📖 Pastoral Ministries — Unit 2: The Pastor's Calling and Character

Orientation

There are two pillars on which every faithful pastoral ministry stands. One is the call — the divine summons that places a man into the office. The other is character — the inward life that sustains him there. Take away either pillar and the building falls. A man with strong calling but weak character will scandalize the gospel before he is forty. A man with strong character but no genuine call will wear himself out doing what God never asked him to do. The world wants charisma. God demands character. The world wants platforms. God demands purity. The pulpit is no place for the unsent — and no place for the unprepared in soul.

This unit examines both pillars: the internal and external dimensions of the pastoral call, the biblical qualifications of character laid down in the Pastoral Epistles, the spiritual disciplines that sustain a long ministry, the protection of the pastor's family, and the dark-side temptations that have wrecked ministers since the days of Eli's sons. None of this is theoretical. Every paragraph below has a graveyard somewhere in the world to confirm it.

I. The Internal Call

The call to pastoral ministry begins inside a man, where no committee can see it. It is the Spirit of God awakening in the human heart a holy combination of desire, burden, and gifting that will not let go. Paul writes, "This is a faithful saying: If a man desires the position of a bishop, he desires a good work" (1 Timothy 3:1). The word desires there is strong — it means to stretch oneself toward, to reach for, to long for. The internal call is not a casual interest in religious work. It is a holy ache.

The Bible's great calling stories almost always come at moments of crisis or vacancy. Isaiah was called "in the year that King Uzziah died" (Isaiah 6:1). The throne was vacant. The nation was anxious. And in that very moment Isaiah saw the throne that was never vacant. He saw the Lord high and lifted up, His train filling the temple, the seraphim crying "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory!" (Isaiah 6:3). Isaiah's first response was not enthusiasm. It was undoing: "Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts" (Isaiah 6:5). Only after the burning coal touched his lips and his iniquity was taken away did the call come: "Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?" And Isaiah answered with the most famous five words in pastoral history: "Here am I! Send me" (Isaiah 6:8).

Notice the order. Vision of God, then conviction of sin, then cleansing by grace, then calling to ministry. Reverse that order and you get a man who runs ahead of God on the strength of his own talent and burns out by forty.

Almost every man God calls in Scripture initially resists the call. Moses said, "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?" (Exodus 3:11). When God answered that, Moses said he was slow of speech. When God answered that, Moses simply said, "O my Lord, please send by the hand of whomever else You may send" (Exodus 4:13). Jeremiah protested, "I cannot speak, for I am a youth" (Jeremiah 1:6). Amos insisted he was "no prophet, nor a son of a prophet, but… a sheepbreeder and a tender of sycamore fruit" (Amos 7:14). The men who were eager to volunteer in Scripture are often the ones who failed. The men who hesitated, who felt unworthy, who argued with the call — those are the ones whose ministries lasted forty and fifty years.

The pattern is consistent through Scripture. Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to hide it from the Midianites when the angel of the LORD greeted him with "The LORD is with you, you mighty man of valor!" (Judges 6:12). Gideon's response was almost comical: "O my Lord, if the LORD is with us, why then has all this happened to us?" He went on to ask for not one but two fleeces before he believed. David was the runt of his family, left in the fields with the sheep when Samuel came looking for the next king of Israel — Jesse did not even bother to call him in for the lineup. Peter, the man Jesus would build His church on, was the same man who said, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!" (Luke 5:8) the first time he saw Jesus' power up close. The internal call almost never lands on a man who is ready for it. It usually lands on a man who feels least qualified — and that very sense of unworthiness is part of how God prepares him to lean on grace rather than on himself for the rest of his ministry.

II. The External Call

But the internal call alone is not enough. Many evangelical traditions have found it wise and biblically grounded to distinguish a second half of pastoral calling: the Spirit who calls a man inwardly also confirms the call outwardly through the church. This is the half most often neglected today. Acts 13 gives us a model. Five faithful men were ministering in Antioch — Barnabas, Simeon, Lucius, Manaen, and Saul. As they fasted and prayed, "the Holy Spirit said, 'Now separate to Me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.' Then, having fasted and prayed, and laid hands on them, they sent them away" (Acts 13:2–3). Notice the cooperation. The Spirit calls; the church confirms. Barnabas and Saul did not appoint themselves. Their brothers in Christ, after fasting and prayer, recognized what the Spirit had already begun.

Paul reminds Timothy, "Do not neglect the gift that is in you, which was given to you by prophecy with the laying on of the hands of the eldership" (1 Timothy 4:14). The laying on of hands matters. It is the church saying yes to what the Spirit has already said. A man who feels called but cannot get any congregation, any group of mature believers, any presbytery to confirm that call should pause long and hard before he insists he is right and they are wrong. God does not normally give the call to a man and hide it from his church. The two work together. When they do not, something is usually wrong with the man.

