When Life has Lost its Joy : Alastair Sterne

Full-Text Transcript

If you’ve ever encountered seasons where you longed to rediscover and cultivate joy in your life and ministry, then you’re going to enjoy today’s conversation.

Jason Daye
In this episode, I’m joined by Alastair Sterne. Alastair is the Founding Pastor of St Peter’s Fireside in Vancouver and currently serves as an Associate Pastor at Coastline Church in Victoria. His most recent book is entitled Longing for Joy. Together, Alastair and I discuss some of the beautiful ways that God shows up in challenging seasons when we’re experiencing hopelessness, despair, and uncertainty. Alastair shares from his own journey some of the surprises that God brought his way and some of the practices that have helped him to not only experience joy but also share joy with those around him. Are you ready? Let’s go.

Jason Daye
Hello, friends, and welcome to another insightful episode of FrontStage BackStage. I am your host, Jason Daye, and I have the honor and privilege every single week of sitting down with a trusted ministry leader, and we tackle a topic all in an effort to help you and ministry leaders just like you embrace healthy and sustainable rhythms, and really thrive in your life and leadership. We are proud to be a part of the Pastor Serve Network. So, each week, not only do I get to have a great conversation and bring it to you, but we also create an entire toolkit that compliments the conversation. You can find the toolkit for this episode, and every episode, at PastorServe.org/network. In that toolkit, you’ll find a number of resources, including our Ministry Leaders Growth Guide. Now, this growth guide includes insights that we’ve pulled out of our conversation. It also includes reflection questions, and we encourage you to go through those questions yourself and even use those questions with the ministry leaders at your local church. This gives you an opportunity to not only dig deeper into the topic we discussed but to see how it applies to your unique context. So you can check that out at PastorServe.org/network. Now, at Pastor Serve, we love walking alongside ministry leaders, and if you would like to learn more about how you can receive a complimentary coaching session from one of our trusted ministry coaches, you can get that information at PastorServe.org/freesession. Now, for those of you who are 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 love getting to know our audience better, and we’ll be praying for you and for your ministry. Whether you’re joining us on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform, please be sure to subscribe and follow because you do not want to miss out on these great conversations. We have a wonderful conversation for you this week. At this time, I’d like to welcome Alastair Sterne to the show. Alastair, welcome, brother.

Alastair Sterne
Oh, so good to be with you. Thanks for having me on the show.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I’m excited about this conversation. I’m excited about this topic, and I want to begin by just thanking you, Alastair, for sharing your journey with us. You’ve written a book called Longing for Joy, and it really helps accentuate and invites us into a journey that you’ve walked and an opportunity for us to really begin to maybe rediscover joy in our lives. So, I want to start the conversation out, Alastair, by giving you an opportunity to share a little bit of your journey, your journey to rediscovering joy. You say that you found yourself at a point where, like the psalmist, you had lost the joy of your salvation. You recognized that you were experiencing joylessness. So I’d love it if you would just start us off with your story and where you found yourself, how you kind of got there, and then we’ll move on from there.

