Page 3585 – Christianity Today (2024)

God has a long history of redeeming our sinful failures, of turning our worst blunders into opportunities for personal growth and spiritual development.
— Richard Exley

The voice on the other end of the line was desperate. In a shaky, emotion-filled voice, the wife of a minister and mother of four confessed her adultery.

“I don’t know why I’m calling you,” she stammered, “except I read your book, and I thought maybe you could help me.”

I began to reply, but she plowed ahead, “But I’m not sure I want help. I love Brad. He’s so understanding, so caring, not like my husband who takes me for granted.”

I listened for the better part of an hour while she poured out her story of a marriage undermined by the demands of ministry that won her husband’s affections. She had inadvertently begun spending time with a younger man who was just a friend. Nothing more. Suddenly she was “in love.” Now she was torn between her family and her lover. Her husband was growing suspicious, and her allconsuming guilt enveloped her.

Following the release of my book, Perils of Power: Immorality in the Ministry (Honor Books), I began receiving calls like this and visits from fallen ministers and their spouses. Although their circ*mstances differed, they all shared at least one thing in common — devastation.

In every case, I found myself face to face with immorality’s tragic consequences. A pastor ensnared by adultery, or some other moral failure, usually loses his position, his income, and often his residence. (Since I’ve worked only with male ministers, I write of the experience of male pastors and their wives.) Not infrequently, he is forced to leave the very community that should be giving him emotional support. He will be asked to confess publicly and resign all hard-won places of honor.

These losses, though, are inconsequential compared to his loss of self-esteem. In telling the truth, he has destroyed his own self-image, false though it was. No longer can he pretend to be a godly man of spiritual and moral integrity. For years he has managed to live a lie, but no more. Now everyone knows, now everywhere he turns his shameful failure confronts him. His confession has destroyed the faith placed in him by his peers, his congregation, his family.

His wife and family, too, share in the consequences. Heather Bryce, a pen name of a spouse who wrote “After the Affair” in Leadership magazine, points out, “The bewildered, stunned pastor’s wife suffers losses in addition to her husband’s. They will move, thus costing her contact with her friends, and she may well lose her husband. At the least, she has lost her pastor. She loses her self-worth both from the adultery and from losing the ministry where she received approval. Since few people understand the whole situation, she is isolated at her point of greatest need. When able to stay within the marriage relationship, her only companion is the one who acted to her hurt.”

Her past, once cherished, is tarnished. Now she is contaminated by it.

Helping such couples in crisis is draining. At times, I don’t feel particularly qualified for it. Still, from time to time, I am required to play a primary role in the restoration of a pastor. Here is what I’ve learned as I’ve walked couples through their pain.

Failure or Sinful Lifestyle?

There is a difference between the minister who falls once, voluntarily confesses his sinful failure, and submits to a restoration process, and the minister trapped in an immoral lifestyle. The latter rarely confesses his sin until he is exposed — even then he may deny its full extent and resist church discipline.

Those in authority are wise to distinguish between the two. Arbitrary discipline, without regard to individual circ*mstances, is irresponsible. A minister should be able to confess voluntarily without fear of exposure or recrimination. If such a forum existed, in conjunction with spiritual care, many ministers could be delivered from immorality before it blossomed into a lifestyle. If the sin is not public knowledge, I see no scriptural reason why it should be publicly exposed if he has forsaken his sin, voluntarily confessed, and submitted to the proper authorities for rehabilitation.

Unfortunately, no such official forum exists. So the minister who, in a moment of weakness, gives in to temptation is trapped with the awful knowledge of his sin. The isolation he feels can make him vulnerable to further temptation. In short order, he is ensnared in immorality. What was birthed in sinful weakness has become a clandestine, immoral lifestyle. It is this situation — secret, habitual immorality — I address in this chapter.

Repeated adultery is seldom just a “sexual sin.” Rather it is a complex web of issues — the way the man relates to his spouse, his self-image and sexual identity, his lifestyle and work habits. These cannot be worked through in a brief encounter or in a few days away in retreat. Nor can they be adequately addressed while the minister is still enmeshed in ministry. The pressures are simply too great, the temptation to return to the familiar routine too compelling — a routine that originally contributed to the problem. Therefore the fallen minister must be removed from active ministry if he is going to be restored both spiritually and vocationally.

Earning Trust

Pastor Ed Dobson, who played a significant role in the rehabilitation of Truman Dollar, a well-known independent Baptist minister, says, “Restoration, to me, has two levels. The basic need is restoration to spiritual wholeness. Only after that issue is dealt with can we begin to even talk about the possibility of restoration to position.”

The early sessions should focus on trust building, believes Louis McBurney, a psychiatrist who specializes in helping clergy in crisis. “It’s important to bring up issues that need to be discussed,” he says, “but it’s especially important to build relationships.”

Trust between the fallen minister and the pastor, counselor, or group must be established on several levels. First he must trust you as a person. He must be convinced you are willing and able to empathize with him — to feel and understand what he is experiencing. Only then can he trust you.

At this juncture, he feels disenfranchised from his peers and feels his professional identity is lost. He feels more like a client than a fellow minister. To help him feel accepted as a peer, I like to meet informally, over lunch or a game of racquetball. These informal meetings are “social” and never take the place of our scheduled counseling. Although they are time consuming, an added pressure in an already over-crowded calendar, the benefits more than justify the extra effort.

I remember one emotional parting at the conclusion of a successful two-year rehabilitation. The restored minister and his wife hugged me and wept with gratitude. “I don’t know what we would have done without you,” the wife said. “It really made a difference the way you and your wife accepted us. The meals we shared were real life savers for me.”

Her husband added, “In the office, you were ‘the doctor’ and I was ‘the patient,’ but on the racquetball court, we were just men. I was one of the guys, not just a fallen minister.”

He also must have confidence in your skills. Fundamental to the whole process is his conviction of your competence, that you can help him. He must be absolutely sure his deepest secrets are safe with you, that you will always honor the sacred privilege of confidentiality.

Finally, he must know, beyond all doubt, that you are on his side, that his spiritual well-being is your highest concern. If he has the slightest doubt where your loyalties lie, the whole process will be compromised. This level of trust will not be achieved in the first session, of course — probably not in the first several sessions. Initially he may resent you, may consider you a part of the religious system that deprived him of his reputation, his ministry, and his livelihood. As the process continues, he will probably send up some trial balloons to see how you’ll react.

One minister finally risked revealing to me his anger at the way his denomination handled his adultery.

“They are accusing me of being uncooperative,” he spewed angrily, “simply because I’m unwilling to relocate to another city. I’ve tried to tell them that we own a home here, that my wife has a good job, which is our only source of income right now. But they refuse to understand. In fact, they have told me that if I don’t relocate within thirty days, I will be expelled from the rehabilitation program.”

He paused, waiting for my reaction. Rather than offering an opinion, I simply said, “It sounds like you feel trapped and misunderstood.”

If you consistently demonstrate both compassion and competence, his trust will begin to grow.

Personal disclosures, if they are timely and appropriate, can enhance the process significantly at this point.

One minister with a long history of sexual immorality struggled with an overwhelming sense of unworthiness. He was convinced he would be doing God and the church a big favor if he dropped out of the ministry for good. He didn’t believe God could forgive him. And even if God could forgive, he wasn’t sure God could change him.

Nothing seemed to pierce his armor until his counselor disclosed that he too had suffered a moral failure in the early years of his ministry. Following that disclosure the fallen minister took hope. The evidence of God’s grace and forgiveness was so obvious in his counselor’s life that he dared to believe God could do the same for him.

One word of caution: disclose personal struggles and failures in the past tense. This accomplishes at least two things. First, it offers hope. If you’ve already worked through a particular temptation or difficulty, the struggling minister can point to your victory. Second, your victorious experience can lend insights for helping him with his temptations, thus reinforcing his faith. Because he knows you share that which is common to all men, he will find your counsel more credible.

The Real Issue

Once trust is established, I begin to discuss his failures. I help him process his feelings, and we try to determine the underlying issue that initially made him vulnerable to sexual temptation.

Owning sin is seldom easy, though. The truth of infidelity is terribly painful. He has grown accustomed to living with selfdeceit. He has developed an elaborate system to rationalize his inexplicable behavior. In confession he experiences, maybe for the first time, the true magnitude of his sin. He suddenly sees his sin through God’s eyes. He is a liar and a deceiver. His immorality has made a mockery out of his faith, his marriage, and his ministry. In the agony of that moment, he will be tempted to withhold some of the details. He will probably attempt to justify his actions.

Take Bill, for example. He avoided detection for more than fourteen years, having been involved in a series of affairs. Even after being confronted with his immorality, he resisted confessing the magnitude of his sin. His wife writes, “It took six days of confrontation to extract all the facts. Through clever hedging and conscious lying, Bill had covered the extent of his immoral actions.”

While understandable, refusing to come fully clean only delays the healing process. And painful though it may be, the counselor must hold the man’s feet to the fire; he must come clean. But often the man doesn’t have the stomach for it; the pain is more than he can admit even to himself. Over a few days, perhaps two to three weeks, he will finally tell all. The results are traumatic — for him and his wife — wide swings of emotion ranging from almost uncontrollable rage to numbing grief.

The help of a pastor, counselor, or support group is invaluable during this period.

In Beyond Forgiveness, Don Baker tells of the discipline and restoration of a staff minister named Greg. Baker confesses, “One of the many mistakes I made during Greg’s twenty-six month restoration period was that I failed to maintain constant contact with him. In fact, Greg admitted later that he felt that I and other members of the staff had let him down. One staff person took him to lunch — once. I met with him occasionally and called periodically, but we never established a routine.”

They had been Greg’s closest friends, the ones to whom he looked for support. But during his ordeal, he had almost no fellowship with them. They were gracious when they ran into him, but they never went out of their way to connect with him or his wife.

Greg was invited to join a group of five men who met weekly for breakfast and spiritual fellowship.

“They accepted him completely,” Baker writes. “They treated him as a human being and as an equal. There was no condemnation, no criticism. No conditions were imposed upon their continuing relationship. They had breakfast together, shared needs with each other, and prayed.” They became a major force in his recovery.

Cracking the Lifestyle

Ministers who fall prey to sexual temptation are often driven people, workaholics whose lifestyle cause their most important relationships to suffer. Helping them regain control is critical. They must learn new ways of dealing with the pressures of life.

One minister I counseled was obviously a type-A personality, but the drivenness contributing to his moral failure remained unchecked. His old way of dealing with stress was to immerse himself in ministry (now in his new line of work), isolating himself from his wife and family. Of course, this only amplified his stress. This cycle fed itself, leaving him stressed out and susceptible to sexual temptation.

With his wife, I explored with him the source of his drivenness. At its root was a lack of self-esteem. No amount of success could enable him to escape his self-doubt. In fact the more successful he became, the harder he pushed himself. He was convinced that if other people really knew him the way he knew himself, they would know what a phony he really was.

Using both Scripture and reason, I helped him see there was not enough success in the world to still the tormenting voices within. Over time he came to appreciate his value as a person simply because of who he was — a man created in the image of God — not because of any success he might achieve. The Scriptures, rather than his emotions, became the foundation for his selfworth. He learned to share his fears with his wife, and in prayer they combated the inner enemies that sought to destroy him. Little by little, his drivenness was replaced by self-acceptance.

Attention should also be given to spiritual disciplines. Often a fallen pastor’s devotional life centers around power rather than intimacy; he’s looking for strength to succeed rather than an experience of God’s love. He has only a “working relationship” with God. His reading, if he takes time to read at all, is generally in the area of church growth and professional development.

So I require him to read for spiritual enrichment, to focus on his own spiritual needs. Required reading includes My Utmost For His Highest by Oswald Chambers, A Testament of Devotion by Thomas R. Kelly, Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster, and Ordering Your Private World by Gordon MacDonald, as well as my books, Perils of Power and The Rhythm of Life.

Probing Marital Wounds

Critical to the restoration process is the minister’s relationship with his wife. Most of the wives I’ve counseled were determined to stand by their husbands. But the healing of their marriage was, nonetheless, a lengthy and difficult process.

Her emotions swing. She has discovered that her husband isn’t the man she married. That man was good and godly, incapable of the kind of things this man has done — unspeakable things, sinful things beyond her comprehension. Not only has he done them, but he has confessed them to her in sordid detail. She had trusted him. She never thought to question his late hours. She believed him when he told her his preoccupation was churchrelated. But now her trust is gone, crushed beneath the awful revelation of his unfaithfulness.

Yet she wants to save their marriage. She badly wants to forgive him as much as he wants to be forgiven. Can she? Can she get rid of her hurt and anger without destroying him — and their relationship? Can she learn to trust him again, respect him as a godly man, as the spiritual leader in their home? These and a hundred more questions haunt her.

Before her wound can heal, though, she must work through her feelings. During this process, the presence of a compassionate Christian counselor is mandatory. The counselor serves as both a nonjudgmental listener and a spiritual facilitator. The counselor holds her accountable, helps her deal with the hurts and anger she might otherwise gloss over or bury. Anger and bitterness must be acknowledged and confessed before forgiveness can truly be extended to the offending spouse.

To survive her husband’s repeated adulteries, Jeanne (not her real name) created an elaborate denial system. She simply refused to admit to herself that he might be unfaithful. Once his moral failures were made public, that same web of denial made it nearly impossible for her to feel the deep emotions of betrayal. She denied her hurt and anger, hid her feelings beneath a “Christian” facade, but on the inside she was raging.

In desperation, I suggested she write a letter to God, telling him exactly what Larry had done and how it made her feel.

“Don’t edit your feelings,” I counseled her. “God won’t be shocked. He knows you better than you know yourself.”

She tried to assure me she had already forgiven Larry, that there was nothing to tell. Gently I insisted, and reluctantly she agreed to give it a try.

When she arrived for her next session, she was barely seated before she extracted a manuscript-size letter from her purse. I commented on it.

“Once I got started,” she said, holding it up, “I couldn’t seem to stop. It all came rushing back — all the lies, the sneaking around, the deceit. And the anger — boy, did I get angry! I felt things I didn’t know I was capable of feeling. If Larry had been there I might have tried to hurt him.” Seeing this quiet woman rage was something to behold. Years of stubbornly denied hurt and anger gave her words an awful intensity.

“For the first time in my life,” she continued, “I realized how much I hate him. He’s destroyed my life, our children, our family — everything. I’ve always been the model wife and mother, and what do I get for all my efforts? A husband who sleeps with my best friend!”

“And her!” she snarled, contempt making her voice thick. “How could she pretend to be my friend? How could she look me in the eye knowing she had been with my husband? She still wants to be friends. Can you believe that?”

During this process, Jeanne faced two dangers. Initially she was tempted to deny her feelings, to avoid the whole painful process. She wanted to hurry on to forgiveness, to put the entire sordid episode behind her. By insisting she write the letter, I helped her overcome that temptation, only to be confronted by a new danger: Once she started to feel deeply, she wanted to indulge her emotions. She felt justified in her anger and wanted to punish Larry, wanted to make him suffer the way she had suffered.

I encouraged her, as I have others, to deal properly with her anger: “Jeanne, there are basically three ways of dealing with anger. The first is the world’s way — express it. Take your revenge, get even. That way has a certain appeal, especially when you’ve been hurt. But it is terribly destructive. The second way is often the church’s way — repress it. Most Christians shove it down, bury it deep inside themselves. That’s what you did for years. I don’t have to tell you how debilitating that can be.

“The third way is God’s way — confess it. Tell God exactly how you feel. Pour your hurt and anger out to him. That’s what you did when you wrote the letter. But you can’t get stuck there. You’ve got to release your anger, let go of it. If you don’t, confession does nothing but recycle your anger.”

I reminded her that forgiveness is an act of the will. We begin by telling God how we really feel, that we don’t want to forgive, but that, in obedience to his Word, we choose to do it anyway. Then we give God permission to change our feelings, to replace our hurt and anger with new love. Then we must forgive specifically each sin the person has committed against us.

When she asked for more guidance, I suggested a prayer. I added that since she had not been sinned against generally but specifically, she needed to forgive the sinful act specifically.

She nodded, and in a voice I had to strain to hear, she prayed, “God, you know that the very thought of the things Larry did with that woman makes me sick. When I look at him, I keep imagining them together. Sometimes I just want to run away, so I never have to see him again, but I can’t. I don’t want to forgive him. I want to get even, I want to hurt him, but I know that’s not right. Please, God, help me to forgive him.”

She took a deep breath. “God, I choose to forgive Larry for having sex with Rachel. I choose to forgive him for betraying me and the covenant of marriage.”

Jeanne prayed for a long time that afternoon, dealing with one painful incident after another. When she finished, I asked her if she would like to destroy the letter she had written to God.

“It’s a symbol of your feelings, of all the things you’ve held against Larry,” I said. “When you tear it up and drop it in the wastebasket, you are releasing your feelings, letting go of your hurt and anger.”

With trembling hands, she slowly shredded the letter and let the fragments fall from her fingers into the wastebasket. When she finished, tears were running down her cheeks. She said, “I feel different. I really do.”

Rebuilding the Broken World

Before the cycle of forgiveness was complete, Jeanne had to confront Larry with the truth of what his adulteries had done to her. During this time, more than once Larry pleaded, “Must you tell me all of this? Can’t we let bygones be bygones?”

Jeanne might have yielded to his pleadings had she not been convinced that Larry’s only hope was coming to grips with the full extent of his sin. He could fully repent only if he saw his sin through her eyes, only if he fully felt everything she had suffered. As the apostle Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 7:10, “Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret.”

Confronting Larry was different from confessing her feelings to God. Then she was pouring herself before God. But the object of her wrath was not present, so no one got hurt. This time she told Larry the effects of his behavior. Her purpose was not to wound him but to confront him with the tragic consequences of his sin.

This phase was painfully slow and fraught with crises — like the time Larry had car trouble and was late getting home but didn’t bother to call. When he finally walked through the door, Jeanne was raging.

“Where have you been?” she demanded. Without giving him a chance to reply, she continued, “Who is it this time?”

When he tried to explain, she cut him off. He then cut her off: “I’m not going to live like this the rest of my life. If you are going to throw the past up to me every time I’m a few minutes late, there’s no hope for us!”

They argued for a long time that night. They finally called me and asked me to come over. I sat in their small living room and worked to help them understand what was happening: “Larry, your adulteries have destroyed Jeanne’s trust. In the past you were often late, and she thought nothing about it. Now she knows you were lying to her, that you made a fool out of her. She’s not going to let that happen again.”

“But I’ve told her I will never be unfaithful again,” Larry protested. He turned to Jeanne. “Don’t you believe me?”

“I want to, Larry,” Jeanne said, “but it’s going to take some time.”

I then read to them from Richard Dobbins’s book Saints in Crises: “When an adulterous relationship has broken that bridge of trust, then building it back again frequently requires a healing period ranging from six months to two years … [the adulterous spouse] must realize that his infidelity has given his mate just cause to be both jealous and suspicious.… The mate who breaks the trust should volunteer information required for the mate whose trust has been shaken to check up on his whereabouts. Discovering that he is in the place he is supposed to be, doing what he said he would be doing, will help to rebuild that trust.”

