By way of explanation for the decision that I am making, I want to tell two stories. The first is of my calling. The second is of my discipleship. I will begin with my calling.
I was called to pastoral ministry when I was sixteen years old. That’s how I understood what happened. I was in a church service in Massachusetts; the pastor read from John 21; and I felt as though the words of Jesus were spoken directly to me:
“Do you love me? … Feed my sheep.”
I interpreted that experience as I had been conditioned to interpret it. I assumed God was speaking to me.
I did not have the awareness at the time to realize that many things intersected on that day, pushing me to interpret my experience in that way. From the time I was young my grandmother had told me I was to do something important for God and the church. That message was subconscious for me, but it was there. In my late teens I had begun to drift from faith in God, and I had a deep desire to repair that relationship. That was there, too. Also, I had been conditioned to read the Bible as a word written first to others, but also as one that spoke uniquely and personally to me. That was there. And, I had been enculturated in the church to expect that heightened emotions in the context of a worship service was God’s attempt to communicate. That was there. And finally, I wanted to do something important with my life, something significant, something that would help others and please God. That was there, too.
Together these pieces of me, and perhaps a host of others I could not and still cannot recognize, led me to a singular conclusion: God wanted me to be a pastor. God wanted me to lead a community of people in discipleship. That conclusion was predetermined. At the time, there was no other available interpretation. It was an imposition and an honor. I accepted. But, I’m not sure the offer was from God.
Growing up and finding one’s way in the world is a meandering and confusing journey. Certainty helps bring clarity, and this calling certainly provided that for me. It determined where I would go to college, what I would study, the kind of person I would look to marry, and the places I would apply for jobs upon graduation. Early on I had no reason to question whether I had heard from God. God was indistinguishable for me from my clarity and my ambition, and doors were opening for me to continue.
But, truth has a way of gnawing at us over time. The first indication that I may have misunderstood the road on which I had been walking came early in my ministry career. I had planned to take the teens with whom I was working on a mission trip, and we had begun to raise money for the endeavor. But, as the deadline for our deposits neared, I could not get enough teens and families to commit absolutely to the trip. So, I decided to change directions. Rather than going away, we would do mission work locally. And so, I began to plan for the week.
One of the days I scheduled to be an ‘invite a non-Christian friend’ trip to an amusement park. When some of those who donated to the trip discovered that we were paying for some teens to ride roller coasters, they felt betrayed. I was accused of misappropriating funds, and I panicked. After a night of sleepless prayer, I determined to ask those who were involved in the planning to defend our decisions publicly. They did that. And those who had opposed me eventually left the church. I knew that this was not the way of Jesus. But, during that night of sleepless prayer, I had felt emboldened to do what I had done. I believed God was leading me. Who was I following?
The attention at that church quickly shifted from me as some controversies surrounding other leaders began to emerge, which led to a difficult season of transition. In the wake of those events, I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, underwent treatments, and experienced what I could only describe as a crisis of faith. I’ve chronicled much of that crisis in my book “When God Doesn’t Look Like God: A Search in the Dark for God.”
After completing my treatments, I left that ministry, but I continued to pursue the calling. In the sixteen years that followed, I earned a Masters degree in Divinity, taught Biblical Hebrew at the graduate level, planted a church, and became the lead pastor of two churches. When I resigned from pastoral ministry in January of 2021, I had reached the end of the call I received when I was sixteen. I had left the god who had called me. And, for the first time in my life, I had come to follow the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob Who became flesh in the Person of Jesus. But, to explain how I have come to that conclusion, I must tell a second story—the story of my discipleship.
There is no doubt in me that, in my youthful mind, I was pursuing the God proclaimed in Christian Scripture. My confession that I had followed the call of false spirits and a false god is not a confession to have been doing such defiantly. And, what I have come to understand over time is that the One true God honors this pursuit by discipling those heading headlong into destruction long before they have an encounter with Him. He discipled me in my rebellion.