Alastair Sterne
Yeah, of course. I think what’s interesting about losing the joy of your salvation is that you don’t recognize it until quite a bit after the fact. It’s not like you wake up the day after it started to happen and realize oh, I’m losing the joy of my salvation. As I work out in the book, I think there were things going on in David’s life leading up to those tragic events with Uriah and Bathsheba before he penned that Psalm, saying that he’ll restore to me the joy of my salvation in Psalm 51. That there are things leading up to that kind of loss and that sense of joylessness that creeps into our lives. So I church planted in the beginning of 2012, and I don’t know, I guess, like a year into that process, I started recognizing there are signs of joylessness, and there may have been hints along the way, but I kept just kind of brushing them aside. Like, Oh, this is just a busy season. This is just a hard season. We had our first child during that season. So, you can kind of just say, Well, you know, it’s just a lot of craziness. And there are some events going on in the background, some tragedies, some deaths, and some difficulties. So, you can easily just be like, Oh, this is just a grieving season, or this is just a challenging season, but there was a baseline where I wasn’t feeling happy or sad, I was actually just kind of going through life numb and a conflict in my ministry led me to have my first and only anxiety attack, and I ended up in my doctor’s office, and she had me do a mental health questionnaire and diagnosed me with severe depression, which was quite a shock. I would have said that I have a depressive kind of streak. I’m a little bit like Eeyore, but there are lots of different kinds of depression, and for me I’m a high-functioning depressive person. So, I always have this picture of, well, if you’re depressed, you can’t get out of bed, and you can’t do anything. That wasn’t the challenge for me. For me, it was more like a dread that piggybacked on my life, where, even though I was doing important work that I believed in, I had this nagging sense that, hey, this doesn’t really matter. So that diagnosis, I describe it almost like receiving the gift of tongues. It was like a new language that I didn’t have before, where suddenly I could describe my experience in a new way and say, Well, this is what’s actually going on in my life. If this is what’s going on, how do I make room in my life for God to meet me in this? Initially, when I had discovered my joylessness, I just wanted to double down on pursuing joy, right? God is most glorified in us when we’re most satisfied in him. That John Piper quote, it’s beautiful. So you start pushing yourself, like, well, I just need to be more satisfied in God. It wasn’t fixing it, and what I realized was it was because I wasn’t actually inviting God into the problem. I was just trying to use God as a band-aid to the problem. So as I started to encounter God in the valleys, in the Depression, in the sense of purposelessness, and as I started taking different steps, whether that was medication for a season, a new habit of running, meeting with a counselor, going deeper in my spiritual friendships, and being more raw and honest. I can’t point to any one thing, but it was like all of those were different tools that helped cultivate the garden of my soul. So, simultaneously, I actually started feeling worse, but I also started feeling happier. What research psychologists point out is you can’t selectively numb emotions. So you numb one, you numb them all, and that’s what I had been doing. I didn’t want to feel the grief over a friend who had died by suicide. I didn’t want to feel the grief of other things I’d gone through, and so I was just pushing it away, and I’d become numb. As I faced those things, I had to face them with the Lord, but as I faced them with the Lord, I actually discovered there was a joy meeting me in the sorrow. I really vividly remember the first time I felt joy again after a long season where I wouldn’t be able to tell you how long it was since I had felt joy, probably a couple of years, and I was just sitting on my couch, and suddenly it was just joyful for no reason. I was just sitting there on a day off, and it struck me that I want to feel this more, but in an authentic way, not in a hey, let’s just pretend we’re happy when we’re not, or let’s just always be optimistic. I want the Lord to Restore to me the joy of my salvation. What I came to see was he was already answering that prayer before I prayed it, but the answer looked quite a bit different than the solutions I thought of.

Jason Daye
Wow. I love that. A couple of things I want to get to the answers, obviously. But before we get there, there are a couple of things that you mentioned. One was that you were like a high-functioning depressive person, right? And I imagine that there are probably many in ministry who probably felt the same way you did. Like, I’m not really wrestling with depression because I’m not having trouble getting out of bed in the morning. I’m not pushing everything off. So help us understand a little bit, Alastair, this idea of being a high-functioning person who’s still struggling with depression. What have you learned about that specifically that might be helpful to others? Like, what are maybe some of the signs that you might be wrestling with and those types of things that might be helpful to others who could find themselves in a similar situation where they don’t feel like they’re personally struggling with depression, and yet they’re not experiencing the fullness of that joy?

