than fifty times. I believe the sermonic form should take its cue from textual form, so this series had all the subtlety of the proverbial ton of bricks.

A lot was going on in my life during that period of time. My grandfather had just died. I was battling some chronic health problems. Our most godly lay-leader was dying of brain cancer. A young couple in whom we had invested significant emotional energy had just left the church in anger. The church had recently paid off a major debt, and the almost inevitable loss of steam occurred—growth and giving dropped far more than the normal summer slump.

Then there was the ecclesiastical equivalent of Chinese water torture—the chronic drip of gossip and malfeasance from a handful of members who had crippled the church for decades. I’d been confronting, working with, and praying for the parties involved for some time, but trying to find the headwaters of the latest rumor is a more perilous adventure than Lewis and Clark ever undertook. My expeditions always led back to the same three or four people, but they would neither admit their guilt nor express even the slightest remorse over the hurt they continually caused.

Fatigue, unresolved emotional pain, and an extended season of conflict had ganged up on me, and cynicism had free reign. Preaching had become a bore and an exercise in futility.

The text for that Sunday was James 3:1-12. In my study that week, you could smell the stench of apathy. I could not get into the spirit of study. You’ve heard of the sinner’s prayer? Well, I prayed the cynic’s prayer: Listen, Lord. If persistent, personal confrontation hasn’t stopped the flow of gossip around here, do you really think anyone will listen to a sermon? Come on. Everyone will just think I’m talking to someone else anyway. Don’t you think I could better spend my time doing other things? Besides, it’s Labor Day weekend and everyone will be out of town anyway.… Tell me. What’s the point?

My prayer faded away as my thoughts turned to the big team roping event taking place thirty miles away. After years away from the sport of rodeo, I’d been given the opportunity to compete again. Fact and fantasy merged:

I’m a better roper now than I was fifteen years ago. I’ve got a great horse, talented partners like Joe, Ray, and Terry. I’ve got a winning streak going in our roping club. Who knows? I might rope well enough to win one of the trophy saddles being given away.

My daydream was interrupted by a phone call, but my priorities had been set. The sermon was to be hacked out, then I would be free to rope all day Saturday, Sunday afternoon, and all day Monday, Labor Day.

The message was entitled “The Biggest Little Troublemaker.”The lack of motivation and creativity coerced me, with only the scarcest bit of regret, to fill in the blanks of a simple outline lifted largely intact from a Warren Wiersbe commentary: The tongue has the power to direct, the power to destroy, the power to deceive.

A few personal illustrations about people who had lifted me and people who had crushed me with their tongues. A nice quote from John White’s The Fight:We gossip because we fail to love. When we love people, we don’t criticize them. If we love them, their failures hurt. We don’t advertise the sins of people we love any more than we advertise our own.”1

Major emphasis on point number two, with cross references to all the verses in Proverbs that lambaste the gossiper. Close with Psalm 19:14: “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.” That was it, I was done. Three hours prep time, max.

Sunday came. I preached. After shaking the hands of the sparse crowd, I ran home, changed clothes, hooked up my trailer, loaded my horse, and drove eighty miles an hour to get to the roping on time. Thoughts of the sermon, those who heard it, and any consequence it may have had never caught up with me. The carelessness of it all still frightens me.

Today, looking back over the manuscript and listening to the tape, I can say it was a mediocre, lackluster sermon. Not the worst I’ve ever preached, but certainly nothing to send in to Preaching Today.

Monday I went back to the rodeo arena with thoughts only of my partners’ catching three consecutive steers by the horns, so I could rope the hind feet of those same three steers as fast as possible. Ray and I were sitting in third place after two head, waiting our turn for steer number three. The two-hundred-plus teams in our division had dwindled; just twenty or so were still in the running.

I was counting cattle in the chute, trying to figure out which steer would be ours, hoping it wasn’t the big, blue-brindle steer that dragged his feet so bad. Jim Wilson hollered at me from across the arena, “Hey, preacher! Your wife’s looking for you!”

I rode out to look for Susan amid the catcalls of “Oooh! You’re in trouble now, preacher!”

I found her car. She was obviously upset. I quickly noted that she and the two kids appeared to be fine. Dang it. I’m just one steer away from possible fame and fortune. This better be important.

“What’s up?”

“It’s Ruby. She had a massive heart attack this morning, and they don’t think she’s going to make it.”

Numbness. Fear. Guilt. More fear. Adrenaline surge. Ruby was the undisputed queen of gossip in our community. My God, was it …?No, no way. This had nothing to do with that sermon. Just coincidence. Wasn’t it? I saw in Susan’s eyes the same questions.

Someone yelled at me: “Ed! You’re up! Get in there before you forfeit!”

I loped back to the arena while building a loop, backed my buckskin into the box, and nodded at my partner. Off we went. A perfect head catch, nice easy turn, smooth rhythm. Perfect. I fired, and missed, sticking my rope in the dirt.

“Sorry, Ray,” I muttered, too much in shock to be embarrassed. I loaded up and drove to the hospital.

I wonder how Peter felt after Ananias and Sapphira dropped dead following his confrontation in Acts 5? Verse 11 says, “Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.”In our small town, word spread like head lice about the sermon and its apparent effect. Later that week at the Donut Shack, one of the old, whiskered coffee hounds walked over to my booth and said, “Hey there, Pastor Ed. Whatcha preachin’ about this week?”He leaned close and winked at me. “I don’t want to be yer next casualty!”

Ordinarily, I would have given it right back to him, but I couldn’t laugh. Ruby was still in critical care.

I spent much of my study time that Tuesday on the floor on my face, trembling. For the first time I had a visceral understanding of the biblical phrase “the fear of the Lord.” God could have chosen to smite me instead, as a visible demonstration of the dangers of handling holy things with nonchalance. He could have made an example out of me for my lack of faith in his ability to sanctify his children.

When I stood to preach the next Sunday, I was still shaking. I’ve never encountered such an attentive audience. We continued our way through the third chapter on James, wanting desperately to pretend that last Sunday had not happened the way it did. Yet we had seen the hand of God, and we were sore afraid. That message might not have been a great homiletical masterpiece, but I can tell you this much—both preacher and congregation were fully engaged that Sunday. We had seen something in our midst that convinced us that preaching had power.

Unlike Ananias and Sapphira, Ruby lived to gossip again. Amazingly, she seemed to be the least affected, at least spiritually, by what had happened. But a lot of the rest of us thought twice about passing on a juicy bit of news, even under the guise of a prayer request.

Not everyone, though: After one couple left the church, word on the gossip chain, er, prayer chain was that their leaving was because of “what Pastor Ed did to Ruby.”

I wouldn’t call what happened next revival, but there were some subtle changes over the following few months. Attendance picked up again. I had numerous conversations about spiritual matters with people who had previously revealed little spiritual bent. Two people with whom I had been sharing Christ came to faith in those weeks. Wednesday night prayer meetings took on a new tone of seriousness about the task of intercession as a few newcomers started attending and a few old-timers quit coming.

Giving increased as well. James 5 was coming up, and perhaps no one wanted to be in my sermonic sights when we got to the subject of stewardship! Following a well-attended world missions conference, our Christmas missions offering was the largest in the history of the church.

We celebrated the season of Advent that year, a radically new idea for our decidedly non-liturgical community of faith. A community Christmas Eve service saw our church packed to the rafters. We finished the year strong. God finally had our attention.

Or should I say, God had my attention.

My wife doesn’t remember that sermon as a pivotal point in the life of that church. Maybe the only real change in the congregation happened within me. Maybe it was mostly a time of personal revival. Some unconfessed pride and ambition were exposed and rooted out. Ever since, I’ve preached with more of a passion, with a faith in my task that has seldom wavered.

Witness to power

I used to laugh when Barney Fife told someone that his hands were registered with the FBI as lethal weapons. I really wonder if preachers should register their Bibles, their notepads, their pulpits. Nothing has fueled my passion for preaching more than the profound belief that preaching really matters. God can use the sermon to bring about an incredible transformation in the lives of his people. Now when cynicism begins to seep into my life, I recall when I’ve seen lives changed, and more importantly, I recall the times God has used the sermon of another to bring about a change in my life.

More than anyone, Paul knew the power of the sermon. In his introduction to the Romans, he wrote, “That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are at Rome. I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes …” (Rom. 1:15-16, niv).

Amen and amen. Cynicism loses its grip on the preacher who has witnessed the power of God move as a result of the sermon.

Then to the Corinthians: “My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power (1 Cor 2:4-5, niv).

Not long after these events, I wrote these words in my journal:

Come, Holy Spirit. Demonstrate your power again and again, that my faith might rest in God and not in my puny attempts at wisdom and persuasion. Change lives through my sermon. And begin, right here, with me.

InterVarsity Press, 1976.

Copyright © 1998 Ed Rowell

A TIMES IHAVE FELT AS THOUGH who I really am did not match what I was doing. At one time I worked my way through a phone directory, teeth clenched, telemarketing for unchurched people—enduring something that was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. Such experiences always leave me with a hollow feeling and the sense that I cannot sustain this kind of activity for very long.

In a TV interview I did, I noticed that the bookshelf in the background, like most of the set, was only for show. The “books” were spines with nice-looking titles but no printed pages inside. Sometimes I have felt as though I was propping up a similar pastoral facade. I was doing what I thought had to be done but I was not acting authentically from the core of my being. My outside actions and inside motivations were in conflict.

Sunday night services are an example of what once commonly gave me this feeling. After pouring my heart out on a Sunday morning, I would go home and have lunch and a short nap. By four o’clock I felt lower than any other time of the week. The last thing I wanted to do was stand in front of a crowd, try to smile and be enthusiastic, and get my heart into another sermon. My throat hurt; my legs were tired. I can honestly say that on most Sunday nights for several years, I raised at least one person from the dead! I am basically an introvert, and I felt I had been with people enough for one day.

Of course, most occupations require that people do some things they do not feel like doing. Fulfilling such responsibilities doesn’t make you a fake; you are simply dealing with the real world. Nevertheless, at times I have had to wonder, Is God in this? Are my feelings a signal that we should be doing something different? Am I trying to fight Goliath wearing Saul’s armor?

Equally important, such times have made me wonder how long I could sustain what I was doing. To work from something other than the core of who I am draws a tremendous amount of energy, like a locomotive pulling a long freight train up a hill. Consequently, when authenticity is lacking, I perform poorly and often feel like quitting.

