Dangers and Delights of Pastoral Ministry

A brief prayer:

Father, what a privilege it is to be gathered in this way, to be able to open your Word and to pay attention to its truth. And in this rather strange setup and being asked to do stuff that is biographical in many ways, I pray that our eyes might be fastened on Christ. I pray that what we don’t know you’ll teach us, that what we don’t have you’ll give us, and what we are not that you will make us. For your Son’s sake. Amen.

All right. Well, what I want to do is mention one or two of what we might refer to as the delights of pastoral ministry. I retired from the church that I’ve been serving for the last forty-two years on the eighth of June, and I’m now in a strange transitional period, in uncharted waters. Prior to that, as you perhaps know, I was eight years in Scotland, which is where I’m from. And I am grateful to God for every evidence of his kindness to me.

Let me just make some general statements. I’m not going to expand on them, but I want to make sure that this is the platform from which I mention these other things.

First of all: the conviction that there is no ideal place to serve God except the place he sets you down—that there is no ideal place to serve God. And in pastoral ministry, it’s not uncommon, I’ve discovered over these forty-two years—especially being called, of all places, to Cleveland, Ohio—to discover that there are a number of people in fairer parts of the United States who have actually come to the conviction that there is an ideal place to serve God. It has to do with how much sunshine there is, access to local golf courses, and basically anywhere other than Cleveland, Ohio.

I arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, in ’83, shortly after the then-mayor had bankrupted the city and after the city had become known for, amongst other things, having the Cuyahoga River able to be set on fire. Where else is the dreadful materials in the river of such substance that you can actually set the river on fire? And it was to this wonderful place that God brought me, so that I would be able to say to you, “There is no ideal place to serve God except the place he sets you down.”

The second thing to say is that it is our calling to preach to the congregation that God has given us, not to preach to the congregation that we wish God had given us. We preach to the one that God has called us to. William Barclay, whose theology should always be tempered significantly, in his little books on the “Plain Man’s” guide to the Gospels… William Barclay was a very successful Presbyterian minister, a Greek scholar, a teacher at Glasgow University. And in his first charge he had, down the river towards Greenock, I think it was, outside of Glasgow, he had launched into his local congregation as someone who was erudite as a scholar and who was very capable of the languages and articulate in relationship to the background and history of the material that he was dealing with. And he was just a young man. And one day, as he walked down the street, he encountered a lady who had been in the congregation for some time. And she noticed it was her new minister, Dr. William Barclay. And she said to him, “Dr. Barclay, we all like you, and you’re a fine man, but we cannae understand a word you’re saying.” (“We don’t know what you’re talking about.”) Because he went from the academy to a very basic congregation, and he started to preach to the congregation that he wished he had. And it was then that he began to write the “Plain Man’s” guide to the Gospels and so on—so that he notched it down and did what, of course, we need to do.

The third thing I want to say by way of basic premise is that I am of the opinion that length of service in any one place is clearly not necessarily tied to any significant usefulness—as if somehow or another we would say, “If you stay there for a long time, it must be because of this or this.” I said to somebody recently—in fact, I think I said it to Kenan this morning—after forty-two years in Cleveland, I don’t know whether I should have been criticized for a lack of initiative or commended for sticking with it for as long as I did. But the fact is that many men have exercised effective and powerful ministries in much shorter periods of time than what I’ve had the privilege of enjoying. And I don’t want to create that impression at all.

It is our calling to preach to the congregation that God has given us, not to preach to the congregation that we wish God had given us.

Many years ago, it was Jim Boice who said to me, “You know, young men tend to overestimate what they can accomplish in one year and underestimate what they’re able to accomplish in five years.” And there is something about youthfulness that wants constantly to be chasing on and getting on. And it’s part of the privilege of youth, but it needs to be tempered by wisdom as well.

