The pastor should always be pure in thought … no impurity ought to pollute him who has undertaken the office of wiping away the stains in the hearts of others … for the hand that would cleanse from dirt must be clean, lest, being itself sordid with clinging mire, it soil whatever it touches all the more.
Gregory the Great
When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. C. S. Lewis
Anyone in the ministry is caught in a tension. On one hand, we’re called to be holy, to provide an example of righteous living for those we lead. On the other hand, we’re human, unable to completely live up to our calling. How can we be ourselves and make our inevitable mistakes — indeed, commit our inevitable sins — without seeing our ministries destroyed? Every Christian leader is forced to come to terms with this dilemma.
I wasn’t aware of this tension when I began ministry. Let me explain the roundabout way it confronted me.
I was an unlikely candidate for any position of Christian leadership. My father was not only an unbeliever during my growing-up years, but he was openly hostile toward the ministry. In our house, it was assumed that if you learned enough about any pastors or evangelists, you’d discover they were crooks or, at best, hypocrites. So many times during my early years, I heard him describe preachers as “parasites” living off other people, as “con men,” as “Elmer Gantrys.”
Dad was also a factory worker and a labor organizer, one of the original signatories to the charter of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). As a union man and staunch Democrat, he felt that preachers were always on the opposite side of the political fence — always in favor of the status quo and opposed to organized labor.
“If you find one church,” he once said to me, “where a pastor’s sermon refers to a man going to the shop rather than to the office, I’ll attend that church.” But then he added, “I will never go to church the rest of my life, because you’ll never find one like that. Preachers think white collar. They think management. They don’t think of the working man.” (In later life, Dad made a commitment to Christ, but like many others of his background, he found the equation of the gospel with laissez-faire capitalism a stumbling block).
Despite that background, I came to Christ during a Youth for Christ (YFC) meeting in my senior year of high school. And shortly after my conversion, I felt a calling to enter the ministry. Naturally, that didn’t sit well with Dad. He had his own plans for me. I had always found schoolwork easy and earned good grades, so Dad had dreamed that I’d become an architect. Because of his strong feelings, I entered Ball State University and began studying architecture.
The summer after my freshman year, I returned home to South Bend, Indiana, and one night went to a city-wide tent crusade called “The Key to Life Campaign,” sponsored by YFC. The preacher spoke that night about letting go of selfish desires and giving your whole life to God. At the end of the service, I decided to end the struggle between Dad’s wishes and what I was sure was God’s will, and I went forward. A pastor spoke with me in the prayer tent, and one verse of Scripture jumped out at me: “For though I preach the gospel, I have nothing to glory of: for necessity is laid upon me; yea, woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel” (1 Cor. 9:16). Since that day, I’ve never had a doubt that I must preach the gospel.
My decision meant, however, that I had to face my father and tell him my intentions. So a week later, I took him to a high school football game. He liked football, and I knew it would get him in a good mood. On the way home, I told him I definitely felt called to the ministry. He got very quiet; I knew I was dashing all his dreams. I didn’t know how he’d react. Would he erupt in anger? Disown me? Throw me out of the house?
We drove in silence for what seemed like forever. Finally he said, “Well, dammit, if you’re going to be a preacher, be a good one! Don’t be a phony. Of all things, don’t be a hypocrite.”
I told him I didn’t have any plans to be a hypocrite.
After a bit more thought, he said, “I don’t know, Jay. You’ll starve to death.”
Trying to add some humor to the situation, I said, “Most of the preachers I know aren’t starving; they have the opposite problem.” Dad laughed, and he eventually began to go along with the idea, though I knew he still felt his hopes were dashed and that I was wasting my potential.
The High Calling
I knew from the beginning that all believers are called to live holy lives. You know the verses as well as I do: “Present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship” (Rom. 12:1).
“I am the Lord your God. Consecrate yourselves therefore, and be holy; for I am holy” (Lev. 11:44).
“Like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your behavior; because int is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy'” (1 Pet. 1:15-16).
Those verses apply not just to pastors, of course, but those of us in leadership feel them perhaps more keenly. We’re to be leaders by example as well as by word; we’re held up to higher standards of conduct; our lives are constantly under the congregational microscope.
The special calling to lead an exemplary life is reinforced, too, by our preaching and teaching role. We are charged with calling God’s people to holy living and with teaching them how. And the best way to do that — the indispensable way — is by our own example. The old admonition “Don’t talk the talk unless you walk the walk” is true. As my dad fully understood, there’s nothing more damaging to the witness of the church than hypocritical leaders. We need to be able to say with confidence (even if with a great deal of trepidation as well), “Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1).
