History
Today in Christian History

July 8

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July 8, 1115: French monk Peter the Hermit dies. Several argue that Peter the Hermit launched the crusades. Supposedly, he visited Jerusalem on a pilgrimage in 1093 and returned to Pope Urban II with a plea to do something to stop the Muslims from harassing Christian pilgrims. Two years later Urban II pronounced the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont and Peter the Hermit became one of the crusade’s dominant preachers. After leading a failed “pre-crusade” in which Muslims slaughtered his entire army of 20,000 peasants, Peter joined the main army of the First Crusade (see issue 40: The Crusades).

July 8, 1896: At the Democratic National Convention, fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan gives his famous speech supporting “the little man” of American life. “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold,” he shouted (see issue 55: The Monkey Trial and The Rise of Fundamentalism).

July 8, 1741: Colonial Congregational minister Jonathan Edwards preaches his classic sermon at Enfield, Connecticut: “You are thus in the hands of an angry God; ’tis nothing but his mere pleasure that keeps you from being this moment swallowed up in everlasting destruction” (see issue 8: Jonathan Edwards and issue 77: Jonathan Edwards).

History
Today in Christian History

July 7

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July 7, 1647: Thomas Hooker, Puritan pastor, political theorist, and founder of Connecticut dies on his sixty-first birthday (see issue 41: American Puritans).

July 7, 1874: Popular New England preacher Henry Ward Beecher demands an investigation by his church into the charges of adultery brought by Theodore Tilton, who later sued Beecher for "alienating his wife's affections." The jury could not decide whether a sexual affair had really taken place.

July 7, 1946: Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850-1917), founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, becomes the first American to be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church.

History
Today in Christian History

July 6

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July 6, 1054: Church legates of the Roman pope march into the church of Michael Cerularius, Patriarch of Constantinople, and place a bull on the altar, excommunicating him. So began of the Great Schism between the Catholics and the Orthodox. (See issue 54: Eastern Orthodoxy)

July 6, 1415: Jan Hus, Bohemian preacher and forerunner of Protestantism, is burned as a heretic in Constance, Germany (see issue 68: Jan Hus).

July 6, 1535: Sir Thomas More (b. 1478), who had recently resigned as Lord Chancellor of England, is executed for treason. He had sided with the pope against Henry VIII in the matter of the king’s divorce. He was sentenced to be hanged, but Henry commuted the sentence to beheading (see issue 48: Thomas Cranmer).

History
Today in Christian History

July 5

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July 5, 1439: Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholics sign the Decree of Union at the Council of Florence, creating an official union between the two churches. Popular sentiment in Constantinople opposed the decree, and when the Turks captured the city, the union ceased. However, the council's definition of doctrine and its principles of church union (unity of faith, diversity of rite) have proved useful in subsequent church talks (see issue 54: Eastern Orthodoxy).

July 5, 1962: H. Richard Niebuhr, theologian, Yale professor, and author of Christ and Culture (1951), dies at age 67.

History
Today in Christian History

July 4

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July 4, 973: Ulrich, bishop of Augsburg from 923, dies. Twenty years later he would become the first person canonized by a pope.

July 4, 1187: Saladin, leader of the united Muslim forces, defeats the armies of the Third Crusade at Tiberius, Syria (see issue 40: The Crusades).

History
Today in Christian History

July 3

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July 3, 529: The Synod of Orange convenes in southern France. Led by a forceful Augustinian, Caesarius of Arles, the synod upheld Augustine's doctrines of grace and free will while condemning the views of Semi-Pelagians (including John Cassian and Faustus of Riez), who believed the human will and God's grace work together (see issue 67:Augustine).

History
Today in Christian History

July 2

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July 2, 1489: English reformer Thomas Cranmer is born at Aslockton, Nottinghamshire. The archbishop of Canterbury wrote the Book of Common Prayer and was burned at the stake in 1556 (see issue 48: Thomas Cranmer).

July 2, 1505: A rain storm in Germany helps launch the Protestant Reformation. While returning from a trip to visit his parents, Martin Luther (then a law student) was caught in a violent thunderstorm near Stotternheim. Fearing for his life, he cried, "Help me, St. Anne! I will become a monk!" Within two weeks, he made good on his promise (see issue 34: Luther's Early Years).

July 2, 1752: The first English Bible published in America rolls off presses in Boston.

July 2, 1865: William Booth founds The Christian Mission to work among London's poor and unchurched. Later, he changed the mission's name to the Salvation Army (see issue 26: William and Catherine Booth).