In mentioning that… And I’m not big on research—I mean, the people who tell me that “This is what is happening, because we researched it.” But the researchers—whoever these people are—have determined that the greatest period of usefulness for a person in pastoral ministry is between year five and year fourteen. You can do your own homework in relationship to that time frame. But the same researchers have also discovered that the average length of a pastorate in the United States of America is [five] years![1] So just when you were about to start your period of usefulness, you go off to find the ideal church somewhere else.

Foundationally, too, I start from the conviction that the tiller that moves the ship of the church through the water is the Word of God itself; that John Owen pointed us in the right direction when he wrote his little piece on the effective performance of our primary pastoral duty—namely, the faithful exposition and application of the Word of God itself.[2] And in that context, we believe ourselves, I take it, to be where we are as a result of the call and initiative of God. And it is by his enabling that we are able, in any sense, to be diligent.

The Delights of Ministry

With all that said, a word or two concerning delights. And this is so straightforward. Many of you have been around as long as me or longer than me, so I’m not here to surprise you with anything but perhaps just to jog a thought or encourage one another in some way.

The first delight is the delight of being made a minister of the gospel. You remember Martyn Lloyd-Jones, when he begins his ministry—Lloyd-Jones, who was the assistant to Lord Horder, who was the physician to the royal family out of St. Thomas’s in London—and when he was called to the place in Sandfields, into his native Wales, he had only ever given a talk maybe twelve times. He was not trained in theology except by his own reading. And his wife said to him, “How do you know that you can preach?” He said, “I can preach to myself. And if I preach to myself, then out of that which I preach to myself, I can preach to others.”[3] And he then, on that occasion, affirmed the fact, from his perspective, that “the [task] of preaching is the highest and … greatest and … most glorious calling to which anyone can be … called”[4] in all the world.

Now, this was not because he flunked out of school at the age of fifteen, and he was working on a building site. He was eminent as a doctor, and his future lay beautiful before him. And out of that, God grabs ahold of him and puts him in the position that was not from any sense regarded as ideal. The church secretary who wrote to him confirming the call told him that “you will be coming to a place where prostitution and drunkenness and vile strife of all kinds pervades the community.”[5] And into that he goes and does what God called him to do.

So that’s the delight. It’s the privilege—the privilege of getting up in the morning and being able to read your Bible not because you have to but because you want to, to be able to pause and have a coffee and say to yourself, “Can you believe this!” People give you… They support you! They don’t pay you for reading your Bible. And they don’t pay us for preaching. They could never pay us enough, and they could never pay us too little. They give support to us so that we can fulfill a high and holy calling in being the servants of the Word. And with that privilege comes the delight of seeing God do what only God does—that is, open blind eyes and soften hard hearts.

The delight, the peculiar delight—it may come soon. It may be like to the missionary who’s your rope guy. His name’s gone from me at the moment. Carey! Yeah, Carey. Seven years! Seven years before he is aware of the fact that God, through his faithfulness, has opened the eyes of some who were blind, seeing them come to faith in Jesus, and then seeing them beginning to grasp the nature of the gospel—the delight of understanding that somehow or another, God has turned the lights on.

I don’t know how it is here, because I haven’t been here much. But back in our place, the hardest thing is to get men to sing. To sing! And… Which is very different from the North of Ireland, or Scotland, or, actually, the British Isles. And part of that is because the culture of the British Isles for men is a singing culture. If you are wise enough to get the Premier League (soccer) on your television, then you will have been quite struck, amongst other things—some of you say, “By the dreadful, boring unfolding of the game”; I know you feel that—but you will be struck by the fact of the singing. What are these fellows singing about? And who started the singing? Well, somebody started it, but nobody knows who started it. Where did it come from? It came from inside. They sing at the football. They sing in the pub. And so when they’re converted, they sing in the church.

But American men don’t sing. At basketball games, I’ve never heard them singing. In the baseball, there’s somebody—an unknown person—who’s playing an organ somewhere. I’ve never seen the organist. And it goes deedle-dee-dee-dee-dee, and then there’s a big sign comes up, and it says, “Charge!” And everybody’s supposed to put their hot dog down and shout, “Charge!” So if the person has been nurtured in that way, and he comes into the congregation, he doesn’t come in as a singer. No, he comes in as a change jingler. He has change in his pocket. And only God knows that he’s actually excited as he does a little jingle and he jingles along.