But because of Dad’s influence, I was also keenly aware of the stereotype most people have of preachers. If you study the movies over the last forty years, for instance, you will find the persistent image of religious leaders as hypocrites — bigots, secret drunkards, repressed sexual deviates, avaricious money grubbers, power-mad manipulators, and variations on these themes. From the hard-headed, unyielding country parson of the western to the dark themes of William Faulkner’s novels, this idea is reinforced in dozens of story lines. The only relief comes from a few insipid, usually Catholic films such as Going My Way, with Bing Crosby. However, the kindly priest is often cast as a strawberry-nosed lush, whiskey jug by his side.
Sadly, the evening news periodically provides reinforcement of these images — whether a Jim Jones’s madness or a TV evangelist’s excesses. In the news, the incomplete secular understanding of Christian institutions sometimes skews the facts; in the arts, the disproportionate frequency of these aberrations in story lines makes them seem normative. The result is that sincere people, like my father, because of this combination of unholy examples, distorted and incomplete facts, and compressed experience carry an almost unshakable negative opinion of those of us in the ministry. Some Christians would like to simply attribute this to the Devil or the offense of the gospel, but I believe it is a legitimate reason to reexamine the justified and unjustified expectations surrounding the ministry.
The Hard Challenge
The general public expects the pastor to be different, to be special, to have overcome the obstacles that trip up ordinary people. When pastors lapse, especially pastors who pretended to live up to the superhuman standard, the tendency is for skeptics to say, “See, I told you so,” and for naive believers to feel betrayed, deceived, or even to give up their commitment to Christ since their cherished models have crumbled to dust.
How can we maintain biblical standards for leadership while remaining transparent and authentic persons? If we reject duplicity, the double standard that’s one thing in the pulpit and another in private, with what do we replace it? In short, how can we be both holy and human?
After I graduated from college and began a preaching ministry with YFC, my own stark awareness of this tension continued to grow as I saw the hypocrisy, the double standard, in my life and the lives of other Christian leaders. In those early years, many of us would preach publicly about the need for Christians to adhere to strict standards of conduct. We would proclaim rules without exceptions. In private, however, I found the other leaders would acknowledge the difficulty if not impossibility of completely living up to those standards.
I noticed that when leaders like this got together and felt they could relax with one another, their conversation made it clear they felt lay people couldn’t handle the truth. While they, the leaders, understood that legalistic answers and simplistic solutions don’t always (or even usually) work, they were unwilling to admit that to their audiences. The attitude was that We’re mature enough to deal with reality, but our audiences are not. It was spiritual elitism, or what I began to call a “conspiracy of hypocrisy.”
I remember once when a prominent speaker came to a YFC convention and gave a very well reasoned sermon arguing that the Bible is without error not only when it talks about faith, but also when it speaks about history, geography, science, or any other subject. No exceptions. No qualifications.
Later, in a small-group session with some staff, someone asked if there weren’t problems in trying to assert that the Bible is an authoritative source of scientific statements. The speaker answered by referring to the parable of the mustard seed, which Jesus described as “smaller than all the seeds that are upon the ground” (Mark 4:31).
“We know first of all,” the speaker said, “that a mustard seed is not the smallest seed. The celery seed is smaller. We know that. You have to use common sense when you read the Bible. God is just saying in that parable that a very small thing becomes a very big thing.”
The group sat in stunned silence. The speaker apparently didn’t realize what he’d just done. He had said something that everyone had thought before he ever gave his sermon, but then he had argued for almost two hours that they shouldn’t think that way. Now he was contradicting the whole thesis of his sermon. The people in the group didn’t know what to think anymore.
Following that session, my wife and I took the speaker out to dinner. “Do you understand what happened in there?” I asked. He said no, so I explained what I thought had occurred.
“Well, yes, Jay,” he responded, “but you cannot tell the general population those kinds of things. If the general population feels you have doubts about one part of the Bible, they might perceive the Bible is not accurate.” He went on to present what might be called a domino theory of the Bible, saying that if the accuracy of even the smallest detail in the Bible is questioned, the credibility of all biblical truth would fall with it.
“I wonder if there’s an even greater danger here,” I said. “And that’s elitism. Not trusting your congregation.” He obviously disagreed.