History
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July 1, 1643: The Westminster Assembly convenes for the first time in the Henry VII Chapel of Westminster Abbey. Five years later it published the Westminster longer and shorter catechisms, which the Anglican church rejected, but the Presbyterians accepted.

July 1, 1824: The Presbyterian church ordains Charles Grandison Finney, the father of modern revivalism (see issue 20: Charles Grandison Finney).

July 1, 1899: Three traveling businessmen meet in a YMCA building and decide to form an organization to distribute Bibles. The Christian Commercial Men's Association of America, later renamed the Gideons, placed their first Bibles in a hotel nine years later.

July 1, 1896: Abolitionist writer Harriet Beecher Stowe dies. She averaged nearly a book a year, but Uncle Tom's Cabin remains her legacy. Even one of her harshest critics acknowledged that it was "perhaps the most influential novel ever published . . . a verbal earthquake, an ink-and-paper tidal wave" (see issue 33: Christianity and the Civil War).

Pastors

Hanging On for the Eight Year

Ben Patterson

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.

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 desperately in need of a good night’s sleep, a day off, a walk in the park, or a shot of penicillin. That’s all. 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 of mine gave me an article from the Journal of Internal Medicine which dealt with the psychologic state conducive to illness called the “giving up, given up complex.” It is found in people who lose the reasons for living; who are saying of their existence, “Why? What’s the difference?” Acedia can make bodies vulnerable to disease and pastors terminally tired of the church.

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, and rightly so. The only real difference is the anxious, frenetic shape hyperactivity takes.

“We are driven,” proclaims the Datsun commercial. So do the schedules of many pastors who 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 2:1-7. The first love is gone, and now all that is left is the form and the trappings. This may be the sickness most preyed upon by the innumerable seminars offered on the techniques of church leadership. People who have forgotten “why” become obsessed with “how.” Where once there was creativity and tenderness born of deep love, there is now only the sex manual.

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. I know. One of the greatest crises I have faced in my own ministry came two years ago concerning my preaching. I had 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. The irritability would build on Friday, and on Saturday I would be almost impossible to live with. Sunday morning found me filled with energy but totally out of touch with my family or anyone else. My energy level would peak during worship, and then I’d drop exhausted back into depression Sunday afternoon.

Week after week this cycle repeated itself. After a few months, I found myself vacillating between frenetic activity and paralyzing sloth-sometimes within the same day. It just wasn’t fun being a preacher any more. That concerned me greatly because I never doubted God called me to preach. Something had to be done, because I couldn’t see myself going through those cycles and mood changes for the next thirty or forty years of my life.

After much prayer, study, and hard thought, it dawned on me that each week I was trying to preach the greatest sermon ever heard, the kind that generations after me would read and admire and discuss. I wasn’t satisfied to offer God and my people my best from the pulpit. 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 worksrighteousness. 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 the ministry, being cut off from the Vine whose branches we are; and then keeping busy enough, or noisy enough, or narcotized enough to not have to face up to the fundamental disjointedness of our lives.

There is only one antidote to forgetfulness, and that is remembrance. In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the pilgrims were leaving the Delectable Mountains after having been warned by the shepherds to beware of the Enchanted Ground. The overwhelming desire there would be to fall asleep, never to awake.

And just as the shepherds told them, the drowsiness became nearly unbearable. Hopeful pleaded for a nap, just one little rest. But Christian made him talk. He asked him the question, “By what means were you led to go on this pilgrimage?” By telling the story, Hopeful kept talking and kept walking.

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.

Motivation to minister, then, is recovered only by a revived first love in response to the resurrected Christ’s command to “remember then from what you have fallen . . .” (Revelation 2:5).

Sometimes remembrance takes no more than a few moments of quiet reflection over the things God has done in your life. More often, it means an intensified effort to 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 begin praying, studying, and thinking again.” So I sit and wait for it to happen-for motivation to somehow descend upon me like tongues of fire on Pentecost.

It never works that way. The more I need to pray, study, and think, the less I feel like doing it. But do it I must. As the song says, “Them that gots is them that gets.” I am convinced that the choices I make when I don’t feel motivated are the most crucial of my Christian walk. C. S. Lewis touched on this when he had the devil Screwtape advise his nephew Wormwood that God will sometimes overwhelm us with his presence and motivating power early in our Christian experience, but that he never allows that to happen too long. 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.” Screwtape observes that during such “tough periods, much more than during the peak periods,” we are growing into the creatures God wants us to be.

