Pastoral care and discipleship are time consuming and by all appearances, inefficient—so use that to your advantage.  Given all the other duties pastors are expected to fulfill, making them feel harried and overwhelmed is hardly difficult.

My Dear Twaddle-Tweeze:

Good intentions!  I’ll never cease to remind you that the road to Perdition lined with these.  I realize that ambitious amateur tempters would rather conspire spectacular scandals.  But particularly when it comes to territorial responsibilities like yours, good intentions can be quietly, even imperceptibly effective.  Remember: our Liege Lord masquerades as an “angel of light” and those of us in his demonic band as “messengers of righteousness.”

Mere mortals tend to think of our Master as an insidious destroyer.  They are inclined to believe that his plan has always been to play fast and free with goodness, truth, and purity wherever they might be found.  In fact, our Abysmal Sublimity does not so much want to tear down “godly” conventions and mores as to build up his own.  His urge to delicious misworship is but the engendering of fine traditions, magnificent achievements, and beneficent inclinations—yet all apart from the endowments of the Enemy’s order.  From the apex temptation in the Garden to the present, his conspiratorial plot has always been to offer some sane, attractive, and wholesome counterfeit to the true Kingdom of our Foe.

That’s why good intentions are the perfect tools for your task to hamper shepherds from shepherding, to deter pastors from actually pastoring.  Amorality is obvious and short-sighted; scandal lasts but for a season; but fiddling the days and hours away on sweet-nothings can become habits of a lifetime—thus, wrecking far greater havoc on the church with less work on your part.

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