On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee, discusses why ministry leadership is difficult. He explains that the challenges stem from our sinful nature, the pervasive influence of sin in the world, and Satan's active opposition. Iorg also highlights that God allows painful circumstances to shape leaders' character.
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Welcome to the Lead On Podcast, and welcome to the first episode of the Lead On Podcast in 2025. It's good to start another year together. I'm coming up on close to 400 of these podcast episodes. And so I'm delighted to continue our conversation about practical issues related to ministry leadership. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee.
Jeff Iorg:And every week, we get together and have this conversation about practical issues related to ministry leadership. Today, I want to start the year with this statement. Ministry is difficult, but it is not complicated. Ministry is difficult, but it is not complicated. Over the next few weeks, I wanna flesh out more of what I mean by ministry is not complicated.
Jeff Iorg:But today on the podcast, I wanna answer the question, why is ministry so hard? What makes it so difficult? It just doesn't seem that leading Christians should be this challenging. In fact, the most popular biblical motif for leadership in the bible is a shepherd with his sheep. Man, how how pastoral that seems.
Jeff Iorg:How how peaceful that appears. Yet, any experienced leader will tell you. That contented scene of a shepherd with his sheep only exists in the Christmas pageant. That's about the only place, and then only if you're lucky. The reality is that sheep can act crazy.
Jeff Iorg:They bite, run amok, get diseases, wander into trouble, get attacked by wolves and other outsiders. Sheep do dumb things, injure themselves, nip at each other, and if a storm comes up, they may panic and all stampede somewhere and injure themselves along the way. The she shepherds shepherds are a little better than the sheep, but not yet perfect. Shepherds get angry, desert their post. They drive their sheep.
Jeff Iorg:They lash at them. They yell at them.
Jeff Iorg:They even hit a few. And worst of all, shepherds sometimes flirt with other herds, hoping to find greener pastures than the sheep they're stuck with. All this talk about sheep and shepherds. It's supposed to be idyllic, but it's often quite difficult. Beyond that,
Jeff Iorg:our spiritual resources and spiritually high ideals should seem to indicate that leading Christians shouldn't be this hard. I mean, god loves us. God loves our followers. He wants the best for all of us. Most Christians want to love and obey God.
Jeff Iorg:We we have clear biblical instructions on how to relate to one another, how to how to relate to people in authority over us, how how to relate to people we're responsible to lead. We have a bible full of instructions and spiritual resources about healthy relationships. We are filled with the holy spirit. We have positive examples from other believers. We have positive instruction from examples of people in the bible.
Jeff Iorg:We have the encouragement of living in the Christian community. We have a shared mission that supposedly unites us. We're responsible for the great commission and the spirit of the great commandment. We we're all working toward the same goal, and shouldn't that produce unity and focus and cooperation and harmony? And beyond all that, we we have covenants and contracts and policies and agreements, all designed to systematize and strengthen our organizational or our leadership relationships.
Jeff Iorg:So with all of
Jeff Iorg:these things going for us, why is Christian leadership so hard? Well, let me give you several reasons. Most of them rooted
Jeff Iorg:in some theological realities that explain the situation. 1st, leadership is hard because Christians still make sinful choices. You know, becoming a Christian is a life changing experience. When when a person places their faith in Jesus, a new birth occurs. The Bible says the old person passes away and a new person emerges because according to 2nd Corinthians 5 17, if anyone is in Christ, he or she is a new creation.
Jeff Iorg:Despite this change though, despite this change,
Jeff Iorg:a residue of the old life remains, and that residue is called sin. Now while sin is forgiven by Jesus and the power of sin is broken at our conversion, you can check that out in Romans 6, all believers are still infected with the propensity
Jeff Iorg:to sin. Now, if you've hung around a seminary like
Jeff Iorg:I did for 20 years, you know there are thick theology books that have been written to try to explain this process. Seminaries even have semester long courses called things like the doctrine of sin or the theology of sin to grapple with what we're talking about today. In fact, sin is one of the few subjects I consider myself an absolute authority on.
