Hope in Hardship: Navigating Challenges in Ministry : Gayle Beebe

Full-Text Transcript

How can setbacks, disasters, and hardships actually help us flourish in both life and leadership?

Jason Daye
In this episode, I’m joined by Gayle Beebe. Gayle is the president of Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. He’s had opportunities to serve and contribute to the global church in a number of ways. He’s written several books, including his latest entitled The Crucibles That Shape Us. Together, Gayle and I explore how God helps us navigate those defining challenges in our leadership. Gayle also shares some specific ways that these hardships provide passageways to experiencing God at a deeper level and serving his kingdom. Are you ready? Let’s go.

Jason Daye
Hello, friends, and welcome to another exciting episode of Frontstage Backstage. I’m your host, Jason Daye. Each and every week, I have the privilege and honor of sitting down with a trusted ministry leader, all in an effort to help you and pastors and ministry leaders just like you embrace an opportunity to have a sustainable, healthy rhythm as you flourish in both life and leadership. It’s a joy to be a part of these conversations and dive into these topics. We are part of the Pastor Serve Network, and not only every single week do we have one of these conversations, but our team also creates an entire toolkit for you and the ministry team at your local church to use so that you can dig more deeply into the topic we discuss. You can find that toolkit at PastorServe.org/network, and you’ll find those toolkits for every episode that we produce. Within those toolkits, you’ll find a number of resources, including our Ministry Leaders Growth Guide. In there, you’ll find insights that are pulled from the conversation, as well as some questions for deeper reflection to see how this topic relates to your particular context. So please be sure to avail yourself of that toolkit. Again, you can find that at PastorServe.org/network. Now, at Pastor Serve, we love walking alongside ministry leaders. If you’d like to learn more about how you can receive a complimentary coaching session with one of our trusted ministry coaches, you can find that information at PastorServe.org/freesession, so be sure to check that out as well. Now, if you’re joining us on YouTube, please give us a thumbs up and take a moment to drop your name and the name of your church in the comments below. We absolutely love getting to know our audience better, and our team will be praying for you and for your ministry. So be sure to drop that down there in the comments. Then, whether you’re joining us on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform, please be sure to subscribe or follow so you do not miss out on any of these great conversations. I’m super excited for today’s conversation. At this time, I’d like to welcome Gayle Beebe to the show. Gayle, welcome.

Gayle Beebe
Hey, thank you, Jason. Great to be with you.

Jason Daye
So good to have you with us. Gayle, we’re going to dive into a conversation around this idea of crucibles that we experience in leadership, and I’d have to say, I’m sure we’d all agree that we’re not out there looking for more challenges or more crucibles. But Gayle, you share how these crucibles can actually be redeemed by God in such a way that it shapes us to become more effective leaders for the kingdom, which is absolutely beautiful. You’ve written a book. Your most recent book is entitled The Crucibles That Shape Us, and you walk us through seven different crucibles that we encounter as ministry leaders, what we can learn from those crucibles, and how we can, again, allow God to use those to shape us for his good work in the kingdom. To start off, Gayle, I would like to ask a real general question about crucibles and not about any of the specific crucibles that you touch on. But just generally, when we think of these crucibles, these challenges that we face, how is it that these crucibles shape us in general terms? What’s happening in the midst of these that we can be looking for?

