Recently I ate lunch with someone new to pastoral ministry.
He has served for years in campus ministry but just took his first position in a local church.
“I never realized how hard it is to be a pastor,” he said. “It’s nothing like campus ministry.”
“How are they different?” I asked.
“Well, at a university, I never had students tell me how to do ministry. But in this church you wouldn’t believe how many people have told me how to do my job.”
One hazard for the soul of pastors is finding ourselves in situations in which we must choose—please God or please people. That sounds like an easy choice, except that the people are often godly, have convictions, and pay our salary.
Every leader for God has faced this dilemma. Saul, for example, had a Philistine army come against him with “soldiers as numerous as the sand on the seashore.” Saul’s soldiers began to desert. He was soon going to be attacked and killed, and the entire country would be lost. The only thing Saul could do, he thought, was take matters into his hands and offer a burnt offering to God. The people would like that.
When the prophet Samuel arrived, though, he told Saul, “You have acted foolishly. You have not kept the command the Lord your God gave you.”
It’s so tempting, when you open angry letters or see certain facial expressions, to give in to what people want. Or to give up altogether. But God wants us to stand in faithfulness to him.
Several years ago, I faced a stark choice between pleasing God and pleasing people. A dear friend of our family—Karen, a young woman in her twenties—was dating a man she truly loved.
As she told us about him, though, my wife and I picked up, amid the descriptions of his endearing qualities, warning signals: his recent past as a drug pusher, his violent outbursts at others, his jealousy when she spent time with her friends.
I gulped. To point out these things would hurt Karen, and I didn’t want to do that. It would probably end our friendship. But fearing God more, I warned her. I can’t remember everything I said, but I do recall saying: “He is nuclear-holocaust level danger for you.”
My fears were well-founded. Karen felt hurt. She stopped calling—except, about six weeks later, to announce her engagement.
But several weeks beyond that, she called to say she had broken off the engagement. She had begun to see in her fiancé things we had warned about.
I think of that story because this Saturday, I’ll be sitting near the front of the church as Karen marries a different man, a godly person who has demonstrated his character in countless ways.
It’s never easy to please God rather than people. But to be faithful leaders, we, like Paul, must make an impregnable decision whom we will please—and it can’t be the people who look up to us or the people who criticize us: “If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ” (Gal. 1:10).
In the eighties, many pastors asked us for articles about church growth, systems, organizational leadership. Today, pastors ask more often for articles about the topic of this issue: “The Pastor’s Soul.”
Questions of the soul are profound, and to address them more deeply, we’re launching a new book series called “The Pastor’s Soul.” This eight-volume series features brand-new material from popular Leadership contributors such as Ben Patterson, Fred Smith, and Kent Hughes. For more information, see page 128.
Kevin A. Milleris editor of Leadership
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