It’s important to recognize that many people in ministry have been seduced by self-glory and lost sight of the glory of God. Not all people in ministry do their work out of a humble sense of their own need. Ministries derail because leaders begin to think they’ve arrived and don’t do the protective things they warn everyone else to do. It’s naïve to think that pastors are free from sexual temptation, fear of man, envy, greed, pride, anger, doubt of God, bitterness, and idolatry. Every pastor is being reconstructed by God’s grace.

I want to begin this Ministry Article where the last one ended. We must be careful how we define ministry readiness and spiritual maturity. There’s a danger in thinking that the well-educated and trained seminary graduate is ministry ready. There’s great danger in mistaking knowledge, busyness, and skill with personal spiritual maturity.

Maturity is a vertical thing that will have a wide variety of horizontal expressions. Maturity is about relationship to God that results in wise and humble living. Love for Christ expresses itself in love for others. Thankfulness for the grace of Christ expresses itself in grace to others. Gratitude for the patience and forgiveness of Christ enables you to be patient and forgiving of others. Your daily experience of gospel rescue gives you passion for people experiencing the same rescue.

These things need to be brought to the forefront in the application and examination of all pastoral candidates. We’re not calling skills, knowledge, and experience to ministry. We’re calling whole people who live out of the heart and whose ministries will always be shaped and directed by some kind of worship.

We’re calling people in the middle of their own sanctification, still struggling with the seductive and deceptive power of sin. We’re calling people who face the daily snares of a world that simply isn’t operating the way that God intended. We’re calling people God will call into hardship for their redemptive good and for his glory.

We’re calling people in intimate daily relationships with other sinners. We’re calling people capable of losing their way, capable of self-deception, and tempted to be self-sufficient and self-righteous. We’re calling people who drag their feelings about and interpretations of ministry experiences into this new place. We’re calling people in as desperate need of forgiving, transforming, empowering, and delivering grace as anybody to whom they would ever minister. We’re calling real people who aren’t yet grace graduates.

So we must get to know – really know – the people we put into positions spiritual leadership and care of God’s people.

SOME BIBLICAL EXAMPLES

It’s clear from examining Scripture that leadership fruitfulness or failure is seldom only about knowledge, strategy, skill, and experience.

Abraham

Consider what Romans 4 says of Abraham. He was chosen by God to receive his covenant promises. He was told that his offspring would be like the sand on the seashore. Yet his wife was a very old woman, way beyond child-bearing age, and he hadn’t yet given birth to the son who would carry on his line.

Romans 4 tells us something significant about Abraham’s heart. When you and I are called by God to wait for an extended period as Abraham was, our story is often a chronicle of ever-weakening faith. The longer we think about what we’re waiting for, the longer we consider how we have no ability to deliver it. The longer we have to let ourselves wonder why we’ve been selected to wait, the more our faith weakens.

Not so with Abraham. We’re told in this passage that during this time of protracted waiting, his faith actually grew stronger. Rather than meditating on the impossibility of his situation, Abraham meditated on the power and character of the One who made the promise. The more Abraham let his heart bask in the glory of God, he grew more convinced he was in good hands. Rather than a cycle of discouragement and hopelessness, Abraham’s story was one of encouragement and hope.

Joseph

What about Joseph, whom God chose as his tool to preserve the children of Israel from famine and resultant extinction? When seduced by the Egyptian ruler Potiphar’s wife, he wouldn’t give in. Why? Not fear of consequences, not learning from experience, and not his skill at negotiating the complicated relationships of the palace.

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