I have in mind one particular individual. He was an Ivy League guy, presently a retired lawyer, a military man from the military school. And he told me on a number of occasions, “I hate the music here.”

I said, “Well, thank you for sharing. That’s always good to know.”

And he said, “I don’t like it at all.”

Well, of course, God hadn’t opened his eyes or softened his heart. And even when he did, he was clearly a jingler. He was a jingler. And I don’t know what Sunday night it was when I looked out. I said, “Oh! Oh! Look at this! He sings! He sings!”

“And when I think that God, his Son not sparing … then sings my soul…”[6] It’s one of the delights: a singing congregation.

Let me just put in a word for those who think they’re worship leaders: You’re not a worship leader. You can be a choir leader. You can be a song leader. But you don’t lead the worship. Jesus is the leitourgos. Jesus is the worship leader. Jesus is the one who stands in the assembly of the congregation and leads his people in praise. And, of course, as we know, Jesus is the preacher.

Jesus is the worship leader. Jesus is the one who stands in the assembly of the congregation and leads his people in praise.

What else do I have down here?

Oh! One of the delights as well is being able to stay long enough to outlive the detractors—you know, the people who, for whatever reasons, multiple reasons, have decided that it is time for them to take their proverbial baseball bat and go and find another diamond somewhere else that they can play.

I encountered this fairly early on in the forty-two years, and I figured something out. I realized that this might be the reason why pastors stay about four years before they start getting useful. And so I told the congregation—as kindly as I could, I hope—I told them, “I’ve got a new plan: I’m not leaving. If you want to leave, you leave. But I’m staying. Okay? Just so you know.” They looked at me like I had a horn growing out of my head—like, “What are you talking about?” Well, it had to be the occasion when something happened, and then the people left. And my wife said, “You should be very worried about this.” I said, “No, no. No, no.” I said, “Leave them alone, and they’ll come home, dragging their tails behind them.”

And one of the delights of forty-two years in ministry is to… I could actually bring people up here, and they could give their testimony.

“So why did you leave in ’86?”

“The youth ministry.”

“Why did you leave?”

“I didn’t like the choir person.”

“When did you go?”

“’91.”

“How come you’re back? How come you’re back?”

Because the Word of God does the work of God by the Spirit of God in the people of God. That’s why I read Nehemiah! We had a lady in the church called Ann. She’s gone on to glory now. She must be singing the song of the redeemed. But she did not like the music in our church either. And so she would write these amazing notes to me. And I would write back to her, “Dear Ann: You’re a wild woman.” So she would write these things. And on one occasion, she actually got under my skin a little bit. And so I employed the Nehemiah 6:8 response—which, I offer it to you as something just to keep as a possibility but not to use with regularity. So it goes like this: “Dear Ann: Nehemiah 6:8. Your pastor and friend, Alistair.” Then she has to go and look up Nehemiah 6:8, which reads, “Nothing like what you [say] is happening; you are just making it up out of your head.”[7] Say, “Well, I don’t know how you’ve managed to last as long as you say.”

But it’s in that context that the delight of a long-term ministry is in part because our people get to know us. They know if it was one of your good ones, or your average ones, or your lousy ones, or whatever it was. But because we’re all in this together, looking in the same direction and searching in the Scriptures, then we can handle this together. Because the church family, in my experience—and I’m… It’s not made up of a bunch of people that I want to go on vacation with.[8] You say, “Oh, you don’t like your congregation?” I love my congregation. But I don’t want to go on vacation with them! And I’ve heard a number of them say the feeling is absolutely mutual.

Because we’re all—you know, building the church is like building with bananas.[9] You know, we’re all funny shapes. Some are, you know, green, and some are all …. And that’s the whole thing. And thinking about singing, you know, we long ago gave up the Bill Gaither song “I’m so glad that you’re part of the family of God,”[10] you know? Yes, we’d never sung that. We changed it to “I’m surprised that you’re part of the family of God.” And we all ought to be surprised that we’re part of the family of God.

