the    sides

Len Evans‘ new article “Pushing Through” is up at YouthMinistry.com. It’s about sticking it out in ministry. Take a gander at it.

Len is one of my closest friends whom I’ve never seen face to face. I’m dead serious. We’ve been emailing and posting and calling for I don’t know how long but we’ve never been able to hook up. But every time we talk, it gets to the “real place” in about 10 seconds. How’s your soul? What’s been the most encouraging thing in your life over the last couple of weeks? The most discouraging? The only major character flaw about Len that isn’t going to get fixed is his love of the Red Sox. It about pushed our relationship to the brink this past fall.

But baseball is not the point of this post nor is it the point of the article. Len and I have talked about how so few youth pastors make it more than 10 years in the ministry let alone in student ministry. The turnover is hard to ignore even though some would argue that it’s no different than any other profession.

Should some of those people never got in the ministry in the first place? I have no idea. To some extent it misses a larger point. The bottom line is this - if our calling was from God and on His terms and His timetable then only He can tell us when we are done. Often times that way past our limit of frustrations of hurt and I’ll be the first to admit that many of us quit before finding out how far God could take us. God seems to always push us further than we thought we could ever go and does more with our junk that we ever thought possible.

I’m not minimizing the hurt and damage the church/ministry can dole out on people. I’ve got my own scars, thank you very much. What I am saying is that Len’s encouragement of ‘pushing through’ is much needed.