Chasing Little Foxes

Although adultery is the most obvious problem in the fallen minister’s marriage, it is certainly not the only one. Larry and Jeanne’s marriage did not suddenly fail; adultery was not the problem as much as the consequence, the culmination of several small things that went undetected. They had to give these “little foxes” their undivided attention. They had to be rectified to prevent their marriage from mediocrity and another episode of adultery.

For Don and Sherry (not their real names), the issue was busyness. With a first grader and two preschoolers, Sherry had her hands full. By the end of the day, she was exhausted. She loved her husband, but running the house and taking care of the children took all of her energy. For his part, Don was always busy with the church and never seemed to have time to help her. She tried to understand, but she resented the long hours he put in. She began to complain.

This only added to Don’s frustrations, which were already stretched as a result of a strained relationship with the church board. Desperately he threw himself into ministry. He was convinced that when the board saw how hard he worked, the long hours he put in, they would appreciate him more. His long hours only served to distance him further from Sherry and the children. Eventually the pressure and loneliness became so great, he became involved with another woman.

Following Don’s affair, Don and Sherry came to me for counseling. By this time, busyness had become for them a way of life. Besides working through the adultery, they had to reorder their priorities. Don made a commitment to protect his day off at all costs and to spend it with his family. He also determined to become more involved around the house and with the children. Sherry made a conscious effort to give Don the special attention he wanted.

And when these “little foxes” are attended to, the relationship is not only healed but can end up being better than the old marriage.

Evaluating Progress

One of the weightier responsibilities the pastor or committee has is evaluating the progress of the person they are restoring. Often their input determines when, and under what conditions, the pastor may return to active ministry. Therefore developing objective guidelines for measuring progress is critical.

Every minister I have worked with was initially angry — angry at his former congregation for the way it handled the situation, angry with his denominational officials for what he perceived to be insensitive and arbitrary decisions, angry with those involved in the restoration process. Rather than addressing his own failures, he insists on finding fault with the process. When a man stops being angry and blaming others, I take note of it. It is a sure sign of progress.

Bishop William Frey, president of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, looks for how much control the fallen minister tries to exercise over his own therapy: “Is he selfdiagnosing and self-prescribing, or is he willing to trust the therapist or the group? I don’t trust somebody who says, ‘Here’s my disease, and here’s the treatment that you ought to give me.'”

Another sign of progress is the way the pastor sees himself. Initially, he has limited self-knowledge and tends to talk about his accomplishments — achievements around which his self-image is centered. As he makes progress toward wholeness, he will develop a greater self-understanding. This will be reflected in the way he talks about himself. His comments should begin to focus on who he is rather than what he has done — on being rather than doing.

Pastor Edward Dobson reports that Truman Dollar learned that his significance and value to God was not determined by whether or not he was in ministry or by the size of his church.

“He also learned more clearly,” writes Dobson, “the importance of a personal relationship with God, not just a professional relationship with God. He learned balance. He’s now convinced that it’s okay to take time off to relax, to exercise, to spend time with his family — to be something besides a pastor of a big church.”

Lifestyle changes also mark progress. Before his moral failure was uncovered, the fallen minister was probably over-investing in ministry at the expense of his marriage and family. That’s not something he can change overnight, but it is mandatory he gets control of his schedule. When I see evidence of a balance between work and rest, worship and play, I know he is making progress.

“Another way to assess a person’s progress,” says Louis McBurney, “is to get feedback from the spouse.… The man may be able to put the mask on or say the right things in public, but the spouse is going to tell us, ‘Well, I’m still worried about him,’ and she will identify unresolved issues.”

Sometimes it is not just what she says, but her body language. I’ve seen a wife cross her legs, fold her arms, and bend forward when her husband was saying something she knew, and I later discovered, wasn’t true. By the same token, when she genuinely affirms her husband’s progress, you can usually be assured real progress is being made.

Back into It

Once emotional and spiritual wholeness has been restored, we can turn our attention toward restoration to ministry. This process should include at least three stages: (1) supervised ministry in the local church, (2) selected preaching engagements, and (3) full and unrestricted ministry as the Lord directs.

This will resurrect a host of conflicting emotions. He is excited yet also filled with dread. Am I really ready? Can I handle the unique pressures and stress of ministry? How will a return to ministry effect my wife and family? The supervised stage of restoration will give him and his family an opportunity to work through their initial concerns without the constant demands of their own congregation.

The minister often finds himself in a dilemma regarding his past moral failure. Unless he was highly visible, most congregations who may consider calling him will be unaware of his fall. How much should he tell them, and when? If he discloses everything up front, will they even consider him?

I believe a full disclosure during the interview with the pulpit committee is mandatory. Deception is at the heart of adultery, and a decision to keep this information from the pulpit committee may open the door for a return to a life of half-truths and self-deception.

Of equal concern to me is the minister’s state of mind. If he doesn’t tell them of his moral failure, he will always live in fear they will find out. No one should live under that kind of pressure. And should the pulpit committee discover his moral failure later, they will feel betrayed and doubt his integrity. As difficult as it may be, a full disclosure of the facts, though not the details, seems best.

Moral failure does not have to end as a disaster. God has a long history of redeeming our sinful failures, of turning our worst blunders into opportunities for personal growth and spiritual development. If a minister’s fall is a time for great grief, then his restoration should be a time for a sacred celebration.

The final official act in the restoration process should be a public service in which the minister is officially restored to ministry. Such a service provides closure for the minister and his family, and those involved in his restoration. It publicly confirms his successful restoration and announces to the church he is once again fit for ministry.

Few experiences in life can match the holy splendor of that moment.

Copyright © 1994 by Christianity Today

Given the right circ*mstances, the best among us is capable of the most unimaginable sins.
— Richard Exley

Few things in life are more painful than a moral failure. This truth was driven home to me afresh when a fellow pastor sought my counsel. Hardly had I closed the office door before he fell to his knees sobbing. When he was able to compose himself, he spilled his dark secret.

He was not an evil man; he never intended to become involved in sexual sin. It started innocently with morning coffee at a nearby convenience store. One morning while sipping his coffee, he found himself browsing through the p*rnographic magazines. A few mornings later he purchased one, and days later, another.

His story shows an all too familiar progression: from magazines to X-rated videos to p*rno theaters to securing the services of a prostitute. This degenerating progression didn’t happen overnight; it took months. After each step he told himself he would go no farther.

As you might imagine, he lived in a self-made hell: moments of lustful pleasure followed by hours of shame, days and weeks of regret. Yet even in his shame, he was drawn irresistibly toward the very thing he hated. His desperate prayers seemed powerless against the demons within. He lived in secrecy and fear: What if someone sees me? What if my wife or someone from the church finds out?

Then his worst fears were realized: he contracted a sexually transmitted disease and infected his wife with it. At least it wasn’t aids, but now he was forced to burden her with his seedy secret so she could receive treatment.

His story is not unique. With increasing frequency, ministers are falling prey to sexual temptation. Of the 300 pastors who responded to a recent Leadership survey, 19 percent admitted to having either an affair or inappropriate sexual contact with people other than their spouses. Nine percent confessed to having sexual intercourse with people other than their spouses.

As disconcerting as the statistics may be, we shouldn’t be surprised ministers are prone to sexual temptation. For some, like my friend, it comes in the form of lust. For others, it is more subtle: sexual temptation is rooted in virtue not vice. What begins as legitimate ministry — a shared project, compassionate listening, the giving of comfort — becomes an emotional bonding, which ultimately leads to an illicit affair.

While sexual temptation can strike randomly, many ministers seem to be most vulnerable during mid-life. (Since my experience and most of my research in this area has been with males, I’m assuming a male pastor for this chapter.) He reaches mid-life only to discover that, for all his achievements, he still feels unfulfilled. He is especially susceptible to affirmation from the opposite sex. Being appreciated as a man, and not just a minister, feels good. He doesn’t intend to commit adultery, but affirmation can, and often does, lead to affection, which in turn leads to inappropriate intimacy.

Others fall prey to their own success. Subconsciously they’ve come to believe the laws of God, which apply to ordinary people, can be amended to suit their lifestyles. This self-deception doesn’t happen instantaneously; it’s the product of a series of small compromises, which are often revealed by the way the minister treats the perks afforded by his ministry. First he accepts them, then he expects them, then he demands them, and finally he abuses them. Once integrity is compromised in any area, it is only a matter of time until the whole is affected.

Yet ministerial infidelity is not inevitable — 91 percent of those responding to Leadership’s survey indicated they had not committed adultery! We should not, however, assume they aren’t tempted. Every pastor will be subject from time to time to some degree of sexual temptation. Yet there are some effective strategies to combat it.

Assuming the Worst

Given the right circ*mstances, the best among us is capable of the most unimaginable sins. The sooner we come to grips with this painful truth, the sooner we can be about the business of overcoming temptation.

Recognizing our propensity for sin is the first step. The apostle Paul warns us of the danger of overconfidence, “If you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall” (1 Cor. 10:12).

Overconfidence can set us up for a moral failure. The two most common ways are spiritual naiveté and risktaking.

The spiritually naive pastor is simply out of touch with his own humanity. Succumbing to a sexual sin is to him inconceivable. Spending extended hours in personal ministry with a member of the opposite sex, even in unsupervised settings, is nothing to him. When the inevitable temptation comes, it blind-sides him. The aftermath devastates him, and he finds living with himself impossible. Usually he takes the initiative in confessing his sin to his wife and church officials.

The risktaker, on the other hand, is an adventurer. He is addicted to danger and excitement, and like a moth drawn to a flame, he is drawn to the heat of temptation. He recognizes the possibility of a moral failure — in fact, it is that very possibility that excites him. But he believes he can handle it. The risktaker overestimates his moral resolve and usually succumbs to temptation in short order.

The spiritually naive pastor and the risk-taking pastor, who have almost nothing in common, share a fatal flaw — overconfidence. And like Peter, who boasted he would never deny Jesus but later found himself weeping bitterly after doing just that, they too have become victims of their own presumption.

Offensive Maneuvers

As a young pastor, I soon discovered my own feet of clay. Although my motives were pure, at least as far as I knew, I repeatedly found myself confronted with inappropriate thoughts and desires. Sometimes the temptations came upon me because of my own wandering mind. Other times, the source was troubled counselees or distraught parishioners who became emotionally attached to me. Keeping my feelings, and theirs, in check required enormous amounts of spiritual and emotional energy, energy better spent cultivating my marriage or practicing spiritual disciplines.

For several years, I simply accepted these disconcerting and distracting emotions as inevitable — the price of being an effective pastor and counselor. I prayed and hoped these temptations would in time fade. But as the years passed, they grew in intensity. I finally concluded that if I didn’t do something quickly, I too might become a casualty of immorality.

With renewed determination, I turned my attention to my methods of ministry. Much to my chagrin, I discovered I was creating many of my problems, not deliberately but out of ignorance. Once I understood what was happening, I implemented a number of guidelines to protect both the counselee and myself.

For instance, I determined I would not counsel with anyone more than six times. If the situation required more sessions, I referred the person to a Christian counselor, someone who specialized in the field. Not only did this protect me from an unhealthy emotional attachment, it also assured the counselee of gaining the best available help.

When I do counsel, the sessions are always pastoral and professional, never chummy. I see counselees only in my office and only when my secretary or other staff members are at the church office. I refuse to counsel a woman regarding sexual matters unless her spouse is present. Nor do I telephone a counselee between sessions “to see how she is doing.”

And I pray for counselees only on the day I am going to see them. This serves two purposes.

First, it protects me from burnout; it helps me compartmentalize their needs, freeing me from the combined weight of concern for several clients.

Second, it protects me from an unhealthy emotional bonding. Being compassionate by nature, pastors genuinely feel responsible for the spiritual and emotional well-being of those to whom they minister. There is always a temptation to overinvest in their lives, creating an unhealthy dependency. When we pray for our counselees daily, we only reinforce our overdeveloped sense of responsibility. As incongruent as it seems, prayer itself can become an incubator in which sexual temptation is hatched. Praying for someone whom you’re attracted to only fills your heart and mind with fodder for the enemy.

Scanning Your Radar

Succumbing to sexual sin is seldom sudden. Rather it is the culmination of a series of small temptations. Recognizing it when it first whispers its beguiling suggestions is imperative. In his book, As For Me and My House, Walter Wangerin, Jr., calls this first subtle temptation a moment of “maybe”:

“Early on in an extramarital friendship there often comes a moment of ‘maybe.’ Even when that friendship is altogether innocent, your friend may send the signal, or you may sense the feeling, of further possibility. It occurs in a glance more meaningful than mere friends exchange. It arises from a touch, a hug, a brushing of flesh that tingled rather more than you expected — and you remembered the sensation.… In that moment nothing more is communicated than this: our friendship could turn into something else. Neither of you need say, or even think, what that ‘something else’ might be … it is precisely here that the drama toward adultery begins. Whether it also ends here, or whether it continues hereafter, is a terribly critical question. For a door has opened up.

“If, in this moment, you do nothing at all, then you enter the door. If you make no decision (privately but consciously) to close the door and carefully to restrict this relationship, the drama continues. For though a promise has not been made in the moment of ‘maybe,’ it hasn’t been denied either. And though you may not yet love each other, neither have you said no to love. You permit, by making no decision at all, the ‘maybe.’ And ‘maybe’ takes on a life of its own.”

Wangerin concludes, “When a desire is born in us, we have a choice. When it exists still in its infancy, we have a choice. We can carefully refuse its existence altogether, since it needs our complicity to exist.… Or else we can attend to it, think about it, fantasize it into greater existence — feed it! … But if we do the latter, if we give it attention in our souls, soon we will be giving it our souls. We’ve lost free will and the opportunity to choose. The desire itself overpowers us, commanding action, demanding satisfaction.”

Temptation is so subtle that recognizing a moment of “maybe” isn’t always easy, especially if we’re inclined to rationalize. We reason that ministry requires sensitivity, support, and care. And it does. But there is a point where concern becomes more than pastoral, where you find yourself meeting her emotional needs — and she, yours — needs that should be met only by one’s spouse. Although nothing sexually inappropriate has been done, we are nonetheless guilty of emotional adultery at that point. And if immediate steps are not taken, a full-blown affair is only a matter of time.

The earliest warning signals of emotional entanglement include but are not limited to

1. A growing fascination with this person, when she regularly intrudes upon your thoughts, even when you are with your wife and family.

2. A heightened sense of anticipation as her appointment draws near, when you find yourself looking forward to “ministry” opportunities when you can legitimately be alone with her, or when you create church projects so the two of you can be together.

3. A growing desire to confide in her, when you are tempted to share with her the frustrations and disappointments in your marriage.

4. An increased sense of responsibility for her happiness and wellbeing, when you think more about her needs than the needs of your wife and family.

5. Emotional distancing from your spouse, when you keep from your wife your secret thoughts and feelings for her.

The moment an early warning signal is tripped, we must act with ruthless urgency. As Thomas à Kempis pointed out in the Imitation of Christ, “The only time to stop temptation is at the first point of recognition. If one begins to argue and engage in a hand-to-hand combat, temptation almost always wins the day.”

Strong Words

In the midst of temptation, especially sexual temptation, our emotions are not reliable moral compasses. The heart is too easily deceived and too deceiving. Only the infallible Word of God can be trusted. It should always be our first and last defense against the deceiver, who seeks to destroy both our souls and ministries.

The Word of God exposes the lies of the enemy for what they are. When we’re tempted to believe our situations are unique, and therefore exempt from the laws of God that govern others, the Scriptures remind us, “For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure or greedy person — such a man is an idolater — has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.… Because of such things God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient” (Eph. 5:5-6).

When we feel powerless to resist temptation, the Bible says, “God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it” (1 Cor. 10:13).

When the enemy tries to isolate us, to make us believe no one, least of all God, understands the pull of lust, the Scriptures declare, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are — yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15).

And when tempted to rationalize, to say to ourselves, “No one will ever know,” the Scriptures scream out a warning: “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction” (Gal. 6:7-8).

As Proverbs wisely says, “Can a man scoop fire into his lap without his clothes being burned? Can a man walk on hot coals without his feet being scorched? So is he who sleeps with another man’s wife; no one who touches her will go unpunished.… A man who commits adultery lacks judgment; whoever does so destroys himself. Blows and disgrace are his lot, and his shame will never be wiped away” (Prov. 6:27-29, 32-33).

The minister who is serious about overcoming sexual temptation will find great help by living in the Word of God, meditating on it day and night, memorizing it. His prayer will then be that of the Psalmist: “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you” (Ps. 119:11).

The Light of Friendship

Temptation, which flourishes in secret, somehow loses much of its mesmerizing power when confessed and exposed to Christian love. That which seems so alluring in the privacy of the imagination is revealed for what it is in the transparency of confession. So, we should expose temptation immediately. Tell your wife, a Christian brother, a fellow minister, whomever — but get it out into the light.

Gordon MacDonald, pastor of Grace Chapel in Lexington, Massachusetts, and author of Ordering Your Private World and Rebuilding Your Broken World, speaks as a pastor who has experienced the tragic consequences of a moral failure. In an interview with Christianity Today following his public confession of adultery, he explained, but did not excuse, his behavior. One of the contributing factors, he said, was a lack of accountability — friendships in which one man regularly looks another man in the eyes and asks hard questions about his moral life: his lust, his ambitions, his ego.

I can testify to the redemptive power of accountability. Some years ago, I began to sense in a counseling session a strong attraction to the woman I was counseling. When the session was over, I immediately went to my associate pastor and confessed my feelings. When I did, I was liberated from their seductive power. While secret they were strangely seductive, but in the light of open confession, they became evil and repugnant. I also asked him to check up on me, to ensure I did not allow myself to become emotionally involved with this woman.

Limiting the Risks

Not a few ministers have fallen prey to sexual temptation because of poor judgment. In ministry, a certain amount of risk is unavoidable, but the minister who repeatedly exposes himself to tempting situations is tempting fate.

For instance, one minister friend will not accept outside speaking engagements unless his wife, or a Christian brother, travels with him. Why? Because the few times he has traveled alone, he struggled with sexual temptation. He now refuses to travel alone.

Another pastor was tempted repeatedly as he counseled women. He prayed about it and sought the counsel of a trusted colleague, but nothing seemed to help. Finally he made the difficult decision to limit his counseling to men only. His decision raised some eyebrows — some thought he was shirking his duties. But he has stood by it. As a result, his spiritual life blossomed. An added benefit was that the lay counseling program at the church began training mature Christian women to counsel with younger women.

A Time to Run Away

Rare though they are, all of us have heard of ministers who, through no fault of their own, were confronted with compromising situations. One pastor responded to an emergency phone call only to be greeted, just inside the door, by a nearly nude woman with something other than pastoral care on her mind. Another pastor, while his wife and children were away, was visited unexpectedly by a seductive young woman.

In such instances, we have only one option — run for our life!

Joseph is our example: “Now Joseph was well-built and handsome, and after a while his master’s wife took notice of Joseph and said, ‘Come to bed with me!’ But he refused. ‘My master has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife. How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?’ And though she spoke to Joseph day after day, he refused to go to bed with her or even be with her. One day he went into the house to attend to his duties, and none of the household servants was inside. She caught him by his cloak and said, ‘Come to bed with me!’ But he left his cloak in her hand and ran out of the house” (emphasis mine), (Gen. 39:6-12).