Jeff Iorg:And like you, I I feel qualified to teach on that. I
Jeff Iorg:I'm an expert at sin. I I've been a sinner all my life. I joke about it, but our struggle with sin as leaders and as Christians is a painful part of our spiritual journey and it's a it's a very real part of the relationships, with people we lead. Listen. List leading Christians
Jeff Iorg:is painful because Christians do sinful things that complicate our lives as leaders, complicate our attempts to lead them, complicate the organizations of which we're all apart.
Jeff Iorg:Listen. I've been at ministry leadership long enough to have seen Christian
Jeff Iorg:people make bizarre choices that created significant leadership pain for me and the people I was working with. For example,
Jeff Iorg:I once worked with a couple that was engaged in a local county election. Their opponent vandalized some of their yard signs, so they decided to get even. The wife and this couple happened to work at the courthouse. So what did the couple do? They decided to tamper with the election.
Jeff Iorg:They voted about a 100 bogus ballots, and this was back in 19 eighties before any of this kind of election fraud or election tampering was in the news like it is today. When they did this, this couple was so guilt ridden
Jeff Iorg:that they confessed to what they had done. And when it
Jeff Iorg:was all said and done, they went to jail and left a 2 year old child to be cared for by their grandparent. Another time, I had a leader that was caught in an adulterous situation, and when confronted, he denied it. When confronted with the evidence, he blamed his wife. When dismissed from his physician, he claimed he
Jeff Iorg:was treated unfairly. And then,
Jeff Iorg:when all of that took place, he hired a lawyer and decided to sue everybody. Believe me, this turned into an incredibly painful situation because of this Christian man's sinful choices. Another time, I was a part of celebrating a wedding, A young man in our church and his wife got a beautiful young woman got married. He came back from his honeymoon and immediately started up an adulterous affair. About a year later, this woman that he was in a relationship with claimed that she was pregnant, and she was.
Jeff Iorg:So she revealed the affair. He confessed his sin. His wife left him. The pregnant woman was abandoned and left in our church's care. He then left her and moved in
Jeff Iorg:with a third woman. This was a mess,
Jeff Iorg:and it happened in our church with everybody connected in some way to the situation. Look. These are the kinds of situations that sinners produce sinful choices that produces incredible leadership pain. These are the choices that Christians make that create conflict in churches and cause people to choose sides, to be publicly embarrassed, cause leaders to have to spend hours trying to sort out these conflicts. Look, these situations I've described here result in sleepless nights, many meetings, including many legal briefings, hours and hours spent in damage control and relationship repair.
Jeff Iorg:All of these situations consume time that could be spent much more productively than cleaning up these messes. Yet, they they happen on our watch as leaders, and we have to take a hand have a hand in trying to resolve them. Sin permeates. Christians sin, and because of that, leading them is painful. But second, Christian leaders are also sinners.
Jeff Iorg:We we sometimes make painful choices that cause pain for us as leaders and in also some cases, for our followers. Our sin contributes to the pain we experience. A call to Christian leadership doesn't super spiritualize you as a leader. You you still have clay feet. You still struggle with sin.
Jeff Iorg:Your your choices still impact your leadership effectiveness, and your choices can still create painful circumstances. I I've done this. I've done incredibly dumb things that were sinful, that created pain for me and the people I was trying to lead. I I once had a custodian in a church that was doing a poor job, and I terminated her in a very, inappropriate and hurtful way. Her husband was so angry about it that he threatened me physically, and as because they were both church members, word soon got around to the deacons and the Sunday school class and just about everybody else in the church, it seemed like, about what I had done and how I had treated these people and how they had responded and how much conflict was coming out of it.
Jeff Iorg:Listen. Apologizing for that situation, cleaning up that mess, it was painful. It was painful on many levels, public and private. I'll tell you another time. I I once had a gossipy conversation with a person about a an associate pastor of our church, and
Jeff Iorg:when
Jeff Iorg:I finished the conversation, I I went around the corner, and sitting there in his office with the door open was the associate pastor just looking up. Just waiting for us to come around the corner, he heard the whole thing. I felt like such a fool. My relationship with this person was damaged significantly. My capacity to lead him was really undermined.