Alastair Sterne
Yeah. I think the signs vary, obviously, from person to person. For me, some of the signs are a growing existential dread, where, like in Ecclesiastes, it’s meaningless. Meaningless. Everything’s meaningless. It goes deeper than just reflecting that everything’s vapor and doesn’t last. It’s actually going into kind of like a dread, like nothing really matters. If that’s growing in me, and the hope of the gospel is being outweighed by that, that’s usually a sign. I can become just very, like, actually, goal-focused, rather than anything else. So if I find that I can’t slow down, if I can’t enjoy my day off, or if I’m not present in the places that aren’t work, then that’s often a sign that I’m trying to escape something, and I escape by going to work. I think being present is a big one. So, like, when I’m at dinner, is my mind able to be present to that moment? When I’m with a friend at a coffee am I actually able to be present to the conversation, or am I kind of off in my own world? These are all like little things that kind of are indicators, I’d say. To me, the check engine light is always like, well, when’s the last time I felt something, like an emotion? I’m a slow, emotion kind of person. In our family, we talk about how there are firecracker emotions and volcano emotions. My wife and my eldest daughter are firecrackers. When they feel something, bang, it goes off, and you know what it is, whatever it is. Whereas my youngest daughter and I are volcanos, where it’s like, what we’re feeling actually is in the depths, and by the time it comes out, it is big, but it kind of takes you by surprise. So if I’m not ever having either a negative or positive emotion, if we want to use it in those terms, or a heavy or lighter emotion, that’s usually a sign of like, why am I not feeling things? Why am I escaping to work? Why am I always feeling distant from people? A book that was really helpful for me on this was Spurgeon’s Sorrows. I think it was Zack Eswine who wrote that one. What’s amazing about Spurgeon is he’s writing, it’s a collection of his different writings on him being very open about mental health, if you want to use that term, but the depression he experienced. What blew me away about that book was like, here’s someone writing before the advent of psychology, identifying that depression has spiritual origins. It has physiological origins, and it has circumstantial origins. So that’s the other thing is that circumstances you have some degree of control over, right? Spiritual to some degree, right? There are things that God invites us to do. But if there’s a physiological dimension, I think this is where ministry leaders get tripped up. We think, well, we just gotta think our way out of this, forgetting that our mind is embodied in our bodies. You can’t think your way out of your high cholesterol, right? You can’t think your way out of the heart surgery. Yet, when it comes to our minds, and this was the barrier for me, I was so afraid of medication because I thought I was somehow circumventing who I am or compromising it. For me, medication changed nothing about my personality. It just gave me the capacity and the reprieve to actually start dealing with some of the things that I just didn’t have the energy for. So, I’m not saying medication is the right solution for everybody. I would say, if you’re even thinking, Hey, am I depressed? You should probably go talk to someone. Go talk to your doctor, set up a meeting with a counselor, or talk to a mentor you trust or a friend. But if that thought is even on your radar, there’s a good chance that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, right? So that would be my advice. I think pastors, we unconsciously adopt both the false expectations people cast on us, the expectations we think we should have, and the ones we think they’re casting on us. So, we live by all these layers of expectations that no one is actually asking of us, and so we have to kind of continually go back to like, what’s the Lord asking of me in my work? What does it mean to be a faithful human serving Him and not this image that I’ve created?

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s so good. Super helpful. Thank you for that. I guess this leads to a question. For those of us in ministry who are walking with God, you would think that even though there are challenges in ministry and even though these other things, you’d think, Hey, man, if you’re someone who has a deep faith in God, then you probably wouldn’t be experiencing the absence of joy in your life. That could be like the assumption we make, however, we know that that’s a dangerous assumption. So, Alastair, can you help us think through that? How is it that we might experience that absence of joy in our lives?

Alastair Sterne
Yeah, I love what you’re pointing out because it’s so selective the way we do it with scripture. So we take a command like, Rejoice always, and we read it purely on an emotive level, be happy always. Be joyful always. I mean, some paraphrases translate it that way, but when we see the command, love one another. Actually, I’m surprised most people don’t interpret that emotively. It’s an action to will the good of another. So we can recognize that love has two dimensions. There’s the emotion, but there’s the action, and you can act in love even if the emotion isn’t there. You can love one another even if there’s an absence of the feeling in the moment. I would say it’s the same with rejoicing. You can choose to rejoice. You can choose to focus on what’s good. You can choose to give praise. You can choose to lift up God’s glory. You can choose to honor him. And sometimes your heart will follow. Sometimes you’re already feeling joyful and so you rejoice. Sometimes you rejoice in the hope of joy following suit. I mean, it’s the same way when you put your hands in the air to worship. It’s not like, oh, the spirit overtook your body, your hands in your air, and what’s happening? It’s no, I’m posturing my body to help my heart follow. So for people that kind of get caught up in this selective like, well, the apostle Paul was always joyful, like, I’ll grant it, right? The spirit was producing a beautiful joy in his life. Let’s just not forget, in Corinthians, when he’s like, we were despairing to the point of death, right? Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep. We want to be like the apostle. Heaven forbid we be like Jeremiah. Heaven forbid we be like the man of sorrows. So I think we get really myopic in our readings of the scriptures because a joyful life is certainly more appealing than a long, prophetic life where your country ultimately falls apart and you’re driven to the bottom of a pit. So I think for pastors, we gotta keep our theological imagination wide. We have to recognize that there will be seasons where the joy is rich. There will be seasons where, I mean, Paul talks about with Galatians, I’m perplexed about you. The Greek is much harsher, and, he has that deep, he says the deep anxiety I carry for the church. So there is actually a godly anxiety. That’s even revolutionary when I realized that some anxiety is actually good, some yearnings of the heart are actually good when it’s for God’s kingdom and the good of his people. Look at Jesus lamenting over Jerusalem. So an important part of my healing was expanding my vision for what the emotional life of God looks like. If you just look through the Gospels and look at all the different things Jesus felt, ranging from love, joy, and compassion, to anger. That one instance where he heals the leper and then tells him, it’s early in Mark’s gospel. Then says, be quiet. Don’t tell anyone. And he tells everybody. Eugene Boring, working in his commentaries, translates the emotion of Christ, and that is snorted and snarled at the disease, right? Just this, like there are really guttural Greek words for Christ’s emotions. I think when we see that, we can say, okay, yes, rejoice always, pray without ceasing, and give thanks in all circumstances. These are actions and habits I want to adopt because they position me toward the kingdom of God and frankly, it’s the will of God for your life. Like it’s underscored. So if you’re ever confused about what God wants, well, start rejoicing, start praying, and start giving thanks, like you’re in his will. Simultaneously, you might be feeling grief and sorrow and all the opposite feelings than the actions. So I think, especially in pastoral ministry, then slowing down to take stock of your emotional life. If that’s a slow reality for you, I know some pastors where it’s like, they wear their emotions on their sleeve. They have a different experience. So I’m just speaking more to people, maybe who are inclined like me, where it’s like you don’t always know what you’re feeling until like two days later. So you have to make space then to be like, What am I feeling? And maybe you get out the feelings wheel, and you gotta identify it that way. That was a godsend for me.

