The Drift No One Plans
I was thirty-three, and I had just sold my first company. I had spent my twenties and early thirties building something, and then I sold it. Instead of doing what a man in that position is supposed to do next, my wife and I enrolled our young family in Youth With A Mission’s Discipleship Training School. A few months later, our outreach assignment sent us to Bali, Indonesia—a place I had pictured, before we landed, as postcards and surf breaks, and found instead to contain ordinary poverty a few streets back from any of that.
We were staying near a river settlement outside one of the villages, doing the plain work of a short-term outreach team—digging latrines, running a children’s program under a tarp when it rained, handing out the limited medical supplies we had been trained to distribute. None of it felt dramatic. Most of it felt like manual labor with prayer attached, and I remember being faintly surprised that this was what I had sold a company to go and do.
There was a boy, maybe eight, who followed our team everywhere for the better part of a week. He lived with very little—no shoes, the same clothes most days, and food that was clearly not always plentiful. But what I remember most was not what he lacked. It was him. He laughed more than anyone else on that riverbank, including us. He learned three English words that week and used all three constantly, badly, and with complete delight.
On our last evening there, our team leader asked if anyone wanted to pray over the children before we left. I knelt beside that boy, put a hand on his shoulder, and had nothing prepared to say. I remember the sensation more than the words—a kind of nearness I had not felt before in thirty-three years, including the year I closed the sale that was supposed to be the thing that made me feel like I had arrived. It was not emotional in the way a worship set can be emotional. It was closer to being noticed by Someone I could not see, in a moment I had done nothing to earn and nothing to orchestrate.
I did not know yet that I was going to plant a church. I did not know I would spend years afterward behind a desk, in board meetings, managing a budget and a staff and a building fund. All I knew, kneeling in the dirt with my hand on a boy whose name I can still say correctly, was that I wanted whatever that nearness was for the rest of my life—that I would have done that work for free, in that riverbed, indefinitely, if it meant staying that close to what I had just touched. It was closer than anything the company had ever given me, and the company had given me a great deal.
I came home a few weeks later and told anyone who would listen that I had fallen in love with Jesus in a way I had never expected, at thirty-three, kneeling in the mud beside a river outside a Balinese village, with a family I had just uprooted for exactly this.
I did not know then how easily even genuine love can be crowded out when nothing is built to protect it—or that the very ministry I was about to build in response to that nearness would, piece by reasonable piece, become one of the primary things standing between me and it. Nobody warns you of that at thirty-three. You are too busy being certain you will never let it happen.
I do not tell this story because I got it back exactly the way it was on that riverbank. I tell it because a person cannot recognize what has been lost until he remembers, specifically and without flattering himself, what he actually had. This is what I had. Whatever the rest of this book has to say about drift, it is measured against this—a boy, a river, a hand on a small shoulder, and a nearness I had sold a company without ever finding, and then found for nothing, kneeling in the dirt.
The drift did not begin on that riverbank. The love did.
No pastor plans to lose first love. I certainly did not. No one enters ministry hoping prayer will become functional, Scripture professional, or the presence of God familiar. Most pastors begin because something in them has come alive: Jesus is real, the gospel matters, people matter, and the church matters. The call feels larger than comfort, career, or the life they might otherwise have chosen. So they say yes.
They study, preach, pray, sit beside hospital beds, and walk with people through marriages, funerals, addictions, doubts, baptisms, births, conflicts, losses, and beginnings. They stand in front of rooms when they feel strong and when they do not, carrying things few people see. For many, ministry is not simply a job. It is an offering. That is why spiritual drift can be so difficult to understand. We expect drift to begin with compromise—rebellion, cynicism, moral failure. Sometimes it does. But another kind of drift is quieter and harder to detect.
It happens while the pastor is still faithful: preaching, serving, believing, showing up. The work continues. The calling remains. People are helped. Yet the relationship underneath the work begins to change. Prayer becomes more hurried. Scripture becomes more connected to Sunday. Silence becomes rare. The needs of people become louder than the needs of the soul, and success begins to carry more emotional weight.
