Everything that comes to us like an assault of fate — dread of the future, human disappointments, embroilments in our life, trials and afflictions — all this becomes for him who has faith an element which can no longer swamp and bury him, but mysteriously bears him up, as Noah was borne by the flood.
Helmut Thielicke
The preceding chapters have offered pastors’ insights into staying power — how to build an enduring ministry, how to persevere when discouragement strikes. Many of the allies mentioned have been external — a listening friend, a vacation, a supportive board.
But perhaps the most important secrets of staying power are the ones you can’t see — the internal, hidden resources.
Ultimately, the minister called by God must be sustained by him. There may be periods when the people and things we had counted on for support fail us, turn against us, waste away. As David cried out from the dank recesses of a cave, “Look to my right and see; no one is concerned for me. I have no refuge; no one cares for my life” (Ps. 142:4). But even at that moment we are not alone: “I cry to you, O Lord; I say, ‘You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living'” (v. 5).
There is always one who cares for us.
The ministers who have endured, who have continued through the years without becoming cynical or hardened, have drawn deeply from what I call “God’s TLC” — his truth, his love, and his call.
They are the three great secrets of staying power.
God’s Truth
Arthur Holmes, professor of philosophy at Wheaton (Illinois) College, has written a book entitled All Truth Is God’s Truth. I like that phrase. Truth is one of God’s commodities, whatever the field of study. Whenever we come to grips with what is true in a situation, we come closer to God.
Discouraged pastors told me some of the pernicious untruths they have battled. There were lines of thinking they couldn’t seem to shake during dark days: “I’m no good as a pastor,” “I don’t have what it takes,” “There’s no future for me,” “I missed God’s will in coming to this church.”
Kent Hughes, pastor of College Church in Wheaton, wrestled with this syllogism during a time a church he had planted was declining in attendance: “God has called me to do something he hasn’t given me the gifts to accomplish. Therefore, God is not good. I had been called by God, and now I was the butt of a cruel joke.”
That’s why God’s truth is essential for staying power. During a crisis, it restores to us the correct perspective — his. J. Francis Peak has said, “The major cause of discouragement is a temporary loss of perspective. Restore proper perspective, and you take new heart.”
Here are some fundamental truths that have helped depleted pastors take new heart.
I can expect difficulty both in life and in ministry. At first, that doesn’t sound like uplifting news. You’ll never see it as the inside verse of a card from Hallmark. But in The Road Less Traveled, Scott Peck explains why it assists us when we’re troubled: “Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult — once we truly understand and accept it — then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”1
Pastor Eugene Peterson illustrates the principle. “I’m a runner, but I have arthritic knees, and if the weather is a certain way those knees really hurt,” he says. “There’s not a whole lot I can do about them, and my natural reflex is to avoid the pain, but that only makes it worse — I tighten my muscles, I lose my running rhythm.
“But I’ve found that when I lean into the pain, kind of accept it and enter into it, it becomes less. And then I can continue.
“I think the image works for me when I encounter spiritual and emotional pain. There’s always that struggle at the beginning: Am I going to go on? But when I say, ‘I’m going to accept this,’ I don’t know what happens, but the acceptance starts to change it.”
In short, discouragement will come to every pastor. That’s not something anyone wants to hear. But accepting that discouraging times do hit, paradoxically, helps in overcoming them.
Just because I’m down doesn’t mean I’ll stay down. Everyone falls; the secret to staying power is comeback — getting up again. Abraham Lincoln once said to his Union Army following a defeat, “I am not so much concerned that you have fallen. I am concerned that you arise.”
Lyle Schaller provides an example for pastors: “So your people are resisting relocation? Every church that relocates has resisted it at least once; maybe it will have to wait ten to twenty years. People usually say no the first time around, so leadership is all about dealing with defeat. All of us normal paranoid people will take it personally at first! So be patient and persistent.”2
At times, I may have to do pastoral work strictly out of duty. Steve Harris remembers that one professor told him in seminary, “One of the most important lessons you can learn is that at times you’ll have to minister when you don’t feel like it.” Once his son, Matthew, who suffers from apneic spells, stopped breathing five times in the hour before he had to perform a wedding. “As I dressed for the wedding in the hospital men’s room, the last place I wanted to be was celebrating with a young couple anticipating the joys of married life,” he admits. “But I also knew that I had made a commitment. The wedding went fine, although I’m sure I’ve done better. But the fact that I did it at all was a positive accomplishment for me. The decision to ‘hang in there’ is an important step for any hurting pastor.”
One pastor I interviewed said to me, “I told my wife I was going to be talking to you about staying power, and she said, ‘Oh, staying power is just another word for stubbornness.'”
It’s both possible and rewarding to hang on in ministry. Wrote one pastor on the Leadership survey, “One resource a pastor has for staying power is the example of those who have stayed.” It’s helpful to hear from people who can say, as one did on the survey, “Now in retirement, the more I consider it all, the more amazed I am at the goodness of God and the loving people who have made up the membership of the churches I have served.”
