Do not despise your situation. In it you must act, suffer, and conquer. From every point on earth, we are equally near to heaven and the infinite.
Henri Amiel
Changing churches provides a unique opportunity to re-evaluate your work style in light of God’s goal for your ministry. One is never more open to changes in style than at the change points of life.
The unique feature of the ministry workload is its open-ended nature. There is far more to do than time to do it in. So the pastor is faced with questions such as: What’s enough? What’s lazy? What’s “working too hard”? The answers can determine not just how you adjust to a new church but your prospects for the long haul. James Berkley, pastor of Dixon (California) Community Church at the time he wrote the following chapter, remembers his experiences with those questions.
“There was a time in my first year when I thought I wasn’t going to make it. The senior pastor called me into his office and said, ‘The youth group really isn’t going like we expect it to.’ Suddenly, I had visions of washing out of the ministry right there. It came as a shock. I didn’t realize things weren’t going well.
“I had to reassess what I was doing. I asked myself if I was working as hard as I could. I got input from other people who knew me well. They thought I could do more. So I knuckled down and worked harder. It made me be much more thoughtful about what I was doing.
“I wasn’t lazy. It’s just that I didn’t know what was expected. The truth is, I was there three years, and the youth groups were all right, but they never took off like you read about in books. There was always that edge of worry lurking somewhere.
“But as I continued to work in ministry, I realized another side to the productivity question. A minister could work too hard and burn out. This came home to me as I watched other pastors eat themselves alive in ministry. I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to be like that.’ They were reverse role models.
“I remember one guy here in Dixon who made me look sick in the amount of work he turned out. But he left town quickly under some kind of cloud. He accomplished a great deal in a short period of time but hurt the church far worse in the process.”
In this final chapter, Berkley addresses the question of how much work is enough.
Afew months ago a friend of mine—one of the most gifted and effective ministers I have ever met—very nearly drove his car off a bridge. Intentionally. The pressures of ministry ate to the core of this young pastor of a thriving church. He mentally composed a farewell message, determined the best freeway bridge for his purposes, and planned the final escape that would neatly conclude his depressed existence.
But before he got in his car, he remembered he had an appointment. Instead of suicide, he dutifully attended a committee meeting.
Another friend serves a small church with large problems. When I asked how the ministry was going, a long sigh best described his feelings. He is not sure how long he can take it.
Still another pastor, young and dedicated, admits to a succession of stomach ailments. Every contact he makes, every decision, every responsibility finds its way to his viscera. Antacid manufacturers love him.
So many pastors enter their calling with superior training, gifts, talent to spare, and all the drive in the world, only to be pressed through the ministerial sieve. Great dreams turn into defeat, despair, exhaustion, and ulcers. As I number the casualties, I often wonder, “Is disaster inevitable?”
British evangelist Christmas Evans once declared, “It is better to burn out than to rust out!” I admire the bravado. It sounds dedicated, bold, and stirring. However, when I view the burnt-outs and the almost burnt-outs who lie by the ecclesiastical road, the glory fails to reach me. I see pain and waste and unfinished service. Is there not a third alternative to either burning out or rusting out? In Acts 20:24, Paul stated, “I consider my life worth nothing to me, if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me.” Herein lies the model I choose to follow. I want neither to burn out nor rust out. I want to finish out the race.
I want to survive this decimator called the ministry. I want something to remain of this person after ten or twenty or thirty more years. It is not that I lack dedication; I just desire something worthwhile to use as the years go by. I fail to see the splendor of a church-ravaged shell weeping in his office twenty years from now. So let me confess my plan for survival. Perhaps my observations can aid your survival as well, to the end that we may all be counted among the survivors.
Tapped, Not Trapped
An assurance of divine calling and giftedness for ministry ranks first in my ministerial survival formula. If God has not placed me in this slot with the tools I need to do my work, then I do not want to be here! The advice to ministerial candidates remains sound: “If you can possibly be happy in any other profession, do it!” Among the first ministerial casualties are those not called to the ministry. If I am not tapped for ministry, then I will certainly feel trapped in a ministry that overspends my means.
Paul urged Timothy to “fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands.” Timothy, reticent as he was, could at least point to a specific time and place where he was called forth and gifted for ministry. How important that call must have been in this shy young man’s survival as a pastor.
