Many church members suppose if they were pastors, their battles with temptation would decline. Pastors, however, find just the opposite. Most of the old temptations don't disappear. Worse, they discover the pastoral life is filled with new opportunities to sin, in ways more subtle but no less corrosive to life in the Spirit. Mark Galli, who pastored in Mexico and California, pays close attention to his own mutating motives as a pastor and gives us others' thoughts about pursuing pastoral holiness.

Pick a century, any century, and you'll find lots of good advice given to pastors. In the sixth century, for instance, Pope Gregory "The Great" wrote a whole book for pastors called Pastoral Care, in which he outlined the ideal pastoral lifestyle, or what some might call pulpit-committee utopia.

The pastor, he wrote, "must devote himself entirely to setting an ideal of living. He must die to all passions of the flesh and … lead a spiritual life."

All well and ...