You know, in saying this, it raises the question that is not a question once solved. It’s a recurring question: Do you want to be liked, or do you want to lead? Now, that doesn’t mean that if you lead, you will be immediately unliked, but it’s asking the motivating question: What is it that I’m looking for here? Do I want simply affirmation, or do I want to do the harder task of leading the people of God?

Margaret Thatcher, who’s long in the distance now, on one occasion, in addressing her colleagues, especially in relationship to the European Union, she said, “If you just set out to be liked, you’d be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.”

That, then, means that we have the delight of not simply sharing the Word but sharing ourselves with them—that our children… And our children were ten months, two years, and four when we began the adventure. Well, do the math. Add forty-two. My son is forty-seven, and so on. We have lived our very selves with these people, with the congregation. They know the struggles. They know the challenges. We haven’t tried to pretend to be what we’re not or gild the lily in any way at all. And in that open vulnerability… And I’m not talking about “naked preaching.” I’m not talking about standing up and trying to explain to people that, you know, you’re really not this, or you’re not that. That’s got too much Uriah Heep to it than to have any value at all. But they know. They know what it is like when we are concerned about these things, when we deal with the loss of loved ones, that—the very reality of the fact that we are followers of Jesus, that we are learning from the one who knows the answers.

The delight, then, of marrying the children of the parents that you married, of seeing a young man in one of the church plants as the pastor and realizing that I held that baby in my arms on the occasion of his dedication. The peculiar delight of 1 John—or maybe second, actually—of seeing our children walking in the truth.[11] The only way that we see them walking in the truth is if we’re walking in the truth with them.

The companionship of family life in a church is fabulous. People have asked me since June 8, “How is it going?”

I said, “I’m sad.”

“Why are you sad?”

Because I miss my congregation. I miss them. I know where they sit. I know if they’re jinglers. I know when they become singers. It’s a peculiar privilege.

The Dangers of Ministry

Let me just go to a couple of dangers, if you don’t mind. Are we okay time-wise, Kenan? I’ve gone on a long time here, I think.

What about the danger of just despondency? I was asked last night if I’d been through an arid period of spiritual life, and I don’t think I gave a very good answer to it. But I thought about it during the night. And I thought: Well, my wife grew very accustomed to me coming home after the Sunday evening service. I always come in through the garage. I take my shoes off, because my father told me to put shoe trees in them—not these miserable things, but normal shoes. And I put my shoe trees in them, put them in the cupboard, and say with horrible regularity, “Honey, tomorrow morning, first thing, I’m going to go and see if I can get a proper job.” And she used to say, “Oh, come on. It wasn’t that bad of a Sunday.” But as time went by, she would just say something Christian, like, “Oh, shut up!”

Because the longer I got into it, the possibility of getting another job is impossible. On one occasion, I came back to the airport, and I saw there was an opportunity to become a security guard at the airport. And I said, “Well, I could do that. I mean, that’s at least a step up from Home Depot, for crying out loud.” And then I looked, and I said, “No! Threshold is, you know, anybody under the age of fifty. I can’t even get a job doing that. I guess I’m stuck”—wonderfully stuck, but aware of our own finitude, aware of our own perplexities, aware of our own sins, aware of our own pride, aware of our own proneness to self-pity, which is as useless an emotion as is homesickness. Despondency.

Laziness. Laziness. I know there’s a lot of books out there about poor souls who’ve “burned out” in the ministry. I haven’t seen any smoking souls anywhere for a long time. But there are a number of guys who are going to rust out in the ministry if they’re not careful.

And I don’t want to be unkind to you younger fellows who are here, but as far as I’m concerned, sitting around in Starbucks with a laptop at eleven o’clock in the morning is not actually what I call an investment in pastoral ministry. And many of these younger men have succumbed to the notion that they might be able, by one big step, to get to where some of us, as older men, have come by bypassing all the other bits and pieces that we had to go through.[12] Laziness—physical laziness, intellectual laziness (not reading widely, not broadening the panorama out of which we come to the text of Scripture), spiritually lazy—is a danger. Because who monitors you? Who does? God does. Yeah.

