A motivated Christian is a relaxed and grateful Christian.
—Ben Patterson
One of the most remarkable plants in nature is the ibervillea sonorae. It can exist for seemingly indefinite periods without soil or even water. As Annie Dillard tells the story, one was kept in a display case in the New York Botanical Garden for seven years without soil or water. For seven springs it sent out little anticipatory shoots looking for water. Finding none, it simply dried up again, hoping for better luck next year.
Now that’s what I call being motivated: hanging on, keeping on when it’s not easy.
But motivation can run out, even for the ibervillea sonorae. In the eighth year of no soil and water, the rather sadistic folks at the New York Botanical Garden had a dead plant on their hands.
Most pastors know what it’s like to find themselves past their seventh season, bereft of soil, thirsty, and waiting for the eighth spring. No more motivation; barely enough energy to send out another anticipatory shoot. With most of us, however, it happens seven or eight times each year. Would that we could last like that tough little desert plant.
Ministry’s twin sins
Sometimes it’s simple fatigue that finally takes its toll. Too much work, a lingering illness, or poor diet come singly or in combination, and we find ourselves desperately in need of a good night’s sleep, a day off, a walk in the park, or a shot of penicillin. That’s all. Simple fatigue, simple treatment, and we snap back like a rubber band.
But there may be a deeper meaning to our loss of motivation. It can stem from a loss of direction in the ministry. Preaching, teaching, training, counseling, and administrating may become intolerably burdensome because we have somehow forgotten why we are doing them. This weariness comes close to the deadly sin of sloth or acedia. Simple fatigue says, “I know I should be doing this, but I just can’t seem to generate the energy.” Acedia says, “Why? What’s the difference?”
“Acedia is all of Friday consumed in getting out the Sunday bulletin,” says Richard John Neuhaus in Freedom for Ministry. “Acedia is three hours dawdled away on Time magazine, which is then guiltily chalked up to ‘study.’ Acedia is evenings without number obliterated by television, evenings neither of entertainment nor of education, but of narcotized defense against time and duty. Above all, acedia is apathy, the refusal to engage the pathos of other lives and of God’s life with them.”
A physician friend of mine gave me an article from the Journal of Internal Medicine, which dealt with the psychological state conducive to illness called the “giving up, given up complex.” It is found in people who lose the reasons for living; who are saying of their existence, “Why? What’s the difference?” Acedia can make bodies vulnerable to disease and pastors terminally tired of the church.
Curiously, loss of motivation can produce what appears to be the opposite of sloth or acedia: hyperactivity. But in reality, it is just another dimension of the same loss of direction and sense of “why” that saps us of our ability to do the “what” of ministry. “Hyperactivity and sloth are twin sins,” says Neuhaus, and rightly so. The only real difference is the anxious, frenetic shape hyperactivity takes.
Many pastors are no longer truly activated to do the work of the kingdom. Like children lost in a forest, the more lost they feel, the faster they run. Hyperactivity is to authentic motivation what junk food is to a nourishing diet. It gives the feeling of satisfaction while starving the person to death. In the New Testament it is the “Ephesian Syndrome” described in Revelation 2:17. The first love is gone, and now all that is left is the form and the trappings. This may be the sickness most preyed upon by the innumerable seminars offered on the techniques of church leadership. People who have forgotten “why” become obsessed with “how.” Where once there was creativity and tenderness born of deep love, there is now only the sex manual.
Clerical works-righteousness
The twin sins of acedia and hyperactivity can be expanded into triplets with the addition of a third: hubris. Hubris, or pride, was the word the Greeks used to speak of presumption, the folly of trying to be like the gods. This vice, rather than stemming from a loss of direction in the ministry, is the loss par excellence. For the Christian, hubris is anything we do to try to save ourselves. For pastors, it is anything we do to try to save the church: clerical works-righteousness.
Hubris is bad enough by itself, but it also sets us up for acedia and hyperactivity. I know. One of the greatest crises I have faced in my own ministry came concerning my preaching. I had noticed a pattern developing in my weeks. Sunday afternoon through Monday morning I would be depressed. Monday afternoon through Wednesday evening I would feel fine. Thursday I would begin to feel irritable. The irritability would build on Friday, and on Saturday I would be almost impossible to live with. Sunday morning found me filled with energy but totally out of touch with my family or anyone else. My energy level would peak during worship, and then I’d drop exhausted back into depression Sunday afternoon.
Week after week this cycle repeated itself. After a few months, I found myself vacillating between frenetic activity and paralyzing sloth—sometimes within the same day. It just wasn’t fun being a preacher any more. That concerned me greatly because I never doubted God called me to preach. Something had to be done, because I couldn’t see myself going through those cycles and mood changes for the next thirty or forty years of my life.
