The Imperfect Pastor Quotes

“It is possible for ministry leaders to desire greatness in ways no different from anyone, anywhere in our culture. Attaching Jesus’s name to these desires doesn’t change the fact that they look just like the cravings of the world.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“A pastor impatiently demands his children to know, believe, and do what it took him twenty-five or forty-five years with Jesus to know, believe, and do. How is it that his own life of mistake making has hardened rather than softened his compassion, when he himself has needed so much grace?”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“Quiet is a means of God’s grace. Within it, God shows us our inner poverty and misguided ambitions. He has waited patiently with a quiet heart while we’ve brewed our lives into storm and froth constantly interrupting him. Now”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“By all our ministry activity to mistakenly be like God, we’ve actually made it hard for people to see or hear him. Calvin”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“We have to resist the naïve or manipulative assumption that just because we preached or said something to someone once, they should hereafter immediately, always, and forever get it right. That’s impatient preaching. Impatient preaching enables the listener to avoid wrestling with a question; it expects the listener to always ask, feel, or think the right way immediately; it presumes that growing in Jesus does not require days, weeks, months, and years.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“Second, God sometimes calls us to a congregation when we don’t yet have what it needs. Sometimes we can’t help a people until after we’ve been with them for a while, and being with them is the means God uses to teach us what he wants us to offer them. For”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“Nothing is sweeter in this sad world than the sound of someone you love calling your name. KATE DICAMILLO”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“Patience says to your empty hands, “God is here.” Patience looks the worst in the face and says, “God will not leave you.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“when one raging man in Christ becomes gentle, there is more power here than in thirty raging men who came to our ministry event and went home unchanged. But”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“No one was more plain, true, reasonable, and clear than Jesus, and they crucified him. Clarity matters a great deal. But clarity can’t always solve or fix the broken things.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“Mark this down, okay? You and I were never meant to repent for not being everywhere for everybody and all at once. You and I are meant to repent because we’ve tried to be.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“At a conference, I preach Christ for you with a hemorrhoid while my books are on sale out in the hallway. What is more, I may have seen myself in my children’s eyes that morning and had to ask their forgiveness for something the day before, or maybe I’m still blind as I speak to you regarding what my wife or my children or my congregation still desperately need me to see. When I visit you in the hospital, I had to tie my shoes that morning or figure out which sweater makes me look a bit slimmer or cry out to God with my own doubts as you hurt and I have no answer why. When you’ve been changed by grace through something I said or wrote, I likely had a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast or enjoyed the sound of the owl that visits our place. Therefore, as we begin to think about desires, we need to cry from the rooftops that pastoral ministry is creaturely. A pastor is a human being. I believe that Christian life and ministry are an apprenticeship with Jesus toward recovering our humanity and, through his Spirit, helping our neighbors do the same. All of this is for, through, by, with, and in him for the glory of God.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“When George Mallory was once asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, he famously answered, “Because it is there.” But in a personal letter to George’s wife, Ruth, he revealed even more about what drove him to climb the mountain. “Dearest,” he wrote, “. . . you must know that the spur to do my best is you and you again. . . . I want more than anything to prove worthy of you.” George left a meaningful legacy that proved worthy of history’s remembrance. But George’s son John wrote something that has challenged me. Proud of his father but sad too, John wrote, “I would so much rather have known my father than to have grown up in the shadow of a legend, a hero, as some people perceive him to be.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“I believe that Christian life and ministry are an apprenticeship with Jesus toward recovering our humanity and, through his Spirit, helping our neighbors do the same.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“What I failed to realize as I take up this wonderful promise is that almost everyone who originally heard it knew that they would never experience its fulfillment in Jerusalem, where they wanted to be. They had to grapple instead with the truth that the future and the hope for them with God would take place right where they were in exile—where they would live and die. Their great-grandchildren would experience the fullness of the future and the hope back in Jerusalem. The next generation would get to move, but not them. What does it mean for us if the future and the hope that God has for our welfare means that we will have to trust him right where we are?”