Calling is the convergence of three things: the inner witness of the Spirit, the outer affirmation of the church, and the visible fruitfulness of the ministry over time. When all three are present, you can be confident. When one is missing, slow down. When two are missing, stop.

III. Character: The Qualifications of an Elder

Calling is the door into the office. Character is the floor that holds you up after you walk through. Paul gave Timothy and Titus the most thorough character checklist in the New Testament — fifteen qualifications in 1 Timothy 3:1–7 and another seven in Titus 1:5–9. Read them slowly. Almost every one of them is about character, not about skill.

The umbrella over the entire list is the phrase "above reproach" (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:6). It does not mean perfect. It means there is no glaring, ongoing pattern of sin that an outsider could legitimately point to and say, "How can he stand in the pulpit and preach when his life is like that?" The pastor must be "the husband of one wife, temperate, sober-minded, of good behavior, hospitable, able to teach; not given to wine, not violent, not greedy for money, but gentle, not quarrelsome, not covetous" (1 Timothy 3:2–3).

Notice what is not on the list. There is nothing about being charismatic. Nothing about being entertaining. Nothing about having a degree. Nothing about being a great speaker. Nothing about church-growth strategies. The biblical qualifications are almost entirely the qualifications of a grown-up Christian — a man whose ordinary life has been brought under the lordship of Christ in marriage, money, speech, temper, and reputation.

The ermine is a small white animal that lives in the northern regions, prized by hunters for its beautiful coat. The ermine has a peculiar habit. It will keep its coat clean at all costs. It will not enter a hole or den that is dirty or muddy, even if doing so would mean escaping a predator. The hunters know this. They find the ermine's home and smear it with dirt. Then they set their dogs loose. When the ermine, fleeing for its life, runs back to its home, it finds the entrance defiled — and it refuses to enter. It would rather face death than soil its coat. That is a parable of pastoral character. The man called to this office must value the cleanness of his life more than his own comfort, more than his own safety, more than his own preferences. There is a place where a pastor will not go, a thing he will not say, a profit he will not take, a flattery he will not accept — even if refusing costs him dearly. The ermine teaches us that the white coat is worth more than the easy escape.

Character is also the guardian of doctrine. In the early sixteenth century a Dominican friar named Johann Tetzel was traveling through Germany selling indulgences — paper certificates that supposedly forgave sins and shortened time in purgatory. Pope Leo X needed money to rebuild St. Peter's Basilica, and Tetzel was an effective salesman. People were profiting from God's free gift of forgiveness. A young Augustinian monk named Martin Luther saw what was happening and, on October 31, 1517, nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. The Reformation was born. What gave Luther the courage to challenge Tetzel, the Pope, and the entire ecclesiastical establishment of Europe? It was a character formed by long years in the Word of God, refusing to call wrong right because it was popular or profitable. Pastoral character is what makes a man able, when the moment comes, to say, "This is wrong, and I will not bless it."

The prophet Amos was given a vision that has become a permanent picture of pastoral accountability. He saw the Lord standing on a wall "made with a plumb line, with a plumb line in His hand" (Amos 7:7). A plumb line is a weight on a string used by builders to determine an exact vertical. It does not bend to the carpenter's whim. It does not adjust to fashion. It hangs true, and all the work must line up with it. God said to Amos, "Behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of My people Israel; I will not pass by them anymore" (Amos 7:8). The pastor lives under the plumb line. He measures himself, his marriage, his money, his speech, his preaching, his motives — all against the unchanging line of God's Word. The man who refuses to measure himself by the plumb line will eventually build a crooked life. The man who lives under it will build a life that lasts.

IV. Spiritual Disciplines: The Hidden Life

The character that 1 Timothy and Titus describe is not produced by accident. It is sustained by hidden disciplines that the congregation never sees. A pastor who does not have a private life with God will eventually have nothing to say in public from God. The pulpit will go dry; the family will grow distant; the sin patterns will tighten their grip; and one day the pastor will look around and wonder how he got so empty.

Countless icebergs float in the frigid waters around Greenland. Some are tiny; others tower skyward. At times the small ones move in one direction while their gigantic counterparts go in another. The small ones are subject to surface winds, but the huge ice masses are carried along by deep ocean currents. The pastor's life is subject to two similar forces. The winds represent everything changeable, unpredictable, distressing — the criticism in the Sunday meeting, the unexpected funeral on Tuesday, the deacon who quit, the donor who left. But underneath those gusts is another force, more powerful than anything on the surface — the deep current of God's purposes and the unchanging flow of His love. When a pastor is carried by the deep currents, the surface winds do not throw him off course. When a pastor is moved only by the surface winds, every storm sends him sideways. Spiritual disciplines are how a man drops his anchor into the deep current.

