After a spirit of discernment, the next rarest things in the world are diamonds and pearls.
Bruyere
I never know how much of my discouragement is just low metabolism, how much of it is the attack of the Enemy, and how much of it is the sheer toughness of the job,” a pastor admitted to me recently.
Are down times caused by our makeup, by the influence of evil, or by God’s shaping hand? Is discouragement mostly spiritual, emotional, or physical in origin? Is it a sin we should feel bad about, or a normal human response, like grief? Is it something we need to repent of, rebuke, or just rest from?
The way we answer these questions makes an Atlanticsized difference. The answer determines whether we will feel guilty for being discouraged — and whether that guilt is accurate. It determines whether we will seek help — and if so, where and how. It even helps determine how long we will feel discouraged, for applying the wrong treatment can be worse than doing nothing at all.
These questions don’t take easy answers. Discouragement and depression, its unpleasant cousin, usually involve a complex of factors — physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social. Discouraged pastors report sheer fatigue, waking up tired. They also talk of not wanting to be around people, of withdrawing socially. Many lose interest in spiritual disciplines such as prayer and Bible study. A pastor feels discouragement at all levels.
But what about pinpointing the cause? H. B. London, pastor of First Church of the Nazarene in Pasadena, California, knows the importance of “trying to retrace how I’m feeling and why. If it’s fatigue, then it makes sense. If it’s failure, then it makes sense. Knowing the cause doesn’t make the discouragement go away, but there’s help in being able to say, ‘Hey, I’m really tired,’ or ‘I blew it. That was a lousy sermon and I know it; it doesn’t matter what anybody else says, I know it was a lousy sermon.’ Or if I can trace my feelings to family problems or finances, then I at least have a reason for what’s bothering me and can work on it.”
Diagnosing Discouragement
One way pastors have tried to analyze their discouragement is to determine whether it’s primarily physical, emotional, or spiritual in nature.
Physical. “I can see a pattern in the things that bring me down,” one minister says, “and it’s this: Physical tiredness relates directly to discouragement in ministry.”
For spiritual leaders trained in the ways of prayer and spiritual vitality, it’s easy to chalk up much if not all of the discouragement we feel to spiritual problems — I haven’t prayed enough; I’m growing cold; the Lord is dealing with me.
But more often than we suspect, as Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote in Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure, “Physical conditions play their part. Certain physical ailments tend to promote depression.… Take that great preacher who preached in London for nearly forty years in the last century, Charles Spurgeon. He was subject to spiritual depression, and the main explanation in his case was undoubtedly the fact that he suffered from a gouty condition which finally killed him. He had to face this problem of spiritual depression often in a most acute form. A tendency to acute depression is an unfailing accompaniment of the gout he inherited from his forebears.”1
Many of the physical connections to discouragement are not yet known, but plenty are, and most of these can be controlled. For example, pastors generally work long hours, get little rest, and have trouble finding time to exercise. Unchecked, that pattern will almost surely lead to discouragement.
Experienced ministers have learned that it pays to not neglect their rest, relaxation, exercise, and proper diet. The body is probably the most easily overlooked source of discouragement — but often it’s a significant one.
Emotional and social causes may be easiest to pinpoint as causes of discouragement. Most of the cries discussed in chapters 4-8, for example, center in these areas. I can’t use my gifts, I need affirmation — these reflect emotional and social needs that, when unmet, can bring discouragement.
In addition, though, the pastorate tends to promote loneliness, as any leadership position does. Ironically pastors may be constantly contacting people, yet face, as Calvin Miller wrote, “lonely nights that follow the hectic days when it seems that, for all my acquaintances, I haven’t got a friend in the world.” The problem is not the number of contacts but the nature of them. Unless some are the refreshing personal kind, where a pastor can truly express his or her feelings, loneliness may dog even the most people-oriented pastor.
When social and emotional pressures build, the temptation may be to cloister yourself, to pray and study, to stay where it’s safe. But “it is a psychological fact that one cannot resolve conflicts or clarify issues simply by thinking about them,” says Arch Hart in his helpful book Coping with Depression in the Ministry and Other Helping Professions. “Self-talk and introspective rumination with no outside input leads inevitably to distortion and irrationality, whereas talking things over with someone else can help to clarify issues and remove distortions.”2
When discouraged by emotional or social conflicts or difficulties, the natural response is withdrawal. Yet unless there’s some social interaction, the problem becomes nearly impossible to trace.