The power of temptation is such that unless a stake is driven into its heart immediately, it may well overwhelm us. Kings have renounced their thrones, saints their God, and spouses their lifetime partners. People have been known to sell their souls, jobs, reputations, children, marriage — they have literally chucked everything for a brief moment of sexual pleasure.

But with Christ, everything is possible, including the resisting of this temptation: “But you, man of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness. Fight the good fight of faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses” (1 Tim. 6:11-12).

Copyright © 1994 by Christianity Today

Mike would discover that in order to overcome despair, he would have to be willing to let go of the things he so feared losing.
— Mark Galli

Michael Wells stood in the kitchen looking at his wife, Joanne, who had just said she needed to talk. Her eyes — sad, fearful, almost panicky — were filled with tears. She started shaking and blurted out, “I don’t think you realize how unhappy I am!”

Mike’s body turned cold. “What do you mean?”

“I’m thinking about moving out.”

The words echoed off the dull tile counters. A heaviness settled on Mike, and his mind went numb. As a Methodist pastor, he had heard parishioners tell him what he thought were clichéd reactions to shocking news. Now they weren’t clichés: This is not happening to me, he thought. I’ll wake up any minute, and it will be a horrible dream.

“Why didn’t you tell me? I didn’t know you were unhappy.”

Joanne had been seeing a therapist for a year. Mike had asked her what she talked about in her sessions, but she had always answered vaguely: “Oh, about my parents.” Mike had learned that with Joanne the more you push, the more stubborn she became. So he hadn’t pursued it.

“This is not fair!” he now continued. “We should go to therapy together before you move out.”

Through her tears, Joanne just kept repeating, “I’m just so unhappy. I need time alone.” She promised to be gone only three months.

The next few May Saturdays, Joanne went apartment hunting in Austin, Texas, where they lived, and within a month she was ready. The June weekend she planned to move, Mike had previously planned a choir trip for his youth group. That Friday, he and Joanne went to breakfast at a little bakery. Over the aroma of croissants and coffee, they chatted nervously about this and that, and then it came time to go to work. Matter of factly, with promises to keep in close contact, they got into their separate cars and drove their separate ways.

Mike, before turning toward the church, stopped and watched Joanne drive away. “Good-bye, Joanne,” he muttered. He wondered if she would ever come back.

Two days later, Mike was exhausted when he returned home and depressed when he walked inside. He flicked on the lights; half of their belongings were gone; it looked so lonely. He tried to sleep but spent most the night crying silently.

That summer, always blistering in Austin, Mike lived in a cold daze. Though Joanne said she would return in three months, Mike feared she wouldn’t. As a minister, he was ashamed, and he believed his very calling was threatened, so he told only one or two close friends at the church. Sometimes Mike would weep. Sometimes his shoulders and arms would quiver, as if he wanted to hit somebody. Mostly he felt like giving up.

One morning as he stepped into the shower, Mike noticed a black spider on the shower wall. He squirted it with water and knocked it to the stall floor. The water pushed it toward the drain, but the spider tenaciously held on, giving way only slowly. Gallons of water poured over it, but the spider hugged the floor. A minute passed before the spider was finally swallowed by the drain.

That’s when Mike fell apart. He burst into tears and sobbed, as he hadn’t sobbed in years. I’m going crazy, he thought, I’ve totally lost it. I’m out of control. He knew he was that little spider. He had been holding on against tremendous odds, holding on to his dreams, to his life, but he realized it wasn’t enough. Everything he had lived for was about to wash down the drain.

During the next three years, Mike would time and again wrestle despair. He would discover that in order to overcome this enemy, he would have to lose the very things he despaired of losing: his marriage, his ministry, and his faith. And today, he thanks God for it.

Soured Dream

The first to go was the marriage, the hinge of Mike’s life.

A couple of years before Joanne moved out, Mike had happily told people he felt “very married.” They had been together about eight years by then and had just bought a home in suburban Austin. Mike was associate pastor of Aldersgate Methodist, and Joanne worked in personnel at a company that made computer disk drives. And most important, Joanne had finally agreed to have children, even though she feared the surgery it would require.

For Mike, everything was falling into place. Though he’d had many dreams about his career, it was visions of family that most captivated his imagination. A house in the lawn-lined suburbs, a wife, children, a dog — that was life. Joanne’s willingness to get pregnant was the finishing touch.

The year they tried to get Joanne pregnant was one of delighted anticipation. They talked about the baby’s room, whether it should be painted blue or rose, where the crib would go. When Joanne bought a colorful mobile or a furry stuffed animal, they would ooh and aah. And it was a time of making love, the special kind of love a man and a woman share when they are trying to create new life.

Then slowly, almost imperceptively to Mike, things started deteriorating. Joanne became increasingly critical. Mike was too heavy. He wasn’t in touch with his feelings. He wasn’t home enough. He didn’t pick up after himself.

Mike recognized these faults, and he set about to correct them. He had swelled to 300 pounds, but a diet dropped 100 pounds in a year. He went to therapy, as Joanne had been doing, and tried to better understand his feelings. He skipped some church meetings and rescheduled others so he could be home four or five nights a week. He tried to be more neat around the house.

Mike, of course, had his complaints too. Joanne was beginning to balk about having children. They made love less and less. It got to the point where Joanne didn’t even want to touch Mike; she seemed repulsed by him. Oddly, the more evenings Mike spent at home, the more Joanne needed to work late.

Mike also wanted Joanne to be more open with him, to tell him what was bothering her, but when he asked, she would just clam up. He wanted her to be more willing to admit her own faults: she could give him a seventeen-point litany of his faults, but whenever he would mention merely one fault of hers, she would throw a tantrum.

Between Mike’s sarcasm and Joanne’s reticence, communication broke down.

Joanne would say she didn’t want to talk, that she needed to get in touch with her feelings. Mike would retort in Obi-wan Kenobi fashion, “Luke, go with your feelings.”

“I don’t appreciate your making fun of my beliefs,” she would say.

“Well, I don’t appreciate hiding your feelings from me. You use this ‘I don’t know what I’m feeling’ as an excuse not to talk to me!”

Still, Mike didn’t think their problems were extraordinary, nothing other couples didn’t face. Then came Joanne’s announcement and move.

Dreams for a Quarter

After Joanne left, Mike grieved hard.

He slept on Joanne’s side of the bed. Sometimes he would walk into her closet and just stand there, inhaling her scent, which still lingered there.

Joanne had always folded laundry on Sunday night while she watched Murder, She Wrote. Mike never had much interest in the show, but now on Sunday nights, he did the laundry while watching Murder, She Wrote.

Sometimes he would just amble around the house; it made him feel as if Joanne were still there.

One windy day in the fall, he was digging in his garden. As he planted bulbs, his tears wetted the dark, clay soil; he prayed, “God, I’m burying these dead things; someday they will be raised up into beauty and glory. I hope that someday you will raise up my marriage. You’re the God of the Resurrection. Please, raise up my marriage!”

After three months were up, Joanne hesitated about coming back. They argued about it in front of their therapist for months before Joanne agreed to give it another try. Mike was ecstatic. It’s going to be all right. We’re going to work it out. She’s my wife again. We’ll have kids together.

The night Joanne returned, when they went to bed, Joanne rolled over to go to sleep. Mike reached over to rub her back.

Joanne bolted upright. “I can’t stand it!”

“What?”

“The tension is so thick! Don’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

Over the next few months, the marriage continued to unravel. Mike discovered some letters and other papers that suggested Joanne had been having affairs, but she explained all the evidence away. Mike agreed to believe her, but he remained suspicious and hurt.

And despairing. One Sunday night, he sat in his office holding a tiny Guatemalan worry doll. A girl in his youth group had given it to him some months before, telling him kiddingly that whenever he worried, he should rub the doll. For two hours, Mike cried in his office, praying, worrying, rubbing the little doll.

As these things go, periods of hope mixed with periods of despair. At one point, Mike was confident the marriage would last, so he agreed to take a new church in San Antonio, some eighty miles away. Joanne said she would quit her job and work on her M.B.A. Mike would move over while Joanne sold the house. Then Joanne would join him.

To prepare for the move, they held a yard sale, and one of Joanne’s friends, Roger, came over to help. They were putting things on the tables when Joanne and Roger came across a box of baby things — mobiles, crib sheets, stuffed animals. They put them on the sale table.

You’re going to sell that? Mike thought.

Later in the morning, a woman came up, glanced at the baby things, and asked, “How much?”

“A quarter a piece,” Roger said.

“I’ll take them,” the woman replied.

Mike noticed that Joanne didn’t even flinch. But he thought, That’s all my dreams are worth. All my dreams are being sold for twenty-five cents. Then voices shouted from within, “You’re useless. You’re worse than useless!” He wanted to run around the corner of the house and cry.

When the house sold, Joanne said, “I’ll move over in about a month. Let me just tie up some loose ends here.” Another month turned into four, then into eight. On his days off, Mike commuted back to see Joanne and to attend counseling with her. He kept pursuing her, begging her to move. He was lonely, and a permanent separation terrified him.

But Joanne continued to waffle. At counseling she would mention how unfulfilled she felt, how unhappy she was with Mike. The next fall, by now a full two years after she first moved out, she cried to Mike, “I just can’t see being married to you for the rest of my life. I just can’t.”

Something clicked in Mike. Pursuing her any longer was pointless. He knew now he could release his wife, his dream. Somehow things would be okay.

“You’re free to go if you want,” he said. “If you don’t want to be married to me, you don’t have to be.” Mike was sad yet relieved.

He still didn’t know, though, that there was more to lose.

A Way of Escape

When Joanne first moved out, Mike believed his ministry was doomed. He often hoped and prayed and dreamed of Joanne’s return, but he feared she never would, and his separation was a huge contradiction for him: how could he manage a church if he couldn’t manage his own marriage? He was sure he would have to give up ministry.

But to give up ministry — the thought flooded him with despair. All he’d ever done was prepare for ministry or minister. He loved to search out God’s Word and then preach it to others. He was honored that in counseling people trusted him with their souls. It was a privilege to stand with people at the critical moments of their lives, at birth, marriage, and death. Ministry was, he believed, the highest calling. But it required a virtuous character, a model lifestyle — things he felt he no longer had.

His first instinct when Joanne first left, then, was to keep it a secret. He was ashamed, and he didn’t want the church to know. The Sunday she left, Joanne stood up during the sharing of prayer concerns and said nothing more than, “I’m not going to be coming to church for a few weeks. I have some things to work out.”

When Mike received dinner invitations for Joanne and him, he made excuses. When people asked awkward questions — “How are things going? I haven’t seen Joanne for a while. Has she been going to the later service?” — Mike remained vague. He knew his excuses were paper thin, and he feared that any minute the truth would come bursting through. He was constantly nervous.

Mike even quit seeing his Christian therapist and sought someone “outside the household of faith.” He figured a non-Christian counselor wouldn’t be disappointed in him.

He did confide in the senior pastor and in one of the church’s leaders, and the church secretary found out soon enough when Joanne put in a change of address to receive the church newsletter. Other than that, the separation remained a secret.

To resolve this great contradiction, Mike began looking for a way out of ministry. And a path, divinely ordained it seemed, appeared to open. At a gym one afternoon, Mike met Al Williams. Al invited Mike to lunch. “I’d like to talk to you about something you might find interesting,” he said. Mike was lonely and intrigued, so he went.

At lunch, Al asked Mike, “How are you doing financially?”

On his associate pastor’s salary, Mike was trying to pay all his usual bills plus his own therapy and for half of his and Joanne’s joint counseling. “Not well,” he replied.

“Well, how would you like to double your income in two years?”

Al took a napkin out and sketched a pyramid-shaped graph. “The principle of my business is this,” Al said. “You work, but then you get others to work for you. It takes a lot of work and good people skills, which I see you’ve got, Mike. But in five years, you can be independently wealthy. You can stop working. You’ll be earning close to $500,000 a year.”

Mike felt a rush. One of Joanne’s complaints was that as a pastor, Mike didn’t earn enough. “Look at the people around us,” she would gripe. “People our age have nicer cars; they have bigger homes. Some of my friends at work have private planes.” Maybe he could woo Joanne back by becoming rich. He’d buy her a big house and a new car. He’d have to give up ministry, but at least he’d have his wife back, and maybe they could get back to making a family. Maybe he could at least partly live his suburban dream.

Another part of him, though, feared she would never return, in which case, his ministerial career was over. It didn’t matter then. If I’m going to be unhappy for the rest of my life, I might as well be unhappy and rich, he thought. In either case, this business opportunity seemed a golden opportunity. Still, he had reservations, but he agreed to think about it.

The next time they met, Al brought a friend who had formerly been a minister. This former pastor gave Mike a pitch: “I used to be a pastor. But now that I make lots of money, I do even more for the kingdom of God. I could build a whole church if I wanted to.” He explained to Mike how he had made over a million dollars the previous year, and how he had given $300,000 to his church. “What could your church do with that?”

At the time, Mike’s church was in the middle of a building program. If I could give my church $300,000, we could retire our debt and get that new building and beautiful new sanctuary!

Pastoring a Therapist

Mike was all but ready to sign on when he was startled by something that happened in sessions with his therapist. At the end of one session, she asked him, “Do you have some time?”

Mike wondered what she could possibly want. “My husband just became a born-again Christian,” she continued, “and I don’t understand what’s going on with him.”

Mike grimaced inwardly and shifted in his chair. He didn’t want to be a minister just then. He was getting ready to shed that role, and here this woman was seeking spiritual advice from him. But common courtesy demanded he listen.

She told him about the circ*mstances leading up to her husband’s conversion, and how he and his minister were now witnessing to her. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “They keep saying I have to give my life to Christ and surrender to his Lordship. But I keep thinking, What if he tells me to go be a waitress? I don’t want to do that! I want to be a therapist. I want to live my own life.”

Though Mike suspected it was wrong for a counselor to seek advice from the client, his pastoral self was hooked. For the next few sessions, they ended his therapy with some pastoral counseling. Soon the therapist was going to church with her husband.

As this went on, Mike began to feel God saying to him, “I still want you to be a pastor.” When this thought first came up, it startled him. It had never occurred to Mike that he was still fit for ministry. At best, he would have to take a sabbatical until he got his marriage straightened out. But the more he talked with the therapist, the more she grew in faith. God was still using Mike.

And with that, Mike phoned Al Williams and gracefully declined the business offer. By the time Mike decided to stop seeing his therapist, she was attending church regularly and relishing the sermons. When they parted, she gave Mike a big hug and said, “Another client of mine is a priest. Both of you came to me within the same week. Do you think maybe God brought you guys to me?”

Mike had given up on ministry but had been given it back. But it would take one more incident before he was to have it back on the right terms.

Losing His Reputation

When Joanne began divorce proceedings, Mike had been at his new church only about a year and a half. He had spent that time building trust. In addition to the usual pastoral concern of living what he preached, Mike was anxious to move his theologically liberal congregation to a more personal, biblical faith.

Now, he figured, his year and a half of trust building was about to crumble. He had to tell the congregation of his impending divorce, and the thought filled him with dread and shame. One night, a few days before he would make the announcement, he sat despondent in his office. He was filled with grief and guilt. I’ve been preaching this gospel of power and transformation, and I wasn’t able to transform my marriage. What a hypocrite!

“God, there are a lot of kids in this church,” he prayed, “and they’re going to grow up and remember that their minister got divorced. What’s going to happen to their faith in you?”

He agonized for two hours. “How can you allow this to happen, Lord? It will hurt your reputation.”

Suddenly, he had a physical sensation of God putting a hand, big and warm, on his shoulder. All the tension went out of Mike’s body, and he slumped in relief. He sensed God saying, “Don’t worry. I love you, and I’m with you. Just let go of the worry.”

Then he was surprised by what he heard next: “You just worry about your own reputation; I’ll worry about mine.” Mike, a little embarrassed, thought, Of course. He had for years assumed that the gospel’s reputation rose and fell with him; if he looked bad, so would God. He now realized there was no way out of his mess, that God would have to take care of himself. And it occurred to him that God probably very well could.

The next Sunday, Mike had an opportunity to test this new insight. As the last hymn of the worship service was being sung, Mike took off his robe; he didn’t want it to be fouled by what he was about to tell his people.

“Could you please sit down,” he said when the hymn finished. A few people looked quizzical. When they had settled in, Mike continued. “After years of trying, it’s not working out with Joanne and me. We’re going to get a divorce.” He said it with composure, but inside he was sick. He talked for a minute or so and then dismissed the congregation.

He had assumed the response would be, at best, mixed. Some people just wouldn’t care; they didn’t know him that well. Some, though, would be offended and leave the church, maybe up to a third of the congregation, he calculated. Some of those, he was sure, would hear his announcement as an excuse to give up on God.

Afterwards, however, literally everyone in church came up and gave Mike a hug. They said they were sorry. They said they were going to be supportive. In the ensuing weeks, he discovered they were. No one left the church. No one, to this day, has criticized him for his divorce. No one’s faith in God seemed disturbed.

To the contrary, and to Mike’s amazement, their interest in things Christian began to flourish in some ways. People were more attentive to his preaching; they believed him when he said he was a fellow struggler seeking God’s grace. And many of those divorced and widowed sought him out now because they felt he would understand their loneliness and pain.

Mike’s new ministry, however, is another story. The main story here was that he had fully given up his old ministry, the one that rested on his goodness, on his reputation. He had begun to let God be God of his ministry.

Before he could finally defeat despair, however, he had to lose one more thing: his life-long faith.

Failed Faith

When Joanne left that first summer, Mike, as he walked aimlessly around his empty house, kept hearing a voice rattling in his head: “People who love you give you away.”

He tried drowning it out; he left the TV on in the bedroom and in the living room, and sometimes he turned the radio on as well. Still he heard, “People who love you give you away.”

He tried exorcizing it. “God, this must be a demon. It’s horrible. Take it away, now!” But it continued, “People who love you give you away.” At times, he thought he was going crazy.

When nothing else worked, he decided, with the help of a therapist, to discover the source of this strange oracle. In part, it came from his childhood. Two incidents, he discovered, had long clung like a leech to his subconscious and to his faith.

At age two, Mike had contracted pneumonia and had to be hospitalized. The hospital was in Dallas, some thirty miles north of his home. It was awkward for his parents to visit, though: they had only one car, which his dad used to drive to work; his mother didn’t drive. So for the two weeks he was hospitalized, his parents never visited him. Mike remembers being a scared, little two year old, absolutely alone in a strange place. He believed he had been given away.

He also remembered some incidents with his dad when he felt he had been emotionally given away. Terror, Mike says, is a soft word to describe how monstrous his dad could be when he got angry.

To take one example: Mike was 15 years old, and he and his dad were working on the car. Mike hated it when his dad asked him to help. His father was a handyman — and a perfectionist. Mike was a klutz. Mike was sure to blow it, and his dad was sure to blow up.

They were changing the oil in the car. His dad was under the car getting impatient trying to loosen a bolt. He yelled to Mike, “Give me the g–d— seven-sixteenths!”

Immediately, Mike tensed. He frantically rummaged through the tool box, picking up and dropping a dozen wrenches. The more he fumbled, the angrier his father became: “G–d— it. What’s taking you so long?” Everything became a blur; Mike could hardly read the wrench sizes. In a panic, he handed one to his father.

His father rolled out from under the car and threw the wrench on the ground and swore again. “This is a nine-sixteenths. You can’t even give me a g–d—- seven-sixteenths wrench.” Mike remembers his dad’s voice echoing off the houses down the street.