Six disciplines hold a pastor together over the long haul. First, the daily Word — not for sermon preparation, but for personal feeding. The pastor must read the Bible as a man, not as a preacher. If the only time he opens the Bible is to mine it for next Sunday's sermon, his soul will starve in the middle of plenty. Second, consistent prayer — not the public prayers from the platform, but the private wrestling. Luther is reported to have said that he had so much to do that he must spend the first three hours in prayer. Most modern pastors have inverted this — they spend the first three hours in email. Third, Sabbath rest. The pastor who does not rest will eventually be rested by force, either through illness, breakdown, or moral failure. The body God gave you was not designed to run six and a half days a week for thirty years. Fourth, accountability. Every pastor needs at least one or two trusted men who can ask the hard questions and get the truthful answers. Lone-wolf pastors are wolf food. Fifth, self-examination. Paul writes, "Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves" (2 Corinthians 13:5). The pastor must regularly turn the searchlight inward. Sixth, confession and repentance. There is no sin so hidden that it does not eventually break the surface. The pastor who confesses early, repents quickly, and lives transparently before God will not be undone by what is dragged into the light. The pastor who hides will be.

V. The Pastor's Family

The qualifications give family leadership a place of unique weight. "One who rules his own house well, having his children in submission with all reverence (for if a man does not know how to rule his own house, how will he take care of the church of God?)" (1 Timothy 3:4–5). The home is the testing ground. Whatever a man cannot do at his own kitchen table, he cannot do in the pulpit either. Whatever spiritual leadership is missing from the dinner conversation will eventually be missing from the morning service.

This is not an argument for pastoral perfection. Children grow up and make their own choices, and even faithful pastors sometimes have prodigals. The point is not perfection of outcome but faithfulness of function. Is the pastor present in his home? Is he leading his wife in love? Is he discipling his children in the truth? Is the church getting his leftovers while his family gets his absence? Many ministries have died because the pastor traded his family for the work — and discovered too late that he had lost both.

Wisdom calls for protected rhythms. Date nights with your spouse that no one moves. Family meals that are not interrupted by phone calls. Vacations that actually happen. A weekly day off that is not eroded by "just one quick thing." Ministry never lacks for emergencies. Most of them are not actual emergencies. The pastor who learns to discern between the urgent and the truly important will keep both his ministry and his family.

VI. The Dark Side

Every pastor has a dark side — temptations that are particular to him, weak places where the enemy has been working since before he entered ministry. The five great wrecks of pastoral ministry are nearly always the same: pride, lust, money, isolation, and discouragement. Pride whispers that the man is now too successful to need accountability. Lust finds its ground in the long hours, the emotional intimacy of pastoral counseling, and the easy access of digital temptation. Money corrupts whenever a pastor allows the size of his salary or the praise of donors to shape his preaching. Isolation is the soil in which all of the above grow — the pastor with no peers, no friends, no one who can speak truth to him, is one bad decision away from disaster. And discouragement is the slow erosion that comes from Sundays that feel small, members who walk out the back door, and dreams that never seem to materialize.

The answer to the dark side is not denial. The answer is honest, regular, ruthless self-examination before the Lord, with at least one or two trusted brothers who know the dark places and pray with you about them by name. Better to confront the dark side at age thirty in private than to be confronted by it at age fifty in public.

Closing

Calling and character. Two pillars. Both required. The pastor who has both will outlast the storms. The pastor who is missing one will eventually fall. Most pastoral disasters in our day are not failures of strategy — they are failures of one of these two foundations. A man stepped into the office without a real call, and burned out. A man stepped into the office without real character, and crashed.

During the dark days of the Second World War, the radio newsman Walter Winchell ended one of his broadcasts with a single sentence — words spoken on a Friday evening when the British port of Singapore had just fallen to the Japanese: "Singapore has fallen, but the Rock of Ages stands." When everything around the pastor is shaking — the culture, the denomination, the congregation, his own weakness — the Rock of Ages still stands. The Chief Shepherd is still on His throne. The crown of glory still waits. And the same Lord who called Isaiah and Moses and Jeremiah and Amos and Gideon and David and Peter is still calling men today.

Read 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 every six months for the rest of your ministry. Read Isaiah 6 every year. Watch for the warning signs. Build the disciplines. Guard the family. Confess the dark side. And keep coming back to the One who called you in the first place — the Chief Shepherd Himself — who is not finished with you yet, and whose grace is sufficient for every weakness His call has uncovered. "Faithful is He who calls you, who also will do it" (1 Thessalonians 5:24).

— Dr. Wayne Cook
Chapala Theological Seminary

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