Gayle Beebe
Well, Jason, I mean, it’s a beautiful question and a great opening. The way I think about it is, growing up, I grew up in a Christian home and accepted Christ when I was a teenager in terms of making him my own Lord and Savior. But I think I grew up that if you’re good, basically good things happen to you. If you’re bad, basically, inevitably, your life comes apart. The wrinkle comes in when you realize, as Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, that the rain falls on the evil and the good. We recognize that actually, challenges do come to fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ. In fact, it’s the nature of life that, in part, makes us long for eternity, gives us an awareness of God, and opens us as one of the pathways to faith. So, I began to think about crucibles as I experienced them. I often have told that… I’m president of a national liberal arts college, Christian College, Westmont College in Santa Barbara. So periodically, I speak in chapel, and one of the things I love to tell our students, who are predominantly 18 to 22, is from zero to 22 years, I had basically nothing go wrong on a macro scale. Nobody died out of sync. My grandparents were still alive at 22. Nobody had had cancer. There weren’t any prominent divorces in the family. Between ages 22 and 30, everything happened, and I realized in eight short years, as I’d gone to seminary, I’d entered pastoral ministry, and my dad died quite suddenly. I talk about that in Crucible Six, the crucible of human suffering. I began to recognize that despite the way in which Proverbs orients us to the good life, inevitably, challenge and hardship come to all of us, and part of getting through it is really having our faith in Christ, having our anchor points in life and disciplines of the church, and really recognizing that if we believe in the sovereignty of God and in his providential care, that we have to look at setbacks as part of God’s permissive will. Not that he wills that evil or bad things come, but being in a fallen creation, working with God for the restoration of the creation, we inevitably die, we inevitably deteriorate, we inevitably have setbacks, and how we work through these will fundamentally shape us. What I discovered over time is that all things do work for good for those who love God and feel called according to His purpose. When you can put your confidence in, okay, I don’t know why this happened, but I’ve got to figure out my way through it. What can I learn of myself? What can I learn of God as a result of this crucible experience? Not that we need to go looking for them because they inevitably come. In that coming, how we respond to them, that’s the whole event. It’s not just what happens to us, it’s how we process it internally, and then what happens because of us. How we respond to these setbacks will really determine both the contribution we make long-term as well as the leadership that we’re allowed to perform in the moment. Part of my own experience of these crucible experiences, people actually develop greater confidence in you when they see you place your confidence in the Lord and make constructive responses, whether these setbacks be physical, emotional, or spiritual.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s helpful and powerful, Gayle. I mean, these are things that we all should know, that we’re all going to experience challenging things. But when you’re in the midst of them, when it happens, again, it can feel like, Oh, God, why me? I mean, we go through those kinds of circumstances and those feelings. One of the things, Gayle, that you make very, very clear is the necessity for us to really have our purpose dialed in. The why behind everything dialed in. Talk to us a little bit about one, why that’s so important. But two, one of the assumptions is, if you’re in ministry, your Why should be a given, right? But all of us who are in ministry experience these challenges when we still have to rely on the why. So, talk to us a little bit about the uniqueness of the why as a ministry leader as well.

Gayle Beebe
Well, boy, the why is big. I quote Nietzsche in the book. He’s an odd one to show up in a Christian book. But he who has a Why to live can bear with almost any How, is one of his famous lines from Twilight of The Idols, one of his earlier books. The basic He who has a Why to live, I talk about how when you are serving the purposes of God, vision exceeds inconvenience. One of the measurements that I use in my own leadership work, both for myself as well as my executive team, and then when I teach, is, are you more preoccupied with vision, or are you more preoccupied with inconvenience? Because if you’re more preoccupied with inconvenience, you’ve lost sight of your vision, and you need to recover it. So, the why becomes critical in terms of what you’re willing to put up with. When we had the fire destroy a third of campus, burn 15 faculty homes, and destroy 231 homes in the community, it would have been very easy to get tired and get preoccupied with having to do two jobs, a regular job of running the college and then the extra job of recovering from the fire. But we were so motivated by the why of we exist to provide faith-based higher education, rigorous academics, and deep love for God, the twin rails on which our educational ministry and mission are grounded. So, as we pushed into all of the hard work, part of the joy of doing the hard work was the greater sense that we were serving the purposes of God at Westmont. I think you have to have that sense to get through all the inconvenience, all the hardship, all of the misunderstandings, and the frayed nerves. I mean, you find people at their best and at their worst in these moments, and the why is what gets you through all of these human foibles that definitely surface during crucible events or experiences.

Jason Daye
Yeah, Gayle, so how can we gravitate and really grasp our why? Again, in ministry, there’s kind of almost an assumed why, right? Like we’re in this for the Kingdom and yet, there are times when challenges arise, these crucibles arise. What do we need to do to dig into that Why, perhaps, whenever these things come up?