His father stood and hulked over Mike. “You are useless. You are worse than useless! I can’t even count on you to help me to change the g–d— oil!”

Mike remembers feeling as if all the neighbors stopped mowing their lawns, playing catch, doing hoola-hoops; they were all watching him as his dad screamed, “You are useless. You are worse than useless. Get out of here!” An emotionally-whipped Mike retreated to the house.

Mike learned early on to avoid experiences like that. He learned to be funny, to tell jokes, to act the clown. When he kept his dad laughing, he learned, he didn’t get mad.

Most of all, he learned to be the good boy, to never make the same mistake twice, so he would never be emotionally given away. One day he was scolded by his dad for leaving his bike on the lawn. Mike never, the rest of his childhood, left his bike on the lawn.

Mike learned that when his dad was in a bad mood, he better not be idly watching TV or listening to the radio. When he heard his dad slam the car door a certain way, Mike would shut off the TV and open his homework before his dad walked in the door.

This fearful pharisaism was carried into his adult years and, in a modified form, into his relationship with God. God was more fair than his father, but he was a vending-machine God. You put a quarter in, you get the product out. He and God had this deal (though he never would have admitted it so bluntly): Mike would be a good boy, a good pastor, a good husband, a good man of God. In return, God would bless Mike with a happy family and a successful pastoral career. No one would abandon him. No one would think him useless.

Mike didn’t fool himself. He didn’t believe he was worth others’ loyalty: his family didn’t even think he was worth visiting in the hospital. He wasn’t very useful: he couldn’t even find “the g–d— seven-sixteenths.” But if he kept people laughing, he might fool them into thinking he was a great guy. And if he would keep his part of the bargain, God would make sure no one abandoned him.

Well, it didn’t work. He had been a good husband. His wife said, “Be home.” He was home. His wife said, “Lose weight.” He lost weight. His wife said, “Go to counseling.” He went to counseling. He had prayed about being a good husband. He had studied other marriages to improve his own. Furthermore, he was a faithful pastor and, as much as one could reasonably expect, a model of Christian behavior to his people.

But his marriage still fell apart, and with his marriage, his dreams. For months, Mike grew increasingly discouraged; though he continued in ministry, and though ministry flourished, he wasn’t sure what to believe about God.

Cursing God

Slowly, and this was some months after he announced his divorce to his congregation, Mike began to realize that at the root of discouragement with his faith lay anger, anger towards God. But for a long time, he couldn’t admit it. Good boys don’t get angry with God; that is blasphemy.

His therapist (he was now seeing a Christian therapist) tried to explain, “Sometimes anger is a way of loving someone. It’s honest. It’s revealing some of your deepest emotions to another.”

Mike was incredulous: “What are you talking about?” Mike had been constantly praying for God to take away his anger. He didn’t want to feel anger, ever; it felt awful. Besides, God wouldn’t love him if he was angry.

But the anger wouldn’t dissipate. Instead it became hotter, and the pain finally became too much to bear. He decided, finally, with the encouragement of his therapist, to be honest with God; the simple fact was that God knew he was angry. If God was going to love him, he was going to have to love him with all his rage.

So he began praying, “God, I feel you failed me. I feel you’re no good. For years I’ve been telling congregation after congregation to love and trust you. But for what? It’s all been a lie and a sham. You let me down!”

His emotions fluctuated wildly for months. There were days when he basked in God’s grace and mercy, and there were days when he would rage at God.

The more he raged, the more he realized the subtleties of his deal with God. He told his therapist once, “I’ve been trying to make God happy by giving him the one thing he wants most: souls, people to love him. And I’ve been giving him people for dozens of years. And he was supposed to give me something back. He failed me!”

The more he raged, the more intense became his prayers: “I wish you would reincarnate so I could kick you in the stomach! You let me down, you sob!” Mike would deliberately go out of the way to be blasphemous, cursing God in the most vile language, as if he were provoking God, testing God.

And the more he raged, amazingly, the more he experienced God. “I was shocked,” he now says, “I didn’t understand it. Even though I was vomiting up all this anger, God was a silent presence to me. He was more present than he had ever been. I can’t explain it, but I experienced him inwardly. It was as if God, like a compassionate parent, was letting me throw a tantrum, but he wasn’t going to leave me. For months, I had an on-going theophany. God was as close as breath.”

One time in prayer, Mike envisioned Jesus on the cross, and he took all his blasphemous anger and poured it on him, stabbing Jesus with it, crucifying him afresh. “Christ just stayed there,” he says, “letting me get all this poison out, taking it upon himself. It was as if he died for me once again.”

Late in this process, his therapist asked him, “How do you feel with God’s just putting up with this?”

“I feel loved,” Mike said. “I’ve said the most unimaginable things to him. And yet it’s as if he’s saying, ‘I’m not going to leave you. I will not give you away.'”

Slowly in this process, Mike lost his old faith, and the despair that went with it.

Confused and at Peace

Despair still attacks Mike, as it does all of us. But the war against debilitating despair has been won, though mop-up operations will continue the rest of his life.

Mike regrets the loss of his marriage. He remains single, with diminishing hopes of remarriage and a family. But he says, “I’d like to get married again. But I’m in my mid-forties now; I realize the odds are against me starting a family at my age. I’m content to remain in this state, if this is what God wants of me.”

His ministry continues in San Antonio. The church remains healthy, and Mike’s preaching is well received. “I don’t have to play games in my preaching anymore. I don’t have to pretend that I’m the model Christian, that it’s my reputation that’s on the line each Sunday. When I preach law, people know that I do so standing under grace. For all of us, that makes obeying Christ much more attractive.”

As far as his faith, Mike remains happily confused. When he was cursing God yet not dying, he would ask, Why isn’t God leaving me? This was not right: be good to God and he’ll be good to you; blaspheme God and he’ll curse you. But Mike discovered, to his frustration at first, he couldn’t make God do anything. As he reflected on it, though, he realized it was the best news yet.

“God was just being God,” he says. “That was a breakthrough for me. I didn’t have to figure out God anymore. He didn’t do anything I could have predicted: no judgment, no quick-fix answers. He was just present. When I had God figured out, I didn’t experience him. Now that I don’t have him figured out, I experience him.”

One more thing: to this day, when Mike finds a spider in his shower, he carefully picks it up, opens his front door, and places it outside.

Copyright © 1994 by Christianity Today

I am prone to a kind of Captain Ahab syndrome: an obsessive, self-absorbed, grim pursuit to the death of the great white whale of ministry.
— John Ortberg

When we take our children to the shrine of the Golden Arches, they always lust for the meal that comes with a cheap little prize, a combination christened, in a moment of marketing genius, the Happy Meal. You're not just buying fries, McNuggets, and a dinosaur stamp; you're buying happiness. Their advertisem*nts have convinced my children they have a little McDonald-shaped vacuum in their souls: "Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in a happy meal."

I try to buy off the kids sometimes. I tell them to order only the food and I'll give them a quarter to buy a little toy on their own. But the cry goes up, "I want a Happy Meal." All over the restaurant, people crane their necks to look at the tight-fisted, penny-pinching cheapskate of a parent who would deny a child the meal of great joy.

The problem with the Happy Meal is that the happy wears off, and they need a new fix. No child discovers lasting happiness in just one: "Remember that Happy Meal? What great joy I found there!"

Happy Meals bring happiness only to McDonalds. You ever wonder why Ronald McDonald wears that grin? Twenty billion Happy Meals, that's why.

When you get older, you don't get any smarter; your happy meals just get more expensive.

Not long after we'd had the first public Sunday service at our church, I talked to a friend who pastors a church he helped found thirty years ago. "Savor these days," he advised me. "You'll discover one day that these early days will have been the best years of your life."

I nodded, but inwardly I told myself he must be crazy. The early days are chaos and uncertainty. Someday we will have stability and continuity, we will have security and resources and credibility; we will have arrived. "That's when I'll be happy," I whispered to myself. That's when fulfillment will kick in, when we have arrived.

Saving Face

On the last day I worked with him, the man who mentored me in pastoring said he had two things he wanted me to remember. One of them I've long since forgotten (which means either it was pretty superficial or I'm headed for serious trouble), but the other has stuck with me. "Have fun," he said. "Being in ministry should be fun. If you ever have an extended period in ministry when you're not having fun, it's a warning that something needs to be attended to."

But when I talk to other pastors, fun is usually not high on the list of topics. Anxiety, pressure, anger, and fear get more air time. And when I look at myself, I see stretches of time far too long where joy is not prominent. Are we having fun yet? And if we're not, when will we?

I treasure a classic line I heard in a church I served years ago. One of the staff members didn't smile more than two or three times a year. An old deacon finally asked him, "Pastor X," (not his real name), "are you happy?"

"Yes. Of course."

"Well, tell your face."

Tell your face. I have wondered many times since what my face is trying to tell me about my soul.

There are certain warning lights that indicate when my joy tank is running on fumes. I am prone to a kind of Captain Ahab syndrome: an obsessive, self-absorbed, grim pursuit to the death of the great white whale of ministry.

Some time ago, I was giving our three kids a bath. I'm a busy guy, so I bathe all three at once to save time (I know this will have to change some day, probably when they're in high school). Our oldest child was finished and combing her hair, our youngest was playing with his armada, and our middle child was on drip-dry. I was reviewing my sermon notes (polyphasia, doing multiple things at one time, is a common symptom of joyless ministry).

"Hurry up," I said to our middle child, more out of habit than anything else. She was doing a dance called "Dee Dah Day." This consists of running in a circle, chanting "Dee Dah Day" over and over as in some pagan fertility ritual.

"Hurry up — Now!" I said, this time with some anger.

"Why?" she said.

I didn't have an answer. I had nowhere to go, nothing I had to do. I had just become so preoccupied, so addicted to hurry, so grimly task focused, that I was incapable of celebrating a Dee Dah Day moment. I know the day is coming when the Dee Dah Day dance will not be performed again, when I will give a thousand dollars to see it once more, but it will be too late. Impatience, preoccupation, hurry, obsession with church life — these are indications that my joy muscle has seriously atrophied.

The Paradox of Joy

G. K. Chesterton wrote once that it is in paradox that the truth of Christianity emerges most clearly.

For instance, about human nature some say we are essentially eternal spirits; others say we're just highly evolved lumps of clay ("portable plumbing," as one poet says). Christianity holds both extremes simultaneously. The same is true about the Christian view of human nature: it's both pessimistic (human beings are sinful) and optimistic (we can be saved).

Philosophies that try to reduce life or reality to a single theme lose the wild, diverse richness that makes Christianity ring so true. Christianity works at both ends of the canvas and paints a whole picture.

There is a paradox about ministry that, when I hold both ends with passion, helps me to keep a firmer grip on joy. When I let go of one or the other end of this paradox, joy is at risk. The biggest paradox might be this: my work matters immensely, and yet my work doesn't matter at all.

Lightness of Being

Take the second half first. When Theodore Roosevelt went camping with his friend, naturalist William Beebe, they used to sit under the open sky at night and search for a tiny blob of light near the constellation Pegasus and chant together, "That is the Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda. It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galaxies. It consists of one hundred billion suns, each larger than our sun." Then Roosevelt would say to Beebe, "Now I think we are small enough. Let's go to bed."

For me, this stargazing and perspective-restoration takes place at a retreat center about thirty minutes from my office. I go there once a week and meet with a group in which we reflect on our prayers over the past week. Our lives are connected only through this group. No one in the group is familiar with my church or even my denomination. I have the gift of anonymity, of being with people who will not be impressed by my success or cluck their tongues over my failure. Sometimes just being on the grounds at this center, I am given the gift of solitude — true detachment (at least for a moment or two) from the rewards and punishments of my "world system" that seeks to squeeze me into its mold.

There I get an occasional glimmer of the immensity of God, and I can rejoice in my smallness and enjoy "lightness of being." Then I recognize my most strenuous efforts are the strategical equivalent of a hyperactive three year old helping Julia Child with the cooking. I become a little bit less messianic.

When I let go of this truth, my joy is at risk. Some time ago at a retreat, a group of us who worked on staff together responded to the question "What is the greatest fear in your life?" All of us but one were around age 30, and we all gave roughly the same answer: our biggest fear was "not making a difference."

To a degree, this is probably healthy; impacting people is a good thing. But it became apparent as we talked that much of what fueled this fear was the need for visible, readily apparent success. We were all under the illusion that somewhere out there was a level of success high enough to satisfy this need once and for all.

Anthony Meisel introduces The Rule of St. Benedict by noting how one of the goals of Benedictine life was to liberate members of the community from this fear. Since their primary task was union with God, their work was to be evaluated not by "material results" but by "growth in virtue." The Rule intends to free people from the enticements and terrors of the world and its values, from addiction to success and fear of failure, and so learn truly to desire God.

Not that the Rule was always successful, but it made a peacefilled path that tried to evade the danger of obsessing over success. Meisel concludes, "For the man of the twentieth century, such serenity and freedom would be treasure indeed."

In general, I take myself too seriously and God not seriously enough. Joy comes when I get it the other way around.

Manageable, Meaningful Work

The other side of this paradox is that what human beings do is of immense importance.

It's hard for ministers to be convinced of that considering how our culture sometimes perceives us. Garrison Keillor writes about when the mayor of Lake Wobegon, Clint Bunsen, hosted a group of ministers on a tour called, "Meeting the pastoral needs of rural America":

"They got off the bus, and Cliff thought, Ministers. Men in their forties mostly, a little thick around the middle, thin on top, puffy hair around the ears, some fish medallions, turtleneck pullovers, earth tones, Hush Puppies; but more than dress, what set them apart was the ministerial eagerness, more eye contact than you were really looking for, a longer handshake, and a little more affirmation than you needed. 'Good to see you, glad you could be here, nice of you to come, we're very honored,' they said to him, although they were guests and he was the host."

The world isn't always impressed with ministers. Yet the doings of the most apparently insignificant person (or store-front pastor) will last when every government and civilization and multinational corporation has been consigned to the ash heap of history. Through people wearing Hush Puppies and fish medallions, through people wearing ephods and robes embroidered with bells and pomegranates, through people as ridiculous as you and me, God has chosen to express himself, to make himself known. That is something I can never take seriously enough.

Joy is not found in ceasing from all effort. We may be prone to base identity overmuch on achievement, but without any achievement there is no identity. There is surely a connection between joy and what we do with our lives.

All human beings seem to have a drive toward growth and mastery. But as Gilbert Brim writes in Ambition, "One important source of happiness is working at the right level of challenge, whatever that level might be for each of us.… It is the challenge more than the material achievement that brings us happiness.… There is the intrinsic satisfaction of achieving a goal itself — having food, health, wealth, love; but, as I will say often, the happiness derived from the achievement itself does not last long. When we win, we rest a moment but then move on; the joy of success is soon gone."

Brim notes that studies indicate major social characteristics like age, gender, education, income, and race combined can account for only about 10 to 15 percent of the variation in happiness among human beings. He writes, "I believe most of the differences between us are caused by our individual actions, by whether we have found a way to live at the level of just manageable difficulty."

This realization has both enlightened me about the futility of thinking any achievement can bring lasting fulfillment, and it also gives me the goal of seeking to live each day at the level of "just manageable difficulty." For me, this varies from day to day; some days just getting out of bed pretty much takes care of it.

At one point, it meant saying no to a terrific educational experience. I didn't want to say no. "But I know you," my wife said. "I see little enough of you as it is already. If you take this on, in addition to everything else, I will get only the leftovers. You won't have enough energy left to give to our relationship, let alone really to enjoy life."

I didn't enjoy that conversation. I like to think that I have unlimited reserves of energy and competence. But I know if I hadn't said no, the only person more miserable than my wife would have been me. (I don't tell her that, because I'm still spending the chips I earned for making the decision "for her.") So I had to cut back to a level of "just manageable difficulty."

Finally then, in my ministry I'm left with the same paradox I see in my daughter's young life. When she marches off to her first day of school, washed and dressed and combed and camcorded with elaborate care, I want to yell at her, "Don't worry about school. Don't worry about A's and B's, about whether or not you get a happy face, about what your class standing is or whether the teacher likes you. Don't carry with you any of those silly anxieties. It doesn't matter! Be free!"

At the same time I want to yell, "You are off now on a great adventure. Now you can ask questions, think great thoughts, discover deep truths that perhaps no mortal creature has ever seen. It is a precious gift, your mind, so don't waste it, don't take it for granted."

Each day as I drive to my office, I expect if I could hear God yelling, he would be yelling something similar to me.

Living the Joy We Preach

Above all, the issue of joy revolves around a question I'm spending more and more time with these days: Is the life I invite people into the life that I'm living?

At a pastor's conference not long ago, I met the main speaker. He talked candidly about his life, and not far beneath the surface he admitted to some burnout and exhaustion, marital strain and personal stress. Nor was this an exceptional time, he said. His view of ministry was that it would take a couple of psychological cornermen to keep repairing him between rounds and sending him back into the ring.

He invited people into a life of peace, joy, and trust, but the reality of life in ministry was hurry, crisis, and fatigue. One got the sense that people were invited to be saved, but if they got deeply enough into ministry, they too would enter into this frenzied lifestyle, all for the purpose of producing more of the "saved" who would ultimately look like them.

This stood in vivid contrast to a man who has written extensively on spiritual life and is also in high demand as a speaker. During an evening I spent with him in his home, he never hurried. The phone rang, and he just let it ring because he was with another person; he was not its slave. He never looked at his watch; he never dropped a name. He appeared to have no place else to go and nothing else to do even though he was a busy man and this night was of no "strategic value" to his career.

He gave the impression that he had gained the power to simply live in each moment with God as it unfolded. The life he writes about, the life he invites people to lead, is the life he himself lives.

Ultimately, then, joy in ministry is a product of a joyous relationship with Christ, nurtured in prayer and worship. It is there that Jesus says to us, "Take my flesh for your bread, and my blood for your wine, and you will finally find food that can nourish your soul. Take my words, and you will find life. For the meal of sacrifice and death — of ministry — is in fact the meal of great joy. It is not just a happy meal; it is the meal of hope, the last supper before the entrance into the kingdom. And the little prize inside, the gift that costs everything and costs nothing, that is worth so little and yet valued beyond price — the little prize is your soul."

And to some of us, as a gift beyond comprehension, he entrusts the task of delivering this meal to his children, to our brothers and sisters. "And remember," he says, "it is a happy meal. So be happy."

And tell your face.

Copyright © 1994 by Christianity Today

When we go through extended pain, we will often have to preach about things we don't resonate with at the time.
— Haddon Robinson

Denver Seminary was hit with three lawsuits in the late 1980s. In one case, a former student had sexually molested a boy, and the family sued the seminary. Two others involved a former professor who had gotten inappropriately involved with a counselee.

For one of the cases, I had to give a deposition. I had no idea what to expect, but I wasn't worried because neither I nor the seminary had done anything improper. With our lawyer at my side, I walked into the room where the deposition would take place, where we met four lawyers from the prosecution.

The questioning began, and I quickly came to a frightening realization. The four lawyers across the table were ruthless, and my lawyer was out of his depth. They were wolves, and he was a lamb. This was the first time he had handled such a case, and he had not prepared me for what happens at a deposition.