The pastor still loves Jesus, but increasingly lives from the momentum of ministry rather than the immediacy of communion. Nothing may look wrong from the outside. That is precisely the problem. The most dangerous drift is often the drift that ministry itself can hide.
A strange paradox
Pastoral ministry creates a strange spiritual paradox. The pastor is surrounded by the things of God almost constantly: Scripture, prayer, worship, theology, Christian community, spiritual conversations, and the language of faith. For most people, spending more time around these things would seem likely to produce greater intimacy with God. And often it does. But professional proximity to sacred things can also create distance of another kind.
The Bible can become material, prayer can become leadership, worship can become something to facilitate, and people can become responsibilities. The presence of God can become something we explain more often than something we quietly enjoy. This does not happen because pastors are insincere. It happens because repeated responsibility changes how we relate to things. The chef can become so focused on preparing food that he forgets to eat. The physician can spend a lifetime caring for bodies while neglecting his own. The counselor can become skilled at hearing everyone else’s pain while losing language for her own. And the pastor can spend years helping other people know God while slowly becoming less attentive to his own life with God.
That is the paradox at the center of this book. Ministry itself is not the danger. The danger is that something good, meaningful, and spiritual can become a substitute for what it was never meant to replace.
Ephesus. Few passages expose this paradox more clearly than Jesus’ words to the church at Ephesus in Revelation 2. He commends their hard work, perseverance, and doctrinal discernment, then names what visible faithfulness cannot answer: they have left the love they had at first. That tension is the theological heartbeat of this book. Much can remain right while something central has begun to move.
The sermon may still be effective. The team may still be strong. God may be genuinely using the ministry. None of those things, by themselves, answer the more personal question Jesus raises:
What has happened to love?
That question reaches beneath ministry output and asks what is happening to the person carrying it.
The work can continue after intimacy begins to thin. One reason pastoral drift can remain hidden for so long is that ministry often continues functioning. Experience, gifting, preparation, systems, and years of accumulated Scripture knowledge can all carry something. A skilled pastor can preach when tired. A seasoned leader can run a meeting while inwardly depleted. A compassionate person can care for someone else while privately running on empty.
And God is gracious.
- He can help people through imperfect leaders.
- He can speak through sermons preached by pastors who themselves need renewal.
- He can bless a congregation while also calling the leader back to greater intimacy.
This should not make us suspicious of fruit. It should make us humble about what fruit can prove. Public effectiveness and private health are related, but they are not identical. A ministry can still bear fruit while the soul of the minister needs attention. This is not hypocrisy by definition. Often it is simply the result of long exposure to responsibility. The pastor has kept giving, carrying, answering, and leading, while the interior life has slowly been asked to survive on what remains. The tragedy is not that the pastor stopped caring. The tragedy is that he may have cared about so many good things that he stopped noticing what all that caring was doing to him.
This is not a book against ministry. This book is not an argument for less commitment or hard work, nor is it suspicious of growth, leadership, excellence, theology, preaching, strategy, influence, or responsibility. The church needs pastors who know Scripture, lead courageously, build healthy organizations, endure, carry vision, and serve people when it costs something. The problem is not devotion to ministry. The problem is when devotion to ministry becomes disconnected from devotion to Christ. The answer is not withdrawal. It is reordered love. Ministry was never meant to compete with intimacy. It was meant to flow from it. The aim is not a pastor who does less because he has become spiritually cautious.
The aim is a pastor whose activity grows from abiding, whose leadership grows from prayer, whose preaching grows from Scripture first received personally, and whose public ministry does not consume the hidden life that gives it weight.
This book is about recovering that order.
Nor is this a book of accusation. Pastors already carry enough accusation, some from outside and some from within. Most know the feeling of leaving a Sunday service remembering the sentence that could have been clearer, the person they did not reach, the family they have not called back, or the conflict they wish they had handled differently. A book about drift could easily add another voice: You are not praying enough. You are too ambitious. You are too busy. You should be more spiritual. That is not the aim. Conviction may come—and should. There may be habits to change, ambitions to name, boundaries to build, and places where repentance is necessary. But shame does not restore first love.