Spiritual. Most pastors have sensitive antennae to the spiritual causes of their discouragement. As an Illinois pastor described it: “My discouragement is directly linked to my spiritual life. If I don’t have a strong spiritual life, if my prayer life is inconsistent, it’s easy for me to get down. I know that burnout and discouragement can happen even with a strong spiritual life, but I do think that encompasses a big part of it.”
During down times, many ministers feel as Spurgeon felt: “I fear I am not so full of love to God as I used to be. I lament my sad decline in spiritual things.… What is it to be popular, to be successful, to have abundance — if I should be left of God to fall, and to depart from his ways?”
But the temptation during times of discouragement is to place the blame wholly there. Then we either withdraw further from the Lord, out of guilt, or throw ourselves utterly into spiritual disciplines. While prayer is always helpful, too much seclusion for the discouraged person can bring on further heaviness of heart. Teresa of Avila spoke of the potential danger: “Let not your soul coop itself up in a corner. In attaining to great sanctity in … seclusion, the devil will keep you company there. And so he will do your sequestered soul much mischief.”
Here many pastors stressed the importance of a spiritual confidant to help them stay spiritually vital and discern more accurately the spiritual causes, if any, of their discouragement. Delbert Rossin, pastor of Faith Lutheran Church in Geneva, Illinois, is one who has experienced the benefit of such a person. “It is pretty hard sometimes all by yourself. I think we all need pastors, spiritual advisers. I’m on the phone to my pastor in Minneapolis once a month, and I ask him to hold me accountable — am I growing in the Lord? He holds me accountable in a loving way; it’s not legalistic. I was going through a time when my Bible reading and prayer time was less than it ought to be — not that we ever arrive. My pastor said to me, ‘Del, why don’t you try this: no Bible, no breakfast.’ That little routine has helped keep me more faithful and disciplined in this area. On my own, it wouldn’t do any good. But knowing he supports me, is praying for me, and that he wonders how it’s going keeps me motivated.”
Mapping Spiritual Pain
Even when we accurately trace our discouragement to the spiritual area of life, we may not yet have pinpointed the precise cause. For within the spiritual realm — a complex and invisible one — several things may cause discouragement, according to pastors.
Basic weariness of the human spirit. One leader described discouragement this way: “It goes deeper than stress or burnout. It’s when the whole spirit just sags.” Counselor G. Keith Olson has pointed out that “the greatest enemy of parents is discouragement,” and the same holds true for spiritual parents. There is great agony in bringing flawed human beings into the image of Christ. It was for good reason that Paul wrote, “I’m in labor again until Christ is formed in you!” One pastor wrote on the Leadership survey, “My greatest sense of discouragement comes from dealing with the marital and emotional and spiritual problems of new converts.” When you’ve invested yourself heavily in a person, especially a young believer, you are going to feel some spiritual tiredness. Just as physical labor causes sore muscles, so spiritual labor can cause a spiritual weariness. That’s why Jesus withdrew often for prayer and rest.
God’s shaping hand. The mystery is great, but the unanimous testimony of church leaders through the ages is that God sometimes withdraws a sense of his presence — brings spiritual dryness — to bring growth and maturity in Christ. (Indeed, Jesus himself was “led by the Spirit” into the wilderness of temptation, Mark tells us.) Bartholomew Gottemoller, a contemporary churchman, described such a period: “For six or seven years … I did not know where I was spiritually since everything seemed to be going wrong.… All my dreams of achieving holiness looked like mere folly. Prayer became dry and difficult. Because of all this, I felt that God was displeased with me, that he had given up on me because of my many faults and failings. The best word I can find to express what I was experiencing is ‘aimlessness.’ I wanted to live for God because I knew he was the only real good, but I did not know how to go about it.”
