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Pastoring gives rise to both the most rewarding and the most defeating moments one can experience.
Peter, one of Jesus’ first disciples, writes, ‘But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of the darkness into his marvellous light’ (1 Peter 2:9).
What a grand verse! What lofty enthusiasm! What delicious rhetoric! Out of the darkness into his marvellous light.
I feel it in my very bones to be true, and my spirit soars at such powerful proclamation.
This is the glorious part of ministry: standing on stage with outstretched arms proclaiming the excellencies (note plural!) of God, seeing—almost feeling!—pulses quicken in the room as people realise we are dealing not with trivial philosophical matters but with life’s ultimate and unalterable realities.
But then… there’s the other side. The church politics, the senseless infighting, the brutal betrayals—all of which go with the territory. My hunch is that if you can survive five years in ministry you’ll be fine for another fifty. The real pain isn’t in those things—traumatic as they are. It's the death-by-a-thousand-cuts you have to watch out for.
From my last few years it's the apathy of the occasional pew-sitter for whom the message only ever sinks epidermis deep—we might see you again at Easter, or when the surf's down, or when the kids don't have a game on. They smile and nod in all the right places and might even come for prayer. They get the message but don’t see a need to prioritise God in their lives; they have just enough of all that Jesus-stuff thank-you-very-much. The odd Sunday, (preferably somewhere that serves good coffee and takes the kids off their hands for a while), does just the trick. Church will be squeezed in occasionally or it won't...either way it doesn't really matter to them. Let's call them the cultural Christians.
On the other end of the passion scale, the gate-keeping doctrinaires who know just enough theology to be dangerous, obstinately clinging to tired, uninspiring, and (often) unexamined beliefs out of fear and ignorance while ostracising those of a more... expansive... disposition. They're the one's who like their atonement with a double-shot of wrath (to go thanks!), a preacher who screams at them like a drill sergeant (an alpha-male of course), and a church that stares down it's long gnarly nose at a sinful hell-bent world. This is a bunker, protected from the enemy (thought, nuance, reason) while firing pot shots at the world at large. Let's call them the fundamentalists.
Finally there are those who are simply too content with their lot—let's call them the consumer Christian. Of the three, it's actually this lot that really burn my bacon. The other two are relatively toothless, but these guys do subtle damage both within and outside the church. They have the air of commitment but without any skin in the game, quick to criticise the short-comings of the church without realising the self-defeating nature of their own statements. After all the church is not bricks and mortar but flesh and blood (theirs).
Am I too harsh on these guys? Probably, but the church is about participation not performance.
Performance changes nothing, participation changes people—people change the world.
The long-suffering contradiction of consumer Christianity—the tension between a God who saves us to serve (and be the church) and those who seek a church to serve them—is a dissonance difficult to ignore. The inability to drop one’s own agenda and cultivate a servant heart of Christ may just remain the final frontier for some.
These are of course caricatures, and we probably all dip a toe into one or more at some time in our journey of faith. That's okay, just don't stay there. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not worried about the church missing out—God’s bride is never neglected—rather, I am grieved about them missing out on the freedom that God holds out, imploring, patiently, for them to receive. They're so close, yet so far. It’s like watching someone drown who won’t take a life-raft; seeing a starving person push away a feast laid out before them; or holding out a hand to someone in a burning house but they won’t come out.
What can I do? Seemingly, nothing. My own inadequacy stares me in the face. The gap feels unbridgeable.
But then we are called to be a 'royal priesthood'. Priests in the Old Testament straddled two worlds, standing in the uncomfortable gap between heaven and earth, interceding, imploring, drawing them together. I sometimes feel like I have earth in one hand and heaven in the other and my grip is slipping. I can barely hold on let along draw them together.
But maybe that’s all we are called to do? To stand, and to hold, arms stretched out—vulnerable, shaking, poured out.
Perhaps pastoring is more about patient perseverance than powerful proclamations.
Both require outstretched hands. It’s an image of a crucified Messiah, suffering for the sins of the world, uttering the unutterable ‘my God my God why have you forsaken me?’ just before all the sin and darkness in the world is utterly and ultimately defeated.
I’m starting to think perhaps this is real ministry after all.
Because then, oh God then (and this happened all in space of the last few weeks) a perplexed young visitor at church genuinely asks me ‘why is everyone so nice here?’; a group of men spanning sixty years in age pouring out their hearts in prayer over each other, a young lady asking in wide-eyed wonder if she too can know this Jesus fella we’ve been talking about, a random teenager walking in the door asking ‘is it okay if I join you guys?’, baptising a gentleman in his twilight years who rises tearfully rejoicing from the water, and just to top it all off, one of my daughters giving me an unexpected hug after the service and telling me she loves me…and for each of these seemingly insignificant moments, I felt like I am born again again. That’s not an error. I am born again a second time, a third time, every time the gap is closed, I am renewed, redeemed, restored, all over again, and it's all worthwhile.
These are small insignificant things, you might say, but you have to take notice. The enemy's voice is loud and proud, God's voice is quiet and insistent. If you don't tune into it you'll be crushed.
The gap persists but that's precisely where His power is the most potent.
In those moments, the pitch-fork wielding nay-sayers, the self-appointed sooth-sayers, and the self-serving church-players all fade into the background. I am swept along with God’s joy, filled with His Spirit, animated by His love, speaking for Him, wielded by Him, poured out for Him, all of this in spite of my own faults and failures.
Serving the Living God is surely the greatest thing in the world.
‘Why do you do it?’ People often ask me, usually when I'm looking worn and weary on a Monday morning.
And I reflect on those God-moments, and I don’t quite know how to say, ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ in a way that makes sense.
But hey, it’s just my two-bob worth.