From the beginning I had a sense that I knew little to nothing about God, and I was one whose confidence came from study, preparation, and proficiency. So, I realized from the onset that in order to have the confidence to lead a church I would need to become an expert on the Christian Bible. Throughout the intervening years, therefore, I was reading, investigating, and studying the Scriptures. I’m still surprised how long it took for me to realize my deception, but the Scriptures were a place in which my blindness was challenged.
I realized very quickly that the Scriptural testimony about God and the kinds of impressions I associated with God were not always lining up. For instance, I had a deep desire to defend myself when questioned, and I quickly interpreted disagreement as distrust. These instincts looked more consistent with persons the like of King Saul than of the faithful followers of God in Scripture. I felt the disconnect, but this voice within me kept saying that I was fine, that I was called. I listened to that voice. But, the dissonant voice of God gnawed at me. I always found Scriptures to justify my feelings and decisions, but the One true God never let me find peace with those justifications.
The voice of God also spoke through my studies. While in graduate school, I was assigned the book Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue, by Edwin Friedman. The following passage left an impression that I have not yet shaken:
The standard bearer usually is the oldest male, or the only one to carry on the family name, or anyone (male or female) who has replaced a significant progenitor two or even three generations back. Such individuals have great difficulty giving emotion or time to their marriage or their children. Success has the compelling drive of ghosts behind it. They have too much to do in the short span of a lifetime. In addition, failure is more significant because it is not only themselves or even their own generation that they will have failed. Individuals, for example, who commit suicide after business failures often occupy the standard bearer position. If it had been only their own failure, they might have been able to “live with themselves.” Such family members are caught in a multigenerational cul-de-sac in which history is their destiny. Something similar is frequently found in the family history of members of the clergy and will be illustrated further in Section IV. For the moment, that multigeneration identifying process can be put in the form of a question: Which of your ancestors really ordained you?
Friedman, Generation to Generation, 21-22.
Friedman’s theories aside, that last question penetrated. After reading this passage, I discussed it with my wife. I still clung to the belief that God had called me, that God had ordained me. But, deep within I suspected that my grandmother had ordained me. God was speaking; God was healing my blindness.
During this same time I was assigned the book Life Together, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. At the time I read it, I had no ears to hear almost anything Bonhoeffer was commending. But, his words remained with me, and the Lord has used them to heal me. One passage that I think of often is from chapter five, “Confession and Communion”:
In confession a man breaks through to certainty. Why is it that it is often easier for us to confess our sins to God than to a brother? God is holy and sinless, He is a just judge of evil and the enemy of all disobedience. But a brother is sinful as we are. He knows from his own experience the dark night of secret sin. Why should we not find it easier to go to a brother than to the holy God? But if we do, we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God, whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution. And is not the reason perhaps for our countless relapses and the feebleness of our Christian obedience to be found precisely in the fact that we are living on self-forgiveness and not a real forgiveness? Self-forgiveness can never lead to a breach with sin; this can be accomplished only by the judging and pardoning Word of God itself.
Who can give us the certainty that, in the confession and the forgiveness of our sins, we are not dealing with ourselves but with the living God? God gives us this certainty through our brother. Our brother breaks the circle of self-deception. A man who confesses his sins in the presence of a brother knows that he is no longer alone with himself; he experiences the presence of God in the reality of the other person.
Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 115-116.
Whether one agrees with Bonhoeffer’s understanding of James 5:16 (“Confess your faults to one another”) or not, the question that has remained with me these many years, is this: Have I been confessing my sins to myself and granting myself absolution? The Apostle John instructs us in 1 John 4:1:
“1Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world.”
1 John 4:1, NRSV.
I was realizing that my discernment should have always been suspect and scrutinized.
