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Here’s a question to ponder: What do you think would happen if you presented yourself to your congregation as a person before doing that as their pastor? What if you took the risk of learning how to share more of yourself with your congregation—not in a way that makes every sermon about you but in a way that allows them to feel a greater kinship with how you experience and respond to God’s word? How would people react if you offered them your true self: an ultra-fragile, incredibly limited, profoundly average, and disappointingly human human being? What do you think would happen?
The problem is that we are scared to death of finding out. Fear makes it “easier” for us to show up as a pastor instead of a person—until, that is, it becomes the hardest thing in the world to do and we become exhausted by the demands of denying the very thing we were created to be: a human being.
Some of the consequences that come with this way of living and being will be paranoia (“I wonder what everyone’s really thinking about me?”), bitterness (“I will never meet people’s expectations”), and disillusionment (“No matter what I do, things will never change”). When these negative internal emotions become the fuel we run on, we can’t go on for long.
So what’s the way forward? To answer that question, we need to look back.
There’s a reason why we love origin stories. And why movie studios like them too. We love learning what made a person the person they’ve become.
The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 and 3 is the origin of all origin stories. It helps us understand the roots of why we aspire to be more-than-human pastors—so that we can avoid becoming less-than-human persons. When I say “less-than-human,” I’m referring to our tendency to live other than in the way that God designed us to—a tendency which denies and diminishes our humanity. As we’ll see, God intentionally created us with limitations as a way for his divine glory and our human flourishing to be better experienced and enjoyed.
Genesis 2 shows us a time when humans were untainted by sin and therefore able to live out their God-given humanity in the most perfect way imaginable. There are some subtle things for us to notice as Adam enters the workplace for the first time:
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”
Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field.
(Genesis 2:15-20)
It’s like you can almost hear God saying, Adam, you have one job. Be the person I made you to be in this garden paradise called Eden. Pay close attention to the phrasing: God “took” Adam and “put” him in the garden. It was God’s job to place Adam, and it was Adam’s job to keep the garden God had placed him in. The differentiation between those two roles is critical. Part of Adam’s responsibility was also to obey the word God had commanded. His humanity depended on it, just as ours does.
God intentionally created us with limitations as a way for his divine glory and our human flourishing to be better experienced and enjoyed.
As pastors, we need to remember that, in a similar way, God took us and placed us to keep the church, which he prevents the gates of hell from prevailing upon. Acts 20:28 tells us to “care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.”
Adam’s job was to work and keep something he did not create. We function as pastors of our churches in the same way. We didn’t initiate our calling or create our churches. The apostle Paul reminds us that we are merely “servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God’’ (1 Corinthians 4:1). What is our calling as stewards? To “be found faithful” (v 2).
This would be impossible if we were not kept by God himself: “The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand … The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore” (Psalm 121:5, 8).
Remembering that God is the one who takes you, places you, and keeps you prevents ministry from becoming the pinnacle of your identity. It also helps remove that rather large anvil of performance-driven spirituality that rides so heavily on your back—the kind of spirituality that seeks applause from an audience other than God in order to be affirmed. God has put us where we are. We work for him.
This is an excerpt from The Unhurried Pastor by Brian Croft and Ronnie Martin which helps pastors adopt an approach to ministry that is effective, enjoyable, and sustainable.
Brian is the former Senior Pastor of Auburndale Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky and is the Founder of Practical Shepherding. He is also Senior Fellow for the Mathena Center for Church Revitalization and an Adjunct Professor at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has served in pastoral ministry for over twenty-five years, spending seventeen of those years as Senior Pastor of Auburndale Baptist Church. He and his wife Cara have four children.
