10. Restoration
He called me in a bit of a panic because he didn’t know who else to call. (He had audited one of my classes.) He was calling because he had found his senior pastor, who was his mentor, in what seemed to be an emotional breakdown. His pastor was irrational, saying things that made no sense. He drove his pastor home, and as the pastor mumbled his way into his house, my former student called and asked me for help. I called his pastor, introduced myself, explained to him why I was calling, and offered my counseling help if it was needed. He thanked me for my concern and told me he had been through a grueling ministry week, hadn’t got much sleep, and had had a bit of a physical breakdown. I prayed with him but left the conversation quite concerned and thinking that I would hear from him or someone close to him again.
A few weeks later, I got a phone call from another man I didn’t know. He was very upset and said that what he was about to tell me needed immediate action, but it had to be done confidentially. He was reaching out to me after scheduling an appointment with the same senior pastor from a few weeks back. The only time they’d been able to meet was after the senior pastor’s normal work hours. By the time the man arrived at the pastor’s office, most of the staff had gone home, and he was let into the building by a janitor. He made his way to the pastor’s office and knocked on the door, but there was no answer. He hesitated for a moment and then stuck his head in the door opening. He saw the pastor with his head down on the desk and called out to him. Alarmed when he got no response, he went over to shake the pastor to see if he was okay, and the moment he got close, he was hit with the smell of alcohol. He knew right away that his pastor wasn’t sick or sleeping; he was drunk.
He ran out of the church building, heart pounding, and called me, because we had developed a bit of a friendship, and he had no idea what to do next. I told him to call the chair of the elder board, which he did. It was like a bomb dropped in the middle of that church. Never had the leadership imagined that such a problem would drop in their lap. Never had they thought that such a thing could be going on in the life of this pastor who was so effective and seemed so committed. Weighty questions swirled around in the minds of the elders about what to do next and what this meant for the life and ministry of the church. And soon it became obvious to me that the developing plan was to set aside the pastor, give him a loving severance, and find a new senior pastor.
Here was a man who had clearly been given ministry, leadership, preaching, and pastoral gifts. Here was a man who had evangelized and discipled many. Here was a preacher-teacher who had given his congregation biblical literacy and theological knowledge, and he was about to be set aside as if he were a commodity, no longer useful and not a dear, God-gifted leader and brother in Christ. The plan seemed more like what an NFL team would do with a weakened player than the actions of a church that believes in the power of rescuing and restoring grace.
I asked if there was any way that I could meet with the elders. My hope was that I could give them an alternative plan. I did my best in the meeting to do two things. First, I preached to these wonderful but scared men of the power and beauty of God’s restorative grace and its promise of fresh starts and new beginnings. And then I laid out a possible restoration plan that included elder and diaconal care, elders’ wives to care for the fallen pastor’s wife, babysitters to be on call as needed, addiction counseling, a system of loving accountability, and ongoing support during the restoration process.
It was a long haul and at times ranged from discouraging to seemingly futile, but God was at work in this process. Through the loving ministry of many, he was restoring this man, reclaiming his gifts, and reshaping his trajectory. No promises were made to the pastor of his return to ministry—only promises of continuing support, help, counsel, and encouragement.
I am so thankful to communicate that this man who had fallen so far has returned to ministry. He is the lead pastor of another church, with a vibrant, growing ministry to its surrounding community. God was not done with him, and the church shouldn’t have been either. Leader restoration is not a romantic dream of people who don’t really understand how deep and serious sin is. Restoration gets at the heart of the gospel that we have given ourselves to. And even if sin necessitates a leader’s removal from his position and ministry duties, turning toward him with grace is always right. We sinners don’t just need forgiving grace; we need reconciling grace. And we don’t just need reconciling grace; we need restoring grace. And we don’t just need restoring grace; we need delivering grace. It is beautiful to see the power of restorative grace up close and personal, and it is sad to see that so many leadership communities don’t actually trust its power when a key leader’s sin has been revealed by the divine restorer.
Everybody Believes in Grace until a Leader Needs It
Every church or ministry leadership community must be a restorative community if it’s going to have long-term spiritual health and ministry effectiveness. A commitment to the spirit, attitudes, and actions of restoration is vital. As I have written before, there may be nothing more important, humbling, or culture-shaping for a ministry leadership community than to keep in view at all times that every member of the community is in the middle of their own sanctification. No leader is sin free, no leader lives above the great spiritual battle for the focus and rulership of his heart, and no leader has graduated from his need for grace. Every leader fails to live up to God’s standard in word, thought, or action somehow, someway, every day. Every leader still has moments when he thinks things that he should not think, desires what he should not desire, and acts or speaks in ways that are wrong.