Gayle Beebe
Well, I start every morning, I enjoy getting up early, I read scripture, I pray, and part of my discipline is to pray through my schedule. I’ve never met you, but earlier this morning, I prayed, Lord bless our time on Jason’s podcast. I talk and I kind of joke about the fact when you’re in semester, when school is in session, the day almost never begins and ends the way you think it will. There are always surprises. But what I have noticed is that if I have prayed through the day, the things I know are going to happen settle in, and then the surprises are easier to handle. What I find in that daily discipline is that it gives me discipline for the macro issues, the big stuff. That when you dial in a strategic plan, like we do a three-year strategic planning conversation with a 10-year horizon. Now that could sound very mechanistic, but what it does is it actually gives you a structure, and then out of that three-year plan, you do your annual goals, and you do your strategies and tactics that will help you fulfill those goals. Now again, that sounds like we’re distancing ourselves from the why. No, we’re leaning into the why. The why is actually what gives meaning to all of that work and I just believe God has us here to be co-creators with him. I believe in work and prayer. I know when I was in close proximity to Richard Foster, he is the most contemplative introvert that I’ve ever spent a lot of time with, and Richard is just masterful. I love his writing. I love the way he thinks about a life with God, but it’s not me. I remember the time when I was with Richard, and I wanted to be like Richard, and God spoke to me and just said, I want you to be the best version of Gayle. I don’t want you to be a Richard. It was really where I was able to embrace the way I’m wired and embracing how we’re wired helps us fulfill the why of why God has us here. What is the unique contribution? Then you go through these experiences, and they shape your character differently. I mean, my wife says my secret power is being able to be present in just the most adverse circumstances. I had never really noticed that about myself. But you just, over time, you recognize, well actually, that is something where I feel comfortable. So each of us has a why. It gets tested every day, and then it gets tested in big ways, hopefully not too often, but it definitely happens.

Jason Daye
Thank you for that, Gayle. That’s super helpful. Now, one of the things I noticed as I was reading through the book is that a lot of what you identified that God is able to do in redeeming these crucibles and shaping us in the midst of hardship. A lot of it has to do with self-awareness, self-understanding, self-regulation, and willingness for self-correction. I think I’m hitting all of them, right? So you shared these throughout the book and that made me stop to think about leadership and vacuums in leadership in the church world. It’s no secret that there’s been a lot of failings within church leaders. I’m curious, Gail, if you could speak to us a little bit about the value and the importance of why self-regulation, self-awareness, self-understanding, and all these things, are something that show up so often when it comes to navigating these challenges or these crucibles?

Gayle Beebe
Well, Jason, if I can take 60 seconds to do a little diversion. So when I was in theological education in the 90s, I was at Azusa Pacific University and eventually Dean of the School of Theology, and this was before our first presidency that took us back to Michigan. But what I discovered working with pastors who were getting ready to pastor, pastors who were already pastoring but hadn’t finished their M.Div. or second-career pastors who had done something else, they all came in with a variety of of dreams, goals, and ambitions, but every one of them had issues. The issues dealt with, a lot of them had to do with the capacity to actually discipline yourself for the purposes of God through ministry. What I meant by that is that we have such an ideal of ministry, including myself, and there’s so much about it that I love, but there’s so much about it that’s crushing. You get in these situations, you just go, I just can’t believe Christian people would treat each other this way, or treat a pastor this way. I was helping a second career pastor in a situation that for him was just crushing, and I couldn’t tell if this was going to turn out well or poorly. Before we had made that determination, he made a career-limiting mistake, and without going into it, it wasn’t a mortal sin. It was a loss of temper with his elders, and then the following Sunday, bringing the dispute into the public in front of the congregation, both of which are just lacking in wisdom. It’s not a sin per se. It’s just a lack of judgment. So that’s where I really began to get interested in various resources that dealt with how we become self-aware. How do we develop capacities to self-regulate? Well, even as recently as this past weekend, I was talking with a neurosurgeon who has a unique interest in neuroscience, which captivated me. I said, Okay, here’s what had happened. I’ve been thinking about this since 1996. What does the literature say? So we started a conversation, an ongoing conversation, with the main thing being my interest in, how you self-regulate so you can self-correct. I talk about how our life of prayer teaches us how to have an internal conversation with God that leads to self-correction. I think that every one of us in ministry, whether it be leadership of a faith-based college, pastoral ministry, or parachurch ministry, whatever the leadership responsibility is, what is the internal conversation that leads to self-correction so that you will self-regulate so that you won’t make career-limiting mistakes, lose your opportunity, and undermine the confidence of the group you’re most committed to serving? That’s where I think so many of these principles that you can find in secular resources, you can immediately recognize the way in which the disciplines that we’re taught through Scripture actually help us in the most profound ways possible. So I have found the reason I do daily devotions isn’t just because I think that it’s just a good discipline. I do it because it actually makes me a more effective leader because I recognize how God comes into my work through those disciplines.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s super helpful. Now, as we’re looking at leadership in general, what does it take for a leader to begin to step back and say, Wait a second, I need to be more fully aware of how I’m reacting or responding because as you write in The Crucibles That Shape Us, you’re talking about that a lot of it is that we find ourselves in the crucible. The whole thing, the entire book, is about how we respond to the crucible in which we find ourselves, right? So there are different ways that people respond. Some people are very reactive. So they’re reacting to that hardship, whereas others begin to be a bit more maybe reflective and responsive to the hardship. So Gayle, can you talk just a little bit about the differences between those and how can we as leaders be less reactive and more responsive?

