Visible success and hidden obscurity in ministry

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Pastoral ministry is a holy calling, but that does not make it invulnerable to perverse motivations and desires. Every pastor knows all about the peculiar temptations and idols of ministry which revolve around success; or merely the appearance of success.

The particular way that success is defined will be different depending on which tribe a pastor belongs to. Some tribes value intellect, others value charisma, and still others have  strange attachments to idiosyncratic behaviours that are part of certain Christian sub-cultures (ways of speaking, dressing, and acting).

Regardless of your particular tribe and its measures of meritocracy, the common streak that runs through the human heart is the sin of vainglory; that longing for the praise of man as the primary motive in ministry.

It is probably true that this season of lockdown has exacerbated this temptation. I can think of a few reasons why this would be the case. First, there is the fact that we are spending more time online and part of that time is spent poking around and looking at what our peers are doing which leads to comparison – that mother of all misery. In the normal run of things these comparisons are impossible because I cannot see what happened in your church this past Sunday, nor you in mine. Taking church online has changed that. Second, there is the fact that we have fewer meetings to distract us with the humdrum of business as usual. That leaves a vacuum in our days in which we can mull on our deeper existential longings, such as the desire to be liked. Third, we are experiencing less encouragement in our work. We cannot see the faces of our people when we preach, or their responses to God in worship. That desire for encouragement is not at all a bad thing; nobody wants to live a fruitless life. But in its absence, the heart searches for ways of finding significance.

Success in any field often follows an arc, like the journey of the stars across the sky. A star will rise until it reaches its apex, but then it will fall behind the horizon where it is out of sight, forgotten. So too in ministry. This means that the temptation towards vainglory has to be resisted at each phase of ministry life, whether your star is rising or it is falling.

That is why the words of John the Baptist resonate so deeply. His star had risen as one uniquely called to prepare the way for the Christ. But just as soon, his ministry began to diminish and fade precisely because he had been successful: He had cleared a path for Jesus, and now all eyes were swivelling to behold that man. And how does he speak of this experience?

A man cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, ‘I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.’ The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete. He must increase, but I must decrease.

Two sentences stand out as life mottos for pastoral ministry.

First, he speaks to his visible success: A man cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven. Every natural talent you possess, every opportunity that has opened, every experience of the power of the Holy Spirit working through you has been a gift from heaven. That is grace; that God would use us undeserving, frail and flawed vessels for his glory.

Second, he speaks to his fading into obscurity: He must increase, but I must decrease. There is only pain in obscurity if your deepest desire is for recognition. But this self-worship will diminish as our love and longing for the glory of Jesus grows. And while the Scriptures are clear that in Christ’s kingdom ‘star differs from star in glory’ – that is, God will raise up some to prominence above others even in our eternal home – it is equally clear that all stars will be rendered as nothing in comparison with the glory of the Son.

What kind of ambition should we therefore nurture? ‘I must decrease.’ Or, in the words of Count von Zinzendorf that have so often been on my mind in recent years: ‘Preach the gospel. Die. Be forgotten.’

Coronavirus, faith, and the fear of death

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Many are questioning religious faith right now. I understand this. The shock of watching the death toll rise each day as the world is battered by this invisible enemy is an example of something very evil in this world. And the question of how God can allow evil to exist is, perhaps, the greatest obstacle to faith in the modern age. 

But, with all respect to those asking such questions, to pose the problem in this way is to miss the entire point of the Christian faith.

Christianity has never been in denial about the reality and the horror of death. In that sense, coronavirus has not (from a Christian perspective) changed anything. Death is coming for all of us. The only variable is the question of when.

That said, the virus has changed one thing: It has shattered the illusion of immortality, the denial of death, and revealed how unprepared we are to die. How so?

Arguably, we are less emotionally prepared for death than any generation that has gone before us. This is for two reasons. First, we have gone to great lengths to suppress awareness of our mortality. We do not speak about death in day to day conversation, we separate ourselves from those who are dying (especially the aged), and very few people have even seen a dead body. Contrast this with previous generations for whom death was a near daily part of life.

