IN GRADE SCHOOL I played the saxophone for two years and then quit. One event that no doubt contributed to this was the annual concert held at the junior high school across town. I remember only one song from that concert: “Red River Valley.” And although I liked the song before the concert, I do not recall it fondly. On that evening I sat in front of more people than I ever had in my memory: a sea of students’ parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles.
We came to the end of “Red River Valley,” and we were supposed to play it twice. So I plowed ahead, blew hard, and belted out the first note of the song. But my plaintive G was the only sound that came forth from the orchestra. Somehow—I still do not know how—everyone else knew we were playing the song only once. Even though I stopped after one note, that one honk was enough. The crowd laughed, all the kids in the orchestra turned and looked at me, and I turned as red as the river.
I have blown my share of wrong notes in ministry as well. I do not like to do things poorly. When I feel unqualified—whether by talent or temperament—I am tempted to quit while I am behind.
Each year my denomination asks pastors to file a report on what is happening numerically in our churches. A few times I have been proud to complete it, but in general I dislike the report because the hard numbers reveal a weakness in me. My pastoral ministry has not borne a significant number of conversions. This is not because I lack desire. I want to lead others to Christ. I work at relational evangelism. In public I include salt in my conversations. In church I preach a number of evangelistic sermons each year and include a gospel component in many others. I ask for a response after I preach, but the fruit simply is not there.
I can beat myself up pretty good over this. In times of discouragement in my first three pastorates, I told myself someone else could reach our neighborhood much better than I could; I should resign so that a more evangelistic pastor could get the job done. Too often I have dragged myself over the hot coals for my personality. I am too reserved, I tell myself. I do not have a magnetic personality. And on it goes. In a few seasons of my ministry, I rehearsed a virtual catalog of why I cannot pastor, and I would be as familiar with it as with anything in the Bible.
When I feel unqualified for my task, I easily rationalize quitting. I argue that I would be doing God, the church, and the world a favor. I am in the way, Lord. Look how I botched up that last service. I did not plan well and during announcements I had to ask someone in the congregation for some information. The musician did not know when to come forward, and I did not forewarn the pianist about a song I wanted to sing after the sermon. In sum, I am the wrong man for the job.
Of course, this line is as old as the burning bush. I have preached about the reluctant Moses, the depressed Elijah, the “aw, shucks” Gideon, and sincerely uttered the cliches: “God does not look for ability, he looks for …”
Nevertheless, when I feel like I’m flunking, I know what it’s like to want to drop out.
Character, not ability
At such a time, I deceive myself into thinking the issue is ability or personality rather than my character. But nobody really flunks out of high school; they drop out.
On the surface, my desire to quit because I am unqualified appears to come from a low opinion of myself, but, in fact, it betrays a healthy streak of pride. I want to appear better than I am to conceal my weaknesses. I want to airbrush my reputation the way a magazine photographer airbrushes blemishes. When God calls me to a task that reveals my flaws, it threatens my self-inflated image.
I felt this drive to conceal my weakness when I came to my current pastorate. The church of thirty-five could not afford a full-time pastor and had been without one for six months. My presbyter asked me to consider serving as interim pastor, and I accepted the role.
After six months I came to a moment of truth. I felt God’s call to become the regular pastor of the church, but I saw the risks. Numerically the congregation hovered tenuously at the thirty-five plateau. As a part-time pastor I had limited time to invest in further activities that would spur growth. The church’s principal layleader had already informed me that he was searching for a home in the suburbs and would leave the church when they moved.
I visualized what would happen; the church would keel over into a tailspin. If I became the pastor, I could not walk away from a declining situation in the way that an interim pastor could. I would be stuck with a church failure on my hands—not something I wanted to be associated with. My pride told me to back away from a situation that would most likely hurt my reputation, but I was convinced of God’s leading. In the end, I overcame my pride and decided to entrust my reputation to him; I assumed the pastorate.
There is a second character issue at stake when I am tempted to quit because I feel unqualified. It is self-pity.
I guess I am in good company. When Elijah fled from Jezebel into the desert, he eventually lay down under a tree and prayed, “I have had enough, Lord. Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.” In Elijah’s confession of inadequacy, I do not sense humility but self-pity. Likewise, when I have discounted my ability to finish God’s work, I have often felt sorry for myself. Poor me, I am not as good as other pastors. Poor me, I am going to fail. Poor me, others will think less of me.
Self-pity provides a perverse satisfaction that can be addictive. The satisfaction comes from passive-aggressive actions against God, my tacit complaint over how he made me. It comes from how self-pity gives me a great excuse for doing nothing. It is hugely self-absorbing. It is so addictive that part of the pathology of self-pity is that it motivates me to kick myself when I am down.