Gayle Beebe
Wow, Jason, I mean, that is right at the heart of it and I’m not sure I have a complete answer. In fact, I know I don’t have a complete answer, but I’ll have a suggestive answer. I honestly believe one of the keys to effective long-term ministry or effective leadership for long-term, in a ministry context, requires that you have a chair of elders, a chair of your board, or some key person who is a part of your inner circle who isn’t just there because the state requires you to have a board, or your church ministry requires you to have a board with a board chair, but because you recognize that there are going to be moments when you actually need that person to speak on your behalf, and they need to know you. I have been doing some form of ministry since I was 21 and in every case, I either reported to a CEO who was directly accountable to a board, or I reported to the board itself. I’m in my 25th year as a college president, I pastored my own church for five years, and I was in another ministry where I reported to the President. So over this time, you just recognize that you don’t need these relationships every day or all the time, but you do need them and the context becomes critical in terms of when you get into situations where there’s ambiguity. I like to say anybody can pilot the boat when it’s in the harbor. What are you like when you’re on the open sea? You need a partner in ministry, someone other than your spouse, if you have the privilege of being married, my wife is my talking partner. She’s a phenomenal talking partner, and I am high-strung. I’m intense just by wiring. So part of my spiritual discipline is dialing that back so I don’t overreact. One of the greatest ways that I dial back is by processing with my wife. Another way is by processing with my board chair. So together, you know your personal talking partner, then your professional talking partner, you need somebody who will say, let’s not overreact and let’s not rush in. Don’t make it worse. Often the discipline of waiting is actually the right discipline because it gives time to sort out, for emotions to quiet down, and for you to get at what the real issue is.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s incredibly helpful. Gayle, as we look at these crucibles, you outline seven different crucibles in the book itself. Different kinds of categories of crucibles, which, as you know, reading throughout the list, you’re like, Yeah, well, I see how this pops up, and how this does, and as I’m reading through, I’m reflecting on my life, right? So I’m suddenly beginning to put the crucibles I faced into these seven different buckets, which is very, very helpful, I think. As we look at some of these, there are a couple that really stood out to me. All seven of them, obviously, are things that we experience, but there were a couple that I would like for us to spend just a little bit of time on if you could. I’d love for us to go through all seven, but I don’t think we have time for that. But the missed meaning, which was the very first one that you touched on, was one that until I started reading it and digging in, wasn’t one that just came to mind. Some of the others, you know, oh, yeah, we identify those. But missed meaning, the crucible of missed meaning. Can you unpack that for us a little bit, Gayle, because I think this is fascinating? This ties in directly with the whole idea of self-awareness, self-understanding, and then self-correctedness. So, talk to us about missed meaning.

Gayle Beebe
I love the parables of Christ. So this is based on Matthew 13, the parable of the sower and the seed. What I like about that is you will always be seen but never perceiving, always hearing but never understanding. But blessed are your eyes because they see and your ears because they hear and understand. So Christ Himself says we can be in the same context. Two people can see and experience the same thing and have completely different understandings of what’s going on, largely because of what’s going on inside of them. When I give speeches on campus, I often use a framework where I talk about what happens to us, what happens inside us, and what happens because of us. What I’m doing is saying, Okay, we have a lot that goes on. One of my favorite poems is T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets where he says they had the experience but they missed the meaning. I think that’s so often true that we actually don’t know how to understand the very experiences we’ve had. Then one of my favorite new learnings. This happened back in March of 2020. Daniel Kahneman came to campus and spoke and he had become famous as a Nobel Prize winner in economics. He wrote the book Thinking Fast and Slow. He had this acronym that stood for what you see is all there is. I write about this in the book because what Kahneman meant is all of us have this tendency to show up and believe that we see things exactly as they are and that we can assess the situation quickly, we can make a sound judgment, and whatever we decide to do will largely turn out for the better. Now he says that’s almost never the case. In fact, it would be better suited if every time we showed up, we said, What’s going on here that we actually don’t understand yet? That we became curious to understand before we actually acted. So in that chapter, I also talk about our Global Studies program. Part of what we do, is we want our students to travel internationally so that they go into foreign cultures and learn how to read cultures because it will help them, not only as they travel right now, but as they prepare for the life that God has for them where, even if they never leave the United States, they’re going to be in different organizations with different organizational cultures. How can they understand both the overt and the subtle signals that come through an organizational or a political culture? That becomes critical in terms of our ability to understand and our ability to respond appropriately, so that we improve situations, not compromise or hurt them.

