8. Candor
I got the anxious call from a member of a board, probably because I had written Dangerous Calling, so he thought I would be knowledgeable, understanding, and safe.1 He didn’t need to tell me why he was calling; I knew from the emergency nature of the call and the nervousness in his voice that the senior pastor had blown up in some way. What I didn’t know was that this conversation and my subsequent involvement in the crisis would be the seedbed in which this book would grow.
The senior pastor had just led the church’s annual meeting. There were exciting things happening in the church and in the way it was impacting the surrounding community. The finances were solid, and the future looked bright. He had communicated well and had led the question-and-answer time that followed with a listening ear and helpful answers. The meeting had taken place on a Saturday night, with a dinner and plenty of time for fellowship. On Sunday morning he had announced a new sermon series and carefully laid out the biblical journey that the church would be taking together. It all seemed to portray a good leader of a good church who was doing the good things God had designed for him to do.
The man who called me described in detail what then happened on Monday night when the board got together for a leadership debrief from the annual meeting and to discuss some other logistics. As the meeting was about to begin, the senior pastor seemed a bit nervous and ill at ease, but no one made much of it. One of his fellow leaders had led in prayer and then turned the meeting over to him, but rather than jumping into the planned debrief, he spoke with great emotion and like someone who is lifting a weighty burden off his chest.
He said, “I just can’t do this anymore. I don’t want to preach any more sermons. I don’t want to lead any more meetings. I don’t want to talk to anyone else about their problems. I’m not even sure that I want to be married. In case you’re wondering, I haven’t cheated on my wife, and I haven’t embezzled any of the church’s money. I’m just done, and I’m not going to continue to put myself through this. I hate what I’m doing. I find it burdensome and exhausting, and I cannot imagine continuing to do it. I have no plan other than doing what I am doing right now—quitting. I can’t tell you how relieved I am that tomorrow I won’t be a pastor anymore. I don’t want to talk to you about this. I don’t want you to pray over me, and I won’t go to a counselor. I know you’ll want to help, but I don’t want help. I want to be left alone and to be free to move on. If you cut me off financially, it won’t stop me. I’m done and there is nothing that will undo that.”
He continued, “In case you’re wondering, I still believe in the Bible and in the work of Jesus Christ, but I no longer believe that I should be in ministry. My marriage is bad, bad enough that I can’t imagine continuing that either. My wife is not at fault; it’s just that the relationship also has become tiring and burdensome, and I’m just done hoping and trying. I don’t know where I’ll go, and I don’t know what I’ll do, but there is one thing I am sure of—I will never be a pastor again, here or anywhere else.”
With those words he got up and walked out. One of his fellow leaders followed him down the hallway and out the door and to his car, begging him along the way to come back and talk some more and let them respond, but the pastor said nothing, got into his car, and drove away. The man who went after him came back into the meeting room with tears in his eyes, to a group of shocked and silent leaders. The board member who called me said that they had not heard from him since. He would not take their calls. He had never reentered the church building, and he was living separately from his wife.
I knew the burning question they would ask me would be, “What do we do now?” but that was not the question that haunted me after I got off the phone. My question was, “What is it about this leader and the leadership community that allowed this to happen?” It is very clear that the sad and painful drama of that Monday night was not an isolated event but the end of a dark, lonely, and debilitating process. This senior pastor had been carrying his burden for a long time. He had been struggling to pull off the duties of his calling for a long time. He and his wife had been struggling for a long time. He had not enjoyed preaching for a long time. He had disliked ministry meetings for a long time. He had fantasized about another life for a long time. He had considered different ways to make his escape many times. He had become skilled at hiding his angst while doing his job. He gave a thousand nonanswers to people’s questions and was good at putting on a public face. But his skill at hiding just deepened his anguish.
All of this had grown and developed as he was in regular contact with fellow leaders. They were together in formal meetings, in ministry situations, in casual conversations in the hallway, and in times of fellowship. He had been with his leadership community on weekend leadership retreats, at leadership conferences, and during short-term missionary work. Every board meeting began with a catered dinner, accompanied by robust conversation around the table and a time of personal conversation and prayer. Yet what he told them on the fateful Monday night came as a complete shock.