Misplaced affections—the danger of misplaced affections. If you’re doing M’Cheyne, you know that you read in part this morning Genesis 39. And it’s there right in front of our face, isn’t it? Speaking to men just for a moment, I guess—although the issue is the same both sides of the gender equation. She said to him, “Hey, you’re in charge of everything here, Joseph! Why don’t you just come and lie with me?” “How could I do such a thing,” he said—“sin against God?”[13]

I would… I know… I’ll just say this in this way: I would rather the women in my church thought that I was a hard-hearted rascal than that I was Mr. Hugger 2026. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,”[14] but I would rather you thought I was cold and indifferent than you thought that I held your gaze for that moment longer which is the province only of a lover.

The danger of misplaced affection—as it relates to sexuality, as it relates to finance, as it relates to the whole thing. “What [am I] living for? Two-roomed apartment on the second floor.”[15] That’s an old line from the song. “What am I living for?” Living for Christ, I take it.

A widening gap between life and doctrine. That’s what Paul says: “Watch your life and [your] doctrine.”[16] As the gap, it gets greater, the danger is before us.

And when that gap gets greater, there is the accompanying danger of prayerlessness. Prayerlessness—not that we don’t pray, but prayerlessness—and the accompanying reality that will follow from it, which would be a form of spiritual—what do you call it?—arteriosclerosis, a hardening of the arteries. Suddenly… Again, I think this is John Owen. He says, “A man may preach every day in the week, and not have his heart engaged once.”[17] It’s a sobering statement from Owen, isn’t it? Danger!

The danger of theological contamination. There’s only so many books you can read. Don’t read stupid books! That’s what I say. I mean, you know the thesis; it’s on the back: that this guy believes that God doesn’t know everything. Why do you need to read a book by a fellow who doesn’t understand the godness of God? And if it’s a sort of trendy idea… Uncertainty is big now. Certainty—you’ve got to be careful if people are certain. And so, I determined long ago that somebody else can tell me what it says, and I’ll just move on from there. ’Cause I don’t want to be contaminated by people whose works I may have admired in the past and yet who have deviated from course.

The flip side of that, of course, is the danger of becoming like those two old guys on the Muppets, Statler and Waldorf. And, I mean, as far as I can tell, do they ever actually say anything, those fellows? It’s like [imitates grumbling]. So what was that about? Well, they’re just two old guys that sit in the balcony and complain about everything: “This is wrong. That’s wrong.” As if, somehow or another, we’ve been called to a ministry of condemnation rather than to be commissioned into the warfare of the gospel itself!

And I don’t know what you want to put on your baseball hat. What, do you want to put a big R on it for “Reformed”? Do you want to put a big C on it for “Charismatic”? Or you want to put whatever you want to put on it—a big B, or a big SB, or whatever it might be? And if you’re not careful, you end up in a situation where you have a mentality that goes, “Us four, no more, shut the door.” In other words, “Look at what’s going on down there!” Nobody really knows. Nobody understands. It’s the Elijah syndrome, really, in many ways: “There’s only one person left, and that’s me.”[18] You can hear my wife saying again, “Oh, shut up!” Right?

Actually, we should just have said, “Dangers: pride.” In forty-two years living in the land of the brave and the home of the free, every single pastoral declension that has become public to us may be traced to the same root. It’s the root of pride. It is the mentality that when I’ve preached it, I have obeyed it, I have lived it. It is the gap that exists.

And this again is where if you are just moving around, and you don’t have a context, a community environment where people know who you are, what you are, where you go, what you do, then you become phenomenally vulnerable. I even say that to you standing here in Memphis, having spent the night in the “Hammons-Somethings by Hilton,” with two televisions. One of them said, “Welcome, Becca.” So I knew I had a problem immediately. Apparently, some well-meaning lady here booked my hotel room. And then I started to look under the bed, see if anybody was in there. Where is Becca?