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“many of us have no patience for pastoral care. Broken bones and minds are not hurry prone.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“almost anything in life that truly matters will require you to do small, mostly overlooked things, over a long period of time with him.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“one can receive accolades for preaching Jesus, yet at the same time know very little about how to follow Jesus in the living rooms of their ordinary lives.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“In our land, a pastor’s experience and wisdom have little monetary value unless we know his name.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“we are tempted to say, ‘I will take the larger place because it will give me more influence for Jesus Christ.’” But Jesus teaches us that we should determine to take the lower place unless the Lord himself “extrudes us” into the larger one.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“But I’m able again to offer rest and hospitable presence for others because I actually possess something of this myself. The grace of this amazes me. When I first introduced the idea of “resting months” to our congregation, they didn’t like it. Three months a year we’d give all our weekly ministries a break without guilt (April, August, and December). I did this because of the age of our congregation, made up of mostly young families with kids. These same families were doing all the volunteering at the church and in the community. Between serving and volunteering, going to Bible studies and house groups, people were wearing out. On the flip side, if anyone did take a break they felt enormous guilt, like they were letting God and us down. Of course, we don’t mandate that our members observe resting months; people can keep meeting if they desire to. But over the years, most have grown thankful for the built-in rhythm they provide. We strategically rest in order to vigorously keep going. If we don’t, we wind up taking unplanned breaks because we are sick or burned out from overworked schedules.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“The poet’s point is obvious. Trying to access the power of a vocation by mere memory and incantation will shortly make a mess of things.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“Early Arctic explorers made this same crucial error. They excitedly envisioned the place and came to it fortified by their own cultural assumptions. The result? They died. They were found frozen in the ice with their volumes of books and fine dishes, wearing coats unwisely tailored to handle the winters they’d always known. Others fared better. These explorers acted as if the Arctic had a storyline of conditions, people, and places that preceded them. They slowed down, studied the terrain, listened, and learned from the people who lived there. These explorers lived.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“you were never meant to repent because you don’t know it all. You are meant to repent because you’ve tried.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“Church discipline (as with any kind of discipline, such as that of parents with kids) has to do with sins. This means we have no cause to discipline because someone differs in opinion with us, has a different style of teaching, expresses a different temperament than we do, or doesn’t do what we want him to do or do it when we think he should.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“Regret still tells the story in the first-person present, as if we are still in the moment. It happened years ago, but we who listen get the idea from you that it happened recently. Regret can also keep secrets. We put the lid on it and tell no one in order to preserve our image. It gradually eats away at us. But godly grief will eventually turn our sinful secrets into testimonies of grace.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“In our way of thinking, “we are tempted to say, ‘I will take the larger place because it will give me more influence for Jesus Christ.’” But Jesus teaches us that we should determine to take the lower place unless the Lord himself “extrudes us” into the larger one.22 We are tempted to take up something “big” in our eyes or in the eyes of others for his name and lose sight of him altogether. Not”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“But the presence of things we cannot control or immediately fix reminds us that though the Bible is God’s revelation, it in itself is not his magic remedy. It lights our path by his Spirit, but it cannot always shield us from what he shows us there. Only the Christ that the Bible verses reveal can do this.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“Our problem is that most of the God-given joys we seek get damaged when words like instantly and haste and impatience are thrown at us. Many of us are confused about what it means to have true joy if we have to embrace a delayed gratification amid the slower speeds required by the things that most matter to Jesus.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus

“You were never meant to repent because you can’t fix everything. You are meant to repent because you’ve tried. Even if we could be god for people and fix it all, the fact remains that Jesus often does not have the kind of fixing in mind that you and I want.”
― Zack Eswine, The Imperfect Pastor: Discovering Joy in Our Limitations through a Daily Apprenticeship with Jesus