This story is not just about a leader who lost his way but about a ministry leadership community that somehow, someway did not provide what he needed when he needed it most. How did an intimate, seemingly knowledgeable ministry life end with a shocking personal revelation? How did this ministry community not know the man they thought they knew? Let me say again, as I’ve written before: an isolated, independent, separated, and self-hiding Christian life is alien to the Christianity of the New Testament. Biblical Christianity is thoroughly and foundationally relational. No one can live outside the essential ministries of the body of Christ and remain spiritually healthy. No one is so spiritually mature that he is free from a need for the comfort, warnings, encouragement, rebuke, instruction, and insights of others. Everyone needs partners in struggles. Everyone needs to be helped to see what they cannot see about themselves on their own. This includes leaders. It’s not enough to just do leadership activities together, because there is not a moment in time when every leader is free from the need of gospel community. Every leader, to be spiritually healthy, needs spiritual help—every one.
As I walked with these leaders through this dramatic and difficult situation, it made me begin to wonder how many pastor/leaders are hiding things that need to be communicated and that can’t be successfully hidden for very long. I began to wonder how many leaders look at their leadership community and simply don’t believe that they can speak with complete personal candor and ever get through it together. I wonder how many leaders have made such a mess of things private and corporate that it seems impossible to believe that the leaders around them will respond to the mess with grace and offer to help clean it up. It made me wonder how many church and ministry leaders don’t really like their wives and have adversarial relationships with their children but don’t think it’s possible to admit it to fellow leaders. It made me wonder how leadership communities function together in such a way that allows members to be practically unknown and to suffer alone.
You would think that a struggling leader in trouble would look around at the leaders in the room with him and say, “These are people like me. They know what it means to struggle. They understand discouragement, and they know we all make sinful choices. I know these leaders love me. I know they will work to comfort, rescue, restore, and encourage me. These leaders offer me a safe place to be real, honest, and self-disclosing. I can speak and not be afraid.” You would think this would be the case, but it is not. We hesitate and delay, not just because we are self-protective or like our sin but also because we are not sure that our ministry leadership community will love us with gospel love in those moments when we need it most. A spiritually healthy leadership community is spiritually healthy when it is a safe place for struggling leaders to speak with candor and hope.
Leadership Candor: A Biblical Case Study
I want to examine with you a biblical example of the kind of candor I am pleading for here and its results. Read carefully the words of the apostle Paul that follow.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.
For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again. You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many. (2 Cor. 1:3–11)
I have provided context for you, but what I’m really interested in, for our discussion, is the second paragraph. Pay careful attention to how Paul talks about his difficult situation. He seems to have no desire to be self-protective. The ministry leaders I regularly meet with often share a personal experience, but they leave out how they themselves factor into it. They talk about what happened and what other people did and said, but they give me little sense of their own heart struggle as it was all going on. I find that I have to pry a bit to get to the spiritual struggle behind the situational difficulty.
Now, you know that even the best of ministry leaders do not always do well. You know that sometimes they get discouraged by difficulties at home or in their ministry. You know that there are moments when they struggle with impatience, anger, frustration, or envy. You know that not every ministry leader around the table experiences regular joy in the Lord and in his service. You know that ministry leaders get burdened by ministry responsibilities and the busyness that follows. You know that ministry leaders are tempted to give way to thoughts and desires that they should not entertain or follow. Yet, seldom in our ministry communities do we talk about these things.
Now back to Paul. In the passage above, Paul describes not just the hard situation; he speaks with candor about the heart struggle it initiated. How more candid, how more humbly honest and self-disclosing, could you get than these words: “For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. . . . We felt that we had received the sentence of death” (vv. 8–9). It’s hard to think of these desperate words coming from the mouth of Paul. Here he is, the giant of the gospel; Paul, who exegeted our faith for us; Paul, our example of the transforming power of the gospel—revealing his experience of utter despair. Paul, yes, the apostle Paul, went through a situation in which he thought, “This is it; it’s over.” Yes, it is true that Paul was a man just like us. Paul was a man capable of spiritual despair. Paul was not free from frailty of heart, nor am I, nor is any leader reading this book. But remarkable here, given the ministry leadership culture that most of us live and work in, is that Paul has no hesitancy, no problem, sharing the depth of the struggle of his heart.
Leader, are you comfortable with this level of personal candor? Does your leadership community welcome confessions of weakness and struggle? Are there subtle, unspoken ways that you look down on leaders who are weak? Does your leadership culture silence confessions of struggle? Does the way you define a leader forbid leaders from confessing places of doubt and despair? Is your community so rich in patient love and gospel care that each leader feels comfortable with the kind of candor that is needed for long-term spiritual health? Do you hide your true self from your fellow leaders, and do you think others do too? Has your leadership community had candid moments followed by encouragement, comfort, promises of assistance, warning, and prayer? Do you really know the leaders around the table whom you think you know? What in the way you relate and function as a leadership community would cause a leader to be afraid to be open and honest about personal heart struggles?
