I once was part of a survey on spiritual formation. Thousands of people were asked when they grew most spiritually, and what contributed to their growth. The response was humbling—at least for someone who works at a church.
The number one contributor to spiritual growth was not transformational teaching. It was not being in a small group. It was not reading deep books. It was not energetic worship experiences. It was not finding meaningful ways to serve.
It was suffering.
People said they grew more during seasons of loss, pain, and crisis than they did at any other time. I immediately realized that, as a church, we had not even put anybody in charge of pain distribution! So now we are figuring out how to create more pain per attender for maximum spiritual growth.
Actually, the wonderful and terrible thing about crisis is that it’s the one resource we do not have to fund or staff or program. It just comes. However, pain does not automatically produce spiritual growth. Ghettos and barrios and abusive homes and trauma wards may produce scarred souls; they can cripple more human spirits than they strengthen.
Crisis can lead to soul strength, but not if the soul is starved of other nutrients, and not apart from certain responses.
If we have not thought carefully about the intersection of crisis and ministry, we may have neglected the most soul-formative moments that occur in the lives of our people. So what does wisdom teach about crisis and the cure of souls?
First, do no harm …
No one wants pain. Not even long-time, mature Christians who want to grow. We will always find ways to avoid pain. Pain itself is a bad thing.
It is a little known fact that in Chinese, the word crisis is made up of two characters: “life” and “stinks.”
Well, that may not be true, but the place to begin in crisis is with simple humanity. When someone is in crisis, don’t start by teaching, leveraging, or explaining. Just be with.
Perhaps the single most disobeyed command the apostle Paul ever wrote was “Mourn with those who mourn.”
He doesn’t say, “Give good advice to those who mourn.” He doesn’t say, “Tell mourners to suck it up because plenty of people have it worse.” He doesn’t say, “Rebuke mourners because being around someone who’s unhappy gets in the way of my own unbridled demand for incessant pleasantness.”
No, mourn with those who mourn. We do not need answers or formulas to minister in crisis. Nicholas Wolterstorff is a brilliant Yale philosopher whose 25-year-old son died in a mountain-climbing accident. His Lament for a Son is as searingly painful and beautiful as any book on suffering I know. He points out that what we need—even more than we need answers—is Presence. Wolterstorff writes that what has moved him deeply is the Presence of the Crucified One who chooses to suffer with suffering people. He notes that Scripture says no one can see the face of God and live. He always thought that meant no one can see God’s glory and live. But now he wonders if perhaps it means no one can see God’s suffering and live.
Or perhaps God’s suffering is his glory.
In crisis, especially in deep crisis, we may not be able to bring answers. But we can always bring presence.
When Job hit his crisis, he was surrounded by his friends: Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. They went to Job to “sympathize with him.” The Hebrew verb here, nud, refers to body movement—shaking back and forth, nodding the head. You see this sometimes when people experience trauma and go into shock, rocking themselves back and forth like a mother does with her baby.
Their love is so strong, their grief is so great, that they sit next to him and take on his anguish.
“They sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him because they saw how great his suffering was.” It’s worth pausing here for a moment. Imagine sitting with someone in silence for seven days. This was such a powerful act, it became part of Jewish life;
To this day they speak of “sitting shiva”—literally “sitting sevens.” Friends will come and sit with one who mourns over a period of a week.
I have a friend whose dad died. Someone from her church asked her, “Was your dad a Christian?” Maybe they wanted to minimize her grief by saying her dad was in heaven.
When she told them no, he was not a Christian, the other person just walked away. They were prepared to try to minimize mourning, but not to enter into it.
It’s interesting that after the seven days, Job’s friends will speak. A lot. They’ll get in trouble with God for what they say. Job’s friends have taken a lot of heat over the years—for good reasons. Their words are not so hot.
But their silence was brilliant. Their silence was a gift.
Maybe one reason Job is able to struggle with God in such honesty and persistence is he had friends who would take on his sorrow in seven days of silence.
Ministry in crisis takes time
This immediately raises a critical issue for pastoral life today, which is the level of “hurry sickness” we all have. Because you cannot mourn in a hurry. Speed may be good when it comes to ambulances and Internet connections—maybe even when it comes to the length of sermons, if my wife can be trusted—but all the technology at MIT cannot microwave the healing of a human heart.
Our time-insanity has gone so far over the top that I actually saw an ad for a pharmaceutical product with this caption: “For the busy woman who simply does not have time for a yeast infection.”
You mean some women do?
One of the ironies of crises is that often we have them because we feel we have no time—only to find that when the crisis hits, we suddenly have nothing else.
A man is so caught up in the demands of his career that he simply does not have time to devote to his marriage. Until his wife leaves him, and the divorce takes massive amounts of money and hours with lawyers and days in court, and suddenly he finds himself at home alone with all kinds of time.