No leader is impervious to a moment of pride or a flash of lust. No leader is above irritation, anger, jealousy, or impatience. Every leader struggles at some time with fear of man or pride of accomplishment. Ministry leaders are quite capable of disrespecting staff members or looking at the opposite sex in ways that are wrong. No leader has a perfect marriage or is a perfect parent. No leader has completely pure and unmixed motives. Here’s the bottom line: no leader in any ministry community anywhere is done, that is, completely formed into the image of Jesus Christ.
So if it is true that every leader is in the middle of the ongoing work of God’s sanctifying grace, then it is also true that there is still the presence of remaining sin in every leader’s heart. And if there is the presence of remaining sin in their hearts, the leaders will fail, sin, and fall. Sometimes anger robs a leader of his effectiveness. Sometimes envy interrupts the kind of relationships every leader needs for his spiritual health and ministry productivity. Sometimes pride of position and accomplishment gets in the way of the servant posture that must be the stance of every ministry leader. Sometimes private sin grows until the leader is addicted and enslaved. Sometimes a leader flags in his personal pursuit of God and presses ahead in a state of spiritual dryness. Sometimes private family dysfunction or marital unfaithfulness exists right alongside a leader’s public ministry. All leaders need spiritual care, but some fall and require loving, firm, well-administered restorative grace.
As I travel the world and have sat with ministry leaders from a wide variety of ecclesiastical and cultural backgrounds, I have seen that when it comes to leaders’ struggle with sin, we tend to make unbiblical assumptions that cause us to be naïve and unprepared for battles that we will face in the life and ministry of leaders in our communities. It is not safe to assume that a seminary graduate is spiritually okay. It’s not safe to conclude that a very gifted leader is where he needs to be in his relationship with Jesus. It’s not necessarily true that a theologically insightful leader is spiritually mature. Ministry effectiveness is not to be confused with cleanness of heart. What you know about the public persona of a leader does not mean you do not need to be concerned about his private life.
Assumptions that a leadership community makes about the spiritual condition of its leaders, assumptions that allow the community to be passive rather than pastoral, result in a shocked and unprepared community when a fellow leader falls in some way and needs restorative care. If the sin of a leader is revealed to the leadership community that surrounds him, it is because God loves that leader and wants it to be revealed. He has placed that leader in an intimate community of faith, and he has revealed that sin so that the community can function as his arm of convicting and restoring grace. Every leadership community has moments when they are called to be agents of God’s restoring mercy. This calling comes in small, private moments as well as in huge, public, and dramatic moments.
If you’ve made unbiblical assumptions, you are unprepared for these moments of ministry, and they quickly morph into panic and/or anger, punishment, and separation. It has been sad to see, in the face of a leader’s fall, how many leadership communities respond in one of two ways, neither restorative.
In the first way, a leadership community, in their inability to believe what has been revealed about a leader they thought they knew and could trust, rises almost immediately to the leader’s defense. They minimize or outright discount what has been revealed while they claim to know this leader and are sure that he would never do what he is charged with doing. They go on to publicly proclaim their loyalty to the leader under charge and question the validity of the charges and the motives of those who have come forward with information. The result is that the leader does not get the convicting and restorative care he needs from the community of grace that surrounds him. Even worse, the sin that has gripped his heart and begun to control his life is given room to grow even deeper roots and take a firmer hold. If you have paid attention to the wider ministry leadership community in the last decade, you’ve seen it happen again and again.
In the second way, the leadership group is again unprepared for God-given moments of restorative calling. In their shock over what has happened, they feel deceived and duped. Compassion for the one caught in sin is replaced by anger. Pastoral care gives way to adversarial responses, which are more punitive than pastoral. They quickly share details publicly that should’ve never been shared and that could or will harm their fellow leader and his family. They soon break relationship with the leader, and because they have, their communications with him are now legal rather than pastoral. He is no longer considered a part of their leadership community, so they negotiate some kind of severance package and move on.
Don’t misunderstand me here; I am not arguing that there aren’t times when a leadership community must separate from a fallen and recalcitrant leader, but I am arguing that this should happen at the end of a wholehearted, gospel-saturated attempt at restoration to the church body, even if it means the relinquishing of his position of leadership and authority. The sad thing about the two typical responses I have shared is that they lack preparedness for and commitment to any kind of practical, pastoral, restorative agenda. When a leader has fallen or is facing charges of some kind, and I get the call, I have on many occasions received surprised and sometimes angry responses from the leadership community when I have laid out for them what it looks like to be committed to biblical restoration.
Let me say again: if sin still remains, and it does, then every leadership community needs to be committed to and prepared for restoration.