Only later did I learn the legal strategy behind such depositions. The prosecution knows that even if you are innocent, law suits can bring financial ruin. Insurance companies are wary of juries, and they stand to pay out $100,000 even if you win your case. So they're often willing to settle out of court even if you're innocent.

All the action, then, takes place in the depositions. That's where the prosecution tries to strike you with fear and make you settle out of court.

In my case, they did a good job of it. My deposition lasted two days. The first day prosecution lawyers grilled me for nine hours with question after question, doing everything they could to cast my answers into a negative light, twisting my motives, questioning my integrity.

Since then I have talked to others who have endured a deposition, and they have said it was the worst experience of their lives. It certainly was for me.

But that was only the beginning. The seminary's insurance company at one point said I personally wasn't covered by the school's policy. (I was also named in the suit). At one point, my lawyer (my new lawyer!) said, "They don't have a good case against us." But he knew that in this day anything can happen in court, so ten minutes later he advised, "You ought to take all your assets and put them in your wife's name. They can still get them, but it makes it harder." So our retirement savings all went in Bonnie's name.

Meanwhile, a former employee of Denver Seminary began to spread untruths about me throughout the community, which damaged my reputation. I had no effective way to respond.

The pain Bonnie and I suffered during those months was devastating. Frankly, I didn't respond well. Like the apostle Paul, I struggled with "conflicts on the outside, fears within." And yet I had to keep preaching, at chapel, in conventions and churches where I had been scheduled for months and years in advance, and later as interim pastor at Grace Chapel in Massachusetts.

All pastors go through times when they must preach through pain. How do you preach when you don't feel like it — when you're distracted, unable to focus, when your family is in turmoil or your health is failing or detractors in the church are launching artillery rounds in your direction, when you're going through loneliness or feelings of failure?

Dangers in the Tunnel

Going through extended times of pain feels like walking a dark, cold, damp tunnel. The tunnel of a preacher's pain has some unique dangers.

First, we can end up using the pulpit for self-therapy. One's style of preaching can change during a crisis. Often, along the way, a suffering pastor preaches a sermon that is nine-tenths his painful story and one-tenth Bible. Listeners identify with the sermon and are moved.

The pastor hears a favorable response to the message, and the next week, because it's difficult to study at such a time, he decides once again to share from his heart. The message is based primarily on his experience, with a sprinkling of Scripture thrown in. Again listeners respond warmly.

Soon he sets a pattern. He is now in danger of preaching weekly from his experience rather than from the Bible. Instead of experiencing what he preaches, he is preaching what he experiences. Preaching becomes a catharsis for his pain.

You cannot make the pulpit a place for self-therapy very often without paying a penalty. Parishioners don't come to church every Sunday to hear the wrestlings of the pastor's soul. They're not unsympathetic, but after a while the weekly service becomes an emotional downer. People don't follow for long leaders who can't handle their emotions.

Another danger is using the pulpit as a sniper's perch. If our pain comes from a church conflict, the temptation is strong to use the pulpit to take a bead on opponents.

Let's say Deacon Bill Jones is out to get the pastor. In the sermon the pastor quotes the verse "Alexander the metalworker did me a great deal of harm."

"We all know what this is like," the pastor says. "There will be times when we want to go forward for God, and others will stand up in a business meeting and call the congregation back to the past. We need to follow God as did the apostle Paul, even when others try to block our way."

The pastor never mentions Bill Jones, but anyone in the know sees right through the comments. They'll be upset that the pastor used the pulpit as a weapon, especially if they feel Deacon Jones's opposition has merit.

If our church is in conflict, we have to take care that people can't read into our comments an attack we never intended.

Furthermore, we can fail to preach the full counsel of God. When we're in pain, we tend to think everyone is in pain. Even if we never mention our personal troubles, our preaching can become strictly an ambulance service focused on crises. Those who are healthy, moving up in their businesses, and feeling strong in the Lord, won't get much out of our preaching.

I went with my daughter to the movie Wall Street several years ago. Gordon Gecko, one of the key characters in the film, was a successful, even ruthless, player of the stock market.

After the movie, my daughter said, "Daddy, what if Gecko said to you, 'You're a Christian. What can you say to somebody like me? You have one hour to give me your best shot.' What would you say to him?"

She gave me pause. Sometimes the church doesn't know what to say to the Gordon Geckos of the world. We can only speak to them, it seems, after they have fallen. Yet, the Scriptures speak both to the weak and the strong. I don't intentionally ignore successful people in sermons, but that's easy to do when I'm in pain.

When we're suffering, we need others to remind us there are more preaching themes than depravity, grace, faith, and prayer. We need to preach also about righteousness, God's sovereignty, justice, outreach, and other fundamental doctrines. Just because some themes aren't feeding me at the moment doesn't mean they no longer are good food for others.

Preaching in the Dark

Some painful situations are naturally shared with the congregation: the death of a loved one, serious illness.

Other situations require discretion: financial problems, marriage stress, conflict on the board, a moral lapse. Even if we never mention such problems, our preaching changes as we walk the tunnel of pain.

As I was living through this intense period of pain at Denver Seminary, several people said they sensed more tenderness and sympathy in my preaching. That is certainly what I felt. If anything good for me came out of this painful time, it was the overwhelming sense of my need of God. I felt completely vulnerable. Although I was not guilty of any legal negligence or failure, I felt more in need of grace than ever.

When prosecutors hammered away at my motives and conduct, when others spread slander and rumors, it forced me to examine my life. I looked into my heart and saw that in spite of my legal innocence, I was like every other person, a sinful human being with impure motives much of the time, in need of God's grace all the time.

One sermon I preached while "in the tunnel" was the parable of the Prodigal Son. I talked about the Father: not worrying about his dignity, his heart filled with grace and acceptance, he ran to meet his son, the prodigal. "I just want you to know the Father is running to meet you," I told the congregation. "His arms are open wide, and he's not angry with you. More than anything else, he just wants you to come home. He says, 'I don't care if you're covered with mud and manure. I don't care how you smell. Welcome home! Welcome home!'

"If that's where you are this morning, I want to welcome you home. Come up here, and let me welcome you home."

One woman answering that appeal told me, "I've been in church and heard invitations all my life. There is no way in the world I would go forward in a church. But I wanted to come. I wanted to be welcomed home."

During a conversation with a work associate, I shared the ideas from that sermon, and she began to weep. She is a fairly controlled person. "Never in my life," she said, "have I felt the full meaning of that parable."

Such reactions weren't due to any new preaching technique or profound insight on my part. I had experienced God's grace anew, and the power of that grace simply came through, without my consciously striving for it to happen.

Pain and the Pastor's Family

Our families share the darkness when we walk through pain. They see us at our best and worst. And then they see us stand before a congregation and preach the will of God. Our families won't question our sincerity if we avoid two mistakes.

First, don't imply that what ought to be actually is in your life. A preacher's responsibility is to declare what Christians ought to do. We teach others to read their Bibles and pray daily, have family devotions regularly, share their faith at every opportunity, pray for our nation's leaders, give as much as possible to missions, sacrifice for others, live unselfishly. At the same time, few if any pastors do all that Christians ought to do.

That's no surprise and no problem, if we're honest. It's only a problem if we imply otherwise. And it becomes a major problem if we have pain in the family.

If we suggest in our preaching that we have all the answers, that our faith is unshakable, that "all you need is Jesus," that we have it all together, and meanwhile our family sees us in doubt, anger, and confusion at home, they'll conclude we are hypocrites and doubt the reality of what we preach.

When I went through my experience at Denver, I was not a model of unwavering, unquestioning faith. I went through times of deep discouragement. My family saw me go through those times. If I had stood up Sunday after Sunday and said, "When you go through a trial, put your faith in God. Don't waver. Don't doubt," I would have lost a lot of credibility with them.

Better to say something like, "When we go through trials, we need to put our faith in God. At times we may waver. At times we may doubt. But we need to pursue faith. Only by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ can we keep our footing when we feel we're slipping."

Second, don't illustrate with your best moments and imply that's the norm. For several months, a pastor suffers unrelenting attacks from his elder board. It gets the best of him. Embittered, he comes home each night and at dinner complains to his family about the latest criticism and speaks disparagingly about various board members.

One night in the middle of the conflict, by contrast, he says to the family, "We need to pray for the board members and their families. No doubt they have pain in their lives that is causing them to be negative toward me."

The next day and for weeks to come, however, the pastor falls back into bitter comments when with the family.

Later the pastor preaches on praying for enemies and illustrates by saying, "As you may know, we went through some disagreements here at the church several months ago. During that time God helped my family to sit together at the dinner table and pray for those who had personally attacked us."

He's telling the truth, but he's implying that the ideal was the norm. He probably isn't intentionally trying to mislead the congregation; he's trying to inspire them with an example of doing what is right. But he is in danger of embittering his family, who have seen his ambivalent behavior.

Preaching When You Don't Feel Like It

Pain makes it hard to concentrate on anything but our problems. It distracts us, confuses us, and saps our energies, leaving us feeling like we don't want to prepare sermons or get "up" for preaching. Preaching through pain requires that we do two things: compartmentalize and filter.

When we go through extended pain, we will often have to preach about things we don't resonate with at the time. We will talk about the sovereignty of God when we feel everything is out of control, or about confidence in God when we ourselves are struggling with unanswered prayer.

At those times, we need to fulfill the calling to preach the Bible. We preach what the Bible says, not what we feel. We, on our own authority, based on our own experiences, may not be able to say, "All things work together for good," but we can say, "God's Word says that all things work together for good."

In a sense, sometimes we have to compartmentalize our experience and feelings. At those times, we may not interact personally with the text or illustrate from our own lives. That's reality.

At such times, it's appropriate to recognize publicly the ambivalence between the text's great promise and the human condition. If you're preaching through the Psalms and come to a place where the psalmist says, "The Lord has rewarded me for my integrity, for the cleanness of my hands in his sight," but you feel the weight of your sin, you can say: "Perhaps you feel like the psalmist today. You're not perfect, but you're forgiven, and you're trying by his grace to walk with God. You feel like praising God that he is a God of justice who rewards the righteous and repays the wicked. You can do that. Others of you will feel a great sense of failure—I know I often do. You can't say with integrity, 'I've served you with my whole heart.' You're feeling instead like the 'chief of sinners.' So this psalm doesn't express how you're feeling today. Still, the psalmist is at a place all of us want to be at times. So let's all listen in, and see what we can learn."

We also need to filter. If we always keep a sermon "out there," we eventually lose our sense of authenticity. If we just keep hammering together what I call "dog house" sermons — let's see, I need three points that begin with the letter T — without living in those sermons, we get hollow. On occasion we need to filter our preaching through our experiences, choosing sermon texts that resonate with what we feel, sharing some of the tough lessons we are learning even if we never tell the story behind them.

In years past, when I would read the parable of the sheep and the goats at the judgment, I felt like a sheep. I had faith in Christ; I visited friends in the hospital; I gave to World Vision.

When I went through the tunnel, I felt totally unworthy of salvation. For the first time, I read that parable and noticed that after Christ commended the sheep, they responded, "Who, me?" They didn't know they were sheep. They didn't feel like sheep.

I came to the conclusion that if I get into heaven, it's because God says I'm a sheep, not because I feel like I'm doing what sheep do. It's all grace.

I began preaching that passage. I felt I had to preach it because it reflected my heart; it made some sense of what I was going through.

After the three lawsuits against Denver Seminary were settled, my lawyer met with the faculty to explain all he could not explain during the trials. He told the faculty, for example, that the president of another seminary had gone over all the testimony and seminary records. He testified that he would have handled the situations just as I had. After all the facts came out, some of the faculty contacted me to say that meeting had vindicated me.

The whole thing is behind me now, though my life will never be the same. And neither will my preaching.

Copyright © 1993 by Christianity Today

It is not the ministry that makes me angry. It’s me that makes me angry.
— John Ortberg

Henri Nouwen has put his finger on something that for a long time I did not realize about myself:

“Anger in particular seems close to a professional vice in the contemporary ministry. Pastors are angry at their leaders for not leading and at their followers for not following. They are angry at those who do not come to church, and angry at those who do come for coming without enthusiasm.

“They are angry at their families, who make them feel guilty, and angry at themselves for not being who they want to be. This is not an open, blatant, roaring anger, but an anger hidden behind the smooth word, the smiling face, and the polite handshake. It is a frozen anger, an anger which settles into a biting resentment and slowly paralyzes a generous heart.

“If there is anything that makes the ministry look grim and dull, it is this dark, insidious anger in the servants of Christ.”

I have anger in me. This realization was somewhat unexpected: I don’t see myself as an angry person. I have always thought of myself as a peacemaker by nature. I don’t explode. I have never been a screamer. I’m a Baptist, but emotionally I’m really more of a Presbyterian.

And yet I have anger in me. I know this because it surfaces when I don’t expect it.

I remember a hurtful thing a deacon said to me a long time ago. Years have passed; surely I’m too big to be bothered by such a little thing, yet there it is. The scene gets replayed in my mind, only with alternate endings. I find myself fantasizing about how to get even, how to hurt back. Where does this come from?

I’m driving home after a long and pressured day of ministry. I inadvertently cut someone off; he catches up and honks and gestures. Suddenly I find myself trembling with rage; I want to cut him off again; I want to hurt him. Where does this come from?

Learning from my anger and acquiring the skill to manage it well have become lifelong goals of mine. I have found a number of questions that help me achieve them.

What is Anger?

Whole forests have been cut down to provide paper for the books that seek to answer this question. I think the best answer is that anger is physiological arousal — heart-racing, adrenaline-pumping, blood-pressure raising arousal — along with my own hostile or indignant interpretation of what caused the arousal.

One of the most common anger problems among pastors is to deny or misread our experiences of anger, which also guarantees we will express it in destructive ways.

Let’s say there is a part of my job that I should be doing more effectively, a part I’ve simply been neglecting. A member of the ministry team tells me this, appropriately, graciously, but quite candidly.

I know that he is right, yet I feel hurt. This tears at the myth of my ability to be a “super pastor,” makes me feel quite ordinary and somewhat embarrassed. His observation is obvious enough that I cannot deny it, but my response is not healthy either. For the remainder of our conversation, I go into withdrawal. I am polite and make no direct complaints. Without thinking about it, I avoid direct eye contact and physical touch and do not smile genuinely; my tone of voice says, “Stay away.”

After you’ve known somebody long enough, you learn how to gauge this withdrawal precisely: clear enough so that the other person unmistakably feels it; subtle enough so that if he asks, “Have you got a problem?” I can respond, “No. Why do you ask? You got a problem?”

For I am Scandinavian, and we don’t get mad. Hurt, sure. Offended, often. Wounded so that we can never recover and never forget — you bet. But not mad.

What Makes Pastors Angry?

The earliest discussion I can remember having with my parents about church was when I asked them, “Why is the pastor always mad at us?”

As I’ve grown older and wiser and learned the subtleties of human behavior, I’ve realized my naive childhood perceptions were right on target. There’s something about pastoral ministry that produces (or attracts) angry people. Why?

Is it because we serve an angry God, as in Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon, “Sinners in the hands of an angry God”? Okay, at least God’s anger can be trusted; it is just another facet of his love — “Anger is the fluid that love bleeds when you cut it,” C. S. Lewis wrote. But sinners in the hands of angry pastors? That’s another story. That’s murder in the cathedral.

One reason we’re angry is because we are constantly being reviewed. Pastoring is a strange job. We are called to shepherd sheep. But the sheep in our charge are also our bosses. And sometimes they act like it.

Perhaps the most obvious and vulnerable area in which we’re reviewed is preaching. It’s helpful to be (tactfully) critiqued. And it is right for pastors to want to do well. But it is painfully tempting to allow Sunday morning to become a kind of spiritual performance on which my emotional well-being hinges. When I succumb, I feel trapped, and trapped ministers are angry ministers.

Sometimes the negative reviews are relatively easy to dismiss. At one church, an attender regularly informed my wife if I failed to button my coat while preaching. (As a passive-aggressive response, I considered preaching without buttoning my shirt.)

Other critiques dig deeper: “I’m not being fed.” For most pastors, this is tantamount to waving a red flag in front of a wounded bull. The not-so-subtle message is “You’re just tickling people’s ears.”

In addition, vision, leadership, interpersonal skills, the general state of the church — all of these are fair game for the congregation’s evaluation — and dry tinder that sparks into pastoral anger.

Thomas Merton wrote somewhere that the false self is fabricated by social compulsions. “Compulsive ministry” is the kind of ministry that produces angry and resentful ministers. Compulsive ministry is when I base my worth on satisfying the standards that define success in my little world. Budgets must be met, attendance must be raised, people must be happy, programs must thrive. Compulsive ministry is in the deepest sense being “conformed to the world.”

I recognize my compulsivity when someone says, “Why don’t we have a … (fill in the blank: singles ministry, stronger missions program, social awareness committee, American flag in the sanctuary, greater commitment to our community, old-fashioned revival with a traveling evangelist and good accordion music).” I don’t think I ever hear that without feeling a twinge of guilt. This sets me up for resentment: Why don’t they do it themselves? Why do I have to keep everybody pumped up? In my compulsivity, I feel like a circus performer who keeps plates spinning on top of sticks; if I ever stop, they’ll all come crashing down.

This pattern of behavior leads me to another insight: it is not the ministry that makes me angry; it’s me that makes me angry.

Because anger is such a powerful emotion, it feels as if it is being caused by something “out there.” My experience tells me that it’s rude drivers and surly deacons. Instead, I have to admit that it is not events but my interpretation of events that makes me angry.

It is nine o’clock at night. My four-year-old gets out of bed and cautiously, tentatively comes down the stairs, in violation of curfew. However, I have nothing to do, nowhere to go; I am relaxed and at peace with the world. Look at the little tyke, I think. Only a few more years to enjoy Kodak moments like this, and then he’ll be grown. How brave and adventurous he is, risking punishment to explore the unknown world of the night. He’s just like his father.

Another night, same hour, same child, same father. But this time I have reached the end of a long and stressful day, and I have to finish a chapter on anger before I go to bed. The little tyke walks down the stairs, but my mind plays a different tune: Only a few precious moments to get my work done, and Eddie Munster here can’t stay in bed. Sure, sneak down the stairs, kid. Go ahead, make my day. The question you’ve got to ask yourself is, “Do I feel lucky?” How rebellious and disobedient he is, defying parental authority ordained by God because of his relativistic narcissism. He’s just like his mother!

Notice that the external event was identical in both situations. But one time it led to joy, the other time, to anger. The critical variable was my interpretation of what was happening. This is universally true. It is not what other people say or do but the way I think about it that gives rise to anger.

Lots of people have the power to hurt or frustrate me. Only one has the power to make me angry. Me.

If it is true that no one else can make me angry, it is even more true that no one else can make me respond aggressively or inappropriately when I feel anger. It often seems that way because my response to feeling anger has become so routine that it seems “automatic.” It feels as if the person or event triggered my anger and caused my response.

The truth is my response is learned behavior. I learned it long ago, from people I grew up around, learned it so informally that I was not aware that I was learning anything.

Tommy Bolt has been described as the angriest golfer in the history of a game that has stimulated the secretion of more bile than any other single human activity outside of war and denominational meetings. One (possibly apocryphal) story recalls a time he was giving a group lesson on how to hit a ball out of a sand trap. He called his 11-year-old son over.

