Messy Ministry: God’s Workroom of Grace
I had poured my life into this lady. She and her family had occupied more of my pastoral time and energies than any other family in our church.
I must confess that when I would see her approach at the end of a service, or when my wife, Luella, would tell me that she was on the phone, I would say to myself, “What now?” I struggled with the chaos that was her life and the subtle and not so subtle demands she made, but I was determined that I would pastor her through her trouble.
I thought I had been patient and understanding, I thought I had been caring and faithful, but she had become one of my biggest detractors. Not only was she highly critical of me; she freely voiced her criticism to others. It hurt my feelings. It made me mad. There were times when I wondered if being a pastor was what I wanted to do.
I fought against my anger and resentment, but there were times and days when I lost the battle, and my focus was interrupted by replaying in my mind what I would like to say to this woman.
If I had been left to myself, I would have become either hardened and cynical or defeated and looking for a way out. But I was not alone.
GOSPEL COMMUNITY
I was surrounded by an intimate, loving, encouraging, protective gospel community. I was granted the right to be absolutely honest about what I was going through, and I knew that I would be greeted with grace. My blindness was greeted by a community that sought to give me sight, free of condemnation.
The community around me was patient and understanding. Fellow leaders took me to breakfast or lunch and lovingly preached the gospel to me. Arms of mercy were wrapped around me and would not let me go.
I didn’t see it then, but I do now: this community protected me from me in a way that was loving, kind, honest, and encouraging. With all the endless demands of ministry leadership, these leaders took time with me without making me feel like an interruption. This may be an overstatement, but if it is, it’s not by much: without the ministry of that leadership community, I might not be in ministry today.
YOUR OWN STORIES
I am sure that my experience resonates with many of you. If you have served long in local church leadership, you have collected your own stories.
You’ve been blindsided by criticism. People you’ve invested in have turned their backs on you. You’ve had your qualifications questioned. You’ve watched dear friends leave your church. You’ve been through seasons of feeling alone and misunderstood.
There have been seasons when you fantasized about doing something else or at least doing what you do somewhere else. There have been times when you’ve been afraid to confess how hurt and angry you actually are. You’ve hungered for encouragement. You’ve longed for someone to come alongside you to help you deal with your struggle without leaving you feeling judged. You haven’t always been a happy, contented leader.
You too have stories to tell.
CHURCH LEADERSHIP IS HARD
If you have given yourself to building people, you have accepted the call to suffer for the sake of the gospel. Leadership in the church is not comfortable and predictable. It’s not a safe place to look for your identity and inner security.
Not only is the church filled with unfinished people with sin still resident inside them in the midst of ongoing spiritual war; your leadership community is filled with the same. No one in your leadership community is free of sin. No one is fully spiritually mature in every way. Everyone in your leadership community needs everything the church is intended to provide. So your leadership is internally and externally messy.
This is God’s choice. He knows your church or ministry is situated in a world that is terribly broken by sin. He knows that everyone to whom you minister is a person in process. He knows that this will make what you have been called to do difficult.
But it has to be said that the hardship, messiness, and unpredictability of ministry is his workroom of grace.
Today there will be pastors and leaders who lose their heart and their way in the middle of the hardships of ministry, and many of them will lose their way because they are not warned, encouraged, confronted, supported, and loved by a group of leaders who function as a community of grace.
GOD’S WORKROOM OF GRACE
You see, difficult things in ministry are meant by God to be redemptive things. What often beats us down is meant by the Savior to be a tool to build us up. What would make us want to quit is meant by him to strengthen us for the battles to come. Institutional achievement is not the Redeemer’s ultimate goal but a means to a greater, more glorious goal: the rescue and transformation of his people.
So your core leadership community must be a pastoral community where leaders are carefully and intentionally pastored and where strategies to pastor the pastors are held in as high a regard as missional strategies.
Healthy ministry communities, which leave a legacy of long-term gospel productivity, have longevity and fruit because they are, at their core, communities of grace. Rather than achievement forming how the leadership community forms itself and operates, the gospel does.
GOSPEL-FORMED LEADERS
It’s the gospel that tells us who leaders are, what leaders need, how leaders should relate to one another, how the leadership community should function, what its values should be, how it will deal with disappointment and failure, and how it will identify and nurture future leaders.
We should look not first at the corporate world for our formative values and ways of operating, but to the right-here, right-now truths, identities, and wisdom principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ. There should be no more powerful influence on leadership formation, mission, community, and methodology than the gospel of God’s grace.
The gospel is profoundly more than the grace of past rescue and future hope. It is both of these and much more. The gospel provides a lens for us to look at and understand everything that we deal with in church and ministry leadership while also providing guidance as to how we should do everything we are called to as leaders in Christ’s church.
If we are called to gospel mission, we must, as leaders, be a gospel-drenched, gospel-functioning community.
Content taken from Lead by Paul David Tripp, ©2020. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, crossway.org.
Paul David Tripp (DMin, Westminster Theological Seminary) is a pastor, award-winning author, and international conference speaker. He has written numerous books, including the best seller New Morning Mercies. His nonprofit ministry exists to connect the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life. Tripp lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Luella, and they have four grown children.