Flesh Pinched in the Cogs

When ministry expectations draw blood.

When did the church become its own worst enemy? At a recent gathering of ministers, a few expressed their sense of failure over the difficulty of the work. But the majority said most of their hurts came from the words and expectations of fellow Christians.

One missionary shared how, when she confessed her depression, the head of her sending committee told her just to get over it. A small-groups pastor grieved how he was told that he’s too relational and that he should just focus on keeping his small-groups system running. A lead pastor shared his constant pressure to be the one with all the answers. A worship leader told how ever higher expectations and long work hours left her so worn out, she wondered if she even believed anymore.

When most of our ministry pain comes from the unrealistic or unfair expectations of other believers and the structure of Christian industry, something is wrong.

Without a doubt, our work is difficult. How hard it is to help someone understand and hold onto faith, how heart-breaking it is to watch people make bad decisions and struggle with the brokenness of life. But when most of our ministry pain comes from the unrealistic or unfair expectations of other believers and the structure of Christian industry, something is wrong.

What are we looking for when we hire a Christian worker? As hiring committees, what is our goal? To find someone who follows God well and can help our community to follow? Or is it something else?

There are natural challenges of ministry work. We have been promised that the world will reject our testimony, that there are spiritual forces at work to undermine our efforts, that temptations will keep us and our flock from following well. Our call is to bring a message to an unhearing world, to pray for change in human hearts, and to walk with people through the challenges of faithfulness. That’s a weighty call, indeed, an impossible call. We shouldn’t be surprised if the impossibility of it all makes our stomach lurch with dread.

I’ve seen it on the faces of many lay-leader boards. They feel the weight of this impossible task. The puzzle of how to move forward furrows their brows and grays their temples. Many of these lay leaders work in industries where there are fixes for the problems: technologies, systems, best practices. They bring that habit into the hiring and management of church staff.

What I’ve seen happen in this situation over and over again is that a human made of flesh is then dropped into a system that doesn’t quite fit, and as the wheels of that system start cranking, human flesh is pinched. The church machine forces them to produce what no human can consistently produce. There is no time for them to love or contemplate or rest.

When human flesh is expected to function among the cogs of an industry, it draws blood. It leads to broken marriages, depression, burnout, spiritual darkness. If we’re honest, when we expect a human to function like a cog, we’re hoping to eliminate our own sense of inability, to alleviate the dread of all the questions and mysteries. We expect a person to give us answers, to manage problems so we won’t have to keep seeking, to keep listening, to keep following. We won’t have to feel the abyss within ourselves, that gnawing sense that comes with ongoing wrestling and waiting. Quick answers and clear solutions are the preference.

The reality is that ministry will always feel impossible. Ministry will always leave us in over our heads, raise more questions than it answers, open more cans of worms than we can control. If we think ministry is just managing systems, processes, and programs, we have misunderstood ministry. Because if ministry is helping people find and follow then God, ministry is about the mess of real human life and the mystery of a real, living God, neither of which is manageable.

But there is hope. Because while systems and procedures don’t have room for the mess of ministry, humans do. In Scripture, the church is never compared to a factory or a machine. It’s compared to a family and to a garden, places familiar with messiness, places where there is room for mystery and for rest.

So what do reasonable expectations in ministry look like? For me, it starts with resting in the deep peace that God is in all things and can use all things to grow his people and his church. If one pastor’s sickness or tiredness or weakness can impede God’s work, we have a pretty small vision of God’s power.

The Bible says that God’s strength is shown in weakness. So, when a children’s pastor gets behind in the administrative part of her work because she’s weeping with parents whose child is seriously ill, will we affirm that? Would it be okay to cancel an event or delegate her work to allow that to happen? When a minister has devoted himself so fully to his work that his marriage needs attention, will we trust that God can take care of both their marriage and His own Bride?

When we, as Christian leaders, start to feel the pinch of unrealistic expectations, how will we respond? Is the only response to fight back in defensiveness? Or even as the pinch becomes more painful, is there an opportunity to lead and pastor our people? Our counter-cultural call as ministers of the gospel is to set aside the expectations of industry and to embrace the impossibility of our work and our need for grace. Our call is to step into the mess and mystery with our people, to cry with them as they suffer, to pray with them, to call out to God from our sense of inadequacy and to trust that He will lead us through.

From these ancient practices of ministry, we can turn to those for whom the weight of ministry is foreign and disciple them in the ways of our God. When we learn comfort in the mystery and find our place in the long tradition of ministry “best practices” like prayer and longing, waiting and hoping, listening and following, there is a way forward.

It allows us to recognize the pinch for what it is—a sign of un-health, an opportunity to guide our people toward truth. It allows us to (with much prayer) kindly and patiently guide our lay leadership in the ways of this work. We may have to make it a regular refrain in our meetings: “Our first call is not to fix but to pray.” And when we, as church leaders, feel ourselves putting the pinch on our staff, it’s an opportunity to repent and come back to our true call to mess and mystery.

This article originally appeared on CTPastors.com and can be accessed here.