The pursuit of authentic ministry is therefore of vital importance. How do I fulfill the demands of my role without losing the sense of who I am as a person? Is it possible in ministry to always feel a true match between who I am and what I do? Can I step outside my comfort zone for Christ and yet feel as though I am working from my core being?

Genuine authenticity

When I think about authenticity, I have to be sure I am working from a biblical concept, not a distorted notion from pop-psychology. I have grown up hearing my culture tell me about the need to find myself, know myself, be true to myself. While valid in many respects, these ideas can slip into error when they leave God out of the picture. God is the ultimate standard of what makes me authentic, not my dna helix.

I cannot find authenticity, though a good word, in any of my Bible versions; rather, Scripture addresses the concept of personal genuineness with words like sincerity, truth, hypocrisy, faithfulness. Authenticity suffers a humanistic distortion when the sentiment becomes “I’ve gotta be me.” Although the concept is not necessarily false, the Bible shows much less concern with the notion of whether I am true to myself and endless concern with whether I am true to God’s will.

What I find unambiguously clear in Scripture is that my authenticity as a minister stands like a table on four legs:

1. My spiritual gifts. God calls me to recognize the spiritual gifts he has given me and to manage them faithfully as my primary responsibility. When I feel hollow, the problem may be that I am minoring in the areas of my spiritual gifts.

2. God’s leading. God expects me to obey his call whether or not I feel qualified. When God tells me to do something that lies outside my sense of competence, it means one of two things: (a) I may be qualified and not know it. (b) God can make me qualified when the need arises. He told a reluctant Moses, “Who made your mouth?”

One criterion for authenticity is to recognize what God’s direction and purpose is for my life, not what I feel natural doing. The point is less Who am I? and more How is God working through me?

3.Christian character. The ultimate standard to which I am to be true is not some subjective notion of my identity, but the person of Christ as reflected in the objective teachings of Scripture. For example: Is shyness a part of my personality, or is it a lack of love for others? Am I introverted, or self-centered? The difference between personality and character can be gray, at best. My ultimate authenticity is based not on the personality formed by my genes and experiences, but rather the character of Christ imparted to me by the Holy Spirit.

4. Wholehearted obedience. God calls me to follow his bidding willingly, not reluctantly. If I halfheartedly obey, I will feel—and be—inauthentic. In such moments my lack of genuineness has more to do with my chief desires and less to do with how I am wired. God shows his concern with authentic obedience in 2 Corinthians 9:7: “Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.”

If I feel hollow, it may be that I am more excited about other things than I am about the will of God.

Ring-true ministry

After two years in my current position, I regularly marvel at how well this church fits me—and how satisfying such a match is. For the first time, I feel I am working largely from my core being. I love what I do and look forward to office days and Sundays. I feel I could pastor this church for a millennium and beg for more. My responsibilities, however, differ little from those in my previous churches. (We do have Sunday night meetings!) What has changed?

1. I now minister in a manner truer to my personality.

Generally my temperament is not that of a high-energy cheerleader. Nevertheless, in my early ministry I usually tried to be very enthusiastic. While enthusiasm helps in many ways, mine was sometimes forced.

In the current stage of my life, I am more enthusiastic when emotion flows naturally from some cause; but as a general rule I am not wired for enthusiasm. In terms of the classic four categories of personality, I lean toward the melancholy and choleric rather than the sanguine or phlegmatic. Even when I feel deeply anointed by the Holy Spirit, I am more apt to be quiet than loud. When I force enthusiasm, I sense in others the discomfort of being subjected to what is emotionally contrived, a discomfort similar to what one feels in the presence of a man wearing a cheap toupee.

I forced my enthusiasm in the past partly because I thought others expected it. Last week, for instance, one man who has attended our church for a year told me that on a business trip he visited a church that was having revival services. He described how much he appreciated those meetings. “They were really on fire,” he said. He told me he didn’t intend his comment as a slam on me or our church, but the implication was clear.

If my spirituality is lacking, I need the challenge of such a comment, but now I am secure enough to express my zeal for God in a manner that is genuine for me (which I would describe as animated rather than loud). I trust love, sincerity, faith, the Holy Spirit, and God’s truth to carry the day.

2. I have a greater sense of freedom. In my previous settings I felt much more constrained about how we did church. For example, our services had to have a certain level of formality; we needed to have certain programs.

My feeling of obligation arose from several sources. Wisdom had something to do with it, I trust, for change is always risky, especially for an inexperienced pastor. Temperament played a part too. I think as well that I had a commendable desire to lay aside my own preferences for what I thought was the good of others.

It is likely, however, that my sense of constraint did not always benefit me or the church. Although I must not be, nor do I want to be, a self-indulgent leader, I recognize now that what suits me may very well be of the Lord. As one called and filled with the Spirit, I must assume that God inspires many of my passions and sensibilities about how to do church. Therefore, as I die to self in order to serve others, I still may often order ministry in a way that goes with the grain of who I am. I believe God works through the design he has given me.

This freedom to go with my own grain is crucial to authenticity. If I persist in a manner of ministry that feels alien, and probably lacks the Lord’s blessing, I will feel hollow.

In my present church I feel an exhilarating sense of freedom to experiment—within the boundaries of wisdom and self-giving love. As never before, I feel I have options. If I prepare people properly, we can try different ideas to see whether God is in them. I am doing a higher proportion of things that I feel passionate about, that I truly believe in, and that I have confidence will be fruitful. The point of this freedom is not to please myself but to find a style of ministry that God works through and that suits me and the church.

For example, we have tried several different ways of praying for people at the end of our church services. I often give traditional “altar calls.” I have sometimes broken the congregation into small groups in order that people may pray for one another. I have invited people to come forward for prayer after the service is dismissed. I have asked people to pray silently where they are. We have even tried holding a mini-prayer meeting at the end of the Sunday morning service, inviting everyone to spend ten minutes in prayer. Although I have not yet found an expression for prayer that works ideally in our church, I intend to keep experimenting.

Of course, many things still do not match me perfectly. I wear a suit on Sunday mornings, even though I am the only one to do so in our church and I feel out of place. I suggest that others call me “Pastor” or “Pastor Brian,” even though I would be more comfortable without the title. I freely choose to deny myself these preferences, though, for the sake of what I feel is best for others.

3. I focus on how everything can serve my highest goals.

I feel as though my ministry has a solid core when my activities align with my purposes and goals—even if those ministry activities fall outside my strengths. If I feel hollow about my work, I may have missed the connection between how it can or already does serve the goals I am deeply motivated about.

For instance, administrative paper work, in itself, leaves me cold. In the past I completed my monthly financial report to my denominational superiors with a sense of frustration. Now I remind myself that my paper work fulfills a purpose I feel strongly about: the oversight of my church’s corporate health. Our finances are obviously of one cloth with that. We must have financial integrity and we must make wise, vision-based expenditures over the long run if we are to accomplish our mission. To do that I must be involved. When I think in these terms, I am working from the core of my soul.

To work from my core, I need to know what my highest purposes are and then see how what I do serves those purposes. If a particular task does not do this, I must find a way to give that work to someone else whenever possible.

Pushing the envelope

In Scripture, the Lord often called people to serve in ways outside their comfort zone, whether it was washing feet or walking on water. When the Lord calls me to do this, I need to be able to expand the envelope of my service with a sense of authenticity in order to persevere. This works if I attend to three things.

1. Discover the genuineness of God’s grace in me. The familiar passage in 2 Corinthians 12, in which Paul says God’s power is expressed most fully in our weaknesses, teaches me a critical lesson: God’s grace is one authenticating element in my life. Who am I and what is genuine to me? The answer includes not only my personality but also whatever God adds to me by his Spirit. His power in me is also who I am.

No matter what I do, as I rely upon his grace, I experience a deep reality to my ministry, for I fellowship with my Creator, who is the Truth. As I serve with a greater dependence on the Holy Spirit, my experience deepens with the One in whom I live and move and have my being. What could be more authentic than that? My genuineness at this point is not necessarily a combination of my ministry and my core self but that of my ministry and the Core of the Universe—in me!

For example, while cold-contact outreach has at times sapped my resources because “sales” would be my last choice for an occupation, at other times outreach has exhilarated and satisfied me immensely. I think this is true because I have had to pray much and rely completely on God’s help at these times, and I have seen him work through me.

2. Wholeheartedly seek God’s will as my highest purpose. My core self comprises not merely my personality and my abilities but also my values and purpose. In other words, my core being includes whatever makes me tick: all my motivations. Thus an integrating sense of genuineness comes from my decision to serve God in any way he desires—not merely in a preferred role such as preaching. My main goal in life is not to preach but to serve God. Preaching is a legitimate subsidiary purpose.

When I left pastoral ministry for three years to work full time with an editorial staff, it was a hard decision because I had not lost my love of pastoral ministry and, frankly, I disliked the prospect of sitting in front of a computer every day. I made the move, however, because I felt God had clearly led me to do so, and that was what mattered most to me. My life purpose gave authenticity to a task that was not my first order of calling. Sometimes other pastors would ask if it was hard “to leave the ministry.” If I had truly left the ministry, I would have been heartbroken, but I had not. I simply ministered in a different capacity, one in which God wanted me to serve, and that is what I want above all else in my life.

3. Honestly acknowledge my personal inability and fallenness without God. Deluding myself about my abilities or character is the quickest way to become a fake. Facing hard reality puts me on genuine ground.

For instance, I have faced the fact that I will never build a church through leadership charisma. I just don’t have it. If I believed I did, I would feel every day like the king who had no clothes. Further, I have confessed character weaknesses such as my inclination toward despair. As a result, when I step outside my comfort zone, I may battle despair and I may struggle with the limitations of my personality, but I do not feel like a hypocrite or a phony because I know God intends to use me in spite of these encumbrances.

I am not pulling anything over on myself or others. I acknowledge that I am genuinely unable to minister without God’s help. As Paul said, “Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God” (2 Cor. 3:5).

Authentic ministry resembles a good jump-shot in basketball. Sports announcers occasionally comment on the excellent technique of a good shooter. The player does not merely flip the ball toward the basket or shoot across his body in a contorted fashion. Instead, he squares his shoulders to the basket, jumps well, and with each shot has an identical stroke. All his motions integrate to support the shot, meaning that his whole body shoots, not only his hands.

When I minister genuinely, everything within me supports the effort. When I minister from my core self, I do so with strength and greater effectiveness. When I am authentic, I can stand and stay with a sense of stability and integrity. I become a person of truth through whom the God of truth can flow.