When I am in a normal state of mind, I see the sin and self-destruction of feeling sorry for myself. When my boys have fallen into self-pity over a loss in sports, I have told them, “Never fall into self-pity. It will make you a loser. Once you enjoy feeling sorry for yourself, you will not mind failure.” But once again, though I know this, I do not always see the dynamics when they occur in me.
New perspectives
My days of beating up on myself are largely over, and several things account for this.
First, I am learning the mindset needed to work for God.
The summer before my senior year in college, I worked for a house builder. When I started, I already knew the basic skills of carpentry—how to hammer nails and saw wood—but I knew nothing about how to put a house together. I could not read blueprints. I did not know how walls and floors and ceilings connected.
If I had perceived my job as a house builder, I would have quit the first day. But that was not my job. The builder hired me to assist him. He built houses; I followed orders. For the walls, he sawed top and bottom plates and marked every sixteen inches where I was to nail the studs. For the roof, he showed me where to lay sheets of plywood and I nailed them down. Throughout the framing process, he regularly laid his level against walls and floors to check for plumb.
This builder was a tall, thick man who worked with boundless vigor, and I did my best to keep up with him. He was on the job early in the morning, before I arrived, and stayed after I pedaled my bike for home. I did not set the pace, he did. I saw myself as working with a human dynamo.
This is the attitude I am learning in ministry. Instead of taking all the responsibility on my shoulders, I am trying to imitate Christ, who said, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working” (John 5:17). If Jesus, the Son of God, saw himself in the capacity I was in with the home builder, how much more must I?
Of course, how to work with God is not usually as clear. I cannot see him, and his directions are not always as easy to hear and grasp as the builder’s were to me. If I didn’t know better, I could get the idea that the work all depended on me! But I am in a mysterious partnership with God, in which he assures me that if I am prayerful and dependent on the Holy Spirit, he will work through me. The work is his business.
Second, I am nor as hard on myself anymore because I am more realistic about whom I can reach and when.
In previous stages of my ministry, I believed I should reach everyone. Every visitor should join our church, and if I was a good enough preacher they would. Every person without Christ with whom I shared the Gospel should become a believer that day, and if I were really filled with the Spirit the person would. When people did not return to church or commit themselves to Christ, I took it personally. Any lack of response meant something was wrong with me.
I do not believe that anymore (though I certainly have a lot of growing yet to do). I have learned God has not called me to be everything to everyone. He has designed me with a unique personality, gifting, and background, and who I am in Christ will reach some people extremely well, while others not at all. My inability to minister to some people does not mean I am unqualified for ministry. I may be poorly equipped to reach some, but I am tremendously qualified to reach others.
I have finally come to the place where I am willing to accept this and, with more difficulty, accept the limitations that come with it. For more than a decade of my ministry I looked to other fruitful ministers and figured if I could be more like them and do more like them I would bear more fruit, which was and is my passion.
Besides the inauthentic feel of such imitation, on a pragmatic level it simply did not work. So I have turned over the business of fruit and numbers to God. If through my best efforts, highest faith, and best thinking he gives me fifty people, so be it. If he gives me fifty thousand or the entire city, better yet. I still pursue personal growth and ministry skills, perhaps even obsessively, but I no longer regard myself as inadequate because I cannot reach everyone. If I am spiritually vital, diligent, and filled with faith, God will use me to touch some, and that must be enough.
Naturally I am still tested. Last year a dental student and his wife began attending our church. After several months they started attending less frequently, and so I phoned to see if everything was all right. Spiritually they were doing fine, but I learned something that disheartened me for a while. They had started attending a midweek home Bible study sponsored by another church—a Korean church, and our dental student is Korean.
I saw the writing on the wall. Even though this couple had frequently expressed their appreciation for my preaching and our church, I thought they would surely gravitate toward the Korean church. I felt competitive. I began thinking about how we could improve our ministry so we would not lose couples like these. But after struggling over this for a week, I finally turned the matter over to the Lord. If the other church was spiritually vital, I gave God “permission” to lead them there if he wanted to; I was not going to take it personally. As it turned out, they have stayed in our church and have become strongly involved.
Another reason I am now able to more quickly get over my tendency to take a “failure” personally is that I have come to see ministry as a process rather than an event. My job is to move people along as far as possible in the direction of God, but if it is not God’s time, I do not have to reap the harvest. My calling from God is to plant seeds and do what I can. No matter how well I do my part through the Holy Spirit, many people will not respond.
Jesus himself ministered with this assumption. When he told the rich young ruler to give away his wealth and follow him, the man turned away. Still, Jesus did not chase after him, pleading with him to change his mind; neither does the Bible suggest Jesus gave an inadequate “altar call.” Jesus compared ministry to the planting of good seed in soil of various qualities. The seed is the same but some of the soil is rocky; some of it is shallow; some is thorn-filled; and even good soil brings forth varied harvests of thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold. I must not knock myself over for something I cannot control and for which I have limited responsibility. I grieve for those who do not respond; I pray for them. and strongly urge them to follow Christ; but the decision is theirs alone.