Knowing the potential power and sweetness of a long tenure has kept ministers going. You catch the flavor in the words of Jacob Eppinga, who came to LaGrave Avenue Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1954. “The longer I stay, the better I understand the people,” he says. “I’m now baptizing children whose grandparents I married. I understand the students in my catechism classes better as I see their family roots showing through. Somewhere along the line I’ve acquired a greater freedom just to be myself. New pastors are on their best behavior for a while, but as the years go by, you let down the façade, and people become your family. It’s getting harder and harder to bury people now; they’re my brothers, my sisters.”
A final truth may be the hardest to keep sight of when you’re discouraged: God has used, does use, and will use my ministry. Oswald Chambers recalls that Martin Luther cried out near the end of his life, “I am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come forthwith and carry me hence.” Another time Luther was dining with the Electress Dowager, and she said to him, “Doctor, I wish you may live forty years to come.”
“Rather than live forty years more, I would give up my chance of Paradise,” Luther replied.
“What produced the misery?” asks Chambers. “He saw the havoc the Reformation had wrought; he did not see the good; he was too near it.”3
Pastors who have weathered discouragement have somehow been able to remind themselves of the good they have accomplished, the times when their ministry has helped people. “The time I was most discouraged in ministry, one thing that kept me going was finding indications that God had been able to use my ministry,” says Ed Bratcher. “I realized there were people who felt that God had been able to use me as a pastor.”
I was buoyed by answers to the question, “At what point did you experience the greatest sense of encouragement about your ministry?” on the Leadership survey. A sampling:
• “I had been working with a young person and his family. He was using drugs and was very rebellious. After a variety of incidents, late-night phone calls from him or his family, and lots of discussions, he entered treatment. Seeing him graduate with honors from that treatment center made me feel as proud as if I were his father. It gave me a sense of being in the right occupation.”
• “We built a new church in a small town when it seemed an impossible though much needed undertaking. The hard work and good spirit of the building committee, the beautiful and functional finished product, and the sense of accomplishment and well-being of the congregation were encouraging.”
• “The church accepted new programs in prayer ministry, family care, and outreach. Follow-through was significant, and all three programs ran with lay leadership in charge. I was encouraged because I felt like a real equipper and not the professional hired to do it all.”
• “Several young people have come to Christ under my ministry and then gone into full-time Christian service. That makes it worth it all.”
Events like these become life preservers, something solid to hold on to. Since God has used our ministry in the past, he will surely do so again.
God’s Love
Pastor Chip Anderson of Shanesville Alliance Church in Boyertown, Pennsylvania, tells this story: “I learned a little about God’s love from a phone conversation I had with my mother during a difficult and painful time in my life. I was hurting all over, and as I told my mom about my struggles, I heard some sniffling. ‘Mom, are you crying?’ I asked. ‘A little,’ she said. At that moment, no one had to tell me my mom loved me.”
A balm for the discouraged pastor is realizing that God feels that hurt as well. In the words of one poet, “There is no place where earth’s sorrows are felt more than up in heaven.”
It’s what the prophet Nahum meant when he said, “The Lord is good, a stronghold to those who are in trouble. He knows those who take refuge in him” (1:7). God knows what hurts us. He knows what discourages us, what brings us down. He cares, and that, countless Christians have testified, is enough.
When we’re in the slough of despond, though, we often feel guilty for being there, for having fallen or waded into it. We feel dirty, unworthy of God’s love. “I tend to forget that God’s love isn’t based on my performance, that it really is based on who I am in Christ,” says Chuck Smalley of Wayzata (Minnesota) Evangelical Free Church. “I preached a sermon on grace a while back because I needed to remind myself that grace is what maintains us. It encouraged me to have to rethink that.”
Says Ed Bratcher: “What helped me stay in ministry at one point was an experience I remember clearly in which Paul Tillich’s phrase ‘You are accepted’ became real to me. I felt a release: I don’t have to prove myself to God to receive his love and his mercy and his presence!”
That fragrant remembrance of God’s love can sustain through the most difficult periods, as Presbyterian pastor Ben Weir found during his eighteen-month captivity in Beirut. His friend Bruce Thielemann, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, describes how Weir endured the fifteen months he was in solitary confinement:
“They took Ben into a room, a small room, and in the room there was a mattress on the floor and a radiator beside it. That was the mattress on which he slept and on which he sat, because one arm was always handcuffed to the radiator. The window had Venetian blinds. There was no other furniture. Interestingly enough there was an old stuffed bird sitting over in one corner, a poor example of the taxidermy art. There were some cracks in the walls, and where there had been a chandelier in the ceiling, it had been taken away and there were three loose wires sticking down. This was all there was in the room.
