Leadership Journal

Someone recently wrote Leadership, "When I was young, I was filled with energy and joy, but now I have to work on stimulating them both."

In ministry, years and joy can have an inverse relationship. For most pastors, serving God will always be more joy than sacrifice. But the weekly-ness of preaching, the seeming daily-ness of criticism, the slowness of the change we see in people—can combine over time to diminish a brightly burning flame.

Two Christian leaders who have burned brighter and hotter as they have aged are Ben Patterson and Zig Ziglar.

1. Ben is dean of the chapel at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, and author of Waiting: Finding Hope When God Seems Silent and Serving God: The Grand Essentials of Work & Worship (both InterVarsity). He has served Presbyterian churches in California and New Jersey.
2. For more than 30 years, Zig has been a popular motivational speaker whose books and products have sold in the millions. His books include Confessions of a Happy Christian (Pelican) and, most recently, Success for Dummies (IDG Books Worldwide).

Leadership editors Dave Goetz and Craig Brian Larson sequestered Ben and Zig in Chicago to see what a hopelessly Reformed pastor and an incurable optimist might say about genuine joy.

Is loss of energy and joy inevitable as the years go by in ministry?

Zig Ziglar: Our natural inclination is to say, "I just don't have the energy I used to have," but that only adds fuel to the problem. Our belief determines our behavior. According to research, roughly 50 percent of us are born as optimists, and 50 percent are born as pessimists. The good news is research conclusively shows that you can change from pessimism to optimism.

Is joy akin to optimism?

Ziglar: I'm a born optimist; I'd take my last two dollars and buy a money belt with it. But there's a big difference between the joy of optimism and the joy that comes with knowing you're in God's will, that he has already won this deal called life. All I've got to do is collect. It's not what I do, it's what Christ did. Ben Patterson: Joy probably looks a little different on Zig's face than somebody else's. Zig, you have a confidence that communicates, "I can handle it, I'm not going to go under." You expect you will succeed. But people in my family, who struggle with depression, are predisposed to being overwhelmed more quickly than someone who is more upbeat. A lot of it is physiological. If I had a choice, though, I would want to be wired like Zig. Much of how we experience joy relates to gifts God has given us, the way we're put together, the way we were raised. Ziglar: Incidentally, I was optimistic and positive at age 45, when I was broke and in debt. Unless you've struggled for years, you don't really appreciate what salvation means. When the reality that everything I'd done in the past was in the past hit me full force, that I now could call on the Creator of the universe, I realized that all I've got to worry about is doing the ...