Every single pastoral declension that has become public to us may be traced to the same root. It’s the root of pride. It is the mentality that when I’ve preached it, I have obeyed it.

Anyway… No, here’s the thing: We have to know our own souls, don’t we? We got to guard against “I’ve got this covered. I got this covered.”

I was preaching with a fellow. You’ll know his name—ex-Campus Crusade guy. His son’s in ministry too. His name escapes me for the moment. And he was preaching. I was sitting out in the pew. And he said, “I’m going to tell you this: Every one of us in here is just one half-step away from stupid.” “Half-step away from stupid.” Joseph was half-step away from stupid. So was David. What of us? Right?

Because we have to be reminded of the fact (and someone will do it for us if we don’t do it for ourselves) that on our best day—on our best day—we’re “unprofitable servants”;[19] that we all have feet of clay;, that we’re all sinners saved by grace; that we’re all working out our own salvation with fear and trembling; that the Evil One, it seems to me, only has a couple of ways to go at us. One is to either inflate our ego—so the devil comes and tells you, “You’re really good,” gives you a fat head—or he comes and tells you, “You’re the worst preacher that ever walked the streets of Tennessee,” and gives you a pinhead. And that’s why every pastor needs a wife, if for no other reason: to keep him humble.

You come back from Memphis: “So how was Memphis?”

“Well, it was a nice group and everything.”

“Mmm.” She just goes for a knitting needle. Goes, “Mmm.”

I said, “What are you doing?”

She said, “I’m just deflating your gargantuan cranium so that you will be able to put your head on our normal-sized pillow.” Faithful are the wounds of a wife.[20]

Isaiah 66:2: “This is the one to whom I will look,” says the Lord: “he,” or she, “who is humble … contrite in spirit … trembles at my word.”

The guy who preceded Lloyd-Jones at Westminster Chapel was once asked, “Do you get nervous when you speak?”

“Oh, yes,” he says, “I have butterflies in my tummy always.”

The person said to him—said, “When do you think you will ever stop speaking?”

“When I no longer have butterflies in my stomach.”

---

[1] “A Profile of Protestant Pastors in Anticipation of ‘Pastor Appreciation Month,’” Barna, September 25, 2001, https://www.barna.com/research/a-profile-of-protestant-pastors-in-anticipation-of-pastor-appreciation-month/.

[2] “The Duty of a Pastor,” sermon 5 in Thirteen Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, in The Works of John Owen, ed. Thomas Russell (London: Richard Baynes, 1826), 17:61.

[3] Iain H. Murray, David Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years, 1899–1939 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1982), 108. Paraphrased.

[4] D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1971), 9.

[5] E. T. Rees, quoted in Murray, David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, 118. Paraphrased.

[6] Carl Boberg, trans. Stuart Keen Hine, “How Great Thou Art” (1885, 1949).

[7] Nehemiah 6:8 (NIV).

[8] Christopher Ash, Teaching Romans, vol. 2, Unlocking Romans 9–16 for the Bible Teacher (Fearn, Scotland: Christian Focus, 2009), 163.

[9] Derek Copley and Nancy Copley, Building with Bananas: People Problems in the Church (Exeter: Paternoster, 1978).

[10] Gloria Gaither and William J. Gaither, “The Family of God” (1970). Lyrics lightly altered.

[11] See 2 John 4.

[12] Iain H. Murray, David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, vol. 2, The Fight of Faith 1939–1981 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1990), 458.

[13] Genesis 39:7–9 (paraphrased).

[14] Philippians 2:12 (ESV).

[15] Ray Davies, “Dead End Street” (1966).

[16] 1 Timothy 4:16 (NIV).

[17] Owen, “Duty of a Pastor,” 17:64.

[18] 1 Kings 19:10 (paraphrased).

[19] Luke 17:10 (KJV).

[20] See Proverbs 27:6.