Incidents like that made it clear to me that many clergy feel that part of the “holy” side of their calling is to pose as an authority figure, to state things categorically even when they themselves have questions and doubts. Somehow they don’t trust God’s ability to teach their congregations the same way he’s teaching them. Again I felt the tension between being a prophet who speaks for God and being a fellow pilgrim who’s also searching for the answers. As Christian leaders, we have to take positions on biblical issues, to clearly proclaim God’s truth. But we also have to be honest. That’s our challenge: to be authoritative in teaching God’s Word while at the same time being fair, open-minded, and candid about what it’s like trying to live up to biblical standards.
Bitter Reality or Sweet Illusion?
Another experience shaped my understanding of this tension of being holy and being human. I saw that pastors who tried to keep up the facade of perfection, of having all the answers, were forced to repress their own feelings and doubts. Such repression is dangerous because things that are repressed have a way of coming out under pressure.
A friend of mind drove a taxi in Chicago while he was attending seminary. He told me, “Jay, you need to drive a cab one Saturday night and see how many preachers you pick up who end up drunk and crying and telling you their story about how they can’t meet the impossible demands.” Their means of coping with overwhelming expectations was to have this “lost weekend” in the big city. This, of course, was one man’s observation, but if you talk with police officers, judges, lawyers, bartenders, credit managers, and others who are forced to deal with the underbelly of society, you will find a great deal of knowing cynicism about our profession.
When some Christians hear about this, their response is: “Let’s just get rid of the phonies. That would clean up this mess.”
To this I say two things. First, if we could clean up human behavior, Jesus wouldn’t have had to die. He would have simply demanded good performance. Second, given the persistent behavior of the human race, God uses flawed instruments. If we get rid of all the sinners in ministry, no work will get done. Solomon had a glimpse of the problem when he said, “Where there is no ox, the stable is clean.”
When I and some of the other men in YFC saw what was going on among our peers, we decided we were going to deal with life as it is and speak honestly about it. We declared our freedom from the “conspiracy of hypocrisy.” The chapter on honesty in Keith Miller’s The Taste of New Wine was a turning point for me. If I’m lusting, I determined, I’m going to call it lust. I’m going to admit to my friends that I lust. I’m going to ask their advice about it, because I’ve decided that they probably lust, too.
Our thinking was that rather than deny our feelings and hide our questions, we and those we preached to would be much better off if we opened the windows of our minds and let the wind blow through. Looking at life’s experiences honestly in the light of the Bible had to be preferable to locking things up in little closets in our minds.
When we are able to “join the human race” and acknowledge that as ministers of the gospel we share the human condition, then suddenly the we/they division becomes less distinct. The people we are trying to reach cease being the enemy or a threat because of differing lifestyles and become fellow human beings who, like us, need an overt expression of the love of God. We are able to identify with their needs, even their sins, because we give them the same benefit of the doubt we want God to give to us.
Because my friends and I were involved in evangelism and the persons needing Christ were out in the world, we began to spend time going where they were and attending some of their activities. As a result, we drew some criticism for being “worldly.” I began to understand what Jesus felt when they said, “He spends his time with winebibbers and sinners.” Thankfully we also began to understand, “The whole need not the physician, but they who are sick.”
There are, of course, dangers in identifying with the world or, more precisely, incarnating the gospel. But I believe God prefers us to admit reality, even when it’s not pretty, rather than perpetuate an illusion.
This new approach revolutionized my Christian life and ministry — for the better, I believe. It’s allowed me to pursue true spirituality, which consists not of denying and hiding but of facing things honestly under the guidance of Scripture and the Holy Spirit. There are great rewards awaiting anyone willing to embark on this journey of robust transparency, honesty, repentance, and freedom.
Yes, all of us agree with the Bible’s statement that holiness is required, but most of us have found perfection elusive. We are earthen vessels called to carry God’s truth through both proclamation and incarnation — not only in our sermons, but in our relationships and personal lifestyle as well. What an impossible task! Especially after an honest look in the mirror or our first psychology class. If we’re honest, we must admit we are downright unholy people. We are called, yes, but called from a fallen race.
In the rest of this book, a somewhat autobiographical and anecdotal journey, I would like to challenge the notion that God demands those in ministry be perfect men and women. In fact, I believe God does not expect perfection; that’s an unrealistic expectation of the world.
As pastors, we must not only proclaim God’s grace, but also understand it as the only hope for any human being, including ourselves! Because we are human, our task is to experience and receive it. Grace is not only a topic for sermons; it’s also the key to authenticity, mental hygiene, and effective ministry.
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