We all have seen men and women trapped in ministry. They do not belong. They function poorly. They are ineffective, out of step, miserable. I often marvel at their perseverance and shudder at the price they and their churches pay. Somehow the gatekeepers passed them through, but since they were never called by God, everybody loses.
Then I think of a friend who entered the pastorate after an executive career with McDonald’s. Even after he finished seminary and served a church for a few years, the hamburger folks wanted him back badly enough to offer him double or triple his salary as a pastor. He agonized over this, contemplating his aged Rambler and five children needing college educations, but he turned the offer down. This man knew he was tapped for ministry. Nothing could lure him away from his calling. Like Paul, he was “compelled to preach. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel.”
I plan to finish out the race because I am convinced God placed me in it. That sense of call is vital to pastoral survival.
A Warehouseman, Not a Warehouse
Several years ago I walked on the Ventura Pier with a pastoral colleague as he wrestled with an overwhelming situation. From all indications, Toby’s wife was dying. I asked him how he could possibly cope with the imminent loss of his wife. He had an infant son plus all the regular cares of a pastor, and now this. It seemed too much to me.
With amazing calm, Toby explained, “I consider myself a warehouseman, not a warehouse. I only handle each burden long enough to unload it in the Warehouse. God is the Warehouse; I am the warehouseman.” I have never forgotten those simple words.
How often caring pastors accumulate the weight of the burdens they handle. A parishioner is fired. A marriage breaks up. An alcoholic cries for help. A college student is killed in an accident. Piece by piece the burden mounts. Pastors who hold on to everything will soon find their knees buckling. They will eventually be crushed by the load. The more pastors care, the more they open themselves to others, the more effective they are, the more they are weighted down.
How many times have we preached on Matthew 11:28—”Come unto me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest”—and yet have felt we must shoulder all the burdens ourselves? We are not warehouses; we are merely the handlers.
Recently a young mother came to me terribly distraught over the stillborn child of a close friend. I acutely shared her distress, but realistically I could tell her nothing she did not already know. I could not neatly wrap up the situation with a tidy solution, and she knew it before she entered my office. Together, we gave it up to God. We placed our concern in the Warehouse. She wanted that, anyway. I carried that burden only long enough to give it to God. I sometimes learn my lessons.
If I heed Toby’s advice, I will not be crushed before I finish the race. I may get weary from shuffling the loads. There may be more deliveries than I care to handle, but I will not be crushed if I carry one load at a time just long enough to give it away.
Jethro’s Law
Passing the baton to others is the third element of my survival formula. Consider the story of Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, in Exodus 18. This wise man observes Moses doing his day’s work.
“Moses,” he says (pardon my paraphrasing), “what are you doing? Why are you making all these nice people waste a whole day waiting for you to mediate their disputes?”
“Because they are there,” Moses replies perceptively.
Then Jethro hands Moses some sound fatherly advice: “What you are doing is not good. You and these people are only wearing yourselves out. You can’t do all this alone. Select capable men, appoint them as judges, and let them handle the simpler cases.”
There are few things I do that someone else cannot do as well. For four years I edited our monthly church newsletter. Every article passed under my pen, and too many originated with that pen. No more! I found a woman in our congregation with newspaper experience. She now edits the newsletter, and I have gained nearly a day a month. Why did it take me four years? I think I actually enjoyed playing Moses—busy, important, overburdened—but I finally got tired.
According to Paul in 2 Timothy 2:2, we are to pass along our skills and understandings to others, who will do the same. Jethro’s Law is not only an effective way to work, it is the right way. Jesus operated that way, eventually leaving his work to a bunch of amateurs—who changed the course of the world.
Jethro concludes, “If you do this and God so commands, you will be able to stand the strain, and all these people will go home satisfied.” Any idea that eases my strain and satisfies the people is one I want to heed. I intend not to run alone when I can find co-runners. We can help each other finish the race.
Consecrated Negligence
Perhaps you have tried this idea with your church leaders. Ask them to list the duties they expect you to perform. Then have them allot the number of hours a week you should spend on each task. Combine their lists, total the hours, and you will probably find the sum greater than the hours in a week. If you never eat, sleep, relax, or spend time with your family, you will still have insufficient time for everything somebody expects of you.
