Hello, fellow wayfarers … What 30 years of ministry has taught me, in a list of 30 disconnected thoughts … Why a reader thought I should listen to a Canadian singer-songwriter I’d never encountered before … How a retired general taught me about character in leadership … A Buckeye State Desert Island Bookshelf … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.
30 Things I’ve Learned in 30 Years of Ministry
Last week, August 6, marked the 30th (!) anniversary of my ordination to ministry by the Bay Vista Baptist Church in my hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi. I recognize the milestone this week by offering you 30 things I’ve learned in 30 years in ministry.
I do not claim that these are the 30 most important things I’ve learned. If I tried to do that, I would procrastinate forever, weighing what is more important than something else. So instead, I am tricking myself by forcing myself to do it randomly, not allowing myself time to think between each of these bullet points.
Some of them are points I’ve made before; some have never occurred to me until right now. They are in no particular order but how they occurred to me as I wrote them down. Here they are.
1.) In preparing to preach, teach, and in everything else I’ve done, immersion since childhood in the Scriptures was more important than graduate and post-graduate education in systematic theology.
2.) Hymnody is more important than “vision statements” or “mission statements” or almost anything else. The hymns are what seep into the broken places and the hidden places. Replacing them with ephemeral, forgettable, and always-changing music is insane.
3.) That said, alongside the hymns, I realize how much of my theology and sense of the world was formed by the contemporary Christian music I listened to as a teenager. Michael Card songs taught me hermeneutics. Rich Mullins and Amy Grant songs taught me to pray. Petra songs taught me a “happy warrior” approach to spiritual battle.
4.) After years of teaching preaching at the seminary level, I ultimately concluded that I could help people to shape and form and get better at a gift they already have, but I couldn’t teach it. Preaching is about a way of seeing, a way of inhabiting a text, and it’s more about affection for and obsession with the Bible than it is about communication ability. That has to just be there; it can’t be taught.
5.) Most of the theological errors I’ve found myself or others in can usually be boiled down to confusing an “either/or” with a “both/and” statement or vice versa. The distinction is important. To put a “both/and” on the question of “the Lord or Baal” or “Jesus or mammon” is deadly. To put an “either/or” on questions of divine providence versus human freedom, truth versus love, faith versus obedience, gospel versus justice, etc., is too.
6.) Early on, I assumed that rigorous theology was the answer to cultural, nominal Christianity. I assumed that people who were steeped in theology were spiritually mature. I found, quite often, just the opposite: Many of those who were deep in theological systems turned out to be hacks, selling out what they believe for politics or denominational belonging or money. And some of those I thought were “pragmatists” or “mystics” turned out to be those who really stood by what they believed.
7.) My mind was often wrong, but my gut rarely was. If I had trusted the latter—“This person gives off a creepy vibe but I seem to be the only one who notices” or “This person is filled with rage but is so important to the kingdom so I should overlook it” or “This leader is, behind closed doors, talking about crazy things, but he’s smarter than I am so I shouldn’t question it”—I would have avoided much heartache. Once, 30 years ago, I attended a purportedly “Calvinist” meeting at which I said, “This seems to be more about neo-Confederate ancestor cultism than about the grace of God, but that must just be my immaturity.” My first intuition proved to be true.
8.) Because as a child, my father—growing up a pastor’s son in a parsonage—had such a bad experience seeing the darker side of church tensions, I resolved to do my best to keep my children from seeing such. I realized just how successful I was at this when one of my adult sons called, preparing to give his “spiritual autobiography” to a new church in the faraway state where he had moved, and asked me, “One thing: looking over this, I realize that we were always in Southern Baptist churches, and then we were at a nondenominational church; is there any back story to that?”
9.) A complementarian who believes that certain biblical texts differentiate a few offices between men and women and an egalitarian who believes the full authority of the Bible but believes the texts in question don’t say what the complementarian says they do have more in common with each other than either does with the “complementarian” who thinks everything is about gender wars or who has a creepy psychological problem with women, or with the “egalitarian” who thinks Paul and Peter were misogynists. The “two-party” system on this stuff—which I once accepted at face value—is nonsensical and dangerous.
10.) I assumed as a youth pastor that I would “grow out” of youth ministry, but I have learned it is all youth ministry. Getting a group of teenagers to Glorieta for Centrifuge—while dealing with who refuses to sit next to whom, who is hiding marijuana in the bottom of the Doritos bag, and who is jealous that so-and-so is talking to somebody else—is all the exact same skill set as leading a church, a faculty, a nonprofit, or organizing a coalition in the Oval Office.
11.) I’ve counseled lots of couples through one cheating on the other. In most of those cases, the cheated-on spouse assumed that he or she was partly to blame for not being attractive enough or sexy enough. I have literally not once ever seen that to be the case. In almost every case, the cheater wasn’t looking for sex but for the feeling of being an adolescent again, with the hormonal rush of “I like you; do you like me?”
12.) The most dangerous and damnable heresy is treating Jesus like a means to an end—political mobilization, marketing a product, financial blessing, or whatever. It doesn’t matter what the “end” is, or how theologically sophisticated one is in getting there. The way of Simon Magus (Acts 8:18–23) always leads to hell.
13.) You can’t avoid criticism. Decide in advance what kind of criticism you would want to be said about you and remembered about you at your graveside, and then don’t let it crush you when it comes.