“Show the people what you’ve learned from your father to do when your shot lands in the sand,” he said. The boy picked up a wedge and threw it as high and as far as he could.

The good news is what can be learned can be unlearned. It is possible for me to manage my anger in a God-honoring way: to “be angry and sin not.”

How Do I Handle Anger?

Anger is an inescapable fact of life. But the experience of anger is different from the expression of anger. What I do with that anger, how I express and manage it, is another matter.

It’s helpful to identify how I usually express my anger. In Make Anger Your Ally, Neil Warren outlines four common profiles of anger management, which I have adapted for pastors.

The first might be termed pastors who blow up. You never have to wonder when these people are angry. They have a little sign on their desk that reads, i don’t get ulcers, i give them. Their sermons are illustrated with stories of General Patton, Woody Hayes, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Mount Saint Helens. Peter Cartwright, the nineteenth-century circuit-riding preacher who bodily threw out inattentive or distracting attenders, who publicly said to a deacon, “Brother, one more prayer like that, and hell will freeze over,” would fit in this category.

The second group is pastors who burn up — who somaticize their anger. These people hold it in, conceal what they feel. They are often unaware of being angry, but inside it eats at them the way acid corrodes a battery.

They may not recognize their anger, but they can’t escape its effects. One author identified over fifty illnesses affected by unprocessed anger. Pastors who burn up are often found on the prayer chain, victims of one sickness or another. Because of their nonconfrontive style, they often find themselves surrounded by openly aggressive types (like the pastor lying in the hospital who received a note from the board, “Dear Pastor, the board voted to wish you a speedy recovery, seven to five with two abstentions”).

The third type are pastors who pout. They retaliate though not aggressively; they prefer to inflict guilt by suffering unfairly. Pastoral ministry is especially attractive to these ministers because it offers such rich opportunity for martyrdom, yet without the nuisance of actually having to die.

The Bible is full of them: Jonah, calling for Dr. Kevorkian because Nineveh was spared and a worm had eaten his shade-vine. The prodigal son’s elder brother: “Sure, Dad, you go have a party. I’ll just stay out here and work the fields just as I have my whole life without anyone even saying thank you. Don’t worry about me.”

Of the four, this is probably my tendency. I pout pretty well. Number one sounds like more fun, but I’m a pastor. I do number one in my heart, but on the outside I do number three.

The fourth group consists of pastors who catch up. These are the sneaky ones. They’ll jab and needle and dig with words funny enough to get away with but designed to do damage. Elders get frustrated with them because these pastors “forget” to return phone calls, or they show up late for appointments. They are masters of (often unconscious) sabotage.

At least with the first group, you know where you stand. With this group, after one of their zingers, you ask, “Where is all this blood coming from?” And then you look down and realize it’s coming from you. If you call them on it, will they admit they’re acting out of anger? Noooooo — the gutless little wimps. Of all anger styles, this is the most infuriating. They make me so angry, I could pout.

How Do I Manage Anger with My Children?

Maybe the most accurate gauge to read on how and why I manage — or mismanage — anger is to examine how my anger comes out with my children. For with them, my anger has few external constraints. They can’t yell back. They can’t get offended, withdraw their pledges, and start attending other families. So I can see what my anger will do unimpeded.

We went to Kinderphoto to have a family photo taken for the holidays. I don’t know who invented the idea of little kids getting dressed up, sitting still, and smiling for some stranger behind a huge camera. This was a nightmare. We put our kids on the giant rocking horse, and our youngest daughter was terrified. She sobbed uncontrollably. We made funny faces, bribed her with sugar cookies — to no avail.

So I got mad and threatened to spank her, not an effective way to get a smile from a two year old. Soon her sister was crying; the photographer was crying; other families were waiting to take their turn, and their kids were crying. They began to chant 1 Timothy 3:5, “If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?”

So I pulled our youngest child off the horse and said to her gently, “Do you wish you had Baby Tweezers right now?” Baby Tweezers was her favorite doll.

With big tears in her eyes, my daughter answered, “Yes.”

“Well,” I continued, “if you ever want to see Baby Tweezers alive again, I better see your face radiate with mirth until that big man behind the camera says we’re done.”

Only later did I realize what was going on. My concern was not for the picture. I needed to look as if I was in control. I was more concerned with my need to look like a good parent, to convince people I was the right kind of father, than I was about the well-being of my children. And if they don’t turn on the obedience to create that appearance, I’ll take my anger out on them.

I don’t want to be that kind of father. I want to be a memory-making, life-affirming, magic-moment-creating kind of daddy. Sometimes I convince myself that I am. But moments like this show how hurry sickness and self-absorption block that goal and fuel so much of my anger, at home and at church.

Do I Enjoy Being Angry?

I must enjoy anger because I work so hard to keep it alive. A grudge is like a baby; it has to be nursed if it’s going to survive. Anger is inevitable. Resentment is optional.

Frederick Buechner writes, “Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll your tongue over the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back — in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”

I need to be careful about preaching out of anger, precisely because it can be fun. Once I was preaching about the prodigal son’s elder brother, and my eyes landed on a man who was legalistic and who resisted change in the church. Suddenly I was filled with righteous indignation. I didn’t stare at him — no one there could have known about this — but in my heart I was saying to him, “This is you. The elder brother is you.” This made my delivery pretty passionate — probably helped the sermon out. But for me it was a spiritually destructive practice. It’s a form of pulpit abuse.

Certainly at times preaching will be done with anger. The words of the prophets were often spoken directly out of their anger. If Martin Luther King, Jr., hadn’t given voice to prophetic anger, our society would be immeasurably poorer. But he always taught that words of judgment must be filtered through love before they can be safely pronounced: “We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love; we must meet physical force with soul force.”

How Do Healthy Pastors Manage Anger?

How can pastors, who are supposed to model patience and love, express anger appropriately in the church setting (meaning, without losing their credibility, jobs, or sanity)?

Three strategies help me: (1) clarify what it is I really want (and value) when I’m angry, (2) create a strategy that is more likely to achieve it, and (3) find a trustworthy person outside the church to whom I can freely, fully express my anger.

I once heard from a third party that a former deacon had criticized the church and me. My first impulse was to criticize the former deacon, by way of defending my reputation and harming his.

Ventilation for ventilation’s sake may feel good at the moment, but it almost never brings about what I really want. If I can identify what I clearly want (as opposed to a reflexive desire to hurt), I can choose a strategy that will help me get there.

I recognized what I really wanted was a church where this kind of communication did not go on. I wanted to be the kind of person who could confront this honestly and in love. So I called the former deacon to arrange an appointment.

At this point, it got more complicated. He said (I know this sounds hard to believe) he refused to meet with me until I changed the church motto.

The motto printed on church stationary seemed to me fairly innocuous: “Reaching up and reaching out.” I found myself getting angrier. This is so stupid! The only just solution entailed having him shot, and this didn’t seem practical at the time. So I called on another resource I think is indispensable for pastors: a person outside the church with whom I can talk openly about all details of my life.

Pastors need an outside “ventilatee” because there are aspects of our church-directed anger that are unfair to burden any church member with.

After I had dumped the whole load of my frustration and hurt with my friend, we were able to devise a plan together that would best lead toward reconciliation.

Effective anger management, then, has become a lifetime goal for me. Because if I don’t become the kind of husband and father and pastor that I dream of being, that will make me really angry. And eternity is a long time to pout.

Copyright © 1994 by Christianity Today

God values some things more than church unity, things like obedience, truth, and integrity.
— Richard Exley

I clearly remember the first time my church leaders discussed our church’s stance regarding pro-life involvement. A small group within our congregation had presented a proposal to the board requesting permission to begin a crisis pregnancy program.

Our discussion was intense. “I will vote in favor of the proposal,” said one board member, “only if we include strict guidelines prohibiting any form of public protest against abortion.”

Others expressed similar reservations. We eventually approved the group’s request, but this was only the beginning of what would become one of the most controversial issues of my twelve years of ministry at Christian Chapel in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Superheated issues in our society have a way of starting fires within the church walls. Political wars can become church wars. Of no issue is that more true than abortion.

As a pastor, I had been reticent to get involved. In the course of everyday ministry, I take enough shots without asking to be shot. I’m more interested in calming church controversy than creating it. Like most pastors, I like people to like me. The last thing I want to do is make people in my church angry.

In the end, I overcame my fears and got involved in the controversial, and I made my church angry! But I learned a lot along the way about how to handle such issues.

Be Open to God

In August 1988 as I watched a national newscast from the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, the news anchor reported that Randall Terry and a group of anti-abortion demonstrators were using their bodies to barricade abortion clinics. They were arrested and jailed. Many refused to give their names, identifying themselves as “Baby Doe.” I questioned their tactics, but I was challenged by their commitment.

After the convention ended, Operation Rescue, as it was being called, passed from the news but not from my thoughts. A recurring question haunted me: Would I do whatever the Lord asked to end abortion on demand?

In the ensuing weeks, my inner turmoil deepened. I didn’t question whether abortion was right or wrong. Both Scripture and science had convinced me that life begins at conception: therefore abortion is morally wrong, since it’s the taking of human life. In my mind the baby’s right to live outweighed the mother’s right to choose.

The conflict arose over my obedience, my level of commitment: How would I respond to this great tragedy?

I had serious reservations about Christians committing civil disobedience. I have a deep respect for both the law and the governing authorities, as prescribed in Romans 13. But I also knew that respect for the law doesn’t mean blind allegiance. Blind compliance has historically produced human rights abuses of the most serious kind, including the Jewish Holocaust.

I was also concerned about my relationship with our denomination. Traditionally, we have distanced ourselves from anything political or social in nature. If I became involved in any serious attempt to end abortion on demand, I feared I might jeopardize my ordination, especially if I participated in civil disobedience.

Of equal concern was my relationship with Christian Chapel. I was the senior pastor. I knew how tense the board meeting had been. I anticipated far greater controversy if I myself became involved in some form of public, confrontational pro-life activity.

Less nobly, I feared arrest and imprisonment. What would happen to my wife, Brenda, if I went to jail for weeks or months? How would she support herself if my income was suddenly cut off?

To escape the torment of my conscience, I plunged into my work, initiating new programs at the church and increasing my counseling load. Nothing helped. Like the fugitive in Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven, I encountered God at every turn; he wouldn’t let the issue leave my consciousness.

Throughout this time of uncertainty, I did not discuss the issue with anyone in the church. I didn’t want to cause any confusion until I was committed to a course of action. Finally, after nearly nine months of agonizing indecision, I still wasn’t decided on what my involvement would be, but I prayed, “Lord, I will take up my cross and follow in whatever way you lead. I will even ‘rescue’ if that is what you want me to do.”

For the first time in many months, I experienced an inner peace. The future was still uncertain; I was no less afraid, but I no longer felt as if I was fighting against God.

Time Your Moves

With my new resolve, I decided to preach an anti-abortion sermon. This wasn’t my first. At Christian Chapel, we addressed this issue at least once a year, always on Sanctity of Life Sunday.

But this was different. This was Mother’s Day 1989, not Sanctity of Life Sunday. Mother’s Day is for mothers, the one Sunday out of the entire year when they expect to be honored. On Mother’s Day, the entire family comes to church anticipating a “warm fuzzy” — a tribute extolling the virtues of motherhood.

Instead I broadsided them with a graphic message detailing the horrors of abortion, ending with a ringing challenge to act now!

Why was I so insensitive? At the time, I was convinced the Holy Spirit had directed me. Now I’m not so sure. I reasoned that Mother’s Day would be a day when our women would be sensitized to the meaning of motherhood and the value of children, and therefore more outraged by the horrors of abortion.

I was right, at least about the outrage part. Several mothers, horrified by my graphic description of aborted babies, fled the sanctuary before I could finish my sermon. I learned later that many others were offended, and at least one family left the church.

Unfortunately, my timing diverted the people’s focus from the tragedy of abortion to a discussion of my taste in preaching such a sermon on Mother’s Day.

Keep Your Balance

But I didn’t give up my desire to demonstrate our commitment to the sanctity of human life, and the congregation and I quickly found ourselves at a philosophical impasse.

Although virtually every member felt that abortion was wrong, we were clearly divided on the church’s responsibility. Some argued against legislating morality, saying that free moral agents have the right to make morally wrong choices.

Others, though, argued that no one’s “right” to sin gives them the right to take a life, that abortion must be outlawed to protect the innocent. That was also my position.

Still others thought our involvement should be limited to prayer. They reasoned that this was a spiritual issue that could be resolved only through intercession.

I agreed but pointed out, “Historically the church has combined prayer with some form of direct action. In missions, it’s prayer and witness. In Christian service, it’s prayer and acts of mercy. In fighting abortion, shouldn’t we use both intercession and intervention?”

But the complaint I heard most concerned the “needs” of church attenders. Again and again church members said, “People don’t come to church to hear about abortion but to have their spiritual needs met.”

That complaint gave me pause. I was committed to the needs of my flock. Yet I also felt impassioned about the injustices of society. How to balance the needs of my members with prophetic action became a constant challenge, one I’m not sure I always managed well.

I easily could have become a one-issue preacher during this time. But the pastoral staff and elder board held me accountable and kept me in balance. Abortion is a great evil and one the church must address, but the message of the gospel is still “Christ and him crucified.”

My insensitive Mother’s Day sermon opened my eyes to the silent needs of some in my congregation. So intent to preach prophetically on the horrors of abortion, I had overlooked the pain of abortion’s other victim — the mother. Many women who have made this choice struggle with guilt and regret. Apart from the grace of Jesus Christ, they have no way of escaping the painful consequences of their tragic decision.

After counseling several women who had aborted their children, I became more sensitive to their needs in my preaching. While some needed to hear the prophetic message of the gospel, others needed to receive forgiveness and healing that comes only through Christ.

Prepare for Loving Confrontation

Christian Chapel soon became known as the pro-life voice for the Christian community in Tulsa. We organized a citywide pro-life rally attended by more than 2,000 concerned citizens. Six weeks later we staged a prayer vigil in front of the local abortion clinic, attended by scores of clergy and nearly 600 pro-life believers.

On the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, we held a memorial service in our church yard, attended by 1,500 people of all faiths. In 1991 I chaired the committee for the Rally for Life at the state capital, attended by more than 14,000. Repeatedly, the local television news interviewed me concerning abortion issues, and several colleges and universities invited me to speak.

Our church swung into action. Members of our congregation picketed the local abortion clinics. Others counseled on the sidewalks leading to the abortion clinics, telling the mothers who came for abortions about other alternatives. Still others opened their homes to single pregnant women, and physicians from our church provided their services at no cost to these expectant mothers.

As a result of the loving concern they experienced, many troubled women found emotional healing and committed their lives to follow Christ. Many childless couples adopted babies who, except for our intervention, would have died at the hands of abortionists.

Keep Your Priorities Clear

As I review the past four years, I see that the cost of obeying what we felt was our responsibility has been high. Although all the leaders of Christian Chapel supported my efforts, others in the congregation did not. Some of the more imaginative dissenters accused me of having a mid-life crisis. Others suggested that if the official board did not censor me, I would lead the church astray. Over a period of months, scores of people left the church.

One of my greatest temptations was to sacrifice my integrity to maintain church unity. Things were going well at the church: attendance, baptisms, and giving — all were up. Why risk rocking the boat over something as controversial as abortion?

I returned again and again to the words of Christ, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law — a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household’ ” (Matt. 10:34-36).

I finally concluded that God values some things more than unity. Among them are obedience, truth, and integrity.

Stay for the Long Haul

“The race,” wrote King Solomon, “is not to the swift or the battle to the strong.”

Nowhere is this more evident than in pro-life work. Mobilizing a congregation to pursue any vision — especially something psychologically threatening like action against abortion — takes time. Just as it takes more than one sermon to teach stewardship or prayer, so it takes several sermons over a period of time to lead a church into a controversial issue.

I found that as our members participated in pro-life activities, their commitment increased, gradually rubbing off on others in the congregation. One of the least threatening ways we introduced our people to action was by encouraging their participation in Life Chain, a peaceful demonstration of pro-life supporters who hold signs and link arms in communities across the country the first Sunday in October. We also encouraged members to serve as volunteers in a local crisis pregnancy center.

“When you fill a swamp with stones,” said missionary Frank Laubach, who pioneered literacy programs in underprivileged countries, “a hundred loads may disappear under the water before a stone appears on the surface, but all of them are necessary.”

When confronting controversial issues, our prayers and efforts seem to disappear from sight, seemingly without effect. But I’m convinced that every action I take counts, and the involvement of my church makes a difference.

Copyright © 1994 by Christianity Today

Sloth is the failure to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done.
— John Ortberg

The sloth is a tropical mammal that lives much of its life hanging upside-down from tree branches. When obliged to descend to the ground, sloths crawl along a level surface at the rate of ten feet a minute (meaning their top sprint is one-ninth of a mile per hour).

Sloths are generally sluggish and inactive; they build no nests and seek no shelter even for their young. They sleep fifteen to twenty-two hours a day, rising in the late afternoon to eat whatever leaves may be close at hand. Being so passive, they are virtually untrainable, although occasionally you’ll find one working as a denominational official or on a roadside construction crew.

From time to time, a sloth hangs around my home and office, a discovery that has surprised me. I’m familiar with lots of my faults but never suspected this one. Up to now, I’ve been careful to whom I admit it.

I’m careful because sloth is our society’s unforgivable sin. It is almost never mentioned. I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone confess it.

Think of job interviews. When someone is asked, “What’s your biggest weakness?” 90 percent of the answers are variations of “I work too hard,” and “I tend to be too perfectionistic.” When have you heard someone say, “I’m just too darn lazy”?

But I’ve discovered that I have to quit playing this game. Psychiatrist and best-selling author Scott Peck says that ultimately there is one great impediment to spiritual growth “and that is laziness. If we overcome laziness, all the other impediments will be overcome. If we do not overcome laziness, none of the others will be hurdled.… Spiritual growth is effortful, as we have been reminded again and again.”

Here are some ways I’ve tried to make that effort and so deal with sloth.

Not Doing What Needs to Be Done

Sloth is deceptive and destructive. One reason people don’t admit sloth is they don’t recognize it.

In the past I would have considered anything but sloth to be one of my problems because I seem to be so busy. Sloth doesn’t necessarily mean we’re doing nothing. Sloth is the failure to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done — like the kamikaze pilot who flew seventeen missions.

I came gradually to the realization that this was a temptation. I would have a task I didn’t look forward to — say, setting up an appointment to confront someone about a broken relationship. Suddenly, a myriad of other tasks leapt up and begged to be done. I would clean my desk, call a staff meeting, write two articles for a newsletter we didn’t even publish.

I did a lot. But over time I discovered that all too often I didn’t do what needed to be done when it needed to be done. Just as most alcoholics don’t live on skid row, most sloth-aholics don’t spend their days eating bon-bons and watching The Young and the Restless.

That’s why Scott Peck notes that even workaholics can be lazy. They may work furiously but only because they are trying to avoid doing something truly needful.

Frederick Buechner, in his book Wishful Thinking, put it this way:

“A slothful man … may be a very busy man. He is a man who goes through the motions, who flies on automatic pilot. Like a man with a bad head cold, he has mostly lost his sense of taste and smell. He knows something’s wrong with him, but not wrong enough to do anything about. Other people come and go, but through glazed eyes he hardly notices them. He is letting things run their course. He is getting through his life.”

