My interview with Mandy Smith helped me look back on my own life in ministry in a new light.
That does not happen to me every day.
I have reflected for many years on why I resigned from full-time ministry in 1995. At the time, I understood part of it clearly enough. I wanted to separate my faith from my paycheck. I had seen too much institutional confusion, too much spiritual overreach, too much of the strange distortion that happens when a person is placed in a role that invites others to confuse human leadership with divine authority.
But there was something deeper going on too, something I do not think I had fully named at the time.
I did not want people looking to me as though I were God.
That may sound overstated, but any minister who has lived in that space knows exactly what I mean. People rarely say it that way, of course. They do not come up and announce, “Please replace the Almighty for me.” But there is often an unspoken hope: answer this for me, decide this for me, resolve this for me, reassure me, carry me, make the uncertainty go away.
And if we are not careful, it feels delicious.
Mandy used that word, and I appreciated the honesty of it. She said there are moments in ministry when people look at you in a way that makes it clear they are mistaking you for God, and that ministers can fall into that trap because, especially when one does not feel particularly competent, that kind of gaze can be intoxicating. It can feel like confirmation. It can feel like relief. It can feel like finally being enough.
But it is a lie.
And it is one of the more dangerous lies in ministry.
One of the last sermons I gave before resigning questioned the familiar language about “doing the work of God.” I asked, more or less, what exactly we meant by that. Had we made God unemployed? If we are doing his work for him, what exactly is he doing? It was not a popular line of thought. It did not make me many friends among the ministry or among lay members who preferred a stronger, clearer, more final kind of pastoral authority.
But even then I was trying to get at something real: the minister is not there to replace God, but to point beyond himself. Not to become the answer, but to encourage people into relationship with the one who is.
Mandy helped me see that my discomfort with ministry was not only theological. It was also profoundly human.
Her whole framework in The Vulnerable Pastor is that our limitations do not disqualify ministry. They are often the very thing that keeps it honest. The pastor who feels the work is impossible is not necessarily failing. In fact, that sense of impossibility may be one of the few things saving him from spiritual delusion.
That struck me deeply.
Because ministry is impossible.
Not difficult. Not demanding. Not merely stressful. Impossible.
If you take the job seriously, you quickly realize that no amount of preparation, intelligence, discipline, or compassion will ever make you equal to it. There is always more pain than you can heal, more conflict than you can resolve, more need than you can meet, more confusion than you can clarify, more brokenness than you can hold.
And then, on top of all that, many ministers carry a second burden: the shame of not being enough.
That is where Mandy’s insight becomes so important. The problem is not merely that ministry is beyond us. The problem is that we often add a false “should” to that reality. I should be able to handle this. I should be able to fix this. I should know what to do. I should be stronger, clearer, wiser, calmer, more decisive, more fruitful.
But who said so?
Not God.
That extra layer of accusation usually comes from somewhere else: vanity, comparison, institutional culture, inherited expectations, fear, ego, or simply the world’s relentless demand that adults be in control. Mandy’s great gift in this conversation was to name that demand and reject it.
That connected very naturally to another theme she raised, one that may seem at first glance unrelated but is not: childlikeness.
Jesus said that unless we become like little children, we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. That is one of those sayings people quote warmly and then usually leave unexplored. Mandy has clearly explored it. And what she said about it was, to my mind, one of the most illuminating parts of the interview.
She made an important distinction between childlikeness and childishness. Scripture itself makes that distinction. Paul says that when he became a man, he put away childish things. So Jesus is obviously not calling us to immaturity, irresponsibility, or foolishness. He is calling us back to something else: openness, honesty, dependence, wonder, availability, freedom from the shame of not being in control.
That last point is crucial.
A child, at least in the healthy sense Mandy was describing, is not surprised by powerlessness. A child does not imagine that he runs the universe. The modern adult, by contrast, is often defined by “adultishness” — her useful phrase — the assumption that I ought to be able to manage, fix, control, and understand everything that matters. And when I cannot, I feel ashamed.
That is not maturity. It is rebellion dressed up as competence.
And it explains a great deal not only about ministry, but about our whole culture.
The vulnerable pastor is not a failed pastor. He may simply be the one who has finally begun to accept that he is a creature.
That is not a small realization.
It reaches beyond ministry into authority itself. One of the strongest parts of the conversation for me was Mandy’s refusal to react to abusive leadership by abandoning leadership altogether. We are living through a time when many people, understandably disgusted by clerical abuse, manipulation, and spiritual grandiosity, want to abolish authority in the church as such. Mandy rightly called that an overcorrection.