It is quite possible to be committed to leading robust gospel ministries and yet be denying the same gospel in your leadership community. Hiding in fear, silence, denial, defensiveness, and a vacuum of humble candor is more of the culture of broken Eden than of victorious Calvary. At the heart of the wonderful new and radically different life that we are welcomed to, based on the person and sacrifice of Jesus, is the welcome to confession. We are lovingly called out of the darkness, out from behind the trees into the open and the light, not because we don’t have things to hide but because grace means we no longer have to hide them. The one from whom we have hidden is now our Father, and the things we hid have been fully atoned for. And it is very clear in the New Testament that the vertical freedom that God has given us to be humbly honest with him is meant to shape the way we live and relate to one another. Because we can be honest with God, we can also be honest with one another. That’s why James boldly says, “Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed” (James 5:16).
A gospel-shaped leadership community will be a confessional community, where leader honesty is a not only a constant protection but encourages a deeper and deeper dependency on God. Confessing communities tend to be humble communities. Confessing communities tend to be worshiping communities. Confessing communities tend to be praying communities. Leaders who confess tend to be tender and kind when people they are called to lead mess up and need to confess. The more a leader has the joy of being in a confessing community, the more he will come to see his need for grace, and because he does, he will tend to be a giver of that same grace. In a confessing leadership community, leaders’ pride shrinks and worship of God grows.
It is in the soil of the devastation and humiliation of confession that servant leaders grow. In the pain of personal candor, lust for power wanes and passion for the gospel grows. Was this not the result in Paul’s life? The passage ends with a deeper dependency on God and humble community prayer. This is the culture that every leadership community needs to foster and encourage. How can we lead people into the welcome of the gospel if we are not living in that welcome as a leadership community? How can we call people out of hiding if we are hiding? How can we call them to deal with things we are still denying? How can we encourage them to confess when we are afraid to confess? How can we call them to love one another, no matter what, when we are not doing the same as a leadership community? How can we invite people to have complete confidence in the gospel when our leadership culture is subtly shaped by a functional lack of confidence in the same? Leaders, the gospel of Jesus Christ predicts that we can do better.
What Silences Us?
Why isn’t humble candor more of a regular part of our ministry leadership culture? Why aren’t we more ready to confess spiritual discouragement or struggle? Why do we sit in silence as we watch fellow leaders drift away from the type of people God calls them to be? Why are too many of us more defensive than approachable? Why do we seem to be more concerned about and activated by the sin of others than we are by our own? What silences humble gospel candor in our leadership communities? Well, I want to suggest a few answers to these questions. My hope is that it will prompt community self-examination and discussion.
Pride is a huge issue for all ministry leaders. Knowledge gets to us, experience gets to us, success gets to us, position gets to us, increasing notoriety gets to us, and in so doing we are placed in spiritual danger. Pride is a temptation that every leadership community should be aware of and keep a watchful eye on. Sadly, way too many leaders change throughout the life of their ministry leadership. The humble, gracious, servant attitude wanes as knowledge, success, and prominence increase. We hear it in the way leaders talk about themselves and how they talk about and relate to others.
If ministry knowledge, experience, success, and position have begun to distort your sense of yourself, if they have caused you to forget who you really are and what you daily need, you will not be quick to admit your sin, weaknesses, and failures to yourself or to others. Pride and confession are enemies. They do not work in cooperation but in constant opposition. If ministry has come to define you, the gospel won’t. Perhaps many leaders are silent because they have fallen into the delusion that they don’t really have anything to confess or don’t see where they need the pastoral love and assistance of fellow leaders.
It is one of the most powerful aspects of the scary and destructive deceitfulness of sin. As long as sin is inside us, we all carry with us a dangerous ability to participate in our own spiritual blindness. It should be a warning to every leadership community everywhere that all members of your community are regularly tempted to think that their sin is something less than sin. We’re able to name our anger as zeal for what is right. We are skilled at calling our impatience a desire to move forward with gospel mission. We are tempted to call gossip the sharing of prayer concerns. Being power and control hungry gets recast as exercising God-given leadership gifts.
Every leadership community needs to pray together for grace to see sin as dark, despicable, destructive, and dishonoring to God as it actually is. Every leadership community needs to regularly cry out for help, admitting that sin doesn’t always look sinful. We need to seek divine rescue from our ability to erect self-atoning arguments for our righteousness that crush gospel grief and humble confession. Any leadership community that has become individually or corporately comfortable with minimizing sin is, because of that, in real and present spiritual danger.