Unfortunately, too often that’s been a description of me.

Signs of Sloth

When I have confessed my struggles in this area with a few carefully chosen confidants, their response — without exception — has been: “What? You, too? I thought I was the only one.” Apparently we all struggle with our own secret forms of sloth. (I know only one person who I’m certain never struggles with laziness. He’s four years old. We’re hoping it hits him soon.)

Max De Pree, author of Leadership Jazz, wrote that one of the most difficult tasks of leadership is intercepting entropy, which he defined loosely as “everything has a tendency to deteriorate.”

He listed signals of deterioration:

— relationships become superficial

— there is little time for celebration and ritual

— leaders try to control rather than liberate people

— day-to-day pressures push aside our need to envision and plan goals

— there is a noticeable loss of grace, style, and civility in our conversations and lifestyles.

Typically the entropy I most need to intercept is my own. Sloth is like gravity; you have to deal with it every day. So I have learned to watch for six tell-tale signs that help me diagnose its presence:

1. My desk top and office get messier.

2. I run late.

3. I stop doing things my wife appreciates, say keeping the grass under three feet high. I’ve agreed to do it but find myself not doing it.

The problem is not energy. For example, after several marathon days — up before dawn, running non-stop until late — I may come home to a free evening but only have enough energy to drag myself down the hall and collapse in the chair. I’d like to help around the house, but I’ve given everything for the ministry.

Then the phone rings. I summon my last reserves to pick up the receiver. It’s a good friend: several guys have gotten hold of a gym, and a basketball game starts in forty-five minutes.

What happens next is a miracle. Energy, strength, and vitality swarm back into my body like the swallows returning to Capistrano.

4. I find telephone messages I haven’t returned since the Carter administration.

5. I experience an odd combination of hurry and wastefulness. I rush in the morning, telling my wife I have no time for breakfast, no time to see the kids off to school; too much to do. Later in the morning, I read the sports section or make an unnecessary phone call.

6. I have a sense of dis-ease at the end of the day: I just don’t feel right about what I’ve done or been that day. When God created the world, he spent time at the end of each day reflecting on what he had done and finding a sense of rightness to it. “It was good,” he said. Restedness flows out of a sense that what needed to be done is what got done. God never hit the weekend and said, “Thank me, it’s Friday.”

The Spiritual Dynamics

For a long time, I didn’t understand the spiritual significance of sloth. I thought it was simply a matter of developing better work habits, becoming more motivated, of working harder, or perhaps just working smarter.

A billion-dollar cottage industry — the motivational market — has emerged precisely because we no longer understand the true significance of sloth and hence don’t know how to respond to it. We go from motivational speaker to seminar to book to tape, as if we were basketballs with slow leaks trying to find someone or something to pump us up, to counteract our tendency to deflate. We pay money for people to quote platitudes and cite bad social science research and tell exciting stories that psyche us up to run a little faster, work a little harder, stay a little later.

Not that motivation is bad. I’d rather be motivated than demotivated. But isn’t there something deeper?

The Bible doesn’t really call us to be more motivated or more productive workers. The relevant image in Scripture is fruitfulness. Not busyness. Not even productivity. Fruitfulness.

A godly person, the Bible says, is like a tree planted by rivers of living waters. Trees are not frenzied or frantic. They do not attend seminars on “releasing the redwood within them.” They do not chant slogans: “What the sap can conceive, the branch can achieve.” They do not consume vast amounts of caffeine to keep up their adrenaline.

Trees are unhurried. They are full of activity, though most of it is unseen. Mostly, a tree knows where its nourishment comes from. It is deeply rooted. It does not wander from its source. It is not easily distracted. A tree has learned to abide.

“If you abide in me,” Jesus says, “you will bear much fruit” (John 15:5).

Abiding in Christ is the great antithesis to sloth. Sloth demands no effort but gives no rest. Abiding is effort-filled but is the place of nourishment and renewal. “Take my yoke upon you …” Jesus says (a surprising offer to make to tired people) “and you will find rest for your souls” (Matt. 11:29).

One year in the middle of the Easter season, I found myself lacking the energy to minister effectively or even pray well. I talked about this with my spiritual director, and she suggested that I get up for an hour at night to reflect on the crucifixion and pray. (She had two techniques for waking up at 1:00 a.m. One was to set my alarm clock. The other — designed to let my spouse sleep undisturbed — was to drink three glasses of water before going to bed.)

I had never done anything like that before, and frankly the thought of losing sleep was not appealing. But I was amazed by the uniqueness of praying at night. There was a stillness that is never available during the day. Somehow the reality of another world was much more accessible at an hour when my usual world was so quiet and remote. In the darkness and the eerie silence, I felt as if I was actually “keeping watch” with Jesus. And in keeping watch with him, I found rest for my soul.

The irony of sloth, of course, is that it isn’t even refreshing. You never talk to someone who says, “I vegged out in front of the tv last night from dinner to bedtime, from Dan Rather to David Letterman, and it was such a life-enhancing experience. Today I feel so full of vigor and energy; it’s good to be alive!”

Our society teaches us to oscillate between frenzy and collapse. We commute and cocoon. We have lost the rhythm that develops between abiding and fruitfulness.

Abiding consists of all those activities of body and mind that put me in the place where I can receive life from God, including such things as prayer, sleep, solitude, eating, hobbies, and long conversations. Of course, none of these activities in and of themselves guarantee that I will be abiding. They become abiding when I learn how to meet God in them.

Giving Sloth the Second Degree

To keep sloth at bay, I have learned to ask myself four questions periodically (assuming I’ve made room in my schedule to do this).

1. Has sloth shown up in my life with my family?

For me this is sloth’s first likely hiding place. Sometimes I operate under the delusion that I can get away with channeling my best time and energy to ministry and giving my family what is left over. But I get little warning signs:

A married couple sits in my office. She grew up a PK; she pours out her anguish over how her father spoke so movingly about family life and attending to feelings and right priorities, while life at home was another story. She is still trying to pick up the pieces. I struggle to keep listening. Inside I am asking myself, Is that me? I think I’m on the right track with my kids, but how do I know? Will one of my little girls be in somebody’s office in fifteen years? What will she say about her daddy?

Though the pastoral schedule constantly hammers away at my goal, I want at least half of my best energy to go for my family.

2. Am I spending too much time on urgent tasks?

Stephen Covey, author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, offers a helpful distinction. He notes that work can be placed in one of four quadrants, depending on its degree of urgency and its degree of importance.

Quadrant I is work that is both urgent and important, for instance, sermon preparation: important because it’s one of my critical contributions, urgent because Sunday’s coming!

Quadrant II is work that is important but not urgent, for instance, developing leaders: the church will be crippled if this doesn’t happen, but this task has no natural deadlines as does preaching.

Quadrant III involves tasks that feel urgent but lack importance; answering the telephone usually falls in this category.

Quadrant IV tasks are neither urgent nor important: reading the cartoons in Leadership, unless you find one you can use in the sermon.

One of the keys to effectiveness is finding which tasks lie in quadrant II, because unless I am intentional in my approach to them, they’re likely to go undone. The real danger, Covey points out, is that the human machine is only wired to be able to cope with a certain amount of urgency. If I spend too much time in quadrant I, I’m likely to spend most of the rest of my time in quadrant-IV activities as a way of recovering. I become vulnerable to sloth. Once I’ve identified my primary quadrant-II tasks, I can realign my schedule.

This has helped me eliminate some quadrant-IV activities. I’m currently on a year-long “TV fast.” It started accidentally; I decided during a time of repentance-focused praying to give up tv for a week. I found myself spending more time with my children at night, having leisurely talks with my wife, going to bed earlier and waking up more refreshed. I said to myself, “Why is this penance? This should be celebration; watching tv should be an act of penance!”

3. Am I serving in areas where my giftedness and sense of fulfillment lie?

I want and need to be giving a good portion of my time to tasks that use my gifts — preaching and leadership, for example. These tend to energize me, and they tend to be tasks that are in fact needful. On the other hand, counseling drains me in a hurry. Too much of that, and I find I don’t have the energy or will to give myself in areas where I could really contribute to the kingdom.

You can only push this question so far, though. “That’s not my area of giftedness” can easily become a cop-out for refusing a Spirit-prompted call to servanthood. I’m not sure any of the disciples would have said taking a basin and washing everybody else’s dirty feet fell in their area of giftedness.

And it provides a dangerously spiritual-sounding reason for not working in the nursery: “Sorry, I took the ‘Wagner-Houts Modified Spiritual Gift Inventory’; ‘nursery’ is not in my area of giftedness.” (I keep hoping one of the more radical paraphrases of the New Testament will translate Ephesians 4:11, “And God has appointed some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be nursery workers.…” It would become the pew Bible of choice in every church in America.)

Nonetheless, if I find myself working consistently outside of my giftedness, I need to rearrange my activities.

4. Am I living too much in the future?

Sometimes I get overwhelmed because I look too far ahead. In my first year of preaching regularly I was badly afflicted with pms (premessage syndrome). I was cranky, irritable, and suffered mood swings that became more extreme as Sunday approached. This was compounded by a crowded schedule — in addition to virtually fulltime ministry I had a 25-hour-a-week internship in clinical psychology, and I had to write a dissertation. For an entire year, except for those weeks when I did not preach, I didn’t take a day off.

I found something odd. The more hours I put in, the less productive I became. I would spend hours staring at a blank sheet of paper, thinking of all the sermons I would have to write that year, wondering where all the ideas would come from.

I finally realized that my busy calendar was a bad mistake. I was paralyzed from doing the few things I needed to do today by the many things I needed to do tomorrow.

Psychologist David Burns talks about how irrational this is. Imagine, he writes, that every time you sat down to eat, you thought about all the food you would have to eat during your lifetime. Imagine a huge room with tons of meat, vegetables, Twinkies and Fritos, and thousands of gallons of ice cream — and before you die you’ve got to consume every bite.

“Just the sight of it all makes me sick,” we would say. “This one little meal is a drop in the bucket. There’s no point in eating it.”

The secret is, of course, we eat only one meal at a time. It’s amazing how much we can consume in a lifetime if we eat it one meal at a time.

“Therefore don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has trouble enough of its own.”

Scott Peck says, “Those who are in the relatively more advanced stages of spiritual growth are the very ones most aware of their own laziness. It is the least lazy who know themselves to be sluggish.… The fight against entropy never ends.”

I’m hardly in the advanced stages of spiritual growth, but becoming aware of my sloth has advanced my spiritual growth. I’ve seen sloth for what it is, even in its subtle disguises. And I’ve learned, as Peck notes, that life is a constant choice between comfort and growth.

As for me and my ministry, I’ve chosen growth. And I’ll start on that tomorrow, right after I get through typing that newsletter article.

Copyright © 1994 by Christianity Today

We are not tempted to do bad things as much as we are tempted to try things God has not called us to do.
— Richard Exley

In August of 1976, a jury found the Reverend Charles Blair, pastor of the 6,000-member Calvary Temple in Denver, Colorado, guilty of seventeen counts of fraud and illegal sale of securities. Blair had raised $14 million from about 3,400 investors to finance the church’s ill-fated geriatric center.

Blair was fined $12,750 and placed on five years probation, but he was allowed to remain as pastor of Calvary Temple. Under his leadership the church was able to repay the investors according to a plan approved by the bankruptcy court.

From all reports, Charles Blair is a man of integrity, a conclusion reinforced by his commitment to repay every investor. No evidence suggests he, or his family, benefited in any way from the illegal sale of securities. Though Blair knowingly allowed financially troubled investors to invest in the Life Center, nothing suggests he intended to defraud them.

All of which makes this scenario more troubling: this is not the story of an evil man reaping the wages of sin but the tragic account of a good man whose vision exceeded his judgment.

In reflecting on the testimony about Blair’s financial and religious empire, Gerald H. Quick, one of the twelve jurors who found him guilty, said, “Maybe the Rev. Charles Blair should stick to preaching and stay out of the securities business.… Maybe ambition got in the way of his common sense.”

Was ambition, the drive to succeed, the culprit? Perhaps. Yet without ambition nothing of significance is ever achieved. How can we make ambition our servant rather than our master? Or as one person put it, how can we tame our “drum-major instincts”?

What’s the Source?

In his book, The Man Who Could Do No Wrong, Blair candidly confesses his mistakes and their source. Growing up during the Great Depression left him with a deep-seated self-doubt and a burning desire to succeed. No one would ever again look down on him, he determined, nor would his children ever endure the bitter humiliation that characterized his childhood. Consequently he was ever conscious of his public image. He drove the right kind of car, wore the best suits, and fraternized with the right people.

This inordinate concern for his public image, coupled with his enormous success, made it nearly impossible for him to distinguish between the voice of God and his own subconscious ego needs. While his desire to provide a center for the handicapped and the aged was noble, it was not necessarily birthed by God.

Herein lies the difference between godly and human ambition: godly ambition originates in the heart of the Father and is fueled by a sincere desire to please him; human ambition originates in the heart of people and is driven by their own ego needs.

A classic example of well-intended but misguided human ambition is found in 2 Samuel 7. King David had finally established his throne in Jerusalem and was, at long last, free from military conflict. One day he said to Nathan the prophet, “‘Here I am, living in a palace of cedar, while the ark of God remains in a tent.’ Nathan replied to the king, ‘Whatever you have in mind, go ahead and do it, for the Lord is with you'” (2 Sam. 7:2-3).

Unfortunately neither David nor Nathan had sought the counsel of the Lord. Apparently they did not think it was necessary. Building a temple seemed only logical. And herein lies a great danger to the man or woman of God: we are not tempted to do bad things as much as we are tempted to try things God has not called us to do.

Still, if we are sensitive to the Holy Spirit, the Lord will “check” us before we get in over our heads. That’s what God did for King David. According to 2 Samuel 7:4, the word of the Lord came to Nathan that very night, telling David not to build the temple. Following this divine revelation, Nathan faced that moment dreaded by all advisers to powerful men — to stand in opposition to David’s plan. His initial support of David’s desire only complicated matters.

Had Nathan been more self-serving and less obedient, he might have ignored this word and let David go ahead with his plans. By the same token, had David been more ambitious, he might have resented Nathan’s counsel and rejected it to his own sorrow. He was spared the painful humiliation that befalls so many spiritual leaders who ignore the counsel of wise friends.

Blair admits he dismissed the warning signals, seeing them as obstacles to be overcome by faith. For example, he ignored the concerns expressed by his wife, Betty; they were not one in heart and mind. He said he never submitted his dream to the counsel of others, so he could never say, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28).

Though we can never be absolutely sure a vision we pursue is from God, we can minimize the risk of making a mistake. First, we can practice a ruthless honesty with ourselves, daily admitting our ambition, reminding ourselves that we must not make important decisions without others’ counsel.

Second, we can become skeptical of our motives. I’ve developed the practice of asking myself some hard questions:

1. Have I fully surrendered this desire to the Lord?

2. Is this truly God’s plan or just my own ambition?

3. Am I waiting for the Lord to “open the door” or am I impatiently forcing things to happen?

4. Am I resorting to human methods in an attempt to accomplish God’s plan?

5. Am I attempting this because God has called me to do it or because I am driven to succeed?

Admittedly, these are subjective questions, but with steady attention to our souls, we can grow in our ability to discern our motives. Still, even if I satisfactorily answer these questions, I do not trust my conclusions. Jeremiah said, “The heart is deceitful above all things.… Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). Spiritual guidance, whether it comes in the form of an inner witness or through a personal vision, is simply too subjective to be left to my judgment. I must submit my vision to the scrutiny of godly advisers. Only if it passes muster with them can I move ahead with confidence.

“Nothing is more dangerous,” writes Richard Foster, “than leaders accountable to no one. We all need others who can laugh at our pomposity and prod us into new forms of obedience. Power is just too dangerous a thing for any of us to face alone.”

Called or Driven?

While serving as pastor of Christian Chapel, I oversaw the field education of several seminarians who served our congregation. Well do I remember the day one of them shared a paper on ministry. In it he referred to Jesus as a “driven man,” consumed with his ministry. A truly committed minister, according to this student’s thinking, would be a “driven man,” willing to sacrifice everything on the altar of “his” ministry.

As he read his paper, alarm bells went off in my head. When he finished, he looked up for my response.

“Dave, I don’t think Jesus was a driven man,” I said carefully. “I believe the Scriptures portray him as a called man. A driven man is consumed with his own needs and desires. A called man is committed to the Father. A driven man is ambitious. A called man is obedient.”

The expression on his face suggested this was a new thought for him. He had been reared on slogans like, “Make no small plans here,” and “Nothing succeeds like success!”

I picked a dog-eared copy of Gordon MacDonald’s Ordering Your Private World from my bookcase and read him MacDonald’s list of eight characteristics of driven people:

“1. A driven person is most often gratified only by accomplishment.… He becomes the sort of person who is always reading books and attending seminars that promise to help him to use what time he has even more effectively. Why? So that he can produce more accomplishments, which in turn will provide greater gratification.

“2. A driven person is preoccupied with the symbols of accomplishment.… That means that he will be aware of the symbols of status: titles, office size and location, positions on organizational charts, and special privileges.

“3. A driven person is usually caught in the uncontrolled pursuit of expansion. Driven people like to be a part of something that is getting bigger and more successful.… They rarely have any time to appreciate the achievements to date.

“4. Driven people tend to have a limited regard for integrity.… Shortcuts to success become a way of life. Because the goal is so important, they drift into ethical shabbiness. Driven people become frighteningly pragmatic.

“5. Driven people often possess limited or undeveloped people skills.… There is usually a ‘trail of bodies’ in the wake of the driven person. Of this person we are most likely to find ourselves saying, ‘He is miserable to work with, but he certainly gets things done.’

“6. Driven people tend to be highly competitive.… Thus, he is likely to see others as competitors or as enemies who must be beaten — perhaps even humiliated — in the process.

“7. A driven person often possesses a volcanic force of anger.

“8. Driven people are usually abnormally busy. They are usually too busy for the pursuit of ordinary relationships in marriage, family, or friendship … not to speak of one with God.”

This is not what Jesus was like, nor is it the kind of minister any of us want to become. Yet the ministry is filled with these kind of people. Most, I believe, entered ministry with pure motives, but in the course of time, ambition, often disguised as a godly vision, became their master.

We’ve all read fictitious accounts of people who made a pact with the devil, who in a moment sold him their souls in return for personal success. Reality is seldom like that: we lose our soul day by day, one piece at a time. We don’t realize what is happening until it’s too late. Selfish ambition eats away at us like unseen cancer, until one day we discover we’ve succumbed to the malignancy of ambition.

The Secret of Service

In his book, It Doesn’t Take a Hero, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, writes, “The Army, with its emphasis on rank and medals and efficiency reports, is the easiest institution in the world in which to get consumed with ambition. Some officers spend all their time currying favor and worrying about the next promotion — a miserable way to live. But West Point saved me from that by instilling the ideal of service above self — to do my duty for my country even if it brought no gain at all. It gave me far more than a military career — it gave me a calling.”

Service above self — that’s the secret of taming our ambition.

I learned this early in my ministry. The first congregation I served was small and riddled with petty jealousies. Like many small churches in rural areas, it was comprised of family members — parents and grandparents; children and grandchildren; aunts, uncles, and cousins. They didn’t consider themselves cliquish and seemed anxious for the church to grow. But they were content with the status quo and resented the changes new families brought to the church.