Jason Daye
That’s helpful. That’s so helpful. Thank you for that. You mentioned earlier this idea of joy and kind of contrasting this idea of finding true joy in God, rather than God as some sort of band-aid. Now you also share that you found some truths about joy that were surprising to you. Maybe not the answers that you’re necessarily looking for. How does our tendency to use God as a band-aid come up and maybe fall short and help us not fully understand some of these surprising truths and surprising answers about joy? What are some of those answers that you found that were a little bit surprising for you?

Alastair Sterne
Yeah, again, starting with rejoice always, right? That can kind of become the classic Band-Aid, right? Any problem, I’m just going positive. It’s popular now to talk about toxic positivity, and for what that’s trying to identify, I’ll concede and say that can be a nice paradigm for us to think through the ways that we sometimes passively or actively try to focus on the sunny side because we think that is a more God-honoring way of living than lamenting, grieving, or complaining, but heaven forbid, grumbling, right? We don’t want to end up like Israel in the desert. So we end up, though, getting tunnel vision of what God wants, where God is, and if I’m not feeling joy, either I’m doing something wrong, or God is displeased with me. It becomes very transactional and I think that misses how joy functions in our lives naturally, and it misses how the Spirit produces joy in us. For me, the first surprise was like closing the divide between what I would call earthly or natural joys and spiritual or heavenly joys. I think a lot of writers hold those apart, right? Yeah, it’s good that you have Joy on Earth, but the joy of God is better. You’re going to hear those sermons where they’ll pit it against happiness. Happiness is shallow. Hauerwas said happiness is too shallow of a concept for the Christian life. Of course, Aquinas would say happiness was the highest achievement. So, these definitions of happiness have radically changed over the course of Christian theology. But we pit them against each other. So we want the spiritual and joy in God and that’s the only joy that’s really authentic. That’s the only joy that really matters. Then we’re left being like, what does that even feel like? So you can’t know the joy of the Holy Spirit if you’ve never felt joy because how would you be able to identify that emotion? I mean, again, it would be akin to the gift of tongues. You’d be feeling this emotion and you have no idea what it is unless someone interprets it for you. So that was an aha, of like, maybe all the natural joys in Christ are transfigured to be received as gifts. So when I feel joy holding my child, when I feel joy over a sunrise, or when I feel joy in a conversation with a friend, what if those are like bread crumbs leading me into the presence of God? What if in turning those over to God in thanksgiving, spiritual joy takes fruit? That was really helpful for me because I realized, if I want to recover my joy of salvation, I actually just need to recover my joy and trust the spirit is in the natural joys and is also going to illuminate the spiritual joys. Of course, there’s the promise of Christ in John 15, where it’s like, I’ve told you these things, so that my joy will be in you, and your joy will be made complete. So there’s this beautiful dynamic where actually Christ’s own joy is being born in us and it’s completing our own joys. So there’s this intