What the System Rewards
No One Is Watching Out for Your Soul
Wednesday’s Compass | The Ruins | June 10
For new readers: The Compass is a newsletter on spiritual formation, and “The Ruins“ is one of its recurring series. Every Wednesday it asks what the church was originally built to be — and what it might look like to build something that true again. Not nostalgia. Recovery.
Last week I wrote about Eugene Peterson’s daughter keeping count of the evenings her father wasn’t home, and Ralph Turnbull’s confession that he began ministry called to an office and ended up running one. I want to stay in that territory a little longer, because I don’t think we’ve looked honestly at why this keeps happening.
It isn’t a personal failure. It’s a systemic one. And the system is very good at disguising itself as faithfulness.
* * *
Here is what the system does. It promotes the pastor who grows the attendance. It celebrates the leader who launches the new initiative. It gives platform to the one who can manage complexity at scale. Denominations reward it. Conferences feature it. Church boards measure it.
What the system does not measure is the pastor’s soul.
No one is asking whether the pastor is still praying in a way that costs something. No one is checking whether the preacher is being formed by the text before he explains it to others. No denomination has a metric for whether a pastor is genuinely present with God or just professionally competent about God. Those things are invisible to the system. And so pastors learn, usually without anyone saying it directly, that the invisible things are optional. In the words of Peter Scazzero, “superficial spirituality becomes okay.”
In the language of the fourth commandment: the system rewards the people who broke it and built something impressive with the extra time.
* * *
The congregation pays a price for this that most of them never identify.
What they receive instead of a pastor is a program. Instead of someone who has been with God and brought something back, they get someone who has been with the calendar and brought more events. The difference is not always visible on Sunday morning. A skilled communicator can maintain the appearance of depth for a long time. But formation doesn’t happen through appearances. It happens through encounter. And you cannot give what you do not have.
Peterson put his finger on it when he described what busyness produces: we become defined by our function. The activity we generate becomes a substitute for rich communion with God. A congregation shaped by functions and events rather than formation will eventually become a collection of religious consumers rather than a community of souls being formed. They will know how to attend. They will not necessarily know how to pray, how to suffer well, how to love people they find difficult, how to sit in silence with God.
That’s not a criticism of the congregation. They can only receive what they’ve been given.
* * *
And then there is what it costs the pastor.
The family knows first. They are keeping the count, as Peterson’s daughter was. They watch the person they love most become gradually less present even when physically in the room. The body is at the dinner table. The mind is on the elder meeting. The heart is somewhere between the two, belonging fully to neither.
The soul knows too, even when the pastor won’t say it out loud. There is a particular exhaustion that comes not from giving too much but from spending yourself on the wrong things. It has a different texture than the tiredness that follows genuine ministry. It feels more like depletion than expenditure. Like something is being taken rather than offered.
I watched it happen to good people. I felt it happening to me.
* * *
I want to say something directly, because this is a clarion call as much as it is an essay.
If you are a pastor reading this in the middle of a week that looks like Peterson’s 32 days, you are not more faithful than the pastor who stopped. You are not more committed. You are more at risk. The busyness is not the sacrifice. It is the symptom of something that needs attention before it becomes the ruin.
The calling was never to run the office. The calling was never to run a program. The calling was never to run a church or a mission. It was to tend souls. Starting with your own.
No one else is going to protect that for you. Not your board. Not your denomination. Not your congregation, who will, with the best of intentions, take everything you offer and ask for more. The protection has to come from inside. From a settled conviction that what God called you to is worth defending, even from the church.
Turnbull knew this late. Peterson learned it hard. You don’t have to wait that long.
Gratefully,
— Gene
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