Only when I am authentic can I persevere with spiritual vitality—strong to the finish.

Craig Brian Larson, pastor of Lake Shore Assembly of God Church in Chicago, is a contributing editor of Leadership He is the author of Hang in There … to the Better End and Preaching That Connects. He makes his home with his family in Illinois.

Copyright © 1998 Craig Brian Larson

“THE TWO FOES OF HUMAN HAPPINESS,” says philosopher Arthur Schopenauer, “are pain and boredom.”

Boredom, stagnation, restlessness—these are less acute than pain, surely, but they do rob pastors of joy and fulfillment. Even something as stimulating as marital sex can become boring when it is routine, and something as demanding as preaching or as challenging as leadership can grow stale over time.

When this happens, we are in danger.

According to the Chicago Tribune, on Father’s Day 1997 Ricardo Enamorado set out on a jet ski from Chicago’s Wilson Avenue boat ramp and headed north along the shoreline of Lake Michigan. After traveling several miles, at about three in the afternoon he turned around to head back south when the engine on the jet ski suddenly quit. Unable to restart it, he floated along nonchalantly, expecting help to come quickly on the busy waters. Gradually, though, the wind and waves pushed Enamorado farther and farther from shore, and help did not come. By dusk he was frantic. Dressed only in cutoffs, tennis shoes, and a life vest, he spent the night on the chilly waters of the lake.

The next day Coast Guard helicopters and a Chicago fire department chopper equipped with special radar began searching for the lost man. By the end of the day they still had not found him, and Enamorado, hungry and sunburned, spent another night on the dark waters of Lake Michigan.

Finally the next morning one member of the search-and-rescue team spotted a flash of light. Enamorado was signaling in their direction with a mirror. The nearly two-day ordeal was over.

Pastors, too, can lose power and begin to drift. At first it may not seem like any big deal. Things will pick up; something will come along that will revive our work. We may busy ourselves with outside interests. We may even ponder resigning our church and finding another that will show greater appreciation. We may quit giving our best in sermon preparation. We may cut back on the work no one sees, such as extra reading and spiritual disciplines. We may stop believing that God will do something significant through us and our church.

Boredom truly is the subtle, sworn enemy of faithful perseverance. It can be deadly.

Sincere, but sincerely wrong

We have all heard the sincerely given advice proffered to those who are dead in the water and sensed perhaps that solutions like the following can come up short:

1. “Just be faithful.” Certainly I can always be motivated by my commitment to be faithful to God-given responsibilities, but what confuses me is when faithfulness leads to stagnation. Surely God does not want me or the church to be stagnant. Is long-term boredom, therefore, a sign that I need to initiate a change, that God is leading me elsewhere? How can I be both faithful and challenged?

Another issue brings the facile appeal to faithfulness into question. Boredom often strikes when little is happening in my ministry. When this is the case, I don’t want to make the mistake of lingering in ineffectiveness in the name of faithfulness. If I persist at a stalled ministry without a clear sense that God has a purpose for me there, I am doing no one—least of all the Lord—any favors. Perhaps languor signals that I am missing the will of God. “Faithfulness” can even be a way to rationalize complacency, laziness, or outright negligence.

2. “Keep growing.” Some would say that if I feel bored I need to stretch myself intellectually and sharpen my ministry skills. Pursue a graduate degree; develop hobbies and interests outside the church; cultivate more friendships.

The disquieting thing about this solution is that I could find it in Dear Abby. While stagnation likely has some natural as well as spiritual roots, I am not satisfied unless the primary answer is distinctively Christian. What is the spiritual core of boredom and stagnation? What would Jesus say about it?

And then, of course, there is the pragmatic question: What if you lack the motivation to even pursue the things that will renew your motivation? Catch-22! Or what do you do when you have tried the tried-and-true paths to lifetime growth but your head is still nodding from boredom?

3. “Pray and read your Bible more.” This is the pill I prescribe to others for almost every ill, and it usually does the trick. Still, as many lament, what do you do when the spiritual disciplines are the most stagnant part of your life?

4. “Persevere.” Just keep putting one foot in front of the other, no matter how you feel. Duty, will power, determination!

While the Bible does call for perseverance, it does not allow for hollow perseverance. One oft-quoted word on the subject says, “Let us not become weary in doing good” (Gal. 6:9). This suggests I should not keep plowing ahead regardless of how I feel, but that I must not even allow the feeling of weariness to linger! I must not continue indefinitely with an engineless perseverance; rather, my heart must be in this. As Romans 12:11 says, “Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord.”

The appeal of Galatians 6:9 to the will implies personal responsibility for weariness. What choices am I making that have brought me to this enervated place? What will enable me to power up again?

Energizing approaches

In my experience, five frames of mind have proven to keep me stretched and interested in ministry to the fullest.

1. Maintain internal faithfulness. Restlessness in ministry and in marriage look alike, and so does the answer to the problem. Malachi said, “Guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith with the wife of your youth” (2:15). The key to marital faithfulness is to guard the center of my being: my spirit. If I am faithful in spirit—choosing to delight in my wife in my thoughts—I will avoid the hollow core of boredom that causes me restlessly to turn my attention to other women.

Mere external faithfulness is an attempt to stay true in conduct even though I break faith in my heart, and it inevitably leads to restlessness, for the inner and outer persons conflict. By itself, a sense of duty can lead to such external faithfulness, but this is the sort of faithfulness that often fails to motivate us adequately.

If I am faithful to my church in spirit, I enjoy an ongoing romance with my church and each responsibility of the pastorate, driven both by a sense of duty and by passion. I need to keep dreaming about what my church can become, not envying someone else’s church. I need to stir up my love for my people and think about the good in each of them. I need to pray and believe for my congregation. Passion is nothing less than a painstaking discipline of the heart.

Inner faithfulness had to be what made John the Baptist who he was. Imagine how boring the desert could be before he broke onto the public scene! No people to converse with. Not much to read. No entertainment. No visual stimulation. If he had gone into the desert merely out of duty, he would have become a very troubled man. Instead, John was faithful in the center of his soul and thus empowered for every situation.

2. Work my field to the edges. I have noticed that farmers find ways to plant seed in every possible square yard of their land. Where there are rocks, they dig them up and haul them away. Where there are trees, they cut them down, pull up the roots, and burn them. Where the land is arid, they irrigate. I have seen farmers in Illinois use earth-moving equipment to improve the lay of the land.

In a similar way, I am trying to work the ministry field God has given me right to the fences, and even in my small church it is a challenging task. I have a list of people I am trying to lead into a committed relationship with Jesus Christ. I also have a list of unchurched people, nominally Christian, who have visited our church but not yet found a church home. I have still another list of people who call our church home—some who attend regularly, others sporadically. I regularly review these lists and attempt to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit about whom to contact through a phone call or letter and how to help them move more fully into the will of God.

I have found ministry becomes boring when I stray from such hands-on ministry with people, and often I have done that. In my previous churches, I emphasized preaching and the devotional life and only sporadically spent time in one-on-one discipleship or evangelism. As a result, I suffered bouts of restlessness regarding the church. When I remain tucked away in my office, simply writing sermons and shuffling papers, or if I solely challenge others from the pulpit, I can lose touch with the relevance of my ministry to my hearers. But if I stay in the trenches with people, get face-to-face with them and appeal to them to cross the next line of commitment, I am stretched to the limit. In fact, I often feel at a complete loss.

Two recent meetings with a student who is an existentialist have jazzed me. He wants to hear about the plausibility of the Christian faith, and each time we have talked cordially for some two hours. He is not yet convinced but he wants to meet again, and I can hardly wait.

Thirty-five people attend our church on a given Sunday, and with growth I know I will have to cut back somewhat on hands-on work with individuals, but I intend to always do some, for I regard it as essential to a proper frame of mind.

3. Wait actively. After years of frustration, I have concluded that much of spiritual life simply comes down to standing fast, hoping in God and his appointed time. “God … acts on behalf of those who wait for him” (Isa. 64:4). If I am going to see God’s fullest work in and through my life, I must master this patient art.

The waiting can be either endlessly dull or truly exciting.

Several years ago I took my family to a popular water park at the Wisconsin Dells. The lines at the more exciting sites were often long, but I noticed that, at least the first few times, my sons didn’t get bored waiting. They watched the other kids on the ride, assessing the challenge, seeing what fun the others were having, wondering if the ride was more than they could handle. As they neared the front of the line, the expectation had them nearly jumping up and down with excitement.

When I wait for God to act, with confident faith and strong hope, I bounce like a ten-year-old about to go down the big water slide. This is faith-waiting, and it has tremendous energy.

My boys have a much different experience when they sit around the house during summer vacation. When they have no idea what to do and nothing to look forward to, they are bored out of their minds. Likewise, when I lack vision and anticipation, I am listless and depressed.

4. Love the familiar. My idea of an ideal vacation is a leisurely mix of travel and hanging around Chicago. On the road I enjoy the stimulation of new sights, people, and activities, but travel from the beginning to the end of my vacation wears me out. By the time I have slept in strange beds and eaten in different restaurants for a few days, I have had enough of the new and long to return home and sleep in my own bed with its familiar depression on my side, listen to my stereo with my beloved Mozart piano concertos, and cook in my kitchen where I can make pasta just the way I like it with my favorite four-cheese sauce.

What I like in a vacation also holds true in life and in ministry. I am happiest when I know how to enjoy both the fresh and the familiar.

The ability to treasure the familiar is not simply a result of increasing age; it is an attitude. Primarily, it involves recognizing the special benefits of the familiar and consciously appreciating them. One reason I enjoy the familiar is that I know I can trust people and settings that have been proven over time. I value the familiar when my soul needs peace and comfort, stability and roots. Sometimes I simply need what is predictable.

Plenty of familiar things in my current ministry bring me great pleasure. When I sit down at my computer, I get a warm feeling; I have used my word processor for six years and it is second nature to me. I enjoy my train ride to the office, which passes the same gritty cityscape and gorgeous skyline every time. I am learning the unique strengths and idiosyncrasies of the people who have been in our church since I arrived, and they bring a smile to my face. These familiar things are part of the rhythms of my life, and even though I know them well, I regularly discover something new in each of them.

