Pastors have always been Sunday fare, but performance expectations can arrive by special delivery any day of the week. On one such day, a congregant arrived in my office to tell me just what she made of my performance as a pastor. In summary, not much.
She was expansive in the adjectives she used to describe my deficiencies. As I listened, I recognized some truth in what she said. But she wanted more than my agreement, she wanted my resignation. Her logic was simple: “If you are not who you should be, you shouldn’t be a pastor.” By grace, I realized there was another logic worth considering. It says, “You are not who you should be, and God wants to use you anyway.”
God’s mysterious strategy is to use fallen people to witness to a gospel of hope and transformation. That means underperformance is built into the paradigm. It means those who do not live up to expectations are the very people God uses to call others who don’t measure up either. This approach is completely counterintuitive, but then so is grace.
Grace is not an excuse to hide our deficiencies or deny our failures, and it’s not a heat shield to protect us from getting burned. But grace does mean our failures don’t have to paint us into a corner where the only way out is to abandon our call. Grace sets our lives in what the psalmist calls “the broad place,” off the knife-edge of judgment, and nowhere near the winner-takes-all option some may offer us.
I tried to respond gently to the outspoken critic in my office. “You are more right than you know,” I told her. “I don’t have many of the qualities of a gifted pastor. But you have the wrong list of deficiencies. The real list is far worse. God knows the real list, and God, by his grace, has still called me to be a pastor.”
I believe what I said, but living it is far more difficult. The temptation in ministry is always to focus on expectations rather than grace.
In a very difficult season when finances were tight, I was driving a dilapidated car that had been donated to the church. It had lots of problems, including a ceiling lining that drooped down and grazed my head every time the broken shock absorbers launched me from the seat toward the roof. The car began to speak to me. It said, “Failure.” Why couldn’t I get my life together? I was getting older every year, I had a family, this car was humiliating, and I felt like a failure.
This continued for months until the day I took the car to the airport to pick up my nieces. It was a very hot day, the air-conditioning in the car didn’t work (surprise), so all four windows were down. Only later did I realize vinyl flakes from the sun-scorched dashboard were being blown into the backseat and covering my sweet nieces.
That day, still without the funds to buy a second car, we leased a new car. It was wonderful! No flakes, no droopy ceiling lining, no broken shocks. I was thrilled until the day this car also began to talk. Its message was also just one word: “Fraud.” I was no more put together, no more successful with this new car than with the scuzzy borrowed one. It just looked better. I was a fake.
My life swings between voices calling “failure” and “fraud.” The key is not listening to either. I’m not as bad as my critics accuse me of being, but I’m not as good as I’ve led some to believe. And right there, in the truth somewhere in between, is where we hear the voice of God. He still says to me, and to everyone called to follow Jesus, “I want you and I will use you.”
In ministry performance matters, but grace matters more.
Mark Labberton is pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, California.
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