But then Gottemoller went on a retreat and heard expounded the “I am the vine, you are the branches” passage from John 15. He saw that “every branch that bears fruit he prunes,” and something broke loose within him. “I clearly saw that it was his work and not my doing. What I had thought was actually destroying my spiritual life I now saw he had been using to bring me to a goal I could never have imagined.”3
Spiritual discouragement may be God’s tool to make us more like Christ. Oswald Chambers spoke of it in these words: “If you are going through a time of discouragement, there is a big personal enlargement ahead.”4
Satan. C. S. Lewis wrote of the “two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with equal delight.”5
Finding that balance isn’t always easy. On the one hand, as an Evangelical Free Church pastor put it, “Satan gets way too much credit for discouragement, I think. Most of the discouragement I’ve gone through came from my own poor performance. Here in the middle of summer, for example, I’m probably going to have to work all day tomorrow, my day off. I’m also going to have to work all afternoon and evening on Sunday. I look at that and say, ‘That’s discouraging.’ But I recognize that’s no one’s fault but my own; I just didn’t plan very well.”
It’s no less true, however, as Dallas Seminary professor Howard Hendricks says, that “when you are doing what Jesus Christ has called you to do, you can count on two things: you will possess spiritual power because you have the presence of Christ, and you’ll experience opposition.”
In Shadow of the Almighty, Elisabeth Elliot writes of the time shortly before her husband, Jim, set out to bring the gospel to the Aucas, a hostile South American Indian tribe. “But the Enemy of Souls is not easily persuaded to relinquish his hold in any territory. Seeing that his authority in the Auca region was going to be challenged, he soon launched an attack on the challengers. Jim was beset with temptations such as had never before assailed him, and that master-weapon, discouragement, which to my knowledge had held no power over him since his arrival in Ecuador, met him at every turn. A gloom seemed to settle over his spirit in December, and it seemed that battles were being fought which I could not share.”6
Ben Haden, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Chattanooga, describes the same opposition this way: “The ministry is a life-and-death, heaven-or-hell matter. It’s a spiritual battle every day — if you’re faithful.
“I find my struggle with Satan usually occurs when I’ve made the gospel clear but individuals can’t bring themselves to respond. They understand what I’m saying and know what is required, but as they weigh their willingness to make the commitment, it becomes obvious there’s spiritual opposition. That’s what I mean by spiritual warfare, and it’s a draining experience.”
Sifting and Sorting
“When it’s happening, when you’re down or discouraged, you often don’t know why,” admitted a Lutheran pastor. Indeed, one characteristic of discouragement is the inability to think clearly. You see the entire world through “gray-colored lenses.” Gaining an objective view of the situation is difficult.
What’s needed is to find out, one pastor explained, “what is the truth of the situation. Is it true, for example, that nobody likes me? You have many voices speaking to you — your own inside you, other people’s, and the Devil’s. But you need to hear the truth, which is God’s voice.”
Pastors do have some substantial resources to gain a more objective view of their situations.
One is time. During discouragement the present seems insurmountable. Even a few days down the road can help us see things more clearly. “I’ll get out and run in the morning, and say to myself, Give it seventy-two hours and then evaluate the problem,” explains Leith Anderson, pastor of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.
Another pastoral ally is rest. A day away for relaxation often puts things into perspective.
The biggest resource is often talking out the situation. Some pastors do that with a journal. Robert Frederich, pastor of Denver’s Galilee Baptist Church, says, “One of the most helpful tools for me is my journal in which I begin each day by answering the question, ‘Where am I?’ Am I tired? Depressed? Worried? By putting it down, I can define the nebulous feelings and relate them to the resources of God.”
Often it’s wise to go to someone outside the situation, someone who can remind us we’re loved and accepted, and who can reorient our sights. Many leaders’ spouses, though not completely removed from the situation, serve that purpose. “The major problem in my life and ministry has been depression,” confesses Howard Hendricks. “That will surprise even some of my closest friends, because I’ve tried hard to be a positive, confident person. I’ve come home from a week of ministry where I’ve been so far beyond myself it was pitiful, where God did things far beyond my own spiritual capabilities, and as soon as I hit Dallas, I was in trouble. I’d crash. I would tell my wife, ‘Honey, I’ve had it.’
“She would say, ‘Well, Hon, why don’t we pray together?’
“‘No, I don’t want to pray.’
“‘Why don’t we read the Word together?’
“‘No, I don’t want to read the Word.’