I have gradually learned that many tasks will necessarily remain undone. To survive amid this reality, I have cultivated the fine skill of consecrated negligence. Perhaps this is my finest survival technique. Those who fail to learn consecrated negligence squirm in continual guilt or languish in chronic exhaustion. My friend who was ready to end it all over the bridge had tried frantically to be the ideal pastor. As he told me later, he felt driven to do everything possible, to do it well, and to do everything with the same energy and creativity. From my viewpoint, he nearly succeeded, but the personal toll proved unbearable. In his inability to be comfortably negligent in any aspect of ministry, my friend nearly destroyed himself.
Paul found it necessary to defend himself to the Corinthians. He wrote, “Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach to gospel.” Here was a man who understood consecrated negligence. He knew his mission—preaching—and he would not let the Corinthians set his agenda for him. While he preached, Paul remained unapologetic in not baptizing, for it did not belong in his commission.
Mere negligence will never do, however. We must determine our mission through prayer, wise counsel, and experience. But once we have set our priorities with wisdom and spiritual insight, we must stick with them and pursue them with all our energies. If that means missing a committee meeting to call in the hospital, or teaching with less preparation to preach with more, then so be it. I have chosen where I will be negligent, and I can live with it. Consecrated negligence tells me not to run in every race if I intend to finish the race I consider most important.
A Sanctified Sense of Humor
A sense of humor greases the ministerial skids to allow gliding where others grind. One summer I finished a bicycle trip with our youth just in time to attend the Sunday service. Tired, dirty, and out of touch with my calendar after a week on wheels, I fell into bed at home after the service.
A phone call awoke me. “Reverend Berkley, aren’t you supposed to be at a wedding now?”
My worst dream suddenly materialized. I had forgotten a wedding! I arrived at the park fifteen minutes late to find a small gathering enjoying the summer day and apparently unconcerned about the time. Whew! How glad I am that I can chuckle over that faux pas rather than agonize over my failings.
Certainly the sense of humor should be sanctified. I wince at the rancor and bitterness sometimes passed off as humor. Biting jests only inflame wounds. Insensitive humor often makes matters worse. To enter the hospital room of a critical kidney patient with a snappy “How’s the plumbing today?” invites instant rejection. Well-placed humor, however, enlivens dragging board meetings. Glimpsing the humorous angle of a difficult situation provides mental relief. The person who is lighthearted about himself will be transparent and nondefensive in dealing with others. Humor pays its way.
While I run my race, I intend to take time for laughter, especially when I catch a glimpse of myself with egg on my face. That laughter will keep me running.
Three Tractors
My life was given me to spend for God. I have no intention of hoarding it or wasting it, but I do intend to spend this one life wisely. Those who quickly spend the principal in a showy display of sacrifice will have no interest in later years. Genuine martyrs are one thing, but misguided wastrels cut short their ministry in the kingdom.
In my agricultural town, a tractor pull is a big event. The idea is to see which tractor can pull a weighted sledge the greatest distance. The unlimited class boasts behemoths with about as much resemblance to a farm tractor as a dragster has to my Honda. These tractors catch the eye, make a lot of noise, and pull a mountainous weight, but their moment of glory is brief. Sometimes in the midst of a pull the massive engine will dramatically flame out from the strain placed on it. In a moment it is good only for the scrap heap.
In the play yard at our church rests an ancient little tractor embedded in the ground for the children to play on. Long ago it saw its last working day. The spark plugs are fused to the block and the pistons frozen in their cylinders. One day it quit working, and now it is so rusted it cannot work.
On my uncle’s fruit ranch in Washington resides another old tractor. This beat-up Ford gave me rides around the orchard nearly thirty years ago, and it still putters around the orchards, hauling bins of apples and mowing hillsides of weeds.
Thirty years from now, I want to be that Ford tractor. I may not make the noise or even accomplish the magnificent feats of the unlimited-class tractor, but I want my motor running for the long haul. Spare me from the ecclesiastical junk pile. However, may my consecrated negligence never turn to pure negligence and make me akin to the playground tractor. I have fields to work for many years. Let me be that reliable and effective little Ford that hauls apples year after year. I don’t want to burn out or rust out; I want to hold out, to finish the race.
Copyright © 1985 Christianity Today
