There is a plethora of skills that a seminary can teach a man aspiring to the office of pastor. Sound hermeneutics, glorious theology, exegetical precision, and homiletical beauty are just a few. While many seminaries are abundantly capable of honing these skills in God called men, what the professors will not have time to do is to warn these men of the dangers of the pastoral ministry. Certainly, we have been warned about moral pitfalls. We know to guard our hearts, our minds, and our eyes. We are commanded to be one-woman men. We know to guard our integrity, pay our bills, and have accountability in church finances. Most of us go through fairly rigorous background checks before ever being issued a call to serve a church. With all this preparation, we often are not prepared to face the war against the church that many times comes from within. Often, the dead center target of Satan is the pastor of the church.
There is a reason for this lack of warning and it is not the fault of the seminary. I believe the main reason is personal. I am not sure we would hear what seasoned pastors tell us. This may be true because we pastors have high hopes and great expectations for the people in the churches we pastor. We view shepherding the Lord’s sheep as not just a high calling and a great responsibility but a glorious privilege. And most of us would do what the Lord has called us to do for free. After all, most of us do it for far less than we could earn in other pursuits especially with the level of education we have received. We think that people think like us. We want to know Jesus Christ and His Word, and we sincerely believe that is the motivation for people that come to church. At least we expect that to be their motivation. This naivety if left unchecked will lead to great pain. But on the flip side, a pastor cannot and must not grow suspicious of all people. This tightrope must be walked, and we cannot have the convenient mantra that President Ronald Reagan lived by, “Trust but verify.” This is far too fleshly for what our calling and vocation. I was so naive coming out of seminary that I believed that if we provided a place of biblical worship, biblical preaching, and biblical fellowship and discipleship, people would flock to that church. You may chuckle at this but how inexperienced have you been about ministry? What are/were your expectations that have not come to fruition? How many seminary graduates do not survive their first pastorate? How many men leave the ministry because the people do not respond positively to their ministry? This diagnosis plays into the problem of attacks on the church typically from within.
If you are a pastor, then you know some of what I am talking about or you will very soon. All pastors get blindsided. We are like that quarterback that throws an interception and then we are leveled by some defensive player who has been waiting to blow us up. There we are lying in a heap and we are not sure what color the sky is, what day it is, or where we are. “Did anyone get the license plate number of that truck?” Sadly, our families are subject to this blindside hit as well. And when your wife and children are attacked, the pain is so much deeper. But know this faithful pastor, if Satan cannot get to you through your own weakness and ignorance, he will come after your family. And this is what is often so perplexing. Because of our nature that has been transformed by the Gospel, we are very often susceptible to attacks and when that attack is on our families, it is often done in such a way that puts us in a position of not knowing up from down. Our reactions to the attacks are wrong. We are put in a position that no man should be put in. How do you protect the church and protect your family? How do you protect one without destroying the other? The sinister nature of Satan is to attack. How brazen the serpent is! He even attacked God! Know that if he is bold enough to come against God, you are nothing.
I am writing this because I have walked through what I speak of. I do not claim to have it all figured out. I know there are wiles of Satan that I have not seen and am not ready for. But I am writing this to hopefully get some input from fellow pastors who have experienced these attacks as well as provide a profile of the attackers that I have come up against. I am also writing this because we live in a day where the Alexanders and Hymenaeuses (1 Timothy 1:20) of the world have not been called out. Honestly, we feel like we cannot. We could get sued and most of us walk a financial tightrope already. The wolves will call our next church and warn them about how terrible we are, poisoning the well before we can establish ourselves. They will seek to disrupt the ministry. I have the experience of hearing someone (a wolf) say to me that he was going to make sure that I never pastored again. He said it to others in the church as well.
Honestly, 2018 was a rough year for my family. It is the closest I have ever come to walking away from my calling. If it were not for some wonderful friends, a supportive wife, and the inability to get a regular job anywhere, I may have walked away. A couple of things sparked the idea for writing these blog posts because I would rather push these thoughts aside or down and not deal with them. One event was dealing with a man in the church who was seeking to cause division. I knew the meeting was coming and as I sat in my office waiting, my chest hurt, and my breathing was shallow. I had flashbacks of other meetings and I even talked on the phone to a good friend of mine and asked him how these people always found me. The second prompting was from my wife. I walked out of the bedroom about to leave for work and she stopped me. She was listening to a sermon by Dr. Sinclair Ferguson from 2013 called “On this Rock.” She paused it and let me hear three application points concerning what he called three weapons that Satan characteristically uses against the church. They are intimidation, false ambition, and complaining that creates division. What I want to do is to put some flesh on these bones.
- By Pastor Thomas S. Davis
Pastor Davis has been in pastoral ministry since 1998. He has served several churches over the years and has received many battle scars. You could say that he has a little ministerial Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Pastor Davis loves expository preaching, sound doctrine, and loving his family and Christ’s church.