Here’s the last chapter first: every leadership community should commit to representing, in their leadership culture and relationships, the restorative heart of the Redeemer. There are few places where we see more of the zeal of the Lord to restore a wayward leader than in the narrative of Jonah. I want to take some time with you to reflect on what we learn of God’s heart there.
Although you surely know the story well, I am going to embed passages from Jonah in our discussion to remind you of Jonah’s heart and the heart of his Lord.
Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord. (Jonah 1:1–3)
Talk about rebelling against the plan and call of the Lord—could there be a clearer example than Jonah? His response to God’s call is to turn and go to the other side of the known world. Our window into Jonah’s heart is that he has actually bought into the delusion that he can run from the presence of the Lord. If we think it’s possible to escape God’s presence, we have gone spiritually insane! Jonah is called to be a minister of the gospel. “The gospel?” you may ask. Yes, if you are called to give a message of warning, you are called to represent the Lord’s willingness to give people an opportunity to listen, examine, confess, and turn. This is gospel work. If all God wanted to do was judge people, he wouldn’t warn them first. God’s warning is a beautiful aspect of his grace. Remember, the way the gospel works is that we have to hear the bad news before the good news will mean anything to us.
But Jonah doesn’t want to go to a hard place or communicate a hard message to people he doesn’t know in a culture he doesn’t understand or respect. So he runs from God and his call. Jonah is a rebel and a fool, but he doesn’t know it. Now, if I had been in charge, the book of Jonah would have been very short—two verses, to be exact: “Jonah, you run from me, you’re done. It’s not like I have a shortage of prophets.” But I am willing to confess that my response doesn’t reflect the heart and way of my Lord.
We get the first hint at the restorative agenda of the Redeemer with three words in verse 4: “But the Lord.” These are three of the most important words ever written. They picture God’s rescuing, protecting, and restorative agenda. Here is a picture of the beauty and essentiality of the divine interruption. But this interruption happens not because of God’s righteous judgment but because of his patient grace. Jonah doesn’t know it yet, but he is about to be called back not just to the location to which God called him but also to the Lord who called him.
It is important to understand that the drama about to take place, which gives us a window into the magnitude of the sovereign power of God, is the drama of restoration. God sends a great wind, so great that it terrifies seasoned sailors. To understand why this difficulty has come upon them in desperation, the sailors cast lots, which fall on Jonah. So they ask him who he is and what he has done. Pay careful attention to Jonah’s response. He answers, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven” (Jonah 1:9). Jonah’s identity statement is interesting. By cultural identity he is a God fearer, but in terms of his response to God’s call, he doesn’t act like someone who fears the Lord. In this way, his words confront us with the difference that may exist in a leader between his confessional theology and his functional theology. Every leadership community needs to be committed to restoration for this very reason. There is often a subtle and progressive separation that takes place in the life and ministry of a leader between his formal confession and the manner by which he lives his life and conducts himself in ministry. The possibility of this drift should be a concern to every leadership community. Pay attention to what the Redeemer, in his sovereignty, is organizing for Jonah:
So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.
And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.
Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish. (Jonah 1:15–2:1)
Yes, God had not abandoned Jonah or his plans for him. Now, you would think, if you didn’t know the whole story, that this was the end. Jonah was thrown into the raging sea—God in his righteousness had given Jonah what he deserved—but this was not the end. God appointed a fish to swallow Jonah. Think of the words “appointed a fish.” This is the incredible extent of the authority of the Lord. He has the power to appoint a fish as a tool in his restoration of a wayward prophet. Because everything lives under his rule, God uses whatever is necessary to accomplish whatever he intends in the life of those he has called to represent him.
You can see that some kind of turning took place in Jonah, because the man who was so intent on escaping God’s presence began praying to the very one he was hoping to escape. In the verses that follow, we can eavesdrop on that deep-sea prayer and get a window into Jonah’s heart. Verse 10 clues us in to what God had in mind for Jonah through his appointed instrument, the fish: “The Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.” Yes, it is true: sometimes restorative grace looks like vomit! Restorative grace doesn’t always look nice and attractive or feel warm and affirming but, rather, is uncomfortable and hard.
The Jonah narrative preaches to us the heart of restoration. Restoration is much deeper and more foundational than doing what is necessary to quickly get a leader back into his ministry position. Surely Jonah needed much more than that, as the rest of the story makes clear. The heart of God’s restorative grace is his zeal to rescue us from us. Jonah needed more than a rescue from the storm, the fish, or the people of Nineveh. Jonah’s problem was Jonah, so to be restored to God and his call, Jonah needed to be free from his bondage to himself.