Jason Daye
Yeah, so Gayle, the crucible then in this situation is that we are making an assumption in some way that we have a firm grasp of what’s going on, and we’re not taking the time to develop our self-awareness, to dig a little more deeply, or to see from others perspectives, right?

Gayle Beebe
Right.

Jason Daye
So what is the shaping and the learning out of that experience that helps you so that the next time you’re a little more open to those types of things?

Gayle Beebe
Well, I think if you can even begin today to think that way. I often talk about, okay, we don’t have all the information, but is this decision directionally correct? Are we headed towards making a decision, even though we don’t have all the information, and then people will often press me a little bit like you’re pressing me down? So I said, Well, we’re trying to figure out, how you balance these two Ben Franklin sayings, Haste makes waste with a stitch in time saves nine. So how do you balance those? That’s part of what you’re doing. If you’re even aware that you need to be balancing them, you’re headed down the right path. Part of what Kahneman wrote in his book, it’s just a beautifully written, brilliant book. What he’s trying to say in Thinking Fast and Slow is we have way too much confidence in how we think fast, which is intuition. Thinking slow is deliberative reason. He said, We need to know when we’ve got to toggle and that we’re thinking fast, but it’s the wrong mode of thinking. We’ve got to flip over to thinking slow so that we can actually grasp what’s going on before we have an accurate intuition.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s super helpful. So great. That’s missed meaning. One of the other crucibles is the crucible of enduring challenge. As this is one that, I mean, it kind of resonates, I think, with probably every ministry leader, right? Like, it always seems like there’s something that you’re facing in ministry. It could be big, it could be small, but there’s always a day when there’s something that you’re challenged with. Talk to us a little bit about how God is shaping us through this idea of the crucible of enduring challenge.

Gayle Beebe
Well, I think both Romans and James have a lot to say, especially James, about how we develop perseverance, and that perseverance is the proving of our faith. I loved writing this chapter because it allowed me to… I went to Winston Churchill High School in Eugene, Oregon, and I had this awesome English teacher. She would give us extra credit by getting us to match quotes Churchill said and to whom he said them and most of them were insults. I mean, they were humorous insults. But one of his quotes was, when you’re going through hell, keep going. That’s his quote about perseverance. So what I loved in Churchill was that he had some historic failures, but he remained committed. He believed God had placed him there to lead the British Empire. People may vote him out of office, but he was determined to get back in and continue. So you read through, I’ve read several of the books that chronicle his great life, but also his utter disasters. He just believed that he was here for a certain purpose and he lived into that. Then I used the book that Henry Kissinger wrote, the last book he published, it came out right around his 100th birthday, back in May of 2023. He would pass away later in 2023. But he looked at six world leaders, and they were all people he knew, or in the case of Richard Nixon, worked for directly, and each of them had inherited a set of problems. Each of them made great headway in a variety of areas, some of which were surprising, but they also left some unresolved problems. Why I like Kissinger’s book, it’s just titled Leadership, is I think that that’s more true of ministry. When you deal with business people, particularly entrepreneurs, they’re usually thinking in 10-year increments. How do I start a business, grow a business, shed expenses, and get a business sold in a 10-year cycle? That’s really their mindset is, open, develop, sell, and close in 10 years. Well, political life, like ministry, or, in my case, a college, we are here to steward it for a period of time. We’re here to make it better. We’re here to hand it off so it can continue. Our school has just started its 88th year. That’s extremely old for a business and that’s extremely young for a college. You have to understand the time frame of your ministry. So many ministries have great starts, and the goal is not for them to get sunsetted, but for them to actually go on and actually rise in their prominence and rise in their contribution. So the enduring challenge is if you’re in a ministry that you have problems and challenges, things that you’ve got to get done, but you also have a vision of where you want the ministry to go, do all you can to get on the trajectory of where you want the ministry to go, so that when you hand it off, it has the momentum that can take it to an even higher expression of itself, and I think you discover that through perseverance.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s excellent, Gayle. To press in on that, because one of the flip sides to this, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, is that you can become a stubborn leader. That’s the dark side of this, right? The dark side of perseverance is becoming stubborn. So how do we guard against that as ministry leaders? How do we guard against not convincing ourselves that we’re being courageous and enduring through whatever when we’re really just being stubborn?