I enjoy the familiar most when it is in counterpoint with what is fresh, so I intentionally vary the mix. Sometimes I walk a different path between the train station and my office, always with an exploring and observant eye. Month to month I intentionally preach different styles of sermons—sometimes topical, sometimes an exposition of a scriptural passage; sometimes a long section, other times merely a verse. There is a way to find variety even in the most routine aspects of life.

5. Never stop asking why and how. Frankly, boredom has only occasionally been a problem for me in pastoral ministry, and one reason is that I have an insatiable curiosity about the Lord, the Bible, people, preaching, church life, leadership, organizational behavior, and prayer. In my several-decades pursuit to understand all of this, I seem never to have run out of questions. Why did this sermon work better than that one? What motivates people? How can we reach people who do not know Christ? How can I know God better? Why did Jesus tell the Gentile woman that it is not right to throw the children’s bread to the dogs? It seems the more questions I get answers for, the more that are raised.

Questions keep ministry fascinating for me. I write them in my journal and pray them to God. I pull out a legal pad to make notes as I analyze a subject or a Scripture. I read books for clues. I listen to audiotapes to try to learn from others. I think about what I can discover from my own experiences. I absolutely, positively love to learn.

For the last year or so my pursuit has been centered on the subject of recognizing God’s leading, or, as some call it, hearing God’s voice. I have several pages in my Day-Timer on which I record any Scriptures I come across in my devotional reading that shed light on the subject, any questions that puzzle me, or principles that come to mind. Gradually, I feel that I am gaining more understanding on the subject.

Being a lifetime learner does not necessarily mean getting formal graduate degrees. At a minimum, though, it means asking questions and seeking answers. Once we lose our curiosity and wonder, we start to stagnate.

When boredom continues

If despite the above approaches to ministry, I still find myself in a season of boredom and restlessness, 1 ask myself several questions:

1. Are my spiritual disciplines energized by the Holy Spirit? The diagnosis of any stagnation problem will usually include a recognition of my need for a fresh anointing of the Holy Spirit. Even before I came to Christ, I was a disciplined person—especially in training for sports—and I have found I can bring that natural discipline into my devotional life—usually to positive effect, but sometimes negative. It is possible to engage in “spiritual” disciplines in a way that could be better described as natural disciplines. That is, when I am not truly dependent on the Holy Spirit. I can read so many chapters daily in the Bible, for example, but in an exclusively rationalistic manner that is insensitive to the leading of the Spirit. Or I can pray systematically through a list, or memorize large portions of Scripture—all in my own power.

Discipline has its place but it is not enough. I need grace and a fresh touch from God. As Zechariah 4:6 says, ” ‘Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the Lord Almighty.” I have learned—and need to keep learning—to engage in spiritual disciplines with an intentional awareness of the Holy Spirit.

Like Abraham, I need to dig fresh wells in the Promised Land. When I am bored, I can keep planting seeds again and again in a dry field; or I can dig for water or build an irrigation system as I plant the seeds. On a regular basis, I desperately need a fresh anointing.

2. Have I asked the Lord about the source of my boredom? As much as I believe in the need to ask God for direction, especially when I am at a loss, my tendency is to avoid doing so. There are several reasons why. To center completely on the Scripture and the Holy Spirit and to wait for an impression from the Lord is time consuming, usually requiring three to six hours, for me. Often I come away from that time with a sense that God has given me his mind; but sometimes not. Even when I do feel that I have his mind, it is a subjective impression that may leave me feeling uncertain.

In any case, when I am at the end of my resources, unless I ask God why it is so, I linger in stagnation. Sooner or later, seeking God leads to a breakthrough.

The procedure that generally helps me is to begin by asking God to impress on my heart a particular place in Scripture to read. Then I wait until I sense some direction or interest. Finally, I read that portion of Scripture, and more often than not the words have life and relevance for me, bringing fresh promise or correction.

3. Have I slacked off from the hard things of ministry?

I can stagnate in ministry when I have been lazy as a thinker and fallen into a rut. On the other hand, I stay challenged beyond anything I can fully accomplish if I periodically do several things: (a) Evaluate the church and my effectiveness regularly, asking the hard questions about our overall effectiveness and spirituality. (b) Keep sharpening a strategy of ministry that bears fruit. (c) Set some goals (though I have mixed feelings about numerical goals). (d) Plan how to solve our problems, reach our goals, and fulfill our vision. (e) Fast and pray for God to inspire this entire process. Hard digging like this leaves me almost unbearably excited about ministry.

There are always a thousand more challenges and opportunities to grow where I am. Normally God wants to give me new vision, not a new address.

4. Am I neglecting the fundamentals? Has my love for God cooled? Have I lost my spiritual vitality? Has my love for the people of God waned? Does it matter to me that people without Christ will go to eternal judgment? Do I believe God will answer my prayers? Do I believe God’s promises, rightly understood, will be fulfilled in my life sooner or later? Have I lost hope? Am I ready for the return of Christ? Do I love the Gospel message and am I still devoted to sharing the Good News with every person I can in every daily situation possible? Am I living for what is most important in life?

5. Other assessment questions. Have I gotten too comfortable? Have I become passive instead of an initiator? Have I stopped attending to growth points in my character? Do I merely want to get out of a situation rather than grow through it? Have I arranged my life to be too safe, in effect clinging to the shallow end of the pool? Have I moved away from the motivations that originally compelled me into ministry and begun to work from ones that cannot rightly sustain me: careerism, professionalism, financial security? Have I neglected significant time spent in seeking the Lord in a variety of spiritual disciplines? Am I renewing my vision? Have I considered both the spiritual and natural causes of my stagnation? Am I getting enough input and stimulation?

Busting complacency

That the most challenging and important work imaginable can become boring should tell me something about its cure. Novelist Samuel Butler said, “The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.”

Ouch! As much as I hate to admit it, when boredom strikes, the responsibility is mine. It is not my setting that has become stagnant, I have. Through God’s grace, I, too, am fully capable of restoring the passion.

The cycle of growth and stagnation is predictable. The Lord places me in a situation that stretches me. Gradually I grow in dependence upon God, upon knowledge, upon experience—to where I feel comfortable with what I am doing. Then I begin to plateau and stagnate.

At this point I have some options. I can become complacent; I can pursue other interests and be diverted from what God has called me to do; or I can press hard into a new cycle of growth in which I dig deeper and draw closer to the Lord.

On second thought, there is no choice.

Copyright © 1998 Craig Brian Larson

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, through a series of bad experiences, I developed for a short time a quirky, negative attitude toward banks.

At the time, I ministered and provided for my family through free-lance writing and itinerant speaking, and we endured a long period of financial pressure. Any unexpected expense was a blow, and over a period of a month or two, several of those blows came from the bank. With no margin in our checking account, we made a recording error, writing a large check and not entering it in the register. Before we knew it, four checks had bounced, and for each one the bank charged an nsf fee of twenty dollars—eighty dollars in all!

Other things happened that compounded the pressure I felt.

I deposited a check from someone that later came back unpaid, and the bank charged me an extra fee for that person’s nsf check. In the local news at the time, a bank in Chicago incurred a public relations fiasco by announcing their intention to charge three dollars each time a customer used a human teller instead of the atm machine. To me, it seemed banks were suddenly becoming predators.

I was under pressure and my emotions spilled over one day at a convenient target. “Banks are leeches,” I said to my wife when I received one of the fee notices.

Sounds pretty irrational, but nevertheless I did not withdraw my vast fortune and stuff it under the mattress. And my sanity returned to where I understood that banks are a business with the same profit motive as any other business.

I admit this bit of foolishness in order to show you something about myself: under certain circ*mstances my thinking can become distorted. If I am under enough pressure and others inflict enough pain on me, I can become cynical.

Such was the case, as outlined in chapter 5, when some ten people rose up in opposition to my leadership and within six months our church declined in attendance by 40 percent. I had never before faced church people who seemed deliberately out to get me. Nor had I ever worked with people who assumed the worst about one another’s motives and as a result grossly misunderstood the actions and words of others.

On one occasion, for instance, a leader of one of our children’s ministries asked if the church would purchase Bibles and present one to each child as a gift. I said I thought it was a great idea but that the money should come out of the children’s ministry fund, not the general fund. I found out later that I was heavily criticized for this decision and cast as a pastor who was unconcerned about getting Bibles into the hands of our young people.

The whole experience was frightening and disillusioning, and it caught me completely by surprise. Frankly, I naïvely thought I was above such opposition. I believed my motives were right and I was doing my best, and consequently everyone should and would think highly of me. With deep sadness, I learned through this experience that no one is above conflict.

The incident threw my assumptions about life out of kilter. Those who “betrayed” me in this were leaders whom I had trusted, to whom I had given responsibility, and to whom I had been vulnerable. I had sought their good and not their harm. If I could not trust these people, whom could I trust? And so, though I continued to work in the church with determination, in subtle ways I grew pessimistic about people and relationships.

My low-grade pessimism expressed itself in various ways. One symptom was a suspicious attitude toward newcomers to the church. Whereas before I would rejoice over visitors and the possibility of their making our church their home, now I was somewhat wary of them, cautiously wondering who among them would turn on me down the road. And though I had at one time rejected the idea that pastors cannot get close to their people, now I was becoming resigned to it. When I was discouraged, little asides slipped out from my mouth unbidden, such as, “People are impossible.” But because cynicism is incompatible with pastoring I never really owned up to that jaded word.

For pastors, even low-grade cynicism can’t help but lead to despair, for the ministry is people work. A distrusting pastor is like a cabinetmaker who grows to dislike wood, or an artist who begins to hate to work with paint. I don’t know of any pastor who entered the ministry expecting to feel like an American cia agent in cold-war Moscow. It is natural that cynicism soon leads to a fainthearted desire to quit. Perseverance depends on hope.

Cynicism is not the automatic result of wounds suffered when relationships go wrong. Several of my own attitudes and beliefs provided fertile ground for the choking weeds of distrust.

Favorable environment

The most obvious and morally neutral reason for my cynicism was self-defense. To protect myself and my family from being hurt again, I tried to determine what I could expect from others in this newly dangerous church world, readjusting what I perceived as reality. I wanted to have life and people figured out, predictable (and therefore somewhat controllable).

With a car door, for example, I understand how I could be hurt by one if my hand is in the wrong place at the wrong time: I could smash a few fingers. I know what to expect from a slammed car door. I want the same predictability with people. I don’t want any painful surprises. Therefore, it figures that if I treat people as though they are potentially dangerous, I will not be surprised by anyone.