Instead of reaching out to new converts, they were critical and judgmental, not only of new members but also of me. After my first year, things reached a boiling point. They accused me of ruining their church. Before I arrived, divorced people and single parents had not been a part of the church. Now they attended, and the established members didn’t like it. There was talk about circulating a petition demanding my resignation.

At the time, I felt threatened and betrayed. I unwittingly raised the level of hostility; since I felt a personal responsibility to disciple the new converts, I spent most of my time ministering to them. The charter members felt ignored.

When things became desperate, I cried out to the Lord. Over a three-week period, I became convinced God was directing me to conduct an old-fashioned, foot-washing service. It made no sense to me, but my inner promptings seemed to grow stronger by the day.

The following Sunday morning, I announced that the evening service would be for men only. I immediately sensed the congregation grow uneasy. By the time I reached the parsonage after the service, the phone was ringing. It was Brother Hoover, an 84-year-old, long-time member of the church. He informed me that his wife had been attending church with him for more than sixty years and that if she was not welcome in the service, then he wasn’t coming either.

Without giving me a chance to reply, he hung up. I was sick at heart. The Hoovers were one of the few families who weren’t opposing me. Now I had offended them!

But it was too late to change my mind. That evening nine men sat on metal folding chairs, facing each other. They sat quietly, occasionally glancing toward the Communion table where I stood. I started the service by instructing the men to remove their shoes and socks. They looked at each other as if to say, This kid has really lost his mind this time (I was only 21). Still, they did as I requested, and in a matter of minutes two rows of barefooted men faced each other.

While the men were removing their shoes and socks, I took off my coat and rolled up my shirt sleeves. Picking up a basin of water and a towel, I faced them.

“Some of you feel I’ve played favorites,” I said, “that I haven’t ministered to your families as I should. You are justified in your feelings. But I want you to know any time I wronged you, I did it ignorantly, out of inexperience, never maliciously. As a demonstration of my sincere desire to serve you, in any way, great or small, I’m going to wash your feet.”

I knelt before the man nearest me and said, “I apologize for any wrong I have done you, and I ask your forgiveness.” Then I washed his feet. I repeated that act before each man.

During that simple ritual, something almost miraculous took place. By taking a towel and a basin of water, by getting down on my knees, by washing their feet and apologizing, I had disarmed those men. I defused their anger. When I made myself vulnerable, when I placed myself in their hands, at their mercy, I appealed to the love and goodness in their hearts.

That experience also radically changed me. Until that service, I had assumed ministers, especially evangelists, were sanctified celebrities. The church existed to fulfill our agendas. As a result, I noticed every slight, however insignificant. I felt unappreciated and was constantly unhappy.

God’s answer for my ambition was a basin of water and a towel, especially the attitude of loving service to others.

Holy Ambition

For years I found myself trapped in the vicious cycle of competition. My predominant concern was “How can I build a bigger church?” rather than “How can I be a more faithful minister of Jesus Christ?” The determining factor in my decision making was not, “Is this God’s will?” but “How will this look on my resume?”

I sincerely cared about the people God had entrusted to my care, and I endeavored to be a good pastor. But always lurking in the shadows of my soul was my personal ambition.

But I was frustrated because I knew I couldn’t compete. In a system in which a minister’s value was measured by the numbers — baptisms, budget, and buildings — I was outclassed. For the first fourteen years of ministry, I served small churches (under 100 members) in remote rural areas. Nothing I accomplished could compare with the success of city pastors.

In addition, it seemed I was always looking up to see some minister whiz by in the fast lane. His achievements dwarfed mine, making mine seem despairingly insignificant.

I managed to deal with my relative insignificance as long as I remained isolated in my own pastorate. I became troubled, however, whenever I attended a district meeting or a national conference. The featured speakers were always “successful” pastors. In their presence, I felt like a nobody. I often found their achievements intimidating rather than inspiring.

Since most of them were several years my senior, I rationalized that by the time I reached their age I would be equally successful. I was jealous when a classmate or someone younger than me was the featured speaker.

At one General Council of my denomination, a peer of mine was a featured speaker. I had to admit he was committed, gifted, and articulate. Still I picked his message apart while 14,000 worshipers hung on his every word. Inwardly I seethed. The better he preached the more jealous I became.

For weeks afterward, I alternated between anger and depression. Envy was eating a hole in my soul. Jealousy was making me sick. Finally I confessed to God my sinful feelings and my inability to subdue them. I confessed my feelings of failure and inadequacy. Gently the Lord comforted me.

Slowly I learned a new way of determining my self-worth. I didn’t have to measure myself against the achievements of more successful ministers. Instead of the numbers game, over which I had only the slightest control, I learned to base my success on my relationship with Jesus. With God’s help I set new goals — character and spiritual goals. From that day forward, I determined to measure my success only by my obedience to Jesus Christ and my willingness to allow the Holy Spirit to conform me to the image of God’s Son.

For the first time in my life, I felt liberated. The work of the ministry still needed to be done, but now it was the by-product of my relationship with the Lord, an expression of who I was in him, rather than an attempt to prove my worth. I felt content, rather than competitive, and for the first time rejoiced genuinely in the achievements of my peers.

While I served Christian Chapel in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the church experienced significant growth. I began to feel smug. God confronted me by impressing upon my heart this truth: “Richard, if you couldn’t build your self-worth on the size of your congregation when it numbered less than 100 people, you can’t do it now.”

Such an attitude isn’t easy and doesn’t come naturally to me. I constantly battle against selfish ambition. Over and over I must submit myself to the sanctifying work of the Spirit.

I constantly aim to be what God has called me to be; that way I’m assured of accomplishing what God has called me to do. I’m discovering that human ambition, tamed and transformed, can become godly ambition. As we daily submit to the Lord in all things, we will grow in grace until “the things of earth grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.”

Copyright © 1994 by Christianity Today

To truly care for people requires not caring too much about their approval or disapproval.
— John Ortberg

Mayor Richard J. Daley, who was as celebrated in Chicago for his malapropisms as for his ability to get votes out of corpses, once said of his opponents, “They have vilified me, they have crucified me, yes, they have even criticized me.”

His honor could have been speaking for those of us in ministry. Whether it’s politics or the pastorate, not everyone will believe we’re wonderful.

Criticism, especially “friendly fire,” can kill our motivation and energy. Generally we pastors have a fairly high need to be liked. While not a bad thing, the need for strokes can set us up to have difficulty dealing with criticism.

But if the actions of Jesus and the prophets are any indication, then giving effective spiritual leadership will surely mean doing things that displease the very people whose approval we desire. For most of us, it’s only a matter of time (and usually not very much time) before the people we’re supposed to serve have vilified, crucified, or even criticized us.

Our strong reaction to such criticism reveals, I believe, a serious addiction problem. It has nothing to do with substance abuse or chemical dependency. It is, rather, a craving for approval.

Diagnosis

Its primary symptom is the tendency to confuse my “performance in ministry” with my worth as a person, to seek the kind of approval from people that can only satisfy when it comes from God.

This addiction has been around at least as long as the church. Paul thunders against it to the Galatians: “Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.”

Even more disturbing is the diagnosis from John about people who were blocked from faith because of this addiction: “They loved praise from men more than praise from God.”

Addiction shows up in odd ways and at unwelcome times.

It was four o’clock in the morning. I lay awake. I had recently left a secure job with a real church to plant a new one, with no buildings, no offices, no secretaries, no handbell choirs, no professional scaffolding at all, and only six weeks worth of expenses (including my salary) in the bank. I do some of my best worrying at 4:00 a.m.

Something disturbs me about this particular concern, however. It occurs to me that a good chunk of my apprehension over this venture is not just that if we don’t succeed, many people will not meet God, although that’s part of it. My anxiety is not just over the financial needs of a family with three small, ravenous children; if worse comes to worse I can fall back on a degree in psychology. (There will always be enough rich, neurotic people to counsel.)

Part of the fear nagging at my heart — a bigger part than I want to admit — is that if the church doesn’t succeed, I won’t look successful.

Recognition, paradoxically, is the first step towards liberation. At least when I become aware of my need to appear successful, I can say, “I refuse to make decisions or hold back on risks based on something as stupid as my need to impress people who most likely are not even thinking about me anyway. I refuse to allow the approval or disapproval of others to determine my worth as a person.”

But recognition doesn’t make it go away.

The Voices Within

When I get up to speak on Sunday morning, the congregation hears my voice, but I hear another, more confusing voice in my head. It’s also my voice. Sometimes it shouts, Thus saith the Lord! But at other times, more often than I care to admit, the voice is less prophetic.

What will they think of me? the voice wonders.

Sometimes I feel less like the prophet Amos and more like Sally Field at the Academy Awards. I find myself desperate to be able to say as she did when she’d won her second Oscar: “You like me! You really like me!”

I do not like this Sally Field voice. I wish I had more of a Rhett Butler voice and could greet evaluations at the door with, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a … rip.”

When Jesus spoke, he was free from the need to create an impression, free to speak the truth in love. But the voice within me is not free. It is driven by ego and pride. It is ugly to me, and I’d turn it off if I could, but turning it off proves not to be so simple. Where does this voice come from?

In Lake Wobegon Days, Garrison Keillor writes about growing up without praise under the theory that compliments cause swelled heads. But the years of emotional malnourishment, far from weaning him away from the need for approval, instead created an insatiable appetite for it:

“Under this thin veneer of modesty lies a monster of greed. I drive away faint praise, beating my little chest, waiting to be named Sun-God, King of America, Idol of Millions, Bringer of Fire, The Great Haji, Thun-Dar the Boy Giant. I don’t want to say, ‘Thanks, glad you liked it.’ I want to say, ‘Rise, my people. Remove your faces from the carpet, stand, look me in the face.'”

This, however, would make for a rather awkward benediction.

Approval and Anger

Sociologist George Herbert Meade wrote about the “generalized other,” the mental representation we carry inside of that group by whose judgment we measure our success or failure. Our sense of esteem and worth is largely wrapped up in their appraisal of our work.

Your generalized other is a composite of all the Siskels and Eberts in your life whose thumbs up or thumbs down carries emotional weight. This may include parents, seminary professors, key lay leaders, or other pastors. My guess is that most of us in ministry have the same set of ego issues as people in any other profession. We just have a different way of keeping score.

When my identity is wrapped up in whether or not I am perceived as successful, I am set up for the approval addiction, for it is my very sense of self that is on the line.

“Who am I?” Henri Nouwen asks. “I am the one who is liked, praised, admired, disliked, hated, or despised. Whether I am a pianist, a businessman, or a minister, what matters is how I am perceived by my world.”

And when my drug of choice is withheld, I respond with the same anger as any other addict: Don’t these people know I have the best interests of the church at heart? Don’t they know I could have gone into some other profession and made lots more money? It’s as if I’m entitled to universal trust and consideration.

Wherever it comes from, whenever my craving for approval makes itself known, I’d better pay attention.

One Sunday morning, as I was greeting people at the door, a visitor handed me his card.

“I usually attend Hollywood Presbyterian,” he said, “but we’re visiting here today. Give me a call sometime.”

I looked down at his card — Speech Instructor.

Hollywood Presbyterian is the home of Lloyd Ogilvie. Lloyd Ogilvie is perfect. His hair is perfect, his robe is perfect, his smile is perfect, but above all, his voice is perfect. Deep as the ocean, rich and resonant, Lloyd Ogilvie sounds like what I expect God sounds like on a really good day.

Next to his voice, mine sounds like I’m in perpetual adolescence. It’s difficult to feel prophetic when you hear yourself chirping like Mickey Mouse, “Okay, now, let’s repent.”

When I catch myself comparing myself to others or thinking, I could be happy if only I had what they have, then I know I need to withdraw for a while and listen for another voice. Away from the winds, earthquakes, and fires of human recognition, I can again hear the still, small voice, posing the question it always asks of selfabsorbed ministers: What are you doing here?

I reply by whining about some of my Ahabs and Jezebels. And the voice gently reminds me, as it has reminded thousands of Elijahs before me, that I am only a small part of a much larger movement, and at the end of the day there is only one king whose approval will matter.

The voice also whispers, Do not despise your place, your gifts, your voice, for you cannot have another’s, and it would not fulfill you if you could.

Celebrating Solitude

To truly care for people requires not caring too much about their approval or disapproval. Otherwise the temptation to give their preferences too much emotional weight is almost inevitable.

To lead people effectively, without being damaged in the process, requires regular withdrawal from the very people I’m trying to lead.

Thomas Merton wrote that the desert fathers considered society to be a shipwreck from which all individuals must swim for their lives. The very pecking orders and ladders of success I naturally find myself climbing they fled in horror.

In solitude I see that career successes and failures, which look so huge in my day-to-day life, take on a much smaller look from an eternal perspective. (“If you can meet with triumph and disaster,” Kipling wrote, “treat those two impostors both the same.”) And the development of my soul, which I can lose sight of altogether in my routine strivings, is revealed as the one great task of my life.

Approval addiction involves some irrational thought processes, which solitude helps clear. Psychiatrist David Burns notes it is not another person’s approval or compliment that makes me feel good, it is my belief that there is validity to the compliment.

Suppose you were to visit a psychiatric ward, he imagines, and a patient approaches you: “You are wonderful. I had a vision from God. He told me the thirteenth person to walk through the door would be the Special Messenger. You are the thirteenth, so I know you are God’s Chosen One, the Prince of Peace, the Holy of Holies. Let me kiss your shoe.”

Most likely your self-esteem-o-meter would not rise. Why not? Because between other people’s approval and your pleasure in it is your assessment of the validity of their approval.

You are not the passive victim of others’ opinions. In fact, their opinions are powerless until you validate them. No one’s approval will affect me unless I grant it credibility and status. The same holds true for disapproval.

Several years back, at a previous church, I used to get regular complaints from a parishioner about all aspects of the service, mostly that the music was too loud. When he couldn’t get satisfaction from me, he hounded other staff and board members.

One afternoon my secretary informed me that I had a visitor from osha, the federal watchdog agency. It turned out this same parishioner, as a last resort, asked for government assistance to get the sound system turned down on Sunday mornings. By law, osha was required to send someone out.

“Can you imagine the kind of ridicule I’ve taken all week,” the osha representative said, apologetically, “with people knowing I’m going out to bust a church?”

Though dramatically stated and strongly disapproving, these complaints didn’t bother me at all. They originated from a character who lived on the fringe, as far as I was concerned.

I realized from this incident that no one’s disapproval can emotionally affect me without my authorization. For me to allow disapproval to subtract from my sense of worth as a human being is both irrational and destructive.

Getting Guidance

In addition to solitude, I find it helpful to have another person or two to whom I regularly go for guidance on these issues.

Some time ago, I heard from an attender that our church doesn’t talk enough about sin.

“Can you imagine that?” I said later to one of my spiritual guides in my non-defensive, emotionally open way. “What he really wants is a sermon series promoting the legalistic, superficial, developmentally arrested approach to morality that will condemn outsiders and reinforce his own self-righteous smugness!”

I waited for my friend to agree with me that this guy had obviously fixated at Kohlberg’s lowest stage of moral development (preconventional level — heteronomous morality).

Instead he asked me two pointed questions:

“Well, do you preach about sin enough?”

Then, after I squirmed, he added, “And what is this need you have for everybody to agree with everything you do?”

He forced me to reexamine my own understanding of sin and to proclaim it in a clearer way. He also reminded me that ministry is not about getting people to like me.

Having a few such people in my life helps me answer a practical question: How do I know when I need to respond to criticism and disapproval? What would suggest that more is at stake than whether a parishioner likes or dislikes me?

To Cope or Confront?

A certain amount of discontent is inevitable, and probably even healthy, in any group. Not every infection calls for a massive dose of penicillin. Many of the personal hits a pastor takes will be absorbed in the natural flow of events.

But at least two types of situations call for criticism to be confronted and refuted.

One is if the criticism affects the health of the body of Christ.

I have a friend who pastors with as much sensitivity and integrity as anyone I know. Because of several changes going on in the church, however, he was accused of (among other things) being a megalomaniac. This has about as much validity as charging Mr. Rodgers with inciting violence.

This criticism, however, went far beyond what his psyche could tolerate. It struck directly at his ability to serve the church effectively; it threatened the church’s ability to choose and follow its leaders. Because it affected the health of the church, this attack had to be handled head on.

The other time I probably need to respond directly to criticism is when the criticism keeps nagging away at me.

At one point early in my ministry, we had a particularly difficult egr (“extra-grace required,” as Carl George calls them) person on the governing board. When his term finally expired, I breathed a prayer of thanks.

Sometime later I was engaged in what was supposed to be an extended time of prayer, when I realized I was deep into an anger fantasy involving this former board member. In my anger fantasies, I never torture my opponents too brutally, because then I would feel guilty (and that would rob my sense of revenge of its purity). Usually in my fantasies, whomever I’m angry at suddenly realizes with painful, shame-ridden clarity the massive, unfair hurt they’ve inflicted on me and my family.

“I hope you’re satisfied with what you’ve done,” I always say, pouring hot coals upon their too-late-repentant heads until they feel like scum.

“I hope when you go home and look in the mirror tonight you can live with what you see.”

It occurred to me that I might still be angry with this man. I realized then I needed to meet with him and discuss it, even if all the issues didn’t get resolved (they didn’t).

The Discipline of Secrecy

We have yet another weapon in the battle against the approval addiction: the discipline of secrecy.

“Be careful not to practice your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men to be seen by them,” Jesus warned. “If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.”

His particular examples relate to financial contributions, fasting, and prayer, but they reflect a deep insight into all of human nature. I used to think Jesus meant God had a reward stored up for me in heaven, but if my motives were self-serving, I would lose it. What he’s really talking about, however, is losing the intrinsic power of these good deeds to help me enter the life of the kingdom now. He was talking to people who were addicted to having their righteousness admired — so addicted, it was impossible for them to enjoy righteousness for its own sake.

If I give my money away, I have less opportunity to become a slave to it, and I can experience true freedom and joy. If I choose to impress people by making sure they know about my generosity, however, the nature of my action changes. I settle for the narcotic of approval, and instead of becoming a little more free, I become a little more enslaved.

On one particularly busy morning at our house, I voluntarily emptied the dishwasher before my wife got up, even though it wasn’t in my job description. That evening, when she still hadn’t commented on it, I tactfully commented on how fortunate she was to have such a thoughtful husband.

At this point, the fundamental character of what I had done was altered. Instead of one tiny action helping me become more like Christ, more like a servant without feeling I had done something extraordinary, it became one more item on a quid pro quo checklist.

Jesus says to do good things without telling anybody about it. Eventually we’ll find we lose the need to let people know. And we’ll also find we can do good because it really is the most liberating, joyful way to live.

I try to implement this discipline of secrecy regularly in my own life. If I’m going to a meeting where there will be people I perceive as important (my “generalized others”), I try ahead of time to identify the things I’ll be tempted to say to impress them, and I declare those topics off limits. (I don’t get carried away with it, though. You notice this article didn’t get published anonymously.)

Weaning myself from the approval of others is a lifetime project. Its vise-like grip on my soul can be broken, however, enabling me, when vilified, crucified, and even criticized, to rest in the approval of the One I serve.

Copyright © 1994 by Christianity Today