Jeff Iorg:What a bad day that was. My sinful actions produced leadership pain. So the first reason ministry is hard is because Christians are sinners, and the second reason ministry is hard is because Christian leaders are sinners. But while we're continuing on this overview of the doctrine of sin and how it impacts us, sin infects everything. The principle of sin, not individual sinful acts, but the principle of sin, also called the curse of sin in the Bible, is the I'll call it this, the atmospheric angst under which the entire universe struggles.
Jeff Iorg:It's like the water in an aquarium. The fish doesn't know any other atmospheric mildew except wet, and that's the way it is with sin. We live in a universe cursed by, infected by, overwhelmed by sin, and it affects everything, including your leadership or relationships and your leadership organization. The curse of sin means that things break down, resources run out, organizations malfunction, cultural opposition rises. All of these things limit or detract from our success.
Jeff Iorg:The curse of sin also means nature is affected. Tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, fires, other storms, they hit Christian ministries all the time. We're we're not immune to these events. Man, once our church building flooded, we lost furniture, supplies, materials. We had significant expenses.
Jeff Iorg:We had a hard, long cleanup, and during that time, we had to, throw out furniture and replace it with new. I was involved in another building program once where we had a frantic call that the, quote, whole building is being flooded by a malfunction of the fire sprinklers. Man, we rushed over there. Fortunately, it was only 4 rooms, not the whole building. But, nevertheless, we had a mess because of a system constructed by sinful humans, and because of that, it had been it had malfunctioned, and we had a mess on our hand.
Jeff Iorg:Look. These events and countless others like
Jeff Iorg:them create painful leadership situations. Money has to be raised, damage repaired, decisions about legal action have to be made, forgiveness has to be sought, trust has to be regained, ministry momentum can be lost. We can just go on and on and on with the impact of sin through nature, through organizations, through equipment, through people. The bad things that happen that are outside of our control because of sin infecting everything we touch, everything we see, and everything we do, this happens to good leaders. And when we're in these situations, leadership can be difficult.
Jeff Iorg:It's definitely needed, but it's still difficult. In fact, sometimes these painful circumstances really call upon leaders to to rise, if you will, to their finest hour. You know, the curse of sin is real,
Jeff Iorg:and it it bites us, and it creates significant leadership pain. Well,
Jeff Iorg:we've talked about the first three reasons why leading Christians is painful, and they're really theological, and they're really grounded in the doctrine of sin. It's difficult to lead Christians because Christians are sinners, Christian leaders are sinners, and Christians and Christian leaders leaders operate in an atmospheric reality of the curse of sin on our world so that everything is tainted, flawed, broken. Now shifting gears just a bit, but staying somewhat with the negative, another reason Christian leadership is difficult is because Satan is on
Jeff Iorg:the prowl, and he is out to get us. The Bible
Jeff Iorg:describes the personification of evil as Satan. He's described as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour in first Peter 589. Somebody said the devil's in the details. No. He's not in the details.
Jeff Iorg:He's loose in the universe like a lion prowling around for fresh meat, and he particularly despises Christian leaders and attacks us relentlessly, looking for weakness and exploiting it for his destructive purposes. How else can you explain what's happened to so many leaders in our generation? Is it just because suddenly we're all weak? No. I don't think so.
Jeff Iorg:There is something demonic about the circumstances surrounding so many prominent leaders who give outstanding leadership for decades and then suddenly implode. The devil hates us, and he wants to make our lives miserable. He's constantly conspiring to work around us in ways that are destructive and harmful. Now, when you think about this, there seem to be 2 extremes about how the devil is at work around us. One one is, sort of a the devil is behind every bad thing that happens.
Jeff Iorg:If I can't find a parking place, it must be the devil. That that that often seems too trivial to me. The other extreme is to to deny spiritual warfare. To say, oh, no. This isn't really devil or demonic or sinful.