At a deeper level, I now see that I was trying to soften my mistakes, to lessen the degree of my guilt. (I don’t want to paint myself too darkly, though, because I tend to be self-critical and follow the maxim that if something is wrong I have somehow contributed to the problem and need to grow through the experience.) The truth is, I was convinced I was easy to work with because I was approachable and easygoing. What I did not want to admit was that in many ways I am in fact difficult to work with. I dislike administrative duties. I avoid policies, procedures, job descriptions. I don’t rush to give structure and discipline to the organization. I make decisions slowly, but I love to be spontaneous. This makes things easier for me but difficult for others.

The darkest impulse within my pessimistic heart during this time, however, was subterranean anger, the inevitable fruit of pain, though again I did not recognize my anger as such because I wasn’t sitting around nursing malicious thoughts. I felt that my detractors had thoroughly ruined my dreams, caused my hard work to go up in smoke, and deepened my financial pressures. I consciously forgave these people, though, and was careful to speak to others about them with goodwill, even if cold currents of disappointment flowed through me like an icy river in my veins. I could not think about some people who had hurt us without having negative feelings.

Frankly, I found some satisfaction in cynicism. I think it is the warped pleasure of being wise in my own eyes. I wonder if a tinge of cynicism is not a common syndrome of those in their thirties. My youthful hand of idealism had gotten burned a few times, and then my eyes were opened and I thought I had everyone figured out: I knew their real motives, I knew what they might do someday, and I was not going to get snookered again. I am smarter than that. I am wise to you.

The most noble reason for my cynicism, however, was idealism. Someone has said that in the breast of every cynic beats the heart of an idealist. That observation indeed describes me. I believe the church can be a glorious community of Christlike people marked by unselfish love. I believe the fellowship of other Christians can be one of the great joys in one’s life. I believe the church is the hope of the world, So when my ideals fell in pieces to the ground, my disappointment was overwhelming. Overwrought emotions drove the pendulum of my once-soaring expectations to the opposite extreme—far past a realistic appraisal of human weakness. Cynicism is the mushroom cloud of exploded ideals.

That is why even pastors can be vulnerable to cynicism. We love people, follow stellar ideals fueled by Scripture, and have lofty expectations based on prayer and faith. We are true believers but we have tricky emotions.

The strength of a pastor’s negative reaction to the failings of his or her people can also arise from the closeness of the relationship, like a father with a prodigal son. The father believes in his son and wants him to be great. When his son goes astray, others assure the father, “He’s just going through a phase. Don’t worry. He’s a good kid; he’ll come out of it.” But these thoughts are not in the father’s heart, for this relationship cuts too close to the bone. The father is angry, disappointed, and ashamed beyond sound reason. The father cannot believe that his son, his own flesh and blood, the one to whom he has given sound guidance and constant love, could do what he is doing. He might even feel mercy toward someone else’s son in the same predicament, but not toward his own.

The bane of cynicism is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: breeding just what it expects. Distrust spawns distrust. If you don’t trust me, I wonder what your problem is. For the pessimistic pastor, relationships become harder and harder.

Higher ground

For about two years I did not view cynicism as displeasing to God or offensive to others. But several influences came together to expose it for what it truly is, and I gladly came out from under its malignant shadow.

First of all, I gradually came to understand that due largely to the undertow of my emotions I had believed a lie. A cynical outlook does not conform to reality. Cynicism distorts my outlook by universalizing a few situations or persons. For example, if one person or five or fifty hurt me, I conclude that all of them will hurt me. One board is manipulative, and I assume all are that way. In effect, cynicism is prejudice—a prejudgment that others are untrustworthy before I even know anything about them. The cynic glosses over those who are kind and true.

Rarely do I make the same universalizing error in judgment about other things: because I am caught in a traffic jam on the expressway doesn’t mean I will always be caught in one, or if I buy a bag of apples and one of them is rotten, that doesn’t mean every bag I buy will contain a rotten apple. Normally I know this. (The more pain involved, however, the more likely will be the misjudgment.) Intense pain caused me to lose my sense of reality with people.

The second thing I learned about my cynicism is especially embarrassing to admit. With the added perspective of time, I came to see my response to some of the people in Arlington Heights as childishly naïve. I had acted like a kindergarten boy at the playground who expected everyone to be nice to him if he was nice to them. When a bully hit me with a rock, I bravely kept on playing, but inside I was sitting on the ground with my lower lip sticking out. It was time to grow up.

Thirdly, one day while reading the Bible I happened across 1 Corinthians 13:7 and its significance did not escape me. “[Love] always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres” (emphasis added). That cannot be what the Bible means, I thought. Obviously I cannot always trust or hope the best of some people. There are bullies in the world!

But I now realize that to some extent mature love demands that I go into ministry with my eyes open and take the risk. Love is not naïve, but it is not overly self-protective either. Love looks for the good in others, not the bad.

Paul wrote his words about a love that always hopes and trusts to the very Corinthians who had hurt him deeply. Many had spoken contemptuously against him and rejected his authority. Nevertheless, Paul could write, “I will very gladly spend for you everything I have and expend myself as well. If I love you more, will you love me less?” (2 Cor. 12:15). While the natural response to those who hurt us is to build walls against them, Paul writes, “We have spoken freely to you, Corinthians, and opened wide our hearts to you. We are not withholding our affection from you” (2 Cor. 6:11-12). Seemingly against all evidence to the contrary, he could even say, “I have great confidence in you” (2 Cor. 7:4). Paul followed his own directions to the letter.

If I am optimistic and realistic about relationships (that is, loving and truthful), I recognize the possibility that others may return bad for good, but I am willing to take that pain for the sake of bringing Christ’s best to them.

Magazine articles also helped me to see cynicism and hope for what they are. For some time I regarded magazines such as Guideposts as Pollyannish. On the other hand, magazines like Time had a gritty, negative edge that I enjoyed. But as time passed, I grew tired of all the unremitting bad news and negative perspectives. Cynical journalism caused me to despair, and it certainly was not painting the whole picture. Gradually, seeing cynicism as gloomy and unhealthy, I lost my appetite for it. I wanted to read things that face reality but at the same time are redemptive, and choose to hope.

I remember the first time I heard the word redemptive and thought of it as something other than a theological term for salvation. It should be the Christian approach to life, As a group of editors, we were weighing the merits of a particular manuscript that told of one pastor’s dark experience. Marshall Shelley, editor at Leadership, asked how the writer could add something redemptive to the story. His question hit me like a lightning bolt as I realized its significance for my current pessimism about people.

Our gospel is all about redemption, I realized. This includes the redemption of people and churches who bruise pastors. God takes people in the grip of evil and turns the situation around for good.

Redemption is a crucial concept for the healing of a cynic. Redemption looks straight and hard at the evil in the world and the capacity for sin in humanity, yet does not give up. Redemption takes hold of fallen humanity and restores it to the glorious state God intended. Our God is our Redeemer. He brings good out of evil and takes hope to the darkest corners of this world.

Another eye opener for me was an anecdote in an editorial by David Neff in Christianity Today. 1 “About five years ago,” Neff writes, “Christian social critic Richard John Neuhaus was being driven from the Pittsburgh airport to a speaking engagement. During the drive, one of his hosts persisted in decrying the disintegration of the American social fabric and the disappearance of Christian values from our culture. Cases in point were too numerous to mention, but Pastor Neuhaus’s host tried anyway. After the tedious drive, Neuhaus offered these words of advice: ‘The times may be bad, but they are the only times we are given. Remember, hope is still a Christian virtue, and despair is a mortal sin.’ “

That was a paradigm I had not considered. Cynicism should be respelled s-i-n-i-c-i-s-m, and like all sin it takes a terrible toll, especially on pastors.

Warped but glorious

Out on itinerant speaking assignments, I talked over Sunday lunch with more than one pastor who was smarting from what church people had done to them, and I saw how their pain had poisoned their attitudes toward people and toward ministry overall. I saw myself in them and realized I didn’t want to be like that.

I thought about my father, an attorney, who in the pursuit of justice has seen the nasty side of others on plenty of occasions, yet he remains a positive, joyful person. I realized that his outlook on life must be the result of a conscious choice.

A pastor friend caught my attention one day as we talked about the ministry. He said, “I don’t have trouble working with people. That’s the easy part of ministry.” At that I did a double take; I didn’t think anyone could feel that way!

His comment confirmed something to me that is obvious but not quickly accepted by someone like myself. Relational and administrative skills have much to do with how others respond to a leader. Some of my troubles in Arlington Heights were due not only to the faults of others but also to my own. And I have a fair share of them. One weakness I have that ironically multiplies problems with others is a great reluctance to confront. By temperament I seek consensus, peace, and good feelings among people. In the past I have rarely confronted anyone. What this neglect does is delay and aggravate many relational and organizational problems. I am finding that as I practice confrontation, when necessary, in most cases I am drawn closer to others.

For example, one of our church leaders was beginning to slip in Sunday attendance, and then he missed a leaders’ meeting without informing me beforehand. Later when I saw him, he said nothing about having missed the meeting. Finally one night I talked to him about the problem, and with a mature attitude he admitted his fault and apologized. We ended that meeting more closely knit in understanding and love than we were before.

As I work on my relationship and leadership skills, I find that I am edging toward the feeling of my pastor friend who said he had no trouble working with people. I feel I am getting somewhat of a grip on how people and organizations work. I thoroughly enjoy the process of church ministry and delight in people who call themselves Christians.

Albeit an irregular hobby, I enjoy woodworking. I find pleasure in the sweet smell of wood, especially when it is cut with the saw. I like sanding wood and feeling its smooth texture, and I appreciate the difference in color, grain, and hardness of the various woods, such as the contrast between pine and cherry. With no small satisfaction, I watch wood slowly take shape into useful things.

Of course I get the stubborn splinter on occasion. Knots as hard as rocks sometimes prevent me from sawing a board as I would like. Sometimes the only boards at the lumberyard are a bit warped, and begrudgingly I make the best of them. On occasion I err with pencil and ruler or drill. Woodworking has its downsides, but I am not put off.

Oscar Wilde says a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. A cynic knows everything about barbed splinters, bruised fingers, pinched skin, warped boards. A pastor sees a “carved” parishioner that sooner or later reflects the glory of Jesus Christ.

Christianity Today (April 3, 1995): 24.

Copyright © 1998 Craig Brian Larson

MY SON MARK HAD PRACTICED gymnastics for several years and he was ready to learn a double back flip on the trampoline. His coach buckled a spotting belt around Mark’s waist and clipped on two ropes that stretched upward to two pulleys on ceiling beams some thirty feet apart and then rejoined and dropped back down to the spotter. If Mark was about to fall on his head, the coach would pull on the rope and suspend him in the air. Mark practiced doubles safely for several weeks in the spotting belt and proudly reported to me how well he was doing.

Then one Saturday he came home with bruises on his head and hip and a disquieting story. In the middle of a double flip, when Mark’s coach pulled on the ropes, one of them came unclipped from the steel ring on the belt. Since the remaining rope ran to a ceiling pulley many feet to the side of the trampoline, Mark swung pendulum-like sideways off the trampoline, where he met a wall.

Until this episode, Mark had placed complete confidence in the spotting belt. Suddenly he did not know what to expect from it.

The same sort of thing has happened to me a few times in my ministry. Based on my interpretation and application of Scripture, I thought I knew what I could expect from God. Then something came unclipped, and I swung in a direction I did not anticipate, leaving me disillusioned and sometimes pondering whether I should quit.

One of these times came in 1994. After serving as associate editor at LEADERSHIP for three years, I had ventured into free-lance writing and itinerant preaching. Financially, this was an extremely risky move. I could not predict from week to week what my honorariums would be, if any. I paid my own health and life insurance, and I had a wife and four sons to house, feed, and clothe.

But I felt I was within God’s will and therefore not presumptuous, and I wanted to bank on God’s promise to meet my needs if I sought first his kingdom and his righteousness. I believed God would supply all my needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus; that if I asked, I would receive. I had no illusions that it would be easy but I was convinced God would make a way.

Several months into my new venture, my finances grew leaner and leaner. Preaching honorariums almost always fell far below what I needed. I wrote and mailed out a number of book proposals to publishers, who were not interested. In the meantime I wrote magazine articles, which usually pay at a rate that works out to minimum wage. Gradually I fell further and further behind in my bills.

Lord, I cannot believe you want me behind in my bills, I would pray. This is not a good witness. I cannot believe you want me to struggle like this, to spend such emotional energy just to meet daily needs.

Everything came to a head in the summer of 1994. The irs had hit me with an unexpected tax bill, and we were now several thousand dollars in debt. In desperation, I put this debt on a high-interest credit card. Other bills remained outstanding. I was getting to the point of no return; I had to make some decisions about whether to make a course correction.

As the noose tightened around my neck, I began to flirt with questions I had never before allowed myself to think. Could I depend on God or not? Could I rely on his promises or not? As far as I could see, I was doing all I could: working hard six and seven days a week, praying, seeking first the kingdom through writing and preaching. I checked my motives and felt they were fairly good. In short, things just did not add up.

As I pondered my situation, a terrible feeling of insecurity swept over me, something like a ship captain must feel when his anchor gives way in a storm. The questions I was asking ultimately addressed issues that went beyond merely paying the bills to the very core issues of my faith. If these promises about provision were not reliable, what was? If the Book does not work when it comes to finances, how can I know it will work in regard to other spiritual issues?

Disillusionment sapped my ability to persevere. I had to preach the Word, and I was wondering how to interpret it! If I was to hang in there with God’s work, I had to understand the nature of prayer and God’s promises and the difference between faith and presumption. I needed to be able to trust God.

I have found the health of human relationships often revolves around expectations—ours and theirs. If my expectations for my wife do not match reality, I am disappointed. The same holds true in my relationship with God. I cannot put God in a box, but I need to know what I should realistically expect of him. If my expectations are unscriptural, I am living under an illusion and will some-day experience a jarring collision with a wall. All the same, just as surely as I did not want to presume upon God, neither did I want to veer to the other extreme of having a small God (to use Phillips’ phrase). That, too, is an illusion and one, I suspect, that is more displeasing to the Lord than presumption.

I think by now my bias is clear: if I am going to err, I choose to do so on the side of faith. But I was face-to-face with stark reality. I was in a no-man’s-land, where a minister cannot long endure. I could not continue to risk everything while unsure about my beliefs. I had to know what I could expect from God in the future. Had I built my life on false expectations?

Over the next six months as I worked through my finances and my Bible, I learned several things about myself and about God.

1. Remember to remember. I quickly forget how God has worked in my life in the past, much as the Israelites forgot how God delivered them from Egypt and led them in the desert. Even though they had repeatedly seen God work mighty wonders on their behalf, with each new peril they complained in full throat that God had left them and that all was lost.

I have read this Exodus account often, with full knowledge of how the story ends, and I have thought, How can they be so dense! Only days before God parted the Red Sea and they walked through on dry ground. On top of that, they saw God’s power on their behalf against the Egyptians. How can they not see that God will help them now as he did before? Yet when I face troubles far less perilous than the Israelites faced (never have I walked with my children for days through a desert without food and water), I am just as quick to shout, “Woe is me!”

In my times of disillusionment, I find it helpful to remember how God has previously pulled me from the fire. Once when I pastored in Chicago, for example, with my salary in the $22,000 range and bills excruciatingly tight, I had slowly fallen behind some $1,500. One day a friend who knew nothing about my bills gave me a check that covered the majority of them, and soon we were out of the woods. I rejoiced because I had seen God’s promises proven true. On another occasion, in winter, the church boiler had burst, and we needed some $6,000 for a new one. Our inner-city church had no money, so I prayed earnestly for God to help us. Within days he provided through neighboring churches that rallied to our aid. Our church worshiped God joyfully for making a way for us.

I can say categorically that God has never failed me in the past. Not once have our cupboards been bare. Not once has my family lacked food, clothing, shelter, or transportation. The Lord has always been faithful and trustworthy.

2. Develop “radical listening” skills. In the middle of my crisis of confidence in the summer of 1994, I decided that at all cost I had to find out what was wrong. I had not discovered it through my reasoning or through talking it out with fellow ministers, so I had to take another tack.

I determined to devote myself to seeking the Lord until he gave me insight into the cause of my circ*mstances. Of course I had already been praying hard for months, but I had also been under pressure to write as much as possible in order to pay the bills. Now I decided to risk everything on God—to put my work aside and fast, pray, read Scripture, and listen for God’s voice. I called it “radical listening” because I was in such desperate straits.

On the first day, after several hours, I felt impressed to read Amos 4. Unsure whether I had “heard” God accurately, I opened the Bible with apprehension, only to have my soul galvanized by the sense that God was apparently at work, for the words seemed directly relevant to my situation. Amos declared God had withheld rain from Israel and struck their crops with plagues because of Israel’s sin. God called Israel to return to him.

The parallel was all too clear. My life was marked by drought. I realized that in all likelihood my financial shortfalls had resulted from conduct that was displeasing to the Lord. The clearest area of disobedience was my marriage. My wife and I had not been getting along well—owing first to some issues we had never worked through and second to our financial problems. Furthermore, I had not properly involved her in the process of making my decision to undertake free-lance writing and itinerant preaching. I saw that I was not trying hard enough to hear her concerns and work together toward a solution.

The impression I had from Amos 4 was confirmed twice. To ensure that I had heard properly, I continued for several days to spend devoted time to seeking the Lord. He impressed only two other Scriptures on my heart: Jeremiah 14 and the book of Haggai. Again, my soul was quickened as I read; both passages addressed the subject of lack having been sent by the Lord to wake up his people.

I was certain now that I lacked provision not because God’s promise had failed but because I had failed. I took steps to correct the areas of disobedience and slippage, and over several months our financial situation gradually improved as a spate of work came my way and honorariums improved. Within eight months we were in the black.

Paul’s word to the Philippians had come true for me: “If on some point you think differently, that too God will make clear to you” (3:15).

3. Look hard in the mirror. I have two cars—a 1992 Toyota Corolla and a 1984 Chevy Cavalier. The latter has 135,000 miles on it that are all mine. Naturally I have had to replace many parts on the Chevy over the years, but only recently did I learn that one of the more expensive replacements should have been unnecessary. Several years after I bought the car, I started having problems with the radiator, and around 1992 I replaced it at a cost of several hundred dollars. I blamed Chevy for having a shoddy product.

When I took my Toyota in for maintenance a few years later, however, I learned something about cars. “The most important maintenance,” said the service manager, “is to replace the fluids. You need to change your oil every 3,000 miles and flush your radiator every two years.” This is because after two years antifreeze undergoes a chemical change and becomes corrosive, ruining the radiator. Throughout the life of my Chevy Cavalier, I had never once flushed the radiator! So I was to blame for the failure, not Chevy.

During my season of disillusionment, I made the same mistake with God. The problem was not God’s promises but my disobedience. If I ever again face similar disillusioning circ*mstances, I am determined to take the attitude that the problem is with me; I am missing something. I am the one with limited perceptions; I am the one who has distortions in understanding because of sin. I am the one who needs to humble myself and accept God’s Word as true, even when I cannot make it fit my experience.

I like the way David expresses this attitude in Psalm 131: “My heart is not proud, O Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me. O Israel, put your hope in the Lord both now and forevermore.”

Someone has said we become disillusioned when we hold on to an illusion. I believe this was indeed the case with me. Not that anything in God’s Word is an illusion, but I always thought I should be able to understand all of God’s ways in my life at the very time that they are happening. Therein lay the illusion. In fact, Scripture assures me that much of the time I will not understand God’s activity!

4. Account for anomalies. Scripture shows that God occasionally works in people’s lives in untypical ways. The events that do not fit our current understanding are something like the anomalies of science that for a season puzzle physicists.

For example, when Einstein was a young man, physicists had already scratched their heads for some fifty years over the unexplainable orbit of the planet Mercury. Newton’s theories of gravity had served well for centuries to understand the orbits of all the other planets. But in Mercury’s elliptical orbit, the point nearest the sun drifted by a very small amount: “5,600 seconds of arc per century,” according to Walter Sullivan. “Newton’s theory explained all but forty-three seconds of this by taking into account the gravity of other planets.”

Astronomers conjectured that another small hidden planet, which they named Vulcan, might orbit near the sun and exert gravitational force on Mercury. But Vulcan was never discovered. Until Einstein came on the scene, those forty-three seconds of arc remained a stubborn anomaly.

But then Einstein formulated his general theory of relativity. When he applied this gravitational formula to the eccentric orbit of Mercury, he experienced one of the breathtaking moments of his scientific life: the numbers fit. Mercury’s forty-three seconds were no longer an anomaly.

