The Lost Art of Pastoral Correction

I can tell you right now the names of two people who no longer call themselves Christians because of my pastoral leadership. In both cases, they left church, probably angry with God and religion to this very day. In both cases, I was confronting a sin in their life. And in both cases, I had a lot to learn afterwards.

As a leader, how do you correct someone without driving them away?

Correction is necessary to the gospel. Jesus was about full, mutual, real, intense, honest relationship where sin was dealt with in the context of community. As a pastor, I’ve come to recognize this afresh, realizing that my role is to help bring this kind of life into my community.

But it is hard.

Three hurdles to jump

I’ve observed first-hand three hurdles to necessary pastoral correction.

First, we have mistakenly minimized the all-too-important relationship between what we enact as leaders and what the Spirit of God does because we were willing to do our work.

Early in my ministry, I quickly came face-to-face with the monster of the church. From my front row seat, I could see the deep-rooted depravity of the people God had given me to lead; not to mention, of course, a newfound respect for my own depravity. I took up my new mantle of authority to correct sin. What I found was shocking: people didn’t like it when I held up a mirror and showed them their own warts and imperfections.

The pain caused by correction—even if done in love—slowly began to cause me to shrink back from my pastoral duty of correction. A fellow pastor said something that seemed to answer the problem: the Holy Spirit is better at correcting people’s sin than I was and I could leave it to him. This, I was convinced, was the theological answer to my pastoral problem. The result was pastoral silence. For a few years, my role as corrector atrophied, all, of course, because the Spirit could do the work. But, over time, I allowed that overly optimistic belief to morph into a kind of belief that, as a pastor, I don’t need to correct, rebuke, or challenge those in my community.

I don’t deny that the Holy Spirit corrects us. What I’ve come to believe, however, is that as a pastor, the Spirit’s work of correction is actually worked out through the loving words of a spiritual leader.

To assume that I am off the hook to say the hard word of correction because God’s Spirit does the work is, in my mind, tantamount to saying we don’t need to learn to recycle because we know the world will end.

Our responsibility is in no way minimized by God’s sovereignty. Just because God can and will does not mean we should not do.

The second hurdle we face in pastoral correction is fear. Silence, by default, will almost always be the easiest answer. Not the best answer, mind you, but the easiest answer. Recently, a member of my church completed his chaplaincy requirements having learned many of the ins and outs of the chaplaincy world. Turns out, the work of a chaplain requires relational juggling—serving the needs of patient, families, doctors, and nurse all at the same time. All while, the chaplain must keep a sane mind, a cool emotional demeanor, and embody the gospel of Jesus in trying times.

My friend learned of a phenomenon known in the medical community as “Mutual Pretense.” Something that takes place after it’s become clear to everyone that the patient will die. The doctor, patient, and family of the patient will often deal with the fact by talking about anything other than the fact that the patient is going to die. They’ll talk about what’ll happen once they get out the hospital, about sports, about family—anything but the truth of the impending death.

Mutual pretense is a kind of survival mechanism allowing everyone to continue talking to each other while not having to actually talk about what’s really going on. mutual pretense also is used by pastors as a way of avoiding corrective conversations. The pastoral vocation is not a vocation that seeks to mute the voice of truth and reality. Rather, it should be the voice of truth in a given time.

Fear often leads us more than love.

Thirdly, and finally, we have a hard time correcting because our church system in the Protestant/Evangelical way does not allow for it. The fear for many pastors in pastoral confrontation is that once the hard, challenging, corrective word has been spoken, the back door for the corrected person is really big; they can easily leave your church, go down the street, and find another community where their sin and selfishness won’t be confronted as it was in yours. if confronted in one place, we have an endless supply of other communities where we will not have to deal with our depravity. Because we know this, leaders often err on the side of silence hoping that things will work themselves out.

This is compounded by the nature of authority in Protestant churches. You will never, ever, see a book written by a Roman Catholic priest that boasts of his parish as the fastest growing parish in America. And the reason is simple. Roman Catholics, unlike Protestants, don’t see size as the mark of authority. Protestants do. Big equals more authoritative.

When size is everything, you will cautiously protect against saying or doing anything that might shrink the flock. Because that harms your own authority. As a Protestant pastor, the size of my flock is directly related to my value or authority as a leader.

Reflections on correction

So, here are my six biblical reflections on pastoral correction.

I’ve learned that Jesus was both confrontive but unflinchingly kind to those on the journey of faith. He was simultaneously a disciplinarian and an encourager, embodying the balance between the two, a balance that is nothing short of having the skill of hugging and spanking someone at the same moment in time.
I’ve learned that, as a leader, I will always gravitate toward desiring power. Paul Tournier once wrote, “A germ of totalitarianism also lies dormant inside all of us.” Because of this, it is going to be easy to amplify others’ sin and mute their own. Paul spoke of his own sin ad nauseum. Spiritual abuse is any system where the leader has permission to correct but is never honest about their own or corrected about their own. Spiritual abuse is always perpetuated by sinless leaders. Before correcting, it is important to ask if the correction is more about me wanting or desiring power or is it a correction of love for the person before me.
I’ve learned that Paul always began his writings with greetings of thanksgiving before he moved to correction. Oddly enough, Paul’s first letter, 1 Thessalonians, is the only one where this is not the case. I. Howard Marshall suggests that after writing 1 Thessalonians Paul learned a lesson and had a change of mind and was learning how to correct a community in love.
I’ve learned that Jesus begins his critique of the churches of Revelation with what he sees good in them, then he moves to the hard word.
I’ve observed that the biblical characters always corrected sin, never opinion. These are very different, and requires us to recognize the fundamental difference between them both.

I go back to the two people who left the church because of my words. The truth is I said what needed to be said. But, I could have spoken differently, with a greater tone of grace. I’ll have to go to the grave wondering if I could have done things differently.

But until then, I lean on grace.

Jesus, please correct me.