Second, we have made great strides in lengthening life, and so most of us live with the expectation that death is far away. The triumph of science, technology, and medicine has ensured that many who would otherwise have died already are enjoying long life today. If we were living in a more primitive age, I am sure my wife would have died seven years ago when my first son was born and she bled out after the birth. I am even more certain that my dad would have died 31 years ago when he suffered acute pancreatitis. Both were saved by the wonders of modern medicine, and all of us have stories like this. The effect has been to cause us all to think much less about the possibility of dying. For most of us, we know we’ll die, but not anytime soon.

Hence, the world has never seen a stronger reaction to the possibility of death than we are witnessing right now. Of course, the hyper-connection of the globalised age is fuelling this reaction. But I suspect that much of this is due to the basic shift in the way we think about death: We finally thought we had gained the upper hand, reigned back most diseases, and lengthened human life. Coronavirus is a stubborn reminder of our failure to conquer death.

Today is Good Friday, the date in the religious calendar when we recall the crucifixion of the Son of God. It is a religious festival that centres on a death. There is something deeply ironic, and profoundly symbolic, about the timing of all this. The coincidence of our nation experiencing new peaks in the daily death toll of the virus at the same time that we remember Jesus’ death is something to make you stop and think. And yet, this is also exquisitely beautiful timing; it is the very reason nobody needs to despair.

Consider this. Why do Christians put so much emphasis upon the death of one man, nearly 2,000 years ago? The answer is rich and complex, but it has much to do with the Sunday that follows the Friday. The crucifixion was not the end; resurrection followed soon after. The New Testament records very briefly that:

…Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas [the Apostle Peter], then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive… [1]

This is written by the Apostle Paul. Because he had seen Jesus risen from the dead, Paul was no longer afraid to die. He was fearless, and later embraced martyrdom at the hands of the Roman empire with courage. The reason for his courage is simply that death no longer loomed as a final and irreversible danger to him; he knew that death was not the end for himself because it was not the end for Jesus. That is Christian belief. Jesus was the forerunner; and, we will follow. There is life after death, and Paul made it his life’s mission to ensure that others understood this fact, and to prepare them to meet their maker. And so, freed from the fear of death, he taunted it:

Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? [2]

It is not a bad thing to be reminded that we are mortal, and it’s certainly not a new crisis. The reaction of horror we’re seeing around us on account of this virus makes sense in a secular age: I would not want to contemplate dying if I thought death was the end, or if I was not ready to face Jesus as judge. But Good Friday is followed by Easter Sunday, and death is not the end, and forgiveness is offered to those who receive it. That is why fear is not inevitable, it is optional.

[1] 1 Corinthians 15.3–6
[2] 1 Corinthians 15.54–55

This article first appeared at Salt.

The root cause of all our anxiety

Why are we all so anxious? That there has been a rapid and dramatic rise in anxiety in this modern world is clearly true. Even though life is getting better by most measures in that we are working less hours, eating better, enjoying better health and longer lives, yet a huge proportion of people are still spiralling down into deeper levels of anxiety than we’ve ever seen. A third of Britons will experience anxiety disorder at some point. [1] The situation seems to be even worse in America, where 4% of Americans had experienced an anxiety related mental health disorder in 1980, and now half the population has suffered in this way. [2]

Yet, nobody really knows why this is the case.

It’s easy enough to point to a set of contributing factors. First, there are the changes in lifestyle that affect our mental health – sleep loss, being sedentary, staying indoors. A second factor, which is tied to the first, is the rapid development of technology. In his book, Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport describes how he met the head of mental health services at a well-known university in the US. Until recently, she had been dealing with the same routine issues (homesickness, eating disorders, depression, OCD), but there was an abrupt shift that coincided with the universal presence of smartphones:

Seemingly overnight the number of students seeking mental health counseling massively expanded, and the standard mix of teenage issues was dominated by something that used to be relatively rare: anxiety. [3]

A third reason we can point to is the change in the fabric of society that has led to deep and widespread loneliness. Community is a powerful antidote to all kinds of mental health issues, anxiety included. But loneliness is rising, and the very things we need in order to solve this are diminishing: we attend fewer social clubs and societies, we’ve stopped going to church, we’re less likely than any generation in history to get married, we leave our families in pursuit of fulfilling our very personal, individualistic dreams, and so on. The picture is of a generation of lonely individuals working hard to find fulfilment but instead experiencing isolation and rootlessness.