Gayle Beebe
Well, great point. I mean, I think that all of us need people in our lives that we trust, that we know have our best interests at heart, and are filled with goodwill for us. Those are the people that are often not your elders and they’re not your chair. But they’re people who love you, know your family, pray for you every day, and care about you. When those people come to you and say, we really think it’s time, I listen to that. On page 28 of The Crucible of Enduring Challenge, I have 12 things that, and this is kind of fun. So Cindy Bunch, the Senior VP and Acquisitions Editor at IVP, said, Okay, I know you’ve got a list. What’s your list? I said, Well, I have ideas in my head. That’s true, but I’ve never written down a list. She goes, I want the list. So those 12 are on the list, and one of them that goes right to the question you’re asking me is always work to outlast the opposition, except when you know it’s the right time to leave for the right reason. What I mean by that is, don’t leave during a crisis. My dad always said, don’t get fired, but if you do get fired, get fired for the right reason. I said, Well, Dad, what’s the right reason? He said, Well, the wrong reason is a moral failing. Don’t ever get fired for a moral failing. But the right reason is when a principle has been violated that you yourself know you cannot accept and continue to serve. But I’ve never been in that situation, and I have had situations where it was unclear how everything would resolve, but it was really clear that if I would have opted out, it would have caused more harm than good. It was these people in my life, these trusted prayer partners, that said when I would say, how do you read this? They’d just say, well, whatever you’re thinking, don’t think about leaving. This is the wrong time. It would destabilize rather than invigorate. I think, again, you never know for sure, but you go with what seems appropriate, given all of the signals that are coming in, and you never have all the information. You have enough information, but you don’t have it all. So you do make decisions that are directionally correct, even about whether you should persist or whether you should move on. Then if I could just add this on the moving on part, I think you can sometimes self-select out, but be sure you do minimal harm as you leave an organization to go to a new one. In higher ed, one of the keys is you need to be sure you don’t leave during a capital campaign because capital campaigns are tied so directly to presidents, and I would think this would be true of many of your ministry partners who are listening, that people want to get behind your dreams and goals. If you’re leaving, there’s no guarantee that they’ll continue to be actively involved financially in all these ministries. So think about doing minimal harm, even if you can’t remove all harm.

Jason Daye
Yeah, no, I think it’s very helpful, Gayle. In local church ministry, it may be a capital campaign, it may be launching a new campus, or it may be some sort of vision that you’ve been casting, right? Then, if you just start and you get just down the road a little bit, then all sudden you leave, then there’s a vacuum of that vision and that encouragement. So I think that’s wise. Gayle, as we’re winding down this conversation, it’s been incredible. I’d love to talk for hours on this. I want to be sure one, that there aren’t some things from the different crucibles that you write about that you want to kind of touch upon or that you want to share. It could be just something general, but if there’s anything there, I’d love to give you that opportunity. Then I’d like to give you an opportunity to share some encouragement with our pastors and ministry leaders. So first, is there anything that you really want to touch on that we didn’t hit?

