The pain of pastoral ministry

There is a difference between being thick skinned and just being uncaring.  There is a difference between being tender hearted and just being soft.  My hunch is that we are all prone to one or the other of those two.  Either we tend to be quickly devastated by any criticism or we have developed a tough carapace that means nothing gets to us at all.

Pastoral ministry is tough, it is painful, it is at times heartbreaking and it was designed to be such.  If we think we are doing pastoral ministry without ever experiencing such pain then I think we need to ask if something has gone wrong somewhere.  Both Paul and Peter call believers to be tender hearted towards one another.  Church is a family therefore when someone leaves or when there is disagreement there is going to be pain.

I wonder sometimes if this is magnified by the way the church promises so much but under delivers this side of eternity.  Or at least it does the way we think of it because we have an over realised ecclesiology.  I'm not down on church, I'm just wondering sometimes if we expect too much of it.  Church is a God's means of displaying his glory which he has staked on the gospel to the world and beyond in ways that we cannot imagine or fathom (Ephesians 3:10).  But at the same time Paul writes to two churches calling them to "bearing with one another" (Colossians v13, Ephesians 4v2), and Peter writes to a church calling them to "Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins." (1 Peter 4v8).  Paul has to write to the Corinthian church about significant breaches in gospel living, he has to warn two ladies in Philippi, he writes to Philemon about Onesimus.  In each and every case we see the imperfections of the church.

And yet so often as believers we are surprised at the imperfections we find in the church.  We react as if a brother or sister in Christ who is fighting sin is a failure, and as if the imperfect church is beneath us.  We are all a work in progress, God's Spirit working in us to realise grace, conquer sin, produce holiness and joy.  Yet too often we are impatient with that work in others, and such impatience spills over into judgement of others.  Too often we are quick to look outward rather than inward, quick to cast the first stone rather than examine ourselves.  The glory of the church is in the application of the grace of the gospel again and again and again.