3. Must Have the Respect of Others
It is my temptation, and if you’re a leader, it’s your temptation too: we care too much about what fellow leaders think of us. There are times when I give more of the concern of my heart to the opinion of a particular ministry colleague than to the view of my Lord. I want too much to be respected. I want too much to be liked. I am too concerned with being spoken well of. I overly desire that fellow leaders affirm my ideas and give weight to my plans. I am too attentive to how fellow leaders respond to me. I am greatly tempted, as is every leader in some way, to care too much about what others think of me.
Balanced relationships in a leadership community are a tricky thing for which we need much grace. On one hand, I am in hand-to-hand spiritual war with my fellow leaders, so we need to have a relationship of respect and trust. One the other hand, I cannot let their acceptance and respect be what controls how I relate to them. If I care too much about what they think of me, I will put forth my strengths while hiding my weaknesses and failures. If I have them in the appropriate place in my heart, I will see them as God-given tools of grace and be free to be candid with them about my real issues of heart and life. Every leadership community needs to pray for grace to get this balance right.
If ministry leadership is your identity, then Christ isn’t, along with that life-changing catalog of comforts that are the result of his person and work. Ministry leadership identity produces fear and anxiety and will never produce the humility and courage that come with identity in Christ. Looking horizontally, as a leader, for your identity, meaning, purpose, and internal sense of well-being asks people, places, and position to do for you what only your Messiah can do. This will produce either pride in success or fear of failure but never the kind of humility and courage of heart that results in humble, willing, confessing approachability. Ministry as a source of identity will never result in healthy gospel-shaped relationships in your leadership community, the kind of relationships in which candor is encouraged, confession is greeted with grace, and bonds of love, appreciation, affection, understanding, and respect grow strong.
Yes, it is possible to be part of a leadership community that has the gospel as its central message and the spread of the gospel as its central mission but whose leaders are silenced by gospel doubt. Too many leaders struggling with issues in their hearts, lives, and relationships have their responses shaped more by a catalog of doubtful “what ifs” than by the hope-producing promises of the gospel. Leaders can’t imagine how their confession will turn out well, so they hide behind silence, denials, or nonanswers. Rather than being thankful for the ever-present grace that is theirs in Christ and the community of grace that surrounds them, they doubt rescuing and forgiving grace and fear the very people tasked with being tools of that grace.
The gospel is laden with promises of forgiveness and restoration. The gospel offers us the comfort of fresh starts and new beginnings. The gospel promises us that the good things God calls us to will produce good in our lives, even if that good looks different from what we hoped for. The gospel reminds us that hardship in the hands of the Lord is a tool of rescuing, forgiving, transforming, and delivering grace. The gospel tells us that Jesus measured up in every way because we wouldn’t and that he took the Father’s rejection so we would never have to. Here’s what every leadership community needs to affirm: to come out of hiding produces good, to admit what you have denied produces good, to confess sin produces good, to own where you are weak produces good, and to say no to pride and cry out for help, even if there is wreckage along the way, produces good.
Will we allow ourselves to esteem ministry identity and position more than we esteem a humble and clean heart before the Lord and in relationship to the fellow leaders he has placed us near? Do we fear loss of a leadership position more than we fear giving sin room to do its evil work in our hearts and lives? Do we really believe that our Redeemer is kind, tender, loving, and good? Do we really believe that all his ways are right and true? Will we allow ourselves to think that his way is more dangerous than our way? Will we let functional gospel doubt silence us when our Savior is calling us to confess and be healed?
This has been a tough and convicting chapter to write. It has caused me to examine why it is hard for me in places to say, “I was wrong; please forgive me.” It has required me to ask myself why at times I find it hard to own my weaknesses and seek help. And it has deepened my longing to be in a robust gospel community with other leaders, where we know we are loved and will find grace, where we know we are needy, and where humble candor is the culture, not the exception. For this, every leader needs grace, and that grace is ours, operating now and secure because of the life, death, and resurrection of our fellow leader, companion, and friend—the Lamb, the Lord, the Savior, Jesus. It is only by his power that our fears are silenced and our mouths are filled with humility, hope, confession, and praise. May we rest in him, and in resting, come out of the hiding and speak. And in speaking, may we experience good things from him that are way better than the bad things we feared.
1. Paul David Tripp, Dangerous Calling: Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012).