“And she just kept right on loving me and accepting me. What can you do in the face of that? You change.”
Is Discouragement Sin?
You can’t talk about the causes of discouragement for very long before you have to deal with a tough question head-on: Is discouragement sin?
The case for discouragement being a sin usually runs like this: Whatever is not of faith is sin, and discouragement is not of faith; instead it’s a sign of unbelief. In addition, the Lord commanded Joshua (1:10) to not be discouraged, and Paul said that he did not lose heart (2 Cor. 4:1). Further, discouragement may have negative effects in our lives, such as causing us to withdraw from others or God. Thus, discouragement is sin.
One minister expressed his belief this way: “Treat discouragement as a sin and shun it.”
Pastors find this line of reasoning difficult when they become discouraged from circumstances beyond their control. When a staff member resigns, pointing the finger at you, it’s hard to make sin the culprit.
And yet we all know cases where people’s discouragement was in some way tied to sin.
Arch Hart makes a helpful distinction “between the causes of depression and the experience of depression. The experience of depression is always legitimate. It is a natural and normal response to something happening either in our environment or in our bodies. The cause of depression may not be.”7
It’s a (Self-)Pity
In addition, though feelings of discouragement are themselves a normal response (to something out of kilter in our lives), we may sin in the way we handle those feelings once we have them. For example, rather than seek out appropriate help, we may fall into self-pity.
One Methodist minister confessed, “It’s embarrassing to admit, but sometimes I actually want to feel sorry for myself, to feel down. I don’t want help from God, my wife, or anyone else.”
“Self-pity is absolutely devastating,” Howard Hendricks says. “I think I’ve set a new record for resigning from the institution. One day my wife said, ‘Honey, why don’t you just write out the resignation and put it in the drawer? It will save you a lot of trouble.'”
Oswald Chambers, in his characteristically piercing prose, explains why self-pity is so destructive in the Christian life: “We think it a sign of real modesty to say at the end of a day, ‘Oh, well, I have just gotten through, but it has been a severe tussle.’ And all the Almighty God is ours in the Lord Jesus! And he will tax the last grain of sand and the remotest star to bless us if we will obey him. What does it matter if external circumstances are hard? Why should they not be! If we give way to self-pity and indulge in the luxury of misery, we banish God’s riches from our own lives and hinder others from entering into his provision. No sin is worse than the sin of self-pity, because it obliterates God and puts self-interest upon the throne. It opens our mouths to spit out murmurings, and our lives become craving spiritual sponges; there is nothing lovely or generous about them.”8
Pastors are unanimous in their assessment of the dangers of self-pity. It keeps us from seeking help, it keeps us from shaking off our discouragement when that’s possible, and it keeps us from responding to God during the time of trouble.
Nothing could be more normal at certain times than to feel discouraged. But nothing could be more destructive than to allow that discouragement to breed self-pity.
One thing that helps us not to let that happen is to realize the purpose for discouragement.
Discouragement’s Valuable Purpose
Discouragement warns us that something is wrong, and in that sense, serves a valuable purpose. Says Steve Harris, “I like to think of discouragement as Philip Yancey describes pain: it’s useful in that it tells us something is not right, something is out of order. I shouldn’t be happy about apathy and lethargy in a congregation. If that didn’t discourage me, I wouldn’t be normal.” So feeling discouraged is normal in a world where very many things are “out of order.” Maybe our body has been overtaxed; the discouragement signals us to slow down, to get some rest. Or perhaps we’re in conflict with a troublesome family in the church; discouragement causes us to withdraw, to pull away until we can gain strength and perspective.
That view of discouragement doesn’t come naturally to us. The experience hits us too painfully, and we feel bad about it, as though we’d done something wrong to feel this way. But there is benefit in identifying the cause, for then we are able to work on it. Eugene Peterson says, “I try to identify the sense of discouragement. At times, mine has been really symptomatic of a vocational hunger for something better, deeper, more authentic. If my discernment is right, if my interpretation is right, then that sense of discouragement is really a hopeful thing, because it shows that there’s something alive there that longs for something different.” In Eugene’s case, the discouragement that led him to the Session to say “I quit,” some seventeen years ago, also led him to discover he wasn’t doing the job he felt called to be doing. He and the Session made adjustments, and today he is able to focus more of his energies on the pastoral tasks of prayer and study, which he loves. Discouragement, oddly, became the impetus for something better and more fulfilling.
