Why Good Pastors Drift

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:

<strong>What has happened to love?</strong>

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.