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 congregations.

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 difficulties of sustaining a pure motivation in the ministry. A high priority in my choice of commitments is a covenant prayer group of fellow pastors. There are times we just get together and gripe. More often than not, however, when one of us is “down” the others are “up” and can offer encouragement and advice. When things are bad for me, it seems that they have never been good, and that they are good nowhere else in the universe either. My brothers and sisters in the ministry often serve as good agents of remembrance for me, reminding me of why I am here, and therefore what I am to do.

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 was a great motivator to hard work. He could relax and rest periodically, and therefore go back to work with greater elan. More important, when he did work, he knew nothing was wasted or lost because God was sovereign over everything.

That’s how it should be for us. A motivated Christian is a relaxed and grateful Christian; grateful because of what God has done in the death and resurrection of Christ, and relaxed because of his hope in God’s sure denouement of all history in his son. Because the motivated Christian has been freed from the bondage of the past and anxiety over the future, he can get down to the work at hand in the present.

The story is told of three frogs who found themselves trapped in a large vat of cream. One looked at what appeared to be a hopeless situation and soon sank to the bottom and drowned. Another panicked and began to flail his legs wildly in desperate effort to get out. He was soon exhausted, and he too sank to the bottom and drowned. The third simply kept kicking methodically, steadily, until the vat of cream turned to butter, and he climbed out. v

Copyright © 1980 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Pastors

Comments from the Editor

Paul D. Robbins

By the time you read this page, the editorial staff will have reviewed all the articles in this journal many times. We go through rough drafts, revised drafts, revised revisions, galleys, page proofs, and blue lines. With that kind of saturation, we ought to learn something ourselves and as I review this issue’s contents, I emphatically feel that I have.

For example, John Cheydleur (page 57) taught me something I’d never realized before: it’s possible to feel encouraged and discouraged at the same time. Allowed to continue, these opposite forces create a condition of “burn-out.” Fulfillment and frustration work against each other, canceling each other out until nothing is left but paralyzing fatigue.

That idea helped me. I was reminded of the contradictory pressures I experienced as a pastor, similar to those our readers mention in their letters. Right now, the highs and lows of editing LEADERSHIP take their toll. Response from the first two issues has been very encouraging; however, finding substantive articles on motivation was quite discouraging. I found lots of manuals, books, and seminars describing what I considered manipulation, but very few on true motivation. Digging through stacks of books and reports sent me home many evenings with a knot in my stomach and a headache. At times I wondered if we’d chosen the wrong theme, even though our field research strongly suggested we quickly address this subject. Eventually, we located the people whom I felt could speak to the issue, but first we had to pursue many dead ends.

Encouraged and discouraged. No wonder “burn-out” is one of the first problems mentioned in any discussion about the complexities of the local church, whether you’re talking about the pastor or the people.

So I know my problem. But does that relieve the pressures? Not necessarily, and that’s where Bill Treadwell (see Forum) helped me. He talks about reporting these contradictory feelings in a responsible manner to someone who cares. Contained, such feelings expand like poisonous gases to a point of explosion. Thank God for loving spouses, resilient children, and understanding friends.

And thank God for the Holy Spirit. Through Helmut Thielicke (page 47) I’m reminded that God is always waiting to hear about my feelings, pressures, and problems. Ministry results are God’s problem-a problem he has reserved for himself. My task is to listen, learn, obey, and enjoy.

Enjoy! That’s a word we don’t hear enough about in ministry circles. As Bill also said in the forum, “When are we going to talk about the joy of ministry?” “Them that edits, learns.”

Ten months ago we began to look for an editorial staff for LEADERSHIP- people who would understand where pastors, staff members, and lay leaders live and minister. It’s a pleasure to announce the appointment of Terry Muck as Executive Editor. The son of a pastor/college professor, Terry has lived close to church ministry most of his life. He holds a master of divinity degree from Bethel Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota, and a Ph.D. in comparative religions from Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Since completing his education, Terry has been editing and publishing secular magazines. One of his first assignments was to prepare the article “How I Motivate My Staff” (page 81). We welcome Terry, his wife, Judy, and their two young sons, David and Paul, to our LEADERSHIP family. (Incidentally, Terry is also the fourth-ranked handball player in the nation. If he comes to your town for research, challenge him to a game of handball or racquetball-but our advice is to demand a reasonable handicap!)

Copyright © 1980 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

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