Fourth, there is huge fear about the future. Greta Thunberg is only the latest in a long line of prophets of doom, and her words are designed to unsettle the most apathetic of people. The message is clear; this world is going to burn.

All of this would naturally point to the conclusion that the rise in anxiety is due to a kind of perfect storm of all of the above. In other words, if you wanted to make the most anxious generation in history you would first of all deprive them of sleep, exercise, sunshine, and rest. Then you would keep them in that state by causing them to be addicted to their screens. Next, you’d want to separate them from genuine relationships and connection and physical affection. And finally, you’d tell them the world is about to explode and that they’re powerless to stop it. 

I can certainly see how all of these factors cause anxiety. It’s easy to find data to support them as causes, but they also have the ring of truth; we know intuitively that these kinds of things have had a detrimental effect on our personal wellbeing. 

But there is an incompleteness to this list. There is one great factor that is not often spoken about, but which seems to be present under all of our anxious feelings, and that is the fear of death. You can think of it like this: each expression of anxiety is merely a symptom, a way of your brain telling you that there is a deep unsettlement in your soul. Trace back any particular expression of anxiety to its root, and you will see that all of them are different manifestations of the fear of death.

For example, anxiety and stress from your work is related to the longing for success, which is really the desire to be immortal, to be known and to be remembered. Anxiety about health is based on an awareness that our bodies are relentlessly decaying, no matter how many detox shakes we consume or burpees we perform. Anxiety that springs from loneliness and the longing for love come from that sense that we do not want to be separated from others – the very thing we find sad about death. 

When you spend any time reading about the subject of anxiety, scouring through books that purport to offer solutions and treatments to this problem, you come across many very superficial bits of advice. You may be told to look in the mirror and tell yourself how beautiful and successful you really are. Or you may be told to let go, to surrender to fate, to acknowledge that you’re powerless. The problem, as I see it, is that nobody is really squaring up to this great and immovable problem that is the inevitability of death.

The obvious rebuttal is to point out that everyone everywhere has always known they were going to die – this is no new factor, and so it can’t explain the rise in anxiety. To which I would respond: It’s true that death is not new, but what is new is our dire lack of resources – moral, philosophical, theological –  for dealing with death. In other words, we have no idea how to die.

If it is true that all fears are connected to the basic fear of death (and I think it is) then our narratives around death have a disproportionately important weight in determining our day-to-day emotional states. We live in a day and age in which all sense of wonder and transcendence has been leeched out of the cosmos, and life has no meaning beyond that which we create for it. Death is a certain and empty end, a bottomless pit, a pure blackness without light. But the human soul needs a sense of security and safety beyond the mere provision of daily needs; it craves a kind of cosmic and eternal reassurance.

My central claim, therefore, is not only that our inability to deal with the reality of death is a root cause in the anxiety epidemic, but something further. I suspect that our collective departure from any meaningful spirituality, especially Christian belief, is the fundamental problem here. That is not to say that having a meaningful faith will automatically be a cure for anxiety (though it might). But the Christian faith is a profound answer to the problem of death, since it is centred on an event which is all about the defeat of death – the resurrection of the Son of God.

The reason this is such a potent belief has to do with the fact that it replaces anxiety with its opposite, that is, with hope. The resurrection of Jesus is the foundational belief undergirding Christian hope, because it is the guarantee that death need not be the end. If Jesus was raised from the dead, then we need not fear death any more.

Even if this sounds like an esoteric and other-worldly answer to ordinary day-to-day anxieties, that is only because we have not really stopped to consider how threatening our mortality is. It is the great looming dread that validates all of our present fears. But by the same token, a deep and settled confidence about life beyond death has the power to unravel our trivial and mundane worries by giving us a wide-angle perspective on reality; there is something better to look forward to.

As we in the West continue our slide toward secularism, I predict that mental health issues will continue to rise simply because a godless world is essentially a hopeless world. But I also predict that this will be one of the main reasons we will see a revival of belief, and a renewed interest in the message of a resurrected Jesus.