The HUMFREYS

Recently Alex Russell a student at Reformed Baptist Seminary asked me some questions about my ministry. Alex is part of Fairview Baptist Church, pastored by my friend Tim Stephens. Tim answered these questions also.

I’m thankful for a chance to share with a young man who is interested in pastoral ministry. May his tribe increase.

Below is the transcript which Alex compiled from my answers.

Questions for Pastor Clint Humfrey

 1.  What is the greatest joy of being a minister of God’s Word?

There are many joys in the ministry. There’s joy as it relates to you individually towards the Lord and there’s the joy as you relate to the people under God. The greatest joy would be a combo of these. Starting with the people, it’s a great joy to see people changed by the Word of God. A pastor who week in week out feeds the flock with the Scriptures, will over time see these weak, malnourished, emaciated sheep, becoming healthy. You see them able to have healthy marriages and healthy family’s, a healthy witness at work, a burden for the lost, a desire to be a global Christian, and an understanding of doctrinal truths. You see them grow and manifest the fruits of the spirit. There’s great joy in having a kind of pipeline role to play as God does this work through his Word and Spirit. In simply being a servant who is doing what the master wants them to do, has called them to do and commanded them to do and entering into the joy of the master. This joy is essential because of the disappointments that accrue in ministry with people or even disappointments with one’s own capacity and ability, lack of faithfulness, failures, mistakes and ultimately sins. If your joy is only centered on your ministry then it will dry up. But the joy of being a sinner, saved by grace and then called into the body of Christ to serve a specific role to the whole body as a shepherd, is a great joy. You know that you are just doing what God has commanded, you can trust him as a forgiven sinner with the promise and hope of heaven. In the meantime, during this fruitful labor, I can have great joy and trust him with the extent of my ministry and the length of it. And the joy that I have now is really a foretaste of the role I will have in heaven, as I worship the living God for eternity. That will be the consummation of the joy now.

2. When you find yourself in seasons of spiritual drought, whether it be personal or in the ministry, how do go about cultivating zeal?

This is a good question because drought happens, it’s an inevitable and a natural function of the ministry because you are giving out all the time. Sundays coming, there’s a sermon to be preached, bible studies to give, counseling to give, decisions to be made and discipline to be applied. All these things are going out, and in the meantime, you can get drawn down. It’s so critical to cultivate zeal, and I think that’s a good word, “to cultivate.” It’s easy for me to think of farmer analogies, so think of yourself like a field. Last years crop was quite fruitful, but it’s harvested and now your lying fallow in the winter, feeling useless. But your useless because you were useful. So, what is required is a cultivation. Just like the prophet said, “there is a breaking up of the fallow ground.” Cultivate the heart in order to prepare for the Lord’s blessing. I believe the Lord blesses with the zeal, the zeal cannot be manufactured. You cultivate your heart by getting back to true honesty before the Lord. That might be a way of confessing your sins, a real self assessment. Taking ownership. Maybe you just don’t have zeal, you don’t have desire, you don’t have discipline or a sense of fulfillment or success, whatever it might be. In owning them, your asking the Lord to bring the plow, to break up the heart because it’s hard and calloused. In these times I will often seek out others to help me. Ask your wife, “what do you see is going on with me? I feel spiritually dry. What do you see, do you see me engaging in patterns that are unhealthy?” You want to be open and honest and have someone come in and assist you with this plowing. That’s also where its important for pastors to have good spiritual friends. Ask them to be honest about your situation, get them to give you a bit of perspective. Someone to assist you in applying the truths you might know in your head but aren’t really believing. Having someone get you to a place of honesty. Seeing the things that are bad or maybe aren’t so bad.

    Lastly, is going back in time. That’s the benefit of church history. Going back and finding heart-warming biography and heart-warming devotional meditation. The piety of the puritans, meditating on what they had, looking at the evangelistic zeal of Whitefield, Robert Murray McCheyne, William Carrey, Spurgeon. It can start to warm your heart. But at the end of the day, in all of it, those are all just means. It comes back to being laid bare before God and to prayer. Asking God to warm your heart. As Edwards said, “looking for those paths of allurement,” to be drawn by God. Put yourself in the pathway for this to happen. Listen to other pastors and other sermons. Sometimes I’ll watch a livestream of a conference or call up a person that I haven’t talked to for a while to hear what the Lord’s doing in their life. Trying to find others to get a little bit of fire. But praying that God would be using those as means and as instruments.