Jeff Iorg:Well, that denies the clear teaching of scripture, so that's not an option either. Instead, I think it's important to recognize that Satan is on the prowl. He is at work, and discerning his work is a complex question that requires real spiritual discernment. And and there's no formula for determining when Satan is on the prowl, but there are some observations we can make that will help us to diagnose, to detect, if you will, satanic opposition and then to oppose it with the spiritual resources we have in Jesus Christ. Let me give you a few touch points.
Jeff Iorg:1st, Satan is often behind stealthy opposition, like anonymous letters or blogs or emails or a spokesperson who comes to you and says, a lot of people think. It can also include misplaced information or, misplaced misinformation, I should say, or half truths, twisting words, editing comments, distorting what a leader really means. This is what I mean by Satan is often present in stealthy opposition. 2nd state Satan is
Jeff Iorg:often behind manipulative opposition. Attempts at blackmail, like
Jeff Iorg:a favorite ploy is threatening a leader with, if you don't blank, I'm going to blank. In other words, if you don't change the order of worship, I'm going to stop attending. If you don't start giving more money to my project, I'm going to start giving or stop giving so much money to the church. This kind of manipulative opposition is satanic in origin. Another way that you can discern when Satan is on the prowl is when the opposition is clandestine, when people call secret meetings or try to bypass authority structures and decision making, when people, meet to organize opposition in secret, God is not behind that effort.
Jeff Iorg:God works in the light, and the devil works in the shadows. And finally, Satan is also behind what I call resolutely uncooperative opposition. When people refuse to dialogue with you about issues or refuse to repent of sin, when they are organizing in uncooperative ways to make your life miserable on purpose, when what they're doing is grounded in entrenched negativity, persistent bitterness, When these opponents reject any possibility that they might be in the wrong, or there's no opportunity for dialogue or resolution, they just wanna attack, snipe, and slip away. That's satanic opposition. So while Christians are sinners and leaders are sinners and sin permeates the atmosphere of our leadership, Satan is also on the prowl in those circumstances
Jeff Iorg:to produce for us the painful aspects of leadership. Now
Jeff Iorg:I wanna shift gears because up until now, I've been talking mainly about the negative. There are two other reasons why leadership circumstances can be painful.
Jeff Iorg:The 5th reason on our list and the first of the 2 more positive ones is that god allows painful circumstances. And says that God allows include things like moving to another ministry assignment,
Jeff Iorg:losing people who leave your ministry for maybe another opportunity, disappointing results from a project you've poured your heart into, challenges resulting from doing your job well, like rapid growth or revisions of policy or changing of organizational direction.
Jeff Iorg:Sometimes, god allows difficult circumstances, not because we've done anything wrong and not because anyone else has done anything wrong, but as part of his process of shaping us into the image of Jesus. We've covered this on
Jeff Iorg:the podcast before. God has a definite purpose for you. He's intentional about his purpose, even relentless about it. He is going to shape you into the image of Jesus. That is his unrelenting, purposeful, intentional project and purpose.
Jeff Iorg:He wants to create the character of Jesus in you, and he allows some difficulty along the way. That difficulty comes through the protective filter of God's overarching purpose for you. You know, it's easy to forget the primary reason you're in your leadership role isn't to do something for God. It's so God can do something in you. Your leadership laboratory is God's setting for shaping the image of Jesus in you.
Jeff Iorg:God wants that more than anything else. He is using all the circumstances of your life to shape you into the image of Jesus.
Jeff Iorg:1 of my professors was fond of saying, life is curriculum, and he would then say, and the learning outcome is the character of Jesus in us. You know, God does not waste our experiences. He allows he allows things to come into our lives that create difficulty for us for the purpose of growing us, changing us, and stretching us. For example, one
Jeff Iorg:of my sins and shortcomings, struggle points is the pride of being self sufficient.
Jeff Iorg:I don't like asking other people for help. I like
Jeff Iorg:to take responsibility, pull myself up by my own bootstraps, so to speak. I I wanna do my own work my own way and be responsible for it in my own time. I don't wanna ask anyone else for assistance. I wanna do it myself. Well, God made me a seminary president.
Jeff Iorg:One person jokingly defined a seminary president as a person who lives in a nice house, but travels around the country asking for money. That wasn't totally wrong. We did live in a nice house, and I did travel around the country asking for money. Why would God do something like that to me? Well, God placed me in that role for 20 years to continually humble me and break my self sufficiency.
Jeff Iorg:It was sometimes wearisome to live this way, yet God made it a consistent part of my life for 20 years that I had to continually ask people for money, ask people for their help, ask people to pay for what I couldn't pay for on my own, but I envisioned God wanted to do through us. God was shaping my leadership ability. God was shaping my character through my leadership laboratory. God was revealing and removing a character deficiency of being too self reliant or too self sufficient. When God allows painful leadership circumstances, he is doing so to shape your character into the image of Jesus Christ.
Jeff Iorg:You have to cooperate with him in this process. You have to be
Jeff Iorg:like a finely trained horse who's quickly responding to the slightest touch of the reins, not some mule that refuses to obey. A discipline for leaders, a spiritual discipline for leaders, is determining how God is shaping your character through the painful side of leadership and then trying to respond positively. It's learning to ask the question, god, why is this happening to me? Not to me as if you're too good for something bad to happen, but god, why is this happening to me? Why is this happening to me right now?
Jeff Iorg:What are you trying to do or shape in my life?
Jeff Iorg:Yes. God allows painful
Jeff Iorg:aspects of leadership to shape our character.
Jeff Iorg:And then finally, God allows painful circumstances as a result of effective leadership.
Jeff Iorg:You know, leading change, for example, can be painful. When you lead a organization or a church to fulfill God's mission, it reaches more people. It expands its influence. It needs more facilities. It needs more staff.
Jeff Iorg:It needs more organization. It needs new policies. Whatever. When you lead well, you are often creating your own set of painful circumstances that are a result of the effective leadership that you provided. In my first church, I led the church to relocate and build a new facility, and a few months into the process, I wondered why in the world did I ever decide to do this.
Jeff Iorg:It was one of the hardest things that I have ever done. Leading a church to relocate, leading a church to build a new campus resulted in some significantly difficult circumstances being thrust upon me, and the painful side of leadership resulted from my own ministry successes. Beyond that, smaller changes, like writing new policies, adjusting job descriptions, shifting order of worship in services. These kinds of things can be very difficult for some people to assimilate and can create conflict, difficulty, hardship, heartache for you as a leader because you are leading in the context of leadership success and progress, and your own effectiveness is creating your painful circumstance. So we've talked today on the podcast about why is ministry so difficult.
Jeff Iorg:On the negative, it's difficult because Christians are sinners, Christian leaders are sinners. Sin permeates the leadership atmosphere in which we work, and the devil, Satan himself, is on the prowl. But on the positive side, ministry's hard, because God is allowing painful circumstances in our lives to shape us into the image of Jesus Christ. And ministry is hard, because when we're effective or successful, the results of our actions create greater difficulty for us as we try to manage the results of our effectiveness and deal with the leadership pain, difficulty, and challenges that ensue. Well,
Jeff Iorg:today on
Jeff Iorg:the podcast, we've tried to ask and answer the question, why is leading Christians so difficult? It is hard. No doubt about it. Now, over the next few weeks on the podcast, I want to talk about the second part of that phrase I started the podcast with. Ministry is difficult, but it is not complicated.
Jeff Iorg:We're gonna move into the it is not complicated over the next few weeks and talk about the simplicity of doing ministry and how to maintain our focus on some simple processes that make ministry more effective. But before we get there, let's remember ministry is difficult, and I don't minimize how challenging it may be. In fact, I wrote an entire book called The Painful Side of Leadership. And some of the ideas on the podcast today are excerpted from that book. If you're interested in more about the subject of why leadership is so difficult, I'd refer you to that book.
Jeff Iorg:Leadership is difficult. No doubt about it. But it's worth doing. We can learn why it's hard, which helps us to manage the difficulty along the way, as we lead on.