Gayle Beebe
Well, so many people have said the two chapters that really jumped off the page for them were Chapter Three, The Crucible of Human Treachery, and Chapter Six, The Crucible of Human Suffering. What I was trying to achieve in the crucible of human treachery is the recognition that all of us experience betrayal. Try to minimize it, try not to let it destroy you, but Jesus himself experienced betrayal. So I make a contrast and I borrow from Rabbi Doctor Edwin Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve, where he talks about saboteurs, charlatans, and the way in which people are there for different reasons, and sometimes mixed voters are hard to sort out. I even make a comparison with, why did Jesus restore Peter but not raise Judas from the dead. What’s the difference between kind of passive complicity in the case of Peter and active destruction? I use the term schadenfreude, which comes from a 20th-century term from psychoanalysis, which means not just that you envy the gifts God has given somebody else, but you actively seek to destroy the gifts God has given somebody else, and that’s the difference. I think you can deal with envy in a normal sense as just a spiritual malady. Schadenfreude is destructive for individuals and for institutions, and you’ve got to root those people out. The crucible of human suffering. I have learned so much about my life with God as a result of certainly the death of my favorite pastor who motivated me to go to Princeton for seminary, Don Green, and the death of my father at age 60. But those were openings and part of the way God used that was to direct me to Dr Allan Diogenes. Allen was my thesis advisor at Princeton and had written a book called Traces of God in a Frequently Hostile World. It’s a very mundane title for an absolutely brilliant, helpful book, and I learned how to respond to experiences of evil and suffering in a way that redeemed them. I realized and discovered the importance that part of the whole event is my response to what happened and that that was critical in terms of really seeing God’s greater purpose at work. So I would want to be able to highlight those two chapters and what they amplify in terms of realities that we face in every area of ministry.

Jason Daye
Yeah. Gayle, I’m glad you brought that up because the human betrayal part, in that crucible, as you shared. In ministry, we almost need to expect to feelbetrayed at some point in ministry. I think when I first went into pastoral ministry, again, you kind of touched on this at the beginning of our conversation. We all enter into it and we’re thinking, hey, we’re here. We’re part of the kingdom. We’re doing great things for God. We’re excited. We’re loving people, we’re encouraging people, we’re discipling people, and you get into it, and then you realize that there are some times you bump into people that they’ll actually really gut you. I remember going through these experiences and just being gutted, or watching my wife feel gutted over someone that she thought was a friend and trusted, and then things happen in ministry. So, I would like to lean in a little more on that for you just a minute, Gayle. If we look at this idea of the crucible of human treachery when we feel betrayed in ministry, what are some helpful ways for us to not allow that betrayal to derail us to such a degree that we’re like, why am I even in ministry altogether? I mean, how do we balance that? Because it is painful. It’s personally painful when we feel betrayed.

Gayle Beebe
Well, it’s personally painful, and then you end up at some level feeling, gosh, why didn’t I see that? Why didn’t I see the behavior? I think you’ve got to try to keep from getting so hyper-vigilant that you literally lose your capacity to have confidence in people, and the goodwill of people, but it should make you pay better attention. What I’ve noticed over time is that if I sense somebody kind of emotionally distancing themselves from me, pay attention to that because if they’ve been close and suddenly they’re acting distant, somebody has gotten to them, or somebody has influenced their perception. You don’t know what it is yet, but boy, learn to read the non-verbal cues because there’s so much evidence that people, unless they’re pathological, almost everybody communicates non-verbally, and they communicate their proximity to your ideas non-verbally, so pay attention to that. If you have been victimized by human treachery, recognize that you have a blind spot and use it as an opportunity to actually learn, rather than to be re-victimized later on. Ministry only gets done because we trust in the goodwill of people, and for the most part, people are worthy of our trust, but there are always people who aren’t, and you’re back to Jesus admonishing us to be as wise as serpents and innocent as doves. I have often taken that to mean be discerning, but don’t be reactive or given to retribution. God gives us wisdom and God gives us insight, even in the moment, listen and pay attention for it.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I appreciate that so much, Gayle, because we probably all know or have friends in ministry who are at a place in their life, and maybe someone watching or listening along feels this way. You almost become cynical about people. It’s almost this jaded factor and you just become so cynical that you’re losing touch with the hope of what Christ can do in people, right?

Gayle Beebe
Well, Jason, I mean, here’s an example that I think is worth paying attention to, even though nobody would think of this as a good source. But they say about Lyndon Johnson that he was a vote counter because he’d had too many experiences of people telling him one thing and then voting a different way. In a similar sort of way I like to get people on the record, meaning I want to know, Jason, okay, thank you for the way you spoke so positively about my idea. Now, do you have any hesitation? Is there anything that remains unclear about it? If you can get into one-on-one conversations with people who are publicly supporting you, you’ll be able to tell, are they playing me or are they really with me. I think that’s critical in terms of resolving so you don’t run with paranoia. Lyndon Johnson was incredibly manipulative so not a great example. But on that, I think he understood human nature, and we should learn from that.