Jesus’ words to Ephesus are serious, but they are also an invitation. Remember. Repent. Return. Those are words of possibility. The One who names what has been lost is also the One calling His people back. This book should be read in that spirit. Not:
“What is wrong with me?” But:
“What has happened to my love, and where is Jesus inviting me home?”
A book for good pastors. The title matters: Why Good Pastors Drift. This is not a book about fraudulent leaders or people who never cared. It is about faithful pastors who love people, take doctrine seriously, prepare, sacrifice, and keep showing up. The premise is not that goodness causes drift. It is that the qualities involved in good ministry can become spiritually dangerous when they are no longer rooted in communion.
Responsibility can become over-responsibility; availability can become the inability to withdraw; diligence can become drivenness; excellence can become the need to prove; compassion can become the refusal to disappoint; influence can become identity; theological knowledge can substitute for present-tense relationship; fruitfulness can reassure us that everything inside must be fine. Good things can become disordered precisely because they remain good things, which makes the disorder difficult to see.
The questions beneath the book. The chapters ahead explore several expressions of pastoral drift: ministry becoming a substitute for God, rewards beginning to shape identity, theology outpacing intimacy, activity replacing abiding, public fruit hiding private distance, and first love being quietly crowded out. Then the book turns toward return: recovering the secret place, leading from overflow rather than depletion, and guarding first love across decades of ministry. Beneath all of those questions is a simpler one—harder to answer with metrics, harder to discuss at a staff meeting, and harder to avoid when the room becomes quiet:
Do I still deeply love being with Jesus? Not merely, Do I believe in Jesus? Am I serving Him? Am I helping other people follow Him? Those questions matter. But this one reaches somewhere else: Do I still enjoy Him? Do I still desire Him? Do I miss Him when I have been too busy to pay attention? Is there still a life with God underneath my life for God?
The question is not meant to create emotional pressure. There are seasons of quiet love, dryness, grief, fatigue, and unanswered prayer. First love is larger than spiritual feeling; it includes attention, affection, priority, desire, obedience, and relationship. The question is whether Christ Himself remains central beneath everything built in His name.
The goal is not nostalgia. Returning to first love does not mean recreating the emotional intensity of an earlier season. Mature love has history. It has survived disappointment, learned obedience, and passed through suffering. The goal is not to become spiritually young again. It is to remain spiritually alive: more knowledgeable without becoming less tender, more experienced without becoming less dependent, more capable without becoming less prayerful. First love is not a demand that mature faith reproduce youthful emotion. It is a call to keep Christ Himself at the center.
Read slowly. Pastors are trained to read quickly. There is always another book, sermon, meeting, or thing to prepare. I would encourage a different pace here. Read slowly enough to notice what resists you. If a sentence makes you defensive, stay there. If something produces relief, notice why. If a chapter names a condition you recognize, resist turning it immediately into a sermon for someone else. Let it remain personal first.
If you think of another pastor while reading, gently return the attention to your own soul. This is not a book primarily about them; it is an invitation for us. The best use of these pages may be simple: tell the truth, let God search, receive grace, and make small changes before large changes become necessary. Awareness is mercy.
Before we begin
Perhaps nothing feels seriously wrong. Good—this book may help you guard what is healthy. Perhaps you recognize mild signs of drift. Good—you are noticing them early. Perhaps you feel deeply depleted and know that ministry has become disconnected from the life you once had with God. There is still a way home. Perhaps you have been blaming yourself because you assumed a faithful pastor should never feel this way. You are not the first leader to discover that serving God and remaining close to God are not automatically the same thing. The invitation is not to panic. It is to pay attention.
Jesus did not call the disciples first to build organizations, develop platforms, preach sermons, or carry movements. He called them first to be with Him, and then He sent them. That order is not elementary Christianity. It is the architecture of sustainable ministry. Be with Him, then go. Receive, then give. Abide, then bear fruit. Love, then serve. The sequence is simple enough to understand and difficult enough to spend a lifetime learning.
This book is about recovering that sequence. It is not about pastors who stopped caring. It is about pastors who cared so deeply about the work that they sometimes stopped noticing what the work was doing to them—and about the possibility of coming home before anything has to fall apart.