“Ben said, ‘I began to use what was there to remind myself of the love of God. Those three wires coming down — well, they reminded me of the way God’s hand comes down and touches the hand of Adam in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. You remember how the gift of life is given in such a way? This meant God’s gift of life.’ He counted the various slats in the Venetian blinds, and he used the Venetian blinds to remind himself that he was surrounded by a cloud of witnesses. The bird, though it was very old and dirty, he used to represent the Holy Spirit, sometimes symbolized in Scripture, as you know, by the dove.
“The cracks in the walls, the places in the plaster that were marred — each and every one of them he identified with some promise in Scripture. He would repeat to himself each day passages which he had long ago hidden in his heart: ‘May the peace of God which transcends all understanding guide your heart and your mind into Christ Jesus’; ‘Call upon me and I will do great and wondrous things that you know not of.’
“He remembered all of these things, and out of this he kept hold of himself for fifteen months alone — a long look, a remembering, a focusing upon the love of God.”4
God’s Call
We turn now to the third hidden resource, God’s call. A “call” to ministry is not easily defined, but nothing could be more solid to most pastors. The call of God is what drew them to their work in the first place.
“Just months before I was ordained in my first charge, I was seriously contemplating becoming an academic rather than a preacher,” remembers Robert Norris, pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Maryland. “I didn’t see myself as a minister; I loved the life of study. One day I was walking across the beach, deliberating the choice, when I ran across an old roommate of mine whom I hadn’t seen in eleven years. He now lived in Hong Kong and was at that beach simply for the day. We began talking, I spoke with him about Christian things, and he became a believer that morning. He went back to Hong Kong knowing Christ, and I knew that I couldn’t do anything else except preach the gospel for the rest of my life.”
That kind of assurance has kept people in the ministry when all the circumstances pushed them to leave. One of the Leadership surveys that most struck me was from a pastor who wrote about his first pastorate. “In my gross inexperience, I just didn’t know what I should do or how to deal with people,” he writes. “And there was a lack of compassion and patience among the church board. They finally threatened to call for a church vote if I didn’t resign, and they said they had the numbers on their side. I saw no need to try to split loyalties in our small church, so I resigned.
“I had such a strong feeling of failure — I’d failed in my job, and I’d failed God. I mean, I had just been ordained one year earlier. I began to send out resumes, thirty of them over the next ninety days, and I didn’t get one response.
“I was strongly tempted to leave the ministry altogether. One of the elders in the church, who was supportive, offered me a partnership in a business of his. My salary would have doubled.
“But I finally had to tell him, ‘I could do the work well, I think, but I could never be happy working any other job than the one God has called me to.'”
Because of God’s call, that pastor hung on. He finally got an invitation to another church, and today both he and his church are doing well.
What happens, though, when a pastor reaches the end, when he or she cannot endure another day in ministry? What does the call of God mean for the pastor who feels, genuinely, “If I don’t get out, I’m going to lose my sanity”?
Ed Bratcher wrestled with the dilemma in a previous church when he was considering leaving the ministry altogether. He’d always had a clear sense of God’s call. Where was it now? What did it mean in these circumstances?
“I was forced to examine my understanding of God’s call,” he remembers. “I had been brought up thinking God’s call was a one-time call for all time. Once you were called into a particular field or area, this was where you had to remain. To get out of the pastorate and go into any other vocation would have meant denying God’s leadership.
“But gradually I began to understand that God’s vocational call was not so much once-for-all-time as it was ongoing. I needed to be following his leadership not just once but always, and since he was sovereign, he might lead in different ways at different times in my life.
“That freed me a good bit. I saw that if, at that particular time, I should feel it was God’s leadership to leave the pastorate, then I could do so without tremendous burden and guilt.”
As it turned out, Ed sensed God’s leadership was to go to another church, and he is still in the pastorate today.
For both the person who stays in pastoral ministry and the person who leaves, God’s call means he is leading them and wants to use them to extend his kingdom. To sense God’s leadership and to see that he is using us — that is what gives staying power.
The Once-Hidden Mystery
The apostle Paul talks frequently in Colossians of a mystery that has been hidden for ages and generations. That mystery, he explains, is the Christian’s hope of glory.
What is the mysterious, long-hidden secret?
Christ in you, he says.
Christ actually dwelling within, bringing his truth, love, and call. That’s what will sustain us until glory.
Pastors who’ve persevered have found that after all the various resources for staying power are laid out, there’s still only one. Christ within.
In his second letter to the church in Corinth, Paul explains how that has kept his colleagues and him going in their ministry. “Since through God’s mercy we have this ministry, we do not lose heart,” he writes. “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor. 4:1, 7-9).
With Christ within, Paul was able to withstand these trials and at the end of his life shout, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith!”
Paul’s secret, our secret — the one secret — of staying power is Christ.
M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), 15.
Cited by Rowland C. Croucher, “Lyle Schaller on the Small Church,” Grid (Autumn 1987).
Oswald Chambers, Workmen of God (Fort Washington, Penn.: Christian Literature Crusade, 1975), 65.
Bruce Thielemann, “Dealing with Discouragement,” Preaching Today (48, August 1987), audiotape.
©1988 Christianity Today