Authority is real.
But authority is not domination.
A pastor does have a unique role. Not because he is a priest in the sense of standing between the people and God, but because he has been given a particular task, a particular burden, a particular stewardship. He has spent time in prayer, in study, in conversation, in hidden service, in sleeplessness, in sacrifice. He sees things others do not see, not because he is superior, but because he is positioned differently.
That can be used abusively. Of course it can.
But it can also be used rightly, and when it is, it reflects something true about Christ. Mandy quoted the idea that the pastor is a parable of Jesus, and I think that is exactly right, so long as we emphasize the right part of the analogy. The pastor is not Jesus. He is a parable of Jesus. A signpost. A witness. A servant. A reminder. A fellow dependent creature.
In that sense, good ministry does not hide need. It reveals need in a disciplined and appropriate way. Not by making the congregation into one’s therapist, but by letting them see, from time to time, that their pastor too must trust God, wait on God, cry out to God, and walk by faith rather than sight.
That, oddly enough, strengthens people.
It also keeps the minister from becoming a little god.
This is part of why Mandy’s comments on men and women also mattered to me, though they arose in a different section of the conversation. I do not think the deepest issue there is modern culture war language, helpful though some of that may occasionally be. The deeper issue is whether we understand difference as rivalry or as gift.
Her image of intersecting lines forming a dove was beautiful for exactly that reason. In the meeting of two distinct realities, something else appeared: peace. That is what the union of man and woman is supposed to reveal, whether in marriage, in church life, or in the broader human calling to partnership. Not sameness. Not domination. Not scarcity. Not competition for who gets to be God. Peace.
That vision belongs not only to marriage but to ministry itself. The minister and the congregation are not in competition for authority. Nor should they be locked in dependency. They are to meet in a shared orientation toward God. “Let’s look for God together,” as Mandy put it in effect. That is healthy ministry.
And that, too, helped me reinterpret part of my own journey.
I resigned from ministry in part because I did not yet know how to inhabit that role without feeling either falsely elevated or falsely crushed. I saw too clearly what was wrong, but perhaps not yet clearly enough what a healthier form could look like. Mandy’s reflections gave me language for something I felt long before I could articulate it: that the answer to impossible ministry is not omnipotence, but partnership.
Not doing God’s work for him.
Doing with him what he has given you to do.
Her closing image made that point better than any abstract argument could. She spoke about Mary being asked to carry something that would stretch her, cost her, and change the world, and yet at the very same time Mary herself was being carried by God. That is the paradox of calling. We are asked to bear something real, but we bear it in One who is bearing us.
That is not only true of pastors.
It is true of parents, writers, teachers, spouses, artists, leaders, and anyone trying to answer a call that exceeds his own strength.
The thing entrusted to you grows in you. But you are also growing in God.
That is a better story than the one the world tells.
The world says: here is your burden; prove yourself.
God says: here is something to steward; stay near me.
The world says: if it feels impossible, you must not be enough.
God says: of course it is impossible without me.
The world says: take control.
God says: become childlike.
The world says: perform authority.
God says: surrender, serve, and speak from love.
So yes, my interview with Mandy Smith helped me revisit my own life in a new light.
Not to rewrite history. Not to pretend I would make all the same decisions again. But to see more clearly that some of what I experienced as failure or disqualification may also have been God’s mercy. To discover that limitation is not the opposite of calling. It may be one of its clearest signs.
The vulnerable pastor is not a failed pastor.
He may simply be the one who has finally stopped trying to be God.
Sneak Peek
I’m pretty much caught up now, so if the planned date of publishing this holds, the first sneak peek refers to yesterday’s show, already out on Youtube, and then tomorrow night’s Tuesday show.
So this past Sunday was my conversation with Graham Tomlin, theologian, author, and editor in chief of Seen & Unseen, reflecting on the church’s role in today’s culture and on how Christians can engage the world with wisdom, imagination, compassion, and hope. That should take us further into questions of public witness, theology, and what clarity looks like in a fractured age.
And Tuesday is my conversation with Derek Vreeland, pastor, author, and discipleship leader, exploring what it means to keep Jesus at the center and how his way transforms communities, relationships, and daily life. That reflection will turn toward spiritual formation, peacemaking, kindness, faithfulness, and the practical shape of discipleship.
And as always, thank you for reading and remember: you are created in the image of God, and God loves his creation.