Discouragement also drove a Midwest pastor we’ll call Larry toward a higher goal. When Larry came to his church nine years ago, he braced himself. “The congregation had gone through squabbles and painful splits,” he says, “and I didn’t think healing would come for a long, long time.
“But God worked faster than I thought possible. In about five years we saw the attendance return, the facility fill up. We went to two worship services and two Sunday schools, and we completely redecorated and refurbished the sanctuary.” Though some of the early years were difficult, it seemed that every dream of Larry’s was coming true.
But then discouragement set in.
“I never had what you would call a midlife crisis in my forties,” Larry recalls, “because there was always so much that needed to be done and that I wanted to do. In a way I was too busy to have one. But then all of a sudden, there was no major challenge in front of me. I’d done everything I’d wanted to do, and I couldn’t see anything else worth working toward. All I had left was going into a maintenance mode, and the thought of that killed me.
“I sank into the most difficult period of my life psychologically. I felt aimless, stuck. I was ready to leave; if somebody would have offered me a good-paying job selling garages, I probably would have taken it.
“As I was groping around for a new challenge, I realized our own county was going to experience good growth over the next decade. If the church was willing to ‘lengthen the cords and strengthen the stakes’ and really accept the challenge for growth — even if that meant relocation — there’d be plenty of exciting things ahead.
“But as I put out feelers in the church, all the readings were for keeping the status quo, complacency. People were beefing about the irritation of having to hold back-to-back services and two Sunday schools; they would never stand still for something larger than that. I thought, How can any church that claims to be a New Testament church settle down to maintain its ministry when all around it are people who need to be reached? I got angry about that. I internalized it, and soon it turned into depression, as it usually does.”
This second wave of discouragement proved too much for Larry. He spent a good portion of that year looking for an opportunity to leave. Most of the positions he made contact with, though, didn’t hold out any challenge for him. “I would simply have been leaving a maintenance ministry to go to a maintenance ministry,” he says. “What was the sense in that?”
Then Larry received correspondence from a large church in a nearby state. The position looked exciting. As the interview process progressed smoothly, Larry’s heart began to lift. The call committee narrowed the choices to Larry and one other. It looked likely that he would get the call, and then a frontier would open before him.
But the committee went with the other candidate.
“I felt trapped,” he says. “I was in such a dilemma. I didn’t want to leave just to be leaving. But I knew God had called and gifted me to do more than keep people happy and maintain things. And now the one option that looked promising fell through. I felt more discouraged than ever.”
It was then that Larry, intuitively perhaps, began to channel that overwhelming sense of frustration toward something he wanted most of all. “I couldn’t see clearly for a long while what my discouragement was coming from. But as I pinpointed it to my need for a new challenge, I thought, What could be a bigger challenge than trying to lead this congregation into the growth I can see for it? I knew these people, and by now I’d built a level of trust with them. If anybody was going to do it, it would be me.
“But at the same time, I didn’t see how I possibly could convince them to try something so radical — to buy land, build a new facility, relocate. A consultant told me I was crazy for thinking a church in this staid community would ever go for something like that. Somehow, though, that in itself spurred me on. I began to dream again.”
When I talked with Larry not long ago, he showed me a brand-new long-range plan for the church. “I envision a developing campus,” he said excitedly. “We have the potential to develop the finest preschool in our state. On Sunday night we had our first congregational meeting to present the plan, and the first sampling showed 75 percent support. We’ve got a long way to go yet; nothing’s for sure at this point. But I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. This is what God had for me.”
As Larry learned, a pastor’s discouragement, when its source is accurately determined, can drive him or her to something better. It can serve a good and useful purpose.
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1973).
Archibald D. Hart, Coping with Depression in the Ministry and Other Helping Professions (Waco, Tex.: Word, 1984), 18.
Bartholomew Gottemoller, Why Good People Suffer (New York: Vantage Press, 1987), 2 – 4.
Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1935), 287.
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters in The Best of C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House), preface.
Elisabeth Elliot, Shadow of the Almighty (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979).
©1988 Christianity Today