I love the first verse of Jonah 3. I find it deeply encouraging and hope giving. It also gives me insight into an aspect of the heart of God that I am called to represent in my relationship with and ministry to fellow leaders: “Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time.” Here’s what restoration is about—fresh starts and new beginnings. Between the “already” and the “not yet,” it’s what the gospel of God’s grace offers every ministry leader. It’s amazing that God’s call would come to Jonah, or to us, even once, but in the face of our foolishness, rebellion, and wandering, it is incredible that it would even come to us a second time. That God can see into our selfish and fickle hearts and still choose to use us is amazing. Jonah the runner has become Jonah the preacher. Jonah, who ran as far as he could from Nineveh, afterward walked its streets proclaiming God’s message, and the results were beautiful.
It’s here that we might think we are finally at the end of the story and God’s work of restoring grace, but we aren’t. Let’s consider Jonah’s reaction to the repentance of Nineveh:
But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. And he prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” (Jonah 4:1–3)
Jonah’s anger and his question of the wisdom of God’s response to Nineveh alert us to the reality that although Jonah had been restored to his ministry calling, he wasn’t yet fully restored at the level of his heart. When he should have been humbled and encouraged by the power and presence of God’s grace, he was angry at the gift of grace to people he didn’t think deserved it. Jonah was mad—so mad that he wanted to die. We are confronted here with the fact that the restoration of a leader cannot just be formal, situational, or locational but must always be heart deep. Restoration that isn’t heart deep sets up that leader and his community for further problems because the core of the problem, the leader’s heart, has not been restored to where God designed it to be.
What happened next is as important, insight giving, and agenda setting as any other portion of the Jonah narrative:
Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, till he should see what would become of the city. Now the Lord God appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, “It is better for me to die than to live.” But God said to Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry for the plant?” And he said, “Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.” And the Lord said, “You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?” (Jonah 4:5–11)
God, knowing that Jonah still needed heart restoration work, set up a physical illustration to expose Jonah’s heart. Jonah’s response to God’s grace wasn’t amazement and gratitude; no, it was anger. He was mad that mercy was being extended to a group of people he believed didn’t deserve it. At the level of his heart, Jonah was completely out of step with God’s message, his methods, and his character. This means that even though Jonah finally went where God told him to go and did what God told him to do, in his heart he had abandoned his ambassadorial calling. We should not assume that because a leader is still doing his assigned ministry duties that he is spiritually where God wants him to be.
Now, we might think this would be it for Jonah, that God had finally had enough of Jonah’s resistance and anger. But as Jonah was outside the city pouting, God was still working to restore him, once more using creation as his tool. Notice that Jonah is a book without an end, because as Jonah was still resisting and angry, God was still meeting him with restorative grace. Jonah doesn’t end with a summary or a conclusion; it ends with a question. It is a question by a patient and gracious Lord that was intended to give Jonah insight into his heart, leading him to confession and repentance.
My prayer is that every ministry leadership community would model the restorative heart of the Lord. Restoration never minimizes the damaging reality of sin, but while it takes sin seriously, it also believes in the power of restorative grace. It believes in God’s power to turn a heart and rebuild a life. Restoration isn’t motivated by seeing how fast we can get a leader back into the ministry saddle; it’s longing that the lapsed leader would know spiritual health of heart and life. Restoration is not about turning away from a ministry leader, even if he needs to be removed from his position and ministry duties, but turning toward him with grace that takes both sin and restoration seriously. Restoration is but another area in which we are called as leaders to take our ambassadorial calling seriously.
No leader is impervious to temptations, because no leader is sin-free and sanctification-finished. Not one. Leaders are susceptible to spiritual blindness. Leaders don’t always share God’s heart. Leaders don’t always find joy in what God has called them to do. Leaders can have bad attitudes and can hide secret sins. Leaders are not always submissive to the Lord they have been called to serve. Leaders don’t always treat people with the same grace that God has extended to them. Leaders are capable of losing their way. It is lovingly and graciously protective to take sin seriously in the life of a leader and to remember that ministry is spiritual war. So every leadership community needs to be committed to, and prepared for, those sad and difficult moments when the Savior they serve calls them to a restorative agenda. We cannot be so protective of the institution, the church, that we discard leaders and members of the church as if they’re broken and no-longer-needed commodities. I am very aware that there is so much to think about when it comes to the specific plans and process of restoration, so I have committed myself to write a book on that topic.
May every leadership community represent the heart of the Lord that is so beautifully portrayed for us in the book of Jonah. And may we remember, with honesty and humility of heart, that the grace we extend to others is always the grace we also need ourselves. May our hearts be filled with gratitude as we consider that we have all been restored by God’s grace, we are all being restored right now by that same grace, and we all will be finally restored by one who will not quit until his restorative mercies have completely rebuilt us into his own image. And may that gratitude of heart shape our response to fellow leaders when sin rears its ugly head.