"10 Career Metaphors Guaranteed to Destroy Your Church"

by David Fairchild

An Award I'll Never Win

In the bowels of our church office was found this amazing (read: horrible) little book called, Church Bulletin Bits, #1.  Apparently it is intended to help you fill your empty bulletin space with wise little nuggets like this one:

Pastor of the Year - the one who pleases all the people all the time.

That is so biblical!  Embarrassingly, it appears to have been used...

For My Own Keeping at Least

30 Ways for Pastors to Love Their Wives and Families

5. Use every hour of your vacation time. And take a vacation that does not involve extended family; restrict it to just your wife and kids.

Not The Way I Want To Go

Check out Mark Driscoll's "Death By Ministry" at the Resurgence.

Notables:

• Fifteen hundred pastors leave the ministry each month due to moral failure, spiritual burnout, or contention in their churches.
• Fifty percent of pastors' marriages will end in divorce.
• Eighty percent of pastors and eighty-four percent of their spouses feel unqualified and discouraged in their role as pastors.
• Fifty percent of pastors are so discouraged that they would leave the ministry if they could, but have no other way of making a living.
• Eighty percent of seminary and Bible school graduates who enter the ministry will leave the ministry within the first five years.
• Seventy percent of pastors constantly fight depression.
• Almost forty percent polled said they have had an extra-marital affair since beginning their ministry.
• Seventy percent said the only time they spend studying the Word is when they are preparing their sermons.

• Eighty percent of pastors' spouses feel their spouse is overworked.
• Eighty percent of pastors' spouses wish their spouse would choose another profession.
• The majority of pastor's wives surveyed said that the most destructive event that has occurred in their marriage and family was the day they entered the ministry.

And a piece of advice:

Work from conviction, not guilt - Conviction comes from God and guilt comes from people. The key to being both fruitful and healthy is to do what God wants and not always say yes to or let yourself be pushed around by people who are demanding and have perfected the art of making you feel guilty if you do not do what they demand.

Furnishing Your Library Is Easy

More from Bridges, The Christian Ministry:

It is far more easy to furnish our library than our understanding.

Patient application is literally everything. - quoting Miller

"Not to read or study at all is to [test] God: to do nothing but study, is to forget the Ministry; to study, only to glory in one's knowledge, is a shameful vanity; to study, in search of the means to flatter sinners, a deplorable prevarication; but to store one's mind with the knowledge proper to the saints by study and by prayer, and to diffuse that knowledge in solid instructions and practical exhortations - this is to be prudent, zealous, and laborious Minister. - quoting Quesnel

What think ye?

When Sanguine Expectations Are Dispelled

If you're a pastor, you've got to read The Christian Ministry by Charles Bridges.  If you have a pastor, get it for him.  Bridges knows my soul.  In his section on the difficulties of ministry he writes, 

But after all, the greatest difficulties derive their origin and power from ourselves.  The spiritual character of our employment - no more than secular occupations - exempts us from the conflict with our corruptions.  It is not easy to overcome our natural love of ease, our indisposition to self-denying devotedness, and our false tenderness in flinching from the declaration of unpalatable truths...

 Hence the danger, lest the powerful energy of the word should be weakened in its application to ourselves; lest we should gradually lose our relish for our work, excuse ourselves from its self-denying exercises, and sink into heartless despondency.  A course of opposition also to our message may stir up a selfish, unhumbled spirit.  Popularity is yet more dangerous...Symptoms of success, unless tempered with personal abasement and habitual watchfulness, excite to self-confidence.  The want of these tokens, on the other hand, is too often accompanied with impatience or despondency...

None of us will find "the pleasure of the Lord to prosper in our hands", except every effort is grounded upon the practical conviction, that no strength but the arm of Omnipotence is sufficient for the work.

Many of us, perhaps, had tasted in the prospect some of the delights and encouragements of the work; and in all the spring and freshness of youth had calculated upon a steady and uninterrupted devotedness rising above all opposing obstacles.  But scarcely had we passed the threshold, before the dream of confidence passed away.  The chilling influence of the world, and the disheartening effect of unsuccessful pains, soon made us conversant with disappointment, and dispelled our sanguine expectation of a harvest proportioned to our industry. 

Two Great Challenges for the Pastor

In a plug for the great puritan Thomas Watson's book, All Things For Good, it is said that Watson "believed he faced two great difficulties in his pastoral ministry. The first was making the unbeliever sad, in the recognition of his need for God's grace. The second was making the believer joyful in response to God's grace."

I think he's right, and there are so many implications. Let's settle for 2 in general:

1. May we pray for and plead with unbelievers that they may understand both the emptiness and terror of being without God's grace. May they catch a glimpse of the glory of God's grace as found in Christ and mourn the lack of it. And may we never assume that all in our churches are believers...

2. May we personally be filled with joy in the knowledge of God's grace on our behalf, and may all believers rejoice and live in the strength of such joy in the Lord. And may unbelievers become believers by God's grace through the witness of our lives and words.

These things are reality when the gospel is the "glory of God in the face of Christ (2 Corinthians 4.3-6)." To see His glory is to desire Him above all else. It is to mourn the lack of His grace or to rejoice in the presence of it. His glory and our joy in it is always the issue.