14.) Everybody talks about “standing on their convictions” or “having a countercultural Christian worldview.” Most of this is fake. You can usually only see it’s fake when the “convictions” cost membership in the tribe. If you don’t adapt, you will find that many people—even those who privately agree with you—will urge you to lie, to apologize for what you don’t think was wrong or to throw out red meat to the base in order to divert their attention.
15.) Praying is easy for some people while, for them, reading the Bible is hard. The reverse is true for me. I need to write down my prayers, or to offer them while walking, alone. That’s not any more or less spiritual than anybody else, just what works for me. Finding that out about oneself is important.
16.) When guest speaking somewhere, there will almost always be someone who wants an ahead-of-time call to go over how to use the microphone or to tell you that the question-and-answer session will follow the message, not precede it. This makes them feel better, but is a waste of their time and yours. If performing a concert, arriving an hour early for a mic check and sound check is probably necessary. To preach a sermon or to give a lecture, it is not.
17.) Wisdom is not optional, and it’s about more than knowing facts. Solomon demonstrated wisdom by knowing human nature generally, and “reading” specific people’s actions and motives particularly (1 Kings 3:16–28). Solomon’s greater son did too (John 2:23–25). You need to get to know psychologies very different from your own. Along with immersion in the text of the Bible, paying attention when counseling people will help, as will reading good fiction.
18.) Most things you think are cul-de-sacs or dry times in your ministry turn out not to be. They are almost always the points where—much later in your life—you will look back and see that God was most at work, preparing you for something else.
19.) Keep notes of encouragement that come to you over the years. You will need them later. Sometimes keep notes of criticism. I can think of one of them that helped me: “You always look to the right side of the sanctuary and never over to the left when you’re preaching.” And I have framed one of them: “Russell Moore is … a nasty man with no heart,” which makes me laugh sometimes.
20.) Keep a journal, if you can. It will help you to remember ordinary graces you will forget, and it will also show you that almost everything you worried about turned out to be either something that never happened or something that was bearable.
21.) Friendships matter. You will find that there are a lot of people who will use you for your gifts. If you can find that small group of people who will love you even if you were to leave ministry entirely to work the night shift at the mortuary, these are the people you need to keep close to you always. If you’re married, the most important of these is your spouse—who must be, of course, much more than a friend but not less.
22.) People will tell you to separate out your Bible reading for devotion and for preparation to teach. Take the truth of what they mean, and then discard this advice. If you separate these two strictly, you are secularizing. If you’re not reading the Bible because it fascinates you and motivates you, you are not going to teach it well. And while reading the Bible on your own, if you don’t start thinking about how you would communicate it to others, you aren’t really a teacher. The goal is to be so in the Bible that you forget whether you’re reading it because you love it or because you’re preparing a sermon or a lesson.
23.) If you’re in a “lower church” tradition, people will tell you that you should space out the Lord’s Supper because if you do it too often, people will get bored with it. If people are bored with being fed by Jesus—of having a sign enacted of his communion with his people, of his death, burial, and resurrection, of the oneness of his body—then that’s the emergency. You don’t solve this by serving the Lord’s Supper less often, but more often.
24.) Cynicism feels self-protective and sophisticated. If you always assume the worst, you will, in a fallen world, often end up right. But it’s just fear—and it will deaden you. When you start to become cynical, you are hearing the devil. Fight like hell against it.
25.) We tend to overreact to the last bad thing. When we decided evangelism programs were overly programmed, we stopped training people—and left people without the mental “hooks” they needed to maintain conversations about spiritual things. When we decided altar calls could be manipulative, we ended them, and ended with them the ability to rehearse for people every week how to communicate the free call of the gospel.
26.) It’s important to have a Christian view of the world, but most of the stuff that goes under the name “worldview” is just somebody’s secular political program—which they would hold even if Jesus were dead—with Bible verses attached. Pay attention to what’s not talked about.
27.) As a matter of fact, the most dangerous ways that one is “conformed to this world” (Rom. 12:2) are almost never about issues now being debated. They are almost always about things so ubiquitous that no one questions them or about things so far ahead that no one is ready for them.
28.) The miracle that many skeptics around you find most incredible is not the resurrection or the virgin birth, but the new birth. They’ve seen lots of Christians who have given no evidence of having been born again, of walking in the Spirit. Lots of people are watching you—people you have no idea are doing so—and they are asking, “Is it real?”
29.) The “slippery slope” argument is a logical fallacy, but slippery slopes are real. It’s just that they go in all directions, not just in one.
30.) The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not, the darkness will not, and the darkness cannot, overcome it. Don’t give up.
31.) For a lot of us called to ministry, math is hard. That’s okay.
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Listening In to Our After Party / Desert island bookshelf
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Readers, what do y’all think? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you, what songs or books would you choose?
- For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list between 5 and 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)
- For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books, along with a photo of all the books together.
Send your list (or both lists) to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like, along with the city and state from which you’re writing.
Quote of the Moment
“She said Pastor Leake was a decent man who often mistook his worldview for the world, a common churchman’s error. She said the church was a broken compass.”
—Leif Enger
Currently Reading (or Re-Reading)
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Russell Moore
Editor in Chief, Christianity Today
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Moore to the Point
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