And then, some years later, an acquaintance with whom I attended seminary wrote a book entitled Shrink. His name is Tim Suttle. I read his book with my leadership team somewhere around 2016. The following passage encapsulates Tim’s governing thesis:
Most of the church leadership conversation today has its footing squarely in the cultural narrative, not the Christian narrative. Leadership today is about getting things done and growing a ministry we can be proud of. As a result, Christian leadership has come to focus solely on best practices. Leaders want to know what we can do to produce the kind of results we desire. We want effectiveness. We crave practical advice that will help us to be bigger, better, and so on.
I have come to believe that this entire line of thinking has little to do with the gospel, even less with the life of Jesus Christ, whom we have been called to imitate.
Here’s the heart of my ethos and the foundation of everything I will say in this book: there’s leadership, and then there’s Christian leadership. Christian leadership is categorically different from any other mode of leadership.
If you have been involved in any kind of leadership conversation recently, you could probably teach a seminar on what the word leadership means. We all know the bullet points: define the mission, assemble a team, cast the vision, set goals, inspire everyone to work together, achieve the goals, celebrate success, adapt to changes, and grow the enterprise. Under this set of assumptions, the way to judge the effectiveness of the leader is by viewing the results. Success is about effectiveness.
Christian leadership operates with a completely different basic assumption. Our most basic conviction is that the kingdom of God has come and is coming in and through Jesus Christ. We cannot accomplish the kingdom of God; it is the work of God. Our job is to be faithful to the ways of Jesus, not the ways of our culture. The Christian leader does not pursue success or results the way the CEO of a Fortune 500 company does. The Christian leader pursues faithfulness. Results, success, and effectiveness are nice when they happen, but they are not the primary pursuit.
Christian leaders are meant to model their lives and leadership practices on the life of Jesus. This means that we can never have the assurance of predictable results. We lead in the way of Christ and leave the results up to God. Faithfulness, not success, is our goal. The goal of Christian leadership is always and only ever faithfulness in the way of Jesus.
Suttle, Shrink, 24-25.
What Tim wrote resonated not with my calling or with my ministerial approach, but with what I saw the Scriptures to teach. The dissonance was becoming deafening to me, and I began in 2016 the slow journey out of the calling to pastor and into the calling to be a disciple of Jesus. Both churches I pastored in the wake of this began to experience this change in me, and it was destabilizing in many ways to both communities—the second more so than the first. When I resigned from ministry in January of 2021, I realized that my resignation was the only way I could continue to follow Jesus in discipleship. I have come to understand that my calling, which I had believed had been from God, was an idol that had governed my life. And, more perplexing still, the Church had become its prophet.
Even with this awareness, I continued to preach and teach through social media after I left, holding out the hope that the calling could still be embodied in a different venue. If the church had been overtaken by culture, perhaps a pure, virtual teaching ministry focused only on Scripture and the Word of God might be the means by which I feed God’s sheep.
However, at the beginning of this month my brother-in-law (who is also a pastor) suggested I listen to the Christianity Today podcast, “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill.” To date seven episodes have been released, and I listened to them all in a single day. And in the story of Mars Hill and its founding pastor, I heard the voice of the god who called me to ministry, to significance, to become a world-changer. It wasn’t until I listened to that story that it all came into focus for me. I was called by the gods of this age. I had been driven by the spirits of this age. Like Paul on the road to Damascus, the God I had longed to serve—the One true God of all creation—had not been the God I had followed.
In the days that followed, the lessons of my past and the whispers of God throughout have become clearer. And I returned to Bonhoeffer’s Life Together to read the following words again with a heart softened by discipleship to Jesus:
By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that was given it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be every so honest and earnest and sacrificial.
God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to others in the circles of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of the brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.
Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 27-28.
I have held on to my calling too long, along with its siren’s call of significance, influence, and legacy. I am ready now to follow Jesus. However life progresses from here, my repentance—my turning—requires my service to Christ to be humble, local, and done in secret. What is currently online will remain, and I will continue to write and blog on occasion. If the Lord gives me a word to speak, I will speak it in whatever venue He requires. But apart from such exceptional circumstances, I am signing off. May Jesus Christ alone be magnified. And may the Lord Himself guide your steps.
