Faithful Endurance (eBook)

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Is It Time for Me to Go?

D. A. Carson

Dear Pastor Don,

I am writing to let you know that I may have reached the end of my rope at this church and stand in desperate need of your advice. I’ve been pastoring here for the past forty years and am nearly convinced that perhaps this church’s future is not my future. I’m wondering if I should leave or retire. I think the evidence is fairly strong. I’ve been praying for wisdom, but so far, God has provided me with no clear path forward.

I don’t have much gas in the tank of energy when it comes to leadership or preaching. I’m tired, frustrated, and discouraged. Please understand, there are no moral problems. My devotional life remains robust, and there is no hidden sin that would disqualify me. I still love to read good works of theology and church history—mixed in, of course, with a little Marilynne Robinson and Wendell Berry now and then. I simply think it may be time for me to move on for my own good and the betterment of the church. Maybe I’ve done all I can for my flock. Have I already stayed too long? I’ve seen other pastors do it even though the handwriting was on the wall. I don’t want to do that. It weakens the church and dishonors God when we stay simply because we don’t know what else to do.

Please advise. Am I out of bounds biblically, theologically, or ethically? When do you think it wise for a man to consider moving on to another theater of gospel service? I eagerly await your counsel.

Faithfully,

Hanging On Too Long

Dear Hanging On Too Long,1

Certain kinds of questions come my way by email fairly regularly—every few weeks, every couple of months. This is not an unusual question, and circumstances that make a man ponder leaving his current place of service are not rare, so I’m not at all taken aback by your question.

When a young pastor asks this question, it is usually prompted by a difficult situation he longs to flee. But it’s quite different when a man is in his late fifties, sixties, or seventies. I think you would agree that the first question to ask is this: Are there any biblical and theological principles that should shape our reflection on these matters?

Valid Question

In one sense, you have phrased the question in the right way. You have not reached some long-awaited ideal retirement age and are now looking for an excuse to withdraw from ministry in favor of buying an RV to spend the next couple of decades alternating between fishing lakes and visits to grandchildren. After all, there is no well-articulated theology of retirement in Scripture. Rather, this is a serious question from someone who has borne the heat of the day and who, for various reasons, wonders if it is not only permitted but right to ask if it is time to move on.

In recent years, I’ve been passing on what I’ve picked up from a few senior saints who have thought these things through. The most important lesson is this: provided one does not succumb to cancer, Alzheimer’s, or any other seriously debilitating disease, the first thing we have to confront as we get older is declining energy levels.

Moreover, by “declining energy levels,” I am referring not only to the kind of declining physical reserves that demand more rest and fewer hours of labor each week but also to declining emotional energy, without which it is difficult to cope with a full panoply of pastoral pressures. When those energy levels begin to fall is hugely variable (at age forty-five? Sixty-five? Seventy-five?), as is also how fast they fall. But fall they will! It follows that if one attempts at age eighty-five to do what one managed to accomplish at age forty-five, a lot of it will be done badly. Frustrations commonly follow: old-man crankiness, rising resentments against the younger generation, a tendency to look backward and become defensive, even an unwitting destruction of what one has spent a lifetime building up.

Major Considerations

I mention three major considerations. I hope these provide some guidance.

First, as long as God provides stable energy levels, one should resist the glitter of common secular assumptions about retirement—for example, that there is (or should be) a universal retirement age, that somehow your work entitles you to a retirement free from all service, that the end of life should be dominated by pleasurable pastimes emptied of self-sacrifice and service. This is not to argue that there is no place for, say, time devoted to creative tasks of one sort or another; it is to argue that it is sub-Christian to imagine that our service across the decades entitles us to a carefree retirement.

Second, once energy levels start to decline (whenever that might be), then, assuming neither senility nor some other chronic disease is taking its toll, the part of wisdom is to stop doing some things so that, with one’s limited energy, one can tackle the remaining things with enthusiasm and gusto. I can think of two or three senior saints who have become wholly admirable models in this regard. In their late sixties, they slowly started to put aside one task after another, with the result that, now in their early nineties, they can still do the one or two remaining things exceptionally well. One of them, for instance, will still preach but never more than once a day. And he won’t fly anywhere: he travels to the place where he is to preach either by car (with someone driving him) or by train. But when he does preach, you can close your eyes and listen to a man who sounds thirty or forty years younger.

There is a third element in such decisions that is partly subjective, partly temperamental, partly a reflection of one’s sense of call—and of the ways these various factors interact with one another. John Calvin died on May 27, 1564, at the age of fifty-four. All his life he held himself to the most rigorous, punishing schedule. On the one hand, that stunning self-discipline, a reflection of his passion for the glory of God and for the promotion of the gospel, was used by God to make the man astonishingly productive. On the other hand, all the biographies I have read of him speculate that if in his latter years he had slowed down a little, he might have lived a good deal longer—and had he lived another decade or two, still with stable health, he may well have produced a great deal more. But who are we to tell John Calvin what he should have done?

Human motives are usually mixed. On the one hand, there is something hauntingly exemplary about a person who wants to burn out for Christ, to waste no time, to serve others, as Rudyard Kipling put it, to “fill the unforgiving minute / With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run”; on the other hand, there may be a wee touch of workaholism in such a stance, in which our self-identity is tied to the number of hours we put in or the number of things we produce.

It might be a careful and thoughtful stewarding of our declining energies that makes a wise calculation about dropping certain responsibilities so as to maintain more important priorities, but who is to deny that there may also be a touch of entitlement, or a cooling of youthful ardor, a dangerous love of mere ease? Each of us will have to give an answer to our beloved Master, who knows us better than we do. It is probably not too much to suggest that if we are temperamentally drawn to one or the other of these extremes, we should be especially diligent to explore our motives most carefully.

Seven Important Conditions

Finally, all things being equal (and of course, they never are), one should not leave one’s ministry until one or more of the following conditions is met:

1. One has to leave for moral reasons. Sadly, such failures are not restricted to young pastors. The older one gets, the more one should pray for grace to finish well.

2. Serious health issues mean that one can no longer discharge one’s pastoral duties fruitfully, leaving no realistic hope of returning to full strength.

3. One is clearly called by God to some other ministry. In this case, all the usual complex factors have to be borne in mind.

4. One judges that it would be a good thing for this ministry if the baton were passed to a younger leader in an orderly way. There is no absolute rule, but the rule of thumb is that the longer a person has stayed in one ministry, and the more fruitful that person has been, the wiser it is for that pastor to help arrange the transition to a successor before bowing out. It is not hard to think of exceptions, of course: for example, an old man merely trying to deploy a bit of nepotism or control the future while neither consulting anyone nor using the transition to train church leaders. Generally, however, the rule of thumb proves valuable.

5. One senses one’s energy levels are declining, and it seems wise to let go of some responsibilities so that one can the more faithfully discharge remaining responsibilities. In some cases that can most easily and fruitfully be worked out by taking on a reduced load in the church, while someone else steps up to the primary leadership; in other cases, the only way to opt for reduced responsibilities is by resigning from that charge and taking on a smaller and different...