When I first started preaching, I assumed that becoming a preacher/teacher/pastor would confer spiritual maturity because you get to study the Bible, talk about it each week, and get paid for it. In actuality, preaching can make spiritual health much harder. Here are a few of things that ensnare those of us who preach.
1. Being inauthentic. How often have you heard (or said), “I don’t watch much TV, but I saw something recently … ” Now why do we say, “I don’t watch much TV”? Because we don’t want people thinking we just sit in the La-Z-Boy every night. It’s so tempting to project an image that we want people to see, and it leaks out in our words, our tone of voice, even our posture and gestures.
2. Fear. When I was starting out in ministry, I remember reading a news story about a pastor who was preaching the book of Revelation when somebody in his congregation shot him. That scared me.
I’ve not had that kind of opposition. So far. But I have had the fears of how I am doing, and how people think I’m doing, and how I get a group of people who are resistant to turn in a different direction. It’s easy to live in fear.
3. Comparison. The first church where I preached was in Southern California. One Sunday a visitor met me and told me he attended Hollywood Presbyterian Church, where the legendary Lloyd Ogilvie was preaching at that time. Have you ever heard Lloyd Ogilvie’s rich, deep, resonant voice? He sounds like what I think God would sound like on a really good day.
So this visitor hands me his business card. He’s a speech instructor. He said, “Give me a call sometime.” All I could think was that to someone who listens to Lloyd Ogilvie, I must sound like Mickey Mouse saying, “Okay now, let’s repent.”
We face this temptation like no generation of preachers has ever faced before. At least in the 1500s, nobody came up to a preacher and said: “I hear Calvin on the radio and get CDs from Luther. How come you don’t preach like they do?”
We live in an era of comparison, but if we give in to it, it can destroy us.
4. Pride. Researchers surveyed 800,000 high school students, asking them to rate themselves on their social skills. How many acknowledged they were below average in social skills? Zero! And 25 percent ranked themselves in the top one percent. Psychologists call this “a self-serving bias.” A spiritual director would call it pride.
When preachers have been surveyed, almost 90 percent rated themselves as above average in preaching skills. Then we have to preach on texts like “Do not think of yourselves more highly than you ought.”
5. Manipulation. Some of us have been in churches where you hear, “Every head bowed, every eye closed. Thank you. I see that hand. Yes. And that hand. Thank you,” even though no hands may have been raised.
I can remember sitting through four consecutive services in a large church, and the speaker cried at the same point in the message four consecutive times.
And we’ve all heard stories told as if they happened to the speaker when we read about them elsewhere.
We’re all tempted to manipulate the facts and the feelings.
6. Anger. Henri Nouwen put this best in his book, The Way of the Heart:
“Anger in particular seems close to a professional vice in the contemporary ministry. Pastors are angry at their leaders for not leading and at their followers for not following. They are angry at those who do not come to church for not coming, and angry at those who do come for coming without enthusiasm. They are angry at their families who make them feel guilty, and angry at themselves for not being who they want to be.
“This is not an open, blatant, roaring anger but an anger hidden behind the smooth word, the smiling face, the polite handshake. It is a frozen anger, and anger which settles into a biting resentment and slowly paralyzes a generous heart. If there is anything that makes the ministry look grim and dull it is this dark, insidious anger in the servants of Christ.”
7. Whatever God brought to your mind while reading the first six.—John Ortberg
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