A pastor is so busy with his church that he simply does not have time to be with his teenage daughter. Until she runs away from home. Then he spends every day in prayer, in tears, checking with police departments, talking with counselors.
If there is not enough time to deal with small crises, then eventually the pace of your life will create a large one. Then you will have time.
So here’s a little litmus test for your pace of life: can you mourn with those who mourn? Your church may well be too large for you to mourn with all the mourners. Ray Johnston of Bayside Church near me has a wonderful expression: he said that as the church grew, he realized that “the people would have to pastor the people.”
But if you are a church leader, there will be some co-workers or board members or key volunteers who hit a crisis. Will you have time to mourn with those whom God calls you to mourn with? If you don’t, and if some day your own time for mourning comes—and it will come—who will mourn with you?
Last summer, for the first time, I took a sabbatical. Our elders provided it. In fact, they insisted on it. I had firm instructions: don’t write anything, don’t speak anywhere, don’t do anything productive.
I was surprisingly good at it.
But during this period, a college teacher of mine who was much-beloved by my closest circle of college friends, passed away. We were all able to gather back at the college, to remember and laugh and cry and pray, and stay up late at night and eat breakfast till noon.
It dawned on me that part of why I was able to mourn in the way I think it was meant to be done—to mourn with ache and confusion and gratitude and wonder—is that I wasn’t preoccupied with too many tasks for my soul to handle.
Of course, I can’t always be on sabbatical. So that leads to this …
Crisis is a temporary opportunity for a permanent gift
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes that crisis may bring growth—but only if we respond rightly.
For a long time, researchers have looked at what enables some people to endure suffering. But over the last decade or so, the focus has shifted from looking only at how some people make it through to how people are able to go through adversity and actually come through it stronger than before.
Just as there is a condition called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, researchers are now talking about Post Traumatic Growth.
One line of thinking is that adversity can lead to growth. Another line of thinking is that the highest levels of growth cannot be achieved without adversity. It may be that somehow adversity leads to growth in a way that nothing else does.
The “growth” that comes in a crisis will stop when the crisis stops—unless it leads us to make lasting changes. If you do ministry long enough, you know that there will be moments of crisis on a broad scale. In San Bruno California, near one of our campuses, there was recently a gas pipeline explosion that destroyed many homes and killed several people. On a national scale, we can all remember how our entire nation hit a spiritual crisis during the attacks of 9/11. Churches were filled, community prayer services were held, and people cried out for God.
But eventually crisis fades, and spiritual urgency fades along with it. We need to help people learn how to make changes that will outlast the crisis.
It’s as if in normal life we step onto a treadmill and begin running after something—money, security, or success—when adversity knocks us off. Suffering enables us to see the folly of chasing after temporal gods, and when people suffer, they often resolve to not return to their old way of life when things normalize. But you have a finite window of time to make changes, otherwise you drift back to old patterns.
Soren Kierkegaard wrote that “affliction is able to drown out every earthly voice … but the voice of eternity deep in the soul it cannot drown.”
If you have courage to make changes in your life, something can happen in your soul. The Spirit will bring the courage if you keep asking while the experience of adversity is fresh. Ultimately, adversity can produce hope because of a reality much larger than you and me.
Crisis can purify my own ministry
Crisis isn’t just something we minister to. It’s something we minister from.
Over a decade ago I had a long-standing pot boil over. From when Nancy and I first got married, I would often do a kind of strange dance with her; I would vacillate from times of intense—even forced—closeness, to times when I would find something about Nancy that bothered me and I’d withdraw emotionally. I did not want to do this dance, but I could not find a way out of it.
Finally, after a particularly painful time of withdrawal, Nancy said she was not doing the dance anymore. She said this pattern clearly involved issues I needed to deal with that were not about her, and she was calling a time out while I dealt with them.
This triggered a long journey inward for me, and a time of pain and depression and coming to grips with the emptiness of a performance-driven life that was unlike anything I had ever known. I carried a ball of pain in my gut that became a kind of companion; I used to write in my journal each morning, “Good morning, ball of pain …”
I could still study and preach, because I will be able to do those things until a few months after I die, but that was about all I was capable of. And even the fact that I was able to do them brought me no joy.
But I was given another gift—I was able to serve other people without getting my ego fed by it. I was, for a six-month window or so, “dead” to many of the motives that divided my will.
I learned, at a deep, deep level, that I was not in control. And while the pain of that era has lessened, so has some of the earlier emptiness. So has the dance of smother and withdraw.
Crisis reminds me that control is an illusion.
One of the most misquoted verses you’ll never find in the Bible is this one: “God will never give me more than I can handle.”
