In the third of three articles, Peter Adam provides wise observations about those serving in Gospel ministry.
This section about resilience is outstanding.
Pastors need to keep revisiting these issues of character in order to be faithful servants.
From the article:
Do you have the resilience required for ministry? It is not a good idea to do trained gospel ministry if:
- You are not able to cope with criticism, rejection, or lack of affirmation, or cannot deal with conflict.
- You need to be needed. For this will mean that you do ministry to meet you own needs, not in order to help others or honour God.
- You are not able to work wisely: if you are a perfectionist, if you take on too many tasks, if you cannot so say ‘no’ to requests for help, if you cannot organise yourself, if you are lazy, if you can be very busy but are not able to prioritise your life and get important things done, if you put off difficult tasks, etc.
- You do not have the “people-smarts”, that is, the understanding of how to relate to people, how they function, how they change, how they respond, how to encourage, challenge, and grow them.
- You are not able to cope with hard work, and with the personal pressures of ministry along with your other responsibilities.
- You do not have the flexibility or the imagination to be “all things to all people, that you might save some” (1 Corinthians 9:23). You must be able to serve people who are not like you, people with a different background, different character, different life experience, different race or culture.
- You do not have a good track record of Christian ministry in your present life.
- You have not learned to be financially responsible, including handling your own money, and being able to handle money given for ministry, including responsibility and accountability, working within budgets, and being good stewards of what people donate.
- If you are married, and your spouse does not support you in this idea, or your marriage would not flourish if you went ahead.
- When you talk to friends and people you know about the possibility, they do not encourage you to follow it up.
- Your sense of call from God is not supported by fellow-believers and Christian leaders who know you well.
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