After much prayer, study, and hard thought, it dawned on me that each week I was trying to preach the greatest sermon ever heard, the kind that generations after me would read and admire and discuss. I wasn’t satisfied to offer God and my people my best from the pulpit. I demanded superstardom.
Of course, superstardom escaped me. My depression each Sunday afternoon grew out of the disparity between what I sought and what I deserved. My sermonizing was clerical works-righteousness. It sapped me of authentic motivation, leaving me alternately asking the “What’s the difference?” of acedia, and proclaiming the “I am driven” of hyperactivity.
With the exception of simple fatigue, all loss of motivation is a form of forgetfulness. It is losing touch with the “why” of ministry, being cut off from the Vine whose branches we are; and then keeping busy enough or noisy enough or narcotized enough to not have to face up to the fundamental disjointedness of our lives.
First-love revival
There is only one antidote to forgetfulness, and that is remembrance. In John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the pilgrims were leaving the Delectable Mountains after having been warned by the shepherds to beware of the Enchanted Ground. The overwhelming desire there would be to fall asleep, never to awake. And just as the shepherds told them, the drowsiness became nearly unbearable. Hopeful pleaded for a nap, just one little rest. But Christian made him talk. He asked him the question, “By what means were you led to go on this pilgrimage?” By telling the story, Hopeful kept talking and kept walking.
It is remembrance that keeps Christians awake; and the supreme act of Christian worship, the Lord’s Supper, draws us into fellowship with Christ by remembering his mercy and love for us. It is a love feast spread out upon a redeemed and quickened memory.
Motivation to minister, then, is recovered only by a revived first love in response to the resurrected Christ’s command to “Remember the height from which you have fallen!” (Revelation 2:5, emphasis mine).
Sometimes remembrance takes no more than a few moments of quiet reflection over the things God has done in your life. More often, it means an intensified effort to a more disciplined life of prayer, study, and rigorous thought. For me, when motivation goes, these three are the last things I want to do. “If only I could get motivated” I rationalize, “then I could begin praying, studying, and thinking again.” So I sit and wait for it to happen—for motivation to somehow descend upon me like tongues of fire at Pentecost.
It never works that way. The more I need to pray, study, and think, the less I feel like doing it. But do it I must. As the song says, “Them that gots is them that gets.” I am convinced that the choices I make when I don’t feel motivated are the most crucial of my Christian walk. C. S. Lewis touched on this when he had the devil Screwtape advise his nephew Wormwood that God will sometimes overwhelm us with his presence and motivating power early in our Christian experience, but that he never allows that to happen too long. His goal is to get us to stand on our own two legs, “to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish.” Screwtape observes that during such “tough periods, much more than during the peak periods,” we are growing into the creatures God wants us to be.
A call to remember is a call to get back to basics and back to the people God has given to us. Acedia, hyperactivity, and hubris isolate us from our congregation.
Each week I conduct a “sermon group.” Five or six people meet with me to do two things: critique my last sermon and discuss the text I’ll be preaching on next.
Face-to-face contact with real people struggling with me over the meaning and application of God’s Word motivates me tremendously; it can carry me along when I’m not particularly excited about preaching. Knowing I will be critiqued introduces a kind of salutary terror into my preparation I would not normally have. Besides, it’s good theology. Preaching should always grow out of a context of dialogue within a community. Jesus’ did. Paul’s did. What they had to say was not little gospel pills dropped out of the sky on an anonymous crowd, but vigorous conversation between God and specific people living in concrete situations.
Among the people God would want us to stay close to are our colleagues in ministry. These men and women know, as no one else, the difficulties of sustaining a pure motivation in the ministry. A high priority in my choice of commitments is a covenant prayer group of fellow pastors. There are times when we just get together and gripe. More often than not, however, when one of us is “down” the others are “up” and can offer encouragement and advice. When things are bad for me, it seems that they have never been good, and that they are good nowhere else in the universe, either. My brothers and sisters in the ministry often serve as good agents of remembrance for me, reminding me of why I am here, and therefore what I am to do.
Relaxed motivation
One last thing needs to be said about remembrance. It has to do with the sovereignty of God. Martin Luther said he took great comfort from knowing that as he sat and enjoyed his mug of Wittenberg beer, the kingdom of God kept marching on. That assurance was a great motivator to hard work. He could relax and rest periodically, and therefore go back to work with greater élan. More important, when he did work, he knew nothing was wasted or lost because God was sovereign over everything.
That’s how it should be for us. A motivated Christian is a relaxed and grateful Christian; grateful because of what God has done in the death and resurrection of Christ, and relaxed because of his hope in God’s sure dénouement of all history in his Son. Because the motivated Christian has been freed from the bondage of the past and anxiety over the future, he can get down to the work at hand in the present.
Copyright © 1997