Huh? Really? Where’s that one? Poverty, genocide, war, failure, mental illness—people are given more than they can handle all the time! The Bible does say that no temptation is given to people without a way out, but that’s about temptation, not adversity. The Bible does not promise that you will only be given what you can handle. In fact, the one certainty of your life is you will die—and you definitely can’t handle that! You will never be placed in a situation God can’t handle.
God isn’t at work producing the circumstances I want. God is at work in bad circumstances to produce the me he wants.
Crisis can produce deeper roots
Imagine you’re handed a script of your newborn child’s entire life. Better yet, you’re given an eraser and five minutes to edit out whatever you want. You read that she will have a learning disability in grade school. Reading, which comes easily for some kids, will be laborious for her. In high school, she will make a great circle of friends, then one of them will die of cancer. After high school, she will get into her preferred college, but while there, she’ll lose a leg in a car crash. Following that, she will go through a difficult depression. A few years later she’ll get a great job, then lose that job in an economic downturn. She’ll get married, but then go through the grief of separation.
With this script of your child’s life before you and five minutes to edit it, what would you erase? Psychologist Jonathan Haidt poses this question in this hypothetical exercise: Wouldn’t you want to take out all the stuff that would cause them pain?
If your child never knew failure, disappointment, or suffering, would that be good?
If you could erase every failure, disappointment, and period of suffering, would that be a good idea? Would that cause them to grow into the best version of themselves? Is it possible that we actually need adversity and setbacks—maybe even crisis and trauma—to reach the fullest level of development and growth?
Paul seemed to think so. “We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, character produces hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us” (Rom. 5:2-5).
Crises can deepen love
Thomas Merton wrote, “As long as we are on earth, the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because this love is the resetting of a Body of broken bones.”
Like large parts of the country, many people in our area have been hit by economic conditions. People are underemployed or unemployed for the first time in their life. This happened to a friend of mine, and though I called him when I first heard, he didn’t return the call for some time, simply because the hurt was so deeply connected to his sense of worth and identity.
But some folks began a Career Action Ministry, where people who were in the same boat had a boat to gather in—and the depth of connection was palpable. People who had never met each other before found a common meeting place in the brotherhood of hurt. They were able to speak the same language; tell the same story without fear of pity or shame. They met with a degree of openness and vulnerability that created family.
The same is true for so many people in pain: people going through divorce, parents of special-needs children, families who have members that suffer from mental or emotional health issues, people who wrestle with addictions to substances or sex.
On the other hand, I saw a news story last week about pastors who have lost their faith. Their faces were blurred and their voices were disguised because they could not let anyone know—not even their spouses. And I wondered how much suffering they might have been spared, how different the outcome of their doubting might have been, if they could have had a community of fellow-doubters to know and be known by.
In normal times, isolation hurts. In crisis, isolation kills.
In normal times, community blesses. In crisis, community saves.
Jacob and Esau were separated by their struggle for the blessing. Eventually this struggle led to murderous threats and years of estrangement. Finally Jacob was coming home. In the strange story he meets and wrestles with a mysterious stranger, to whom Jacob says, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
Jacob is given a blessing, but also given another strange gift. His hip is wrenched. The next day he was limping because of his hip.
He looked up to see his brother. The text says that “Esau ran to meet Jacob.”
Jacob could not run. His running days were over. The rest of his life he would walk with a limp.
“Esau ran to meet Jacob and embraced him; he threw his arms around his neck and kissed him. And they wept” (Genesis. 33:4).
In normal times, community blesses. in crisis, community saves.
Perhaps something about Jacob’s vulnerability healed Esau’s heart in a way that Jacob’s cleverness and strength never could.
Jacob was given a wound, and a blessing. Or maybe his wound WAS his blessing.
Maybe you will bless more people with your limp than with your strength.
Blessed are you who limp, for you shall walk with God.
In crisis, people are hungry for Hope
When a crisis hits, when the stock market plummets, or your morale is sinking, or your assets are shrinking, or your health is collapsing, you may wonder, Is anything going up?
Yes.
The chance to trust God when trusting isn’t easy is wide open, the prospect for modeling hope for a hope-needy world is trending upward, and the possibility of cultivating a storm-proof faith is always going up. This is so because certain truths remain unchanged: God remains sovereign, grace beats sin, prayers get heard, the Bible endures, heaven’s mercies spring up new every morning, the cross still testifies to the power of sacrificial love, the tomb is still empty, and the Kingdom Jesus announced is still expanding without needing to be bailed out by human efforts.
God is still in the business of redemption, specializing in bringing something very, very good out of something very, very bad.
Yes, crisis is prime time in the cure of souls.
John Ortberg is pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church and editor at large of Leadership.
Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
