 |  Staying your course amid the forces of ministry.
Winter 1998
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Progress Your Can Measure
Overcoming discouragement so you can move ahead.
Loren Seibold
January 1, 1998
While serving a small church in a small town, I heard about
pastors who ran themselves ragged to keep ahead of their parish's possibilities.
My problem wasn't overwork. Mine was a loss of motivation for work that produced
little progress. I coveted the stress of the too-fast life. Instead, I'd
awake each morning to the question, "What should I do today?"
It wasn't that there was nothing to do, of course; there just wasn't much
immediate reward for doing it. The church was small and certainly needed
to grow, but the town was small, too, and my attempts at church growth always
came up hard against the small town's barriers to change.
I was admonished in seminary to study diligently and preach good sermons.
But in my little church, it soon became apparent that the extra time in my
study didn't impress anyone; a simple Bible study seemed to please everyone
as much as a sermon I'd worked on for days. People needed to be visited,
but I had seen everyone in the parish, plus all of those on the fringes of
the church family, in the course of three weeks.
Ours, like many small-town, small-church pastorates, was a caretaking ministry.
At the end of a day, I'd come home feeling like I'd achieved little—nothing
of lasting value to the church, and certainly nothing recognized in wider
circles as the marks of success.
The combination of my church's inertia and my declining interest in caretaking
left me with a lot of guilt. I thought, I'm being paid with people's
hard-earned money, but what am I accomplishing?
I felt that I'd failed, and with no one to tell me otherwise, guilt became
paralysis. How does a pastor fight the discouragement and see some measurable
progress?
1. Take time to grow
When I was younger and less sure ...
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