3. What are the greatest and most common concerns you deal with in the context of pastoral counselling?

In the context of pastoral counselling, what I am shocked at is the extent to which pornography and sexual immorality prevails within the church. That is the number one pastoral problem that keeps coming around and its amazing the grip it has on men and women. We had to add questions about pornography into our membership interviews, simply because people can hide it and don’t disclose it. It is very much like ancient Israel. They go to the temple, worship Yahweh, and yet they are also going up on every hill and under every green tree and engaging in immorality and worshipping false gods. They’re doing both. So, the removal of the high places is critical. Another one is a predominance of anxiety. People are struggling, not only with their identity in Christ but anxious of things. Some of that is just the instantaneousness of our world with cell phones and all the buzz, creating a sense of being out of control.       

4. Is there one thing you wish someone would have told you about ministry while you were in seminary?

For my own seminary experience, I would say there needed to be more of an emphasis on the importance of experiencing true health in a local church. That might seem obvious, but what often happens is the students themselves, although zealous, are coming from unhealthier, dysfunctional church situations. So, they go to seminary and have never really seen what health looks like. Or the only picture of health they have is the guy on the radio, or video. They hear about his big megachurch, like a MacArthur say, and they think “that’s a picture of a healthy church.” Yet those ministries are all quite unique. So, they’ve never really had a localized, contextual encounter with what true healthy church ministry looks like. And I think this was the case for me in early ministry, having to hunt and peck and find models of the different practices in order to cultivate health. But the health your trying to cultivate is then based more on an idea rather than something you’ve personally experienced a lot of. I’ve seen a lot of guys that have never really seen a healthy church and they don’t realize how important that is. Then they get into local churches and start applying all the great theology they’ve learned but they’ve never seen a godly pastor and how he handles things. They haven’t really seen the order and ecclesiology of a healthy church. Then unfortunately they must do a lot of trial and error which results in a lot of imbalance. So, guys can be strong on the things they learned in seminary and be very weak on some of the basics of Christian living and the basics of churchmanship. Trying to teach others to practice these things without a template to offer them.

5. What practical steps do you take to ensure your wife and family come before the ministry?

Having set times when my phone is shut off, I’m not looking at email or thinking about church work. Realizing that the church is not my identity. This particular ministry is not my identity. The calling for me as a husband and as a father, those will abide longer than my ministry at this local church. So as much as I care for this flock and these people, its just a stewardship for a time. My marriage and my children, that will be a stewardship I have until the day I die. I always keep that in the back of my mind. Also, introducing my kids to my ministry and helping them understand what churchmanship is. So that when they see how much I’ve invested in it, they might recognize that they are more important than my work. They are my first point of discipleship. Then they can see its in proportion.

6. What is the most important aspect of a ministers walk with Christ? Why?

The most important aspect of his walk with Christ is his personal appropriation of the gospel. In the truest sense, he is a gospel minister, but that does not mean that he is merely a gospel dispenser. He must exhibit the reality that Jesus came to save sinners of whom I am chief. That I am living in light of justification by faith alone. I’m not showing that I’m justified by any other identity, by works or by any success. But that I am justified based upon the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ alone. So then, the practical outworking’s of the gospel are manifest in my life, and I am repeatedly returning to my appropriation of the gospel. Understanding that today is another day of grace, I am in Christ, not because of anything in me, any righteousness or any goodness, but based upon the free gratuity of Jesus Christ. This is to mark how I speak, how I act, what I prioritize and what I don’t, how I preach, how I pray, all these different things. These are within that rubric of the appropriation of the gospel which you must keep coming back to. Saying, “I am living in light of the gospel, I am a forgiven sinner, I don’t deserve any of this.”