My life will occasionally take on an orbit like Mercury’s that for a time simply defies my best efforts to explain it. Nonetheless, as surely as there is order in the universe, there is a heavenly reason for my circ*mstances that is utterly consistent with God’s Word and character. I simply cannot understand it yet.

The Bible records many circ*mstances that contradict what I would expect of God:

• God commands Abraham to emigrate to the Promised Land and, once there, the first thing Abraham finds is famine—severe famine. An anomaly.
• God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son. An anomaly.
• David eats the consecrated bread. An anomaly.
• God commands Ezekiel to eat food cooked over human dung. An anomaly.
• God commands Hosea to marry a prostitute. An anomaly.
• Jesus shows mercy to sinners for four years; then when Ananias and Sapphira lie, God strikes them dead. An anomaly.
• Jesus hangs on the cross and cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” An anomaly.

I can trust God’s Word, but I cannot lock God into a formula. At the same time, I must take care not to make what seems like an exception into the rule. For example, if I do not see the provision I expect for some period of time, I cannot say God’s promises of provision cannot stand the acid test. The rule is the rule, and an apparent exception is precisely that.

I heard one analogy that has helped me. For an airplane to fly, one law of physics must supersede another. The laws of aerodynamics must take precedence over the law of gravity. Airplane flight does not mean that the law of gravity has failed, only that another law has taken precedence. So it is that on occasion one principle of Scripture supplants another. In my case, for example, as it often was for the Israelites, God’s discipline superseded his provision.

5. Wait for time to prove God right. A few months before my disillusionment hit, I figured out how much money I would need, not only to get out of debt and pay current bills but also to purchase some things we desperately needed and had delayed buying. The amount was $10,000. I began to pray for this specific amount to come in. Extraordinarily. Beyond my regular income.

When nothing happened, I went through my deep disillusionment. As I said before, I entered a period of radical listening; I corrected some things in my life; and after a few months my finances slowly improved, though the week-to-week pressure remained.

About another six months passed. And then one year after I had first prayed for the miraculous supply of $10,000, I received a completely unforeseen gift from a family member for exactly $10,000. That check took us out of the woods, and since then we have kept pace with our expenses and enjoyed the most pressure-free time in our financial lives.

Situations like this have shown me again and again that time proves God’s promises true, often an extensive amount of time. The short run is deceptive.

Through this entire experience, Psalm 89 has taken on special meaning for me. Written by a Jew after the destruction of Jerusalem, this psalm is an account of cognitive dissonance.

Without a hint of his anguish, the psalmist begins with praise to God for his faithfulness and love. He writes at length of the covenant God established with David and quotes God’s promise to establish David’s line forever even if his sons stray.

Then in a jarring, abrupt reversal in tone, the psalmist addresses God in the second person, recounting in accusatory terms how God has cast David’s throne to the ground. “Where is your former great love,” he asks, “which in your faithfulness you swore to David?” He begs God to remember Israel and finishes with a curt, almost obligatory “Praise be to the Lord forever! Amen and Amen.”

On the one hand, the psalmist knows what God has promised; on the other, history and his experience contradict those promises. He cannot reconcile the two no matter how hard he tries. He believes God’s Word, yet he must face a reality that seems to deny God’s Word can ever be fulfilled.

From my position in history, though, I know how God’s faithful covenant was and is being fulfilled, and, to a degree, that surpasses anything David could have imagined. God himself would become David’s royal descendant and establish an eternal kingdom of absolute justice and righteousness that would fill the universe. Despite how unlikely it appeared to the psalmist, God is fulfilling his covenant to David.

David—and Moses and Abraham and Joseph and Esther and Ruth and Mary, among many others—teaches me that when God’s promises appear the least likely to be fulfilled, he is working out ambitious projects that dwarf my capacity even to conceive of them.

My problem is that I live in a fax-machine culture. If my computer takes a half-second to obey a command, I want to spend thousands of dollars to upgrade. My culture conditions me to expect everything quickly. If I bring those expectations to God, however, I am usually disappointed. God is the Timeless One, for whom a thousand years are as a day. He knows most of his highest purposes for me are realized in a time-intensive process, so he uses Old Man Time as a chisel on my inner man.

And so in my times of disillusionment I have learned to simply persevere no matter what circ*mstances or thoughts buzz around me. My mind may never resolve every question, but time will.

I must not put an arbitrary statute of limitations on God’s Word. If I become disillusioned again, it will be a failure of my patience, not of God’s promise. He encourages me in almost unqualified terms to pray and believe but he reserves to himself the date of fulfillment.

6. Focus on what God pursues. My faith, like my character, is an end in itself, not merely a means by which God gives me what I ask. Christ is the author and perfecter of my faith. I expect, then, that God will allow circ*mstances that demand faith, hence circ*mstances that by definition defy my reasoning and expectations, that force me to trust in spite of everything. Because faith is the goal, I should expect God to defy my expectations.

After my son Mark’s accident on the trampoline, the owner of the gymnastics club took action to ensure that such a mishap would not occur again. He installed a safety latch to keep the clip from accidentally unclipping. God is likewise interested in my safety. If I will do the one thing he clearly instructs me to do—persevere—he will ultimately show himself faithful. In the long run, God is always found true.

Copyright © 1998 Craig Brian Larson

AT TIMES I HAVE FELT that my work in ministry was wasted. My prayers did not appear to be answered. My sermons did not seem to change lives. My counseling did not appear to help people. My evangelism won no converts. My leadership initiatives were ignored. My discipling of others seemed to bring no growth. Even in the areas of my strongest gifting, my efforts have occasionally looked utterly ineffective.

At such times I identify with the apparent contradiction described in Isaiah 49:1-4. There God speaks of his high purpose for his people, comparing them to a sharpened sword and a polished arrow for divine use. “You are my servant, Israel,” the Lord concludes, “in whom I will display my splendor.”

But the servant of the Lord has quite a different feeling. “I have labored to no purpose;” he replies. “I have spent my strength in vain and for nothing. Yet what is due me is in the Lord’s hand, and my reward is with my God.” In apparent futility, the servant can only console himself with his ultimate reward from God.

Most who have ministered in churches for any length of time have known the servant’s paradoxical state: a stirring sense of call and a frequent sense of futility. We do the most important work in the world with the greatest resources imaginable, yet we sometimes feel as though we are accomplishing nothing. What gives?

As I have mulled over this paradox for several decades, I have come to some conclusions that help me to persevere with peace of mind even when tangible results are few and far between.

1. I can influence but I cannot control. Spiritual work has limits. The nature of these limits is illustrated by the difference between the work of a farmer and that of a cabinetmaker.

With tools like saws and routers, a cabinetmaker directly and immediately molds his product to conform to his vision. There is no delay between the push of the circular saw and the cut of the board, and if he pushes the saw to the left, it goes to the left. If he wants a half-inch-wide groove along the lower edge of the board, he uses a router or chisel to make one. Because the tools and wood have no life or will of their own, the results of the cabinetmaker’s work are primarily a function of his skill and diligence. In other words, a cabinetmaker enjoys almost complete control.

A farmer, on the other hand, has influence but no real control. He works in partnership with a host of other forces, resources, and living things: soil, sun, seed, weather, pests, fertilizer, and, ultimately, God. A farmer works indirectly with his crop, encouraging an environment for growth with fertilizer, weeding, and irrigation. Because he deals with living things, a farmer cannot directly shape his crops. And because living things require time to grow, a farmer must wait patiently for the process to be completed.

Jesus repeatedly used the farming analogy for good reason. Even he did not force people into the kingdom but only influenced them. I can pray for others, love them, teach them, challenge them, but I cannot make decisions for them.

In recent weeks I have been on-again-off-again frustrated with someone whom I am trying to help get on his feet as a Christian. He says he has committed his life to Christ but in six months has attended church only a few times and resists my efforts to disciple him one-on-one. He will not return my phone calls. When I do catch him at home, he says he is too busy to study the Bible together over the phone. A tentative appointment to talk yesterday went by the wayside. Last night, in frustration, I thought to myself, I’m going to quit pursuing him; I’ll pray for him but I’m going to wait for him to come to us.

No, I cannot do that, I told myself later. He is a baby Christian who needs a shepherd. His resistance should not surprise me, considering his life prior to his conversion. The truth is, I am frustrated—largely because I want control. I want A plus B to quickly equal C. I want to be able to employ techniques that yield results as directly as the cause-and-effect world of the cabinetmaker.

2. Any growth in righteousness is of infinite value. In the 1996 Summer Olympics, sprinter Michael Johnson set records in the 200- and 400-meter races. To do so he trained for some ten years to cut a mere second or two from his time. In Slaying the Dragon he writes,

Success is found in much smaller portions than most people realize. A hundredth of a second here or sometimes a tenth there can determine the fastest man in the world. At times we live our lives on a paper-thin edge that barely separates greatness from mediocrity and success from failure.1

Few people would suggest Michael Johnson had trained in vain, yet he toiled for a mere medal and title— passing glories. How much more valuable is the hard work pastors invest in others to produce even “small” gains in obedience to the will of God.

In fact, there is no such thing as minor repentance. Granted, in this fallen world, to help one person overcome a sinful habit, such as a critical spirit, can seem about as productive as cleaning one piece of gum from the sidewalk of a trash-laden ghetto. But to God, who is infinitely into the details, all righteousness matters, every effort counts.

Therefore, all my discipling matters immensely. For example, if I preach to forty people and only one righteous deed results in the life of one person—a mother, perhaps, resists the temptation to lose her temper with her child—it is of eternal significance. Any conformity to the will of God is of infinite worth. If one sin—a bite from the forbidden fruit—could be so cataclysmic as to send Christ to the cross, then it is worth preventing even one sin. If one act of righteousness—Mary’s anointing of the body of Jesus—could lead to her story being told wherever the gospel is preached, then one act of obedience is of immense worth. If at the last judgment every careless word will be brought to account, every motive judged, and every good deed receive its reward, then everything in the realm of human conduct matters. In God’s eyes, the vileness of one sin or the eternal glory of one righteous act exceeds anything we can imagine.

Paul knew this, and this knowledge was the engine of his pastoral work. “We proclaim him,” he said, “admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone perfect in Christ. To this end I labor, struggling with all his energy, which so powerfully works in me” (Col. 1:28). These words are not merely the Pharisaical personality distortion of an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist, but rather a true reflection of the value of each bit of repentance and growth in any person. Clearly Paul expresses the mind of Christ, who said, “Go and make disciples of all nations … teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19-20, emphasis mine).