I have also learned that although we all have weaknesses we can still bear fruit. God calls only unqualified people—that is all that is available—and he (a) qualifies them in certain ways; and (b) works through them in spite of other incompetencies.
God does not have a single perfect minister. When I moved from the pastorate to editorial work with leadership for several years, I interviewed the church leaders whom I had long admired from afar. Up close, I found they are not larger than life. They are good and gifted men and women, worthy of respect, but they too have weaknesses. They too are “jars of clay,” whom God uses anyway to display his glory.
And so it has always been. God worked through the apostle Paul even though he apparently was a poor speaker and physically unimpressive. Paul admitted as much to the Corinthians but added that God had given him great knowledge and apostolic authority. God worked through the boldness of Peter, James, and John, though they were uneducated. God worked through the oratory of Spurgeon, though he wrestled regularly with depression. The phrase “God worked in spite of” qualifies every minister who has ever lived.
Not only does God overlook my weaknesses but so do my people. Granted, in every church a few immature people will actually expect a pastor to be perfect, but most do not. I am not fooling anyone in my church; they know my weaknesses quite well, but they have chosen to love and follow me nonetheless. In fact, our weaknesses endear us to people who are only too familiar with their own failings. When good people sense their shepherd loves them and is faithful in service to Christ, they will chuckle over his or her inability to sing, sustain small talk, or organize a banquet. There are limits, of course, and I strive continually for excellence and growth, but most people expect perfection only from those who act as though they’re perfect.
Not only can I bear fruit in spite of my inabilities, God uses them for good. I can quickly become independent if I suppose I have it all, but when I am aware of how much I need others, I am forced into greater reliance upon other people and thus a deeper involvement in the community of Christ. My weaknesses also draw out the abilities of others. Churches with an omnicompetent employee for a pastor may have dormant spectators in the pews.
Most importantly, as the apostle Paul describes in his definitive treatise on the subject, I have found my “thorns” keep me humble and cause me to rely more fully on the power of Christ.
For instance, I have more pastoral skills now than when I first entered the ministry, and part of me thinks I know how to pastor a fruitful church. When I came to my present church as the interim, part-time pastor, I served the church only one day a week outside of Sunday. This is not much time to prepare a sermon, keep the church “shop,” lead and disciple others. Although I believe in the necessity of prayer, I told the Lord I could not pray as much as I wanted to, that I had to do the minimum of activities to actually pastor the church, and I asked him to make the church fruitful just the same.
Over the first year I think I did a well-qualified job of administration, preaching, and discipleship, but after more than a year I had to face the fact that our meetings lacked the vitality that should characterize a church. With my abilities I could produce neither an ersatz human energy thing nor the real kingdom thing. I finally came face-to-face with what I already knew—for me at least, pastoring abilities cannot substitute for significant prayer—and I rearranged my schedule to let some pastoral tasks slide a bit in order to pray more.
Eight-watt ministry
In 1972 NASA launched the exploratory space probe Pioneer 10. According to Leon Jaroff, in Time magazine, the satellite’s primary mission was to reach Jupiter, photograph it and its moons, and beam data to earth about the planet’s magnetic field, radiation belts, and atmosphere. Scientists regarded this as a bold plan because up until then no satellite had gone beyond Mars, and they feared the asteroid belt would destroy the satellite before it could reach its target.
But Pioneer 10 accomplished its mission and much, much more. Swinging past Jupiter in November 1973, the space probe was hurled at a higher rate of speed toward the edge of the solar system by the planet’s immense gravity. At one billion miles from the sun, Pioneer 10 passed Saturn. At some two billion miles, it hurtled past Uranus; Neptune, at nearly three billion miles; Pluto, at almost four billion miles. By 1997, twenty-five years after its launch, Pioneer 10 was more than six billion miles from the sun. And despite that immense distance, Pioneer 10 continues to beam back radio signals to scientists on Earth. “Perhaps most remarkable,” writes Jaroff, “is the fact that those signals emanate from an eight-watt transmitter, which radiates about as much power as a bedroom night-light, and take more than nine hours to reach Earth.”1
“The Little Satellite That Could” was not qualified to do what it did. Engineers designed Pioneer 10 with a useful life of only three years. But it has kept going and going. By simple longevity, its tiny eight-watt transmitter radio accomplished more than anyone thought possible.
So it is when we offer ourselves to serve the Lord. God can work even through someone with eight-watt abilities. God cannot work, however, through someone who quits.
Leon. Jaroff, “Still Ticking,” Time (November 4, 1996): 80.
Copyright © 1998 Craig Brian Larson
