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 in desperate need of rest. 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 once showed me a journal article on the “giving up, given up complex”—a psychological state found in people who lose their reasons for living. They ask, “Why? What’s the difference?” And that question makes even pastors vulnerable to exhaustion and burnout.
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. 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. People who have forgotten “why” become obsessed with “how.”
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. One of the greatest crises I faced in ministry came concerning my preaching. I 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. Friday, it built. Saturday I was impossible to live with. Sunday morning I was filled with energy but out of touch with everyone. Worship would peak, and then I’d crash.
Week after week this cycle repeated itself. After a few months, I was vacillating between frenetic activity and paralyzing sloth. It just wasn’t fun being a preacher anymore. That concerned me greatly because I never doubted God called me to preach.
After much prayer and hard thought, it dawned on me: I was trying to preach the greatest sermon ever heard. I wasn’t satisfied to offer God and my people my best. 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, and then keeping busy enough or noisy enough to not have to face up to the disjointedness of our lives.
First-love revival
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.
Remembrance 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.
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 means quiet reflection. More often, it means 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 pray, study, and think again.”
It never seems to work that way. The more I need to pray and study, the less I feel like doing it. But do it I must. As the song says, “Them that gots is them that gets.” The choices I make when I don’t feel motivated are the most crucial of my walk. C. S. Lewis touched on this when he had Screwtape advise Wormwood that God will sometimes overwhelm us with his presence early in our experience, but he never allows that to last. 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.”
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 difficulty of sustaining pure motivation. A high priority in my commitments is a covenant prayer group of fellow pastors. When one of us is “down” the others are “up” and can offer encouragement. My brothers and sisters in ministry often serve as agents of remembrance for me, reminding me why I’m here and what I’m 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 motivated him to work hard. He could relax and rest, and go back to work with greater energy. More important, when he did work, he knew nothing was wasted because God was sovereign over everything.
That’s how it should be for us. A motivated Christian is a relaxed and grateful Christian: grateful for what God has done in the resurrection of Christ, and relaxed because of his hope in God’s sure conclusion of all history in his Son. Freed from the bondage of the past and anxiety about the future, we can finally get down to the work at hand in the present.
Ben Patterson is a retired pastor, having served as campus pastor at Westmont College for 17 years and as a church planting pastor in Irvine, California for 23 years. . He is also a former contributing editor to Christianity Today and The Wittenburg Door and has authored many books.