Jason Daye
Yeah, and that idea of proximity, Gayle. I mean, we’ve made that clear, and that’s one of the things that we can fall into in ministry and leadership, is we begin to isolate ourselves, right? We don’t have these relationships. We don’t have these people we can bounce things off of. We’re not looking beneath the veneer and having, as you said, just honest conversations to dig a little more deeply and hear a little more from people. Those things we see prevent us from, I mean, it makes the crucibles into hardships that can sink us, as opposed to a way that God can shape us, right?

Gayle Beebe
Oh, exactly.

Jason Daye
Excellent. Well, this has been such a rich conversation. Gayle, thank you so much. I do want to give you the opportunity to share. You’ve got the eyes and ears of pastors and ministry leaders. I’d love for you just to share some words of encouragement for them as we close down.

Gayle Beebe
Well, I love you. I love what you do. I love your willingness to do it every day, regardless of a culture in a society that doesn’t value the church and pastoral ministry the way it once did. I recently was at the Lausanne Congress in Seoul, and it was the gathering for the 50 year anniversary of the gathering that Billy Graham and John Stott started. I tell you, it was so awesome because what I experienced was that we get kind of embroiled in the politics of the American church, and we sometimes lose perspective on what God is doing in the world. By 2030 there’ll be roughly 9 billion people. 3 billion of them will self-identify as Christian. I mean, that is just phenomenal. By 2030. That’s only six years away. This is coming in from demographers who were at Lausanne. I left Lausanne so encouraged by what God is doing on the face of the earth. I mean, there are 220 countries and territories. There are only 193 countries registered with the UN, two observer states, 46 territories, and you had virtually the entire globe represented at Lausanne. What you saw and what you experienced was people who are fully devoted to Christ, looking for how God is inspiring their work in the world, and it was just awesome to get to be a part of that. So what you’re doing is incredibly important, the witness that you’re bearing, we’re at a cultural moment that doesn’t value it in the same way. Sometimes I think we’re in kind of a period of the Dark Ages. But long after our time on Earth is done, we will derive the greatest meaning during our time on Earth by committing our life to purposes that will outlive us, ones that honor God, and you’re deeply engaged in that as a central, primary value of your life. Thank you for doing it.

Jason Daye
Awesome, brother. What a great word of encouragement, Gayle. Man, it’s been so good to have you with us on FrontStage Backstage. I want to remind everyone that we do have the toolkit that compliments this conversation. So if you want to dig more deeply into what Gayle and I were discussing, the crucibles and different things, and if you want to get a link to where you can purchase the book so you can read it with your team, I think it’d be a great thing to take your team through. I love, Gayle, that you have reflection questions at the end of each chapter, and that’d be a great thing to take your ministry team through at your local church. You can find all those resources at PastorServe.org/network. We’ll have all that for you and available to you. So please be sure to check that out. Gayle, it’s been an absolute pleasure to spend some time with you. Thank you for making time in your schedule to be with us here on FrontStage Backstage.

Gayle Beebe
Jason, my privilege. I loved it. Thank you.

Jason Daye
All right. God bless you.

Gayle Beebe
God bless you.

Jason Daye
Now, before you go, I want to remind you of an incredible free resource that our team puts together every single week to help you and your team dig more deeply and maximize the conversation that we just had. This is the weekly toolkit that we provide. And we understand that it’s one thing to listen or watch an episode, but it’s something entirely different to actually take what you’ve heard, what you’ve watched, what you’ve seen, and apply it to your life and to your ministry. You see, FrontStage BackStage is more than just a podcast or YouTube show about ministry leadership, we are a complete resource to help train you and your entire ministry team as you seek to grow and develop in life in ministry. Every single week, we provide a weekly toolkit which has all types of tools in it to help you do just that. Now you can find this at PastorServe.org/network. That’s PastorServe.org/network. And there you will find all of our shows, all of our episodes and all of our weekly toolkits. Now inside the toolkit are several tools including video links and audio links for you to share with your team. There are resource links to different resources and tools that were mentioned in the conversation, and several other tools, but the greatest thing is the ministry leaders growth guide. Our team pulls key insights and concepts from every conversation with our amazing guests. And then we also create engaging questions for you and your team to consider and process, providing space for you to reflect on how that episode’s topic relates to your unique context, at your local church, in your ministry and in your life. Now you can use these questions in your regular staff meetings to guide your conversation as you invest in the growth of your ministry leaders. You can find the weekly toolkit at PastorServe.org/network We encourage you to check out that free resource. Until next time, I’m Jason Daye encouraging you to love well, live well, and lead well. God bless.