7. How do you avoid spiritual pride and self-glorification associated with ministerial success?

It comes back to an honest view of what ministerial success is, that’s the key. If it’s viewed in a worldly way, then its a bigger church, more money and more notoriety. There’s no pastor that’s immune to that, when people aren’t at the church, your disappointed, when more people come, your encouraged. You must define ministerial success first and make sure your getting rid of worldly views of ministerial success. Recognizing how thin the supposed worldly ministerial successes are as opposed to faithfulness before the Lord with week in week out handling of God’s Word and feeding the sheep. Faithfulness in prayer, faithfulness in persevering when your being wronged. Faithfulness in terms of the integrity of one’s marriage. Faithfulness in these even though few people are going to be applauding you for any of it. But that is what the Scriptures define to be ministerial success. It comes back to the joy question, which was joy in knowing you are serving the master in the way that he has called you to serve. Having a sense of this will allow you to understand very clearly your limits. Some pastors often focus on great success, saying, “we’re going to be world changers.” Well just hold on, there’s only one messiah and you’re not it. So, understand your limits and be faithful to your patch and then trust the Lord. As MacArthur said, “you take care of the depth of your ministry, God will take care of the breadth.” It provides a hedge against undo spiritual pride and self-glorification. This is where cultivating good relationships can assist you with honesty. You should have a Paul, a Barnabas and a Timothy in your life. We need those peers who can encourage us in our faithfulness or see the problems in our actions. You must work at being aware of these things and avoiding that kind of pride. If not, God cares too much for the sheep to let you carry on in that way and he will break you. He will break you regardless. He will humble you. He resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. It helps to be aware of how frail one is. In the fullness of your strength, people may start praising you in a wider ministry, asking you to come speak, and you might start thinking your really something. Very quickly it can be exposed nobody really knows who you are. However, in having a long view of history and a long view of redemptive history, you will understand that you’re not nothing. The Lord has you here for a purpose, but always live in preparation for the day when you’re gone. Keep a real reliance on the Holy Spirit. As time goes on, you will start seeing how weak and frail you are and how poor your equipment is. So, it really must be the Lord doing it.

Some Additional Questions

1. What are some important aspects of an aspiring minister’s character?

For a young guy considering pastoral ministry, do all that you can to become self-aware. Sometimes that seems counter intuitive because we don’t want to be self-focused. In his institutes, Calvin made the point that as we know God, we understand ourselves better, both in terms of our fallenness and our weaknesses. As we understand ourselves better, it puts us in a better position to understand God. It is this constant reciprocal relationship. So, there is a real importance of being self aware. In the context of 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 12, understand that God has you as a part in the body. Am I a toe? Then I must know that I’m a toe and not an eye or a hand. I’ve got to know what I am. Instead of then being in a crowd or going to a school where everybody is trying to be a hand, realize, maybe you’re not a hand. So, having a self-awareness is really helpful and that’s where good friends, good pastoral leadership over you is very important. Therefore, always think about the ways that you can cultivate self-awareness

2. Other aspects of an aspiring minister’s character?

Think about the ways that you can develop and cultivate healthy churchmanship. Because what happens is, many guys watch Paul Washer on YouTube and they’re lit up and stirred, so they’re going and sharing the gospel and they zealously want to preach. Then they see the role in the church to do that most is the pastor. So, they get a very narrow view of what shepherding ministry is. Thinking that they simply get to go preach at people and study the Word. What happens is, you can have guys that end up with an unhealthy view of pastoral ministry and an unhealthy view of their own personal walk with the Lord. And I’ve seen it many times, that guys then use godliness as a means of gain. Maybe they weren’t very good at other things, their job, in school or maybe their marriage wasn’t great. But then they think, “I’m actually good at this bible thing, I can namedrop, and I know the Scriptures well.” They use this as a ladder so that they can climb higher than other people. Godliness as a means of gain. But they don’t know how to serve in the church. They don’t know how to be faithful or know how to submit to authority. They want to be in authority, but don’t want to submit to it. And in any ecclesiology, there’s going to be some type of submission to authority and ultimately submission to God’s authority as a steward of God. I think that healthy churchmanship is really underestimated by guys considering the ministry and they themselves must cultivate that. So, what does it mean to be a faithful church member? What does membership entail at the very least? Is going to a congregational meeting and talking about the budget valued by you? Is serving in the children’s ministry something a guy would willingly be able to do? Or do they say “no, I’m reading Calvin’s commentaries, let somebody else do that.” They are at times too snobbish and proud to do it. Maybe go shovel the sidewalk. I guarantee Tim has shoveled the sidewalk too sometimes. If it has to be done, then you have to do what has to be done.

3. One more aspect of an aspiring minister’s character?           

John Piper has the phrase, “being a first hander.” What happens for a lot of guys now a days with YouTube, online resources and the overwhelming riches of Christian publishing is that they become book, video, blog, Facebook and twitter collectors. But they’re not good first handers. When they read Scripture, they have thin scanning, jumping to conclusions thinking they know what the right answers are and how to approach it. However, they don’t have real, first hand analytical skill; breaking down a text, thinking and appropriating it to themselves in that puritan meditative tradition. They’re not very good at appropriating that text to their own soul, having their hearts lit up and concisely sharing it with their family or with someone at church. Instead its all second-hand stuff, and there’s great danger for a guy going into ministry that way because they are always a man of the last book they read. And you wonder how some guys after ten, fifteen years of ministry really get off track. When in reality, they stopped being first handers a long time ago.