Our remit as the Pastors’ Academy Pastoral support team is to befriend, encourage and pray for pastors, and generally try to help them both stay in ministry and flourish as good pastors of local churches.
Pastors of Conservative Evangelical churches in the UK face a wide variety of difficult challenges at the present time. It is obviously not possible to enumerate everything. But the question I am addressing here is ‘what is the main cause of discouragement for pastors?’ I believe what I outline contributes to pastors being undermined by feeding into many other ‘presenting problems’ that they face.
Constant cause
Asking around and in conversation with various pastors, it seems that the constant cause of discouragement for many men in ministry is their people’s lack of commitment to the local church. True enthusiasm for the church is quite rare, especially among younger generations. Where there is enthusiasm among the young, it is often in a church in which the majority of those who attend are around their own age and may well be connected to friendship, music and seeking a partner in life rather than to genuine spiritual thirst for the things of God and a willingness to stand unflinchingly for truth.
This lack of commitment generally exhibits itself in many ways, but especially it does so in the development and general acceptance of the ‘morning service culture’ alongside the demise of the Sunday evening service. Those who seem enthusiastic church members in the morning are often missing in the evening – except for an older generation who came to Christ in the 50s and 60s influenced by Lloyd-Jones, Stott and Billy Graham in whom often the ‘fire’ still burns. The ‘morning only’ culture is discouraging because it implies both that God and his church are not that important. This also means therefore, that the pastor’s work is not very important either.
Further, a pastor (not out of pride) can know that he has preached a very good sermon in the morning, and felt that the wind of the Spirit was in his sails and yet still people are not interested in coming back for more. Thus, the feeling settles on him that no matter how hard he tries he is unlikely to see any real change. It gets him down. He is discouraged.
Widely reported individualism
The root of this lack of commitment to the church is the widely reported individualism which has come to dominate the thinking of Western society. Because it is not obviously and overtly sinful, individualism has not been thought through and sufficiently addressed by the churches and so it has become part of the accepted outlook of many Christians. In fact, many contemporary sermons close with purely individualistic applications concerning ‘your personal spiritual life’. Individualism undergirds the morning service culture, often with the rationale of ‘time for my family’ and the pressures of modern-day work (though remember it was only around mid-20thcentury that Saturday became a day off for many). Many Christians have this mindset as their outlook.
Authority of God’s word
How different we are now from a previous generation of Evangelicals. Congregations crowded to hear the Reformer, Hugh Latimer preach that ‘The author of Holy Scripture is the Mighty One, the Everlasting…God himself…and this Scripture partakes of the might and eternity of its author. There is neither king nor emperor that is not bound to obey it.’[1] But today though there is much preaching available the conviction as to its authority and the enthusiasm for its teaching has waned.
There is a loss of functional authority of the word of God that is also related to the outlook of Christian individualism. The internet nurtures individualism. The local pastor and his pulpit ministry have far less influence than they once did. Apart from church, the Christian can access sermons by well-known preachers online anytime. Rather than local congregations expecting that God will speak to them by the word through their minister, many Christians think in terms of just seeking out their favourite preacher to listen to for their own pleasure. This undermines the place of the pastor in the church and can lead to a ‘hire and fire’ attitude to pastors who fail to grow a church numerically. So again, pastors get discouraged.
Love in the pulpit
We may have contributed ourselves to this problem. Preaching is often treated as an end in itself, whereas it is actually meant to be the vehicle for hearing from God, building up and shaping the lives of the people of the church. Many preachers lecture rather than preach from a loving heart. Churches can be simply ‘puffed up’ by knowledge. The status quo morning service culture prevails. But it is love that builds up (1 Cor 8:1). Perhaps a pastor becomes so discouraged that he just goes through the motions and his messages no longer emerge from a loving heart. But when preaching is not truly aimed at producing love for God and love for others, we open the door to the blight of individualism and ultimately the destruction of the church. Of course, ‘career pastors’ are themselves operating on the outlook of individualism.
Turning the tide
Explaining all this to discouraged pastors may well help them to stop blaming themselves and put things in perspective. But the great and urgent question is, ‘How do we turn the tide of individualism?’ Certainly, pastors need to find a deep sense of the living God again. We must re-emphasize his greatness and his grace to turn our eyes away from ourselves. Further, we must emphasise the New Testament teaching that that the church is family, with the Lord’s Supper being the family meal table to reinstate a proper community rather than individualism. And the practice of simply tagging communion on to the end of a public service works against this and in fact encourages a Christianised form of individualism.
[1] J. H. Merle d’Aubigne, The Reformation in England (Banner of Truth, 1962), 228.