What people do and think and say matter so much that to spend our entire lives on the growth of only one person is worthwhile, not in a fastidious spirit of Pharisaical legalism but in the freedom of those who have a joyful desire to please the one who loves righteousness.

Given this truth, I know I actually see few of the true results of my ministry, for I cannot follow people around in their daily lives to see how God is gradually changing them. After I preach, people walk away and their lives are changed in ways I cannot know now, but one day I will see it. Then I will realize that the results of my work far exceed the winning of even a hundred Olympic gold medals. I will know for a certainty that righteousness is real—that it has eternal significance.

3. Ministry is measured in many ways A year ago I received an evaluation form in the mail from my denominational superiors to be used in the annual review of my ministry at our church. The form asked for data on attendance, income, missions giving, and one or two other numerical criteria for the previous three years. After I completed the form, it seemed to me that the report did not tell the whole story, for by its measure little had happened during the previous year. And that was not the case, for in many critical intangibles good things were happening.

For this reason, I added an additional sheet in which I rated the strength of our church on a scale of one to ten in areas I felt were critical, such as the quality of our worship and our relationships, progress on our vision, our effectiveness in evangelism, our spirit of giving, the degree to which members responded to my leadership, the levels of unity, joy, faith, and morale among the congregation.

This was not merely an attempt to put a positive spin on a lackluster report. On some of the added criteria we fared well and on others poorly, but I felt the new-and-improved evaluation better pictured what was actually happening. By these measures, we were seeing results, the kind that I trust will eventually lead to tangible fruit.

4. Spiritual ministry requires faith from beginning to end. Salvation is not the only thing in the Christian life that depends on faith; so does Christian ministry. “We continually remember before our God and Father,” said Paul, “your work produced by faith” (1 Thess. 1:3). God delights in our faith too much to let ministry be based primarily on works. Consequently, if I am following his leading, I find that he often orders my ministry in the church in a way that requires my faith.

In practical terms, this means I often have less security and control than I would prefer. When fears arise and I wonder if God is really with me, I remind myself that on this earth kingdom ministry never graduates to a point where I no longer need faith.

This fact has huge implications for those concerned about results. I must see my faith as an end in itself, valuable in itself, a fruit of ministry as valid as conversions or numerical growth. All Job did was believe, in spite of everything, yet he pleased God greatly. Some pastors must plant themselves in a community—like Abraham in the Promised Land—and pray and believe for a season without tangible results because God delights in their faith in the same way he delighted in Abraham’s faith (which waited a long time before seeing results!). Like Paul, who delighted in hardships because Christ’s power rested on him at those times, I am learning to delight in situations that require faith, for then I know my heart pleases God.

If God wants to bear the fruit of hundreds of conversions through me, I will thank him for it. If God wants to produce faith in me in the face of few tangible results, I will believe him for the coming of his kingdom in people’s lives—sooner, or later.

Naturally there is an aberration of this kind of faith. Faith must not become a rationale for laziness or passivity, a failure to do my part in the divine-human partnership called ministry. I am careful to prayerfully think through the ministries of our church to be sure we have biblical purposes and effective strategies to fulfill them.

5. Spiritual seeds have enduring power. On September 6, 1622, the Spanish galleon Atocha, bristling with bronze cannons and laden with gold and silver, served as the rear guard of a twenty-eight vessel flotilla in the Gulf of Mexico. A hurricane struck, and the Atocha sank near the Marquesas Keys of the Florida coast, where it remained for 365 years.

In the 1980s a treasure hunter and a college professor who had pored over Spanish documents of the voyage found the Atocha. Among those who examined the boat’s contents was an archaeologist, and in the sand that had served as its ballast he found something of special interest: seeds. To keep them from drying out he put the seeds in cups of fresh water. Nine days later as he checked the water level in the cups, he made a surprising discovery: “Suddenly, I saw leaves sticking up,” he says. To his astonishment, four of the seeds had sprouted.

As this account verifies, the seeds of this natural world are miracles endued by God with the power of life. Can the seeds of the spiritual world be any less powerful? Indeed, they have greater staying power.

In an important parable about seeds that gets less attention than the familiar parable of the four soils, Jesus described this power:

This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. (Mark 4:26-28)

God’s Word has power long after we sow it. Ideas, principles, beliefs, and insights based on Scripture have staying power. While the soil may be hostile to their growth now, while birds may carry some seeds away, in many people the seeds will someday germinate and take root. Because I believe in the enduring power in the seeds of truth, I can endure even in the seasons when I see little or no results.

Several months ago the church in Chicago where I previously served as pastor asked me to preach on a Sunday night. Because ten years had passed since my ministry there I did not expect to see many familiar faces. At the church dinner before the meeting, however, I found otherwise. The room was filled with people whom I knew well. My greatest surprise—and joy—was to see many people who had not been regulars of the church during my time: non-Christians whom we had tried to bring to Christ or immature believers struggling to escape the allure of the world. While some were still in-and-out, others had become regular churchgoers and church workers with Christian families.

I was especially gratified to see one young man. During my time in the pastorate, he had not attended with his mother; and in the months before my resignation, he had fallen into gang trouble and been locked away in prison. I had visited him at the Cook County jail and encouraged him to reach out to the Lord and trust in Christ for salvation. I also visited his wife, who started coming to church irregularly. Eventually he went to the penitentiary. But he had served his time, and I saw him at the church dinner with his wife and young children—a family man and a believer in Jesus Christ.

I was deeply moved with a sense that my ministry with the people in this church had mattered greatly. Now, with a long-term perspective, I saw more results from my ministry than I had seen before. The seeds of truth and love keep working long after they are sown. There is no way around it; spiritual ministry takes time.

The evening at my old church encouraged me to continue the simple method of the apostle Paul: “By setting forth the truth plainly,” he said, “we commend ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God” (2 Cor. 4:2). In other words, sow the seeds and patiently, prayerfully watch God work on a person’s conscience. This holds true not only in evangelism but in discipleship and church leadership. My responsibility is simply to love people, present the truth, give understanding, appeal to people to move into God’s will, pray for them—and watch the kingdom come. Sooner or later the results God intends will spring forth.

6. Each step people make in God’s direction should be celebrated. Our church worships in the second-floor conference room of the ibm building in downtown Chicago, overlooking the Chicago River. During the summer months, we see through the full-length windows the raising of the cantilever bridges, which work like a pair of opposing drawbridges to allow sailboats to pass on their way to Lake Michigan. Any boat coming from the south branch of the river must pass through a bridge nearly every block—some ten of them.

The city does not stop traffic for stray boats, nor do they raise all the bridges at once. Doing so would almost completely cut off automobile traffic into the Loop from the north and west. Instead, one bridge is raised at a time while a cluster of six to eight sailboats passes through. These wait, then, for the next bridge to rise. Step by step the boats eventually reach beautiful Lake Michigan.

Like these sailboats, individuals usually move closer to the Lord one commitment at a time, and the church moves toward greater fruitfulness one step at a time. If I save my sense of satisfaction until the ultimate goal is reached, I will be a frustrated man. I have learned instead to celebrate every bridge we pass through.

Several weeks ago, for instance, I rejoiced with the leaders of our small groups at the progress of a well-educated young man. When he first came to our church, he was emotionally distraught over a divorce and attended our meetings regularly for a few weeks until his feet were back on the ground. But then his attendance trailed off, and we would see him at a worship service only once every few months. We encouraged him to join a small group and he tried this, but soon he became irregular there, as well. It seemed he would never get on track.

But then about two months ago things suddenly changed. He started attending his small group regularly and has attended Sunday worship several times. When I talk to him, I get the feeling his faith is taking hold, that he is stabilizing. He still has a long way to go, but he has passed through a bridge or two, and we are celebrating.

7. Spiritual ministry is a mixture of muddle and glory. I enjoy watching most sports, but above all I enjoy playoff hockey. Sometimes I wonder why I do, because most of the game is a muddle of misplays. Rarely do players make more than three consecutive passes before their team loses the puck because of a bad pass, poor stickhandling, a steal, or a check from an opposing player. One team has the puck for a few seconds, and then the other. When a player does come free to shoot at the goal, the goalie almost always stops it. If I were looking for results—goals scored—90 percent of the time a hockey game is an exercise in futility. But now and then, like the sun briefly piercing through the clouds on an overcast day, out of the muddle something right suddenly happens for the offensive team. In the blink of an eye, someone makes a brilliant pass and an offensive player comes open with the puck in front of the goalie. He lets fly, and the puck sinks into the net. The players celebrate as if they had just entered heaven itself.

In my experience, pastoral ministry is like this. Like hockey, ministry does not appear to be a thing of order and well-scripted results (like football) but rather of mistakes and frustration. There is a lot of muddle. Occasionally, though, I see moments of glory so joyful they make the muddle worthwhile. Someone commits his or her life to Christ. A marriage is saved. Someone becomes a truly sacrificing servant of the church. The purpose of it all is realized.

Why do I like hockey so much? Perhaps because I played on frozen creeks as a kid and took frozen pucks off my shins; perhaps because I grew up loving the Chicago Blackhawks, in awe of their star Bobby Hull. But it may be, too, that I am wired by God to enjoy something that requires persevering through much grind and seeming futility to know those occasional moments of overwhelming, euphoric joy. In short, I am called to ministry.

In “Total Eclipse” Annie Dillard writes,

The Ring Nebula, in the constellation Lyra, looks, through binoculars, like a smoke ring. It is a star in the process of exploding. Light from its explosion first reached the earth in 1054; it was a supernova then, and so bright it shone in the daytime. Now it is not so bright but it is still exploding. It expands at the rate of seventy million miles a day. It is interesting to look through binoculars at something expanding at this rate: it does not budge. Its apparent size does not increase. Photographs of the Ring Nebula taken fifteen years ago seem identical to photographs taken of it yesterday.2

The Ring Nebula teaches us that huge happenings are not always apparent to the naked eye, and that is especially true in the spiritual realm. If I could see from heaven’s perspective, I would know that in the spiritual realm when progress appears slowest, kingdom movement is actually occurring—perhaps even at the rate of seventy million miles a day.

Michael Johnson, Slaying the Dragon (New York: Harper-Collins, 1996).

Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse,” The Annie Dillard Reader (New York: Harper-Collins, 1994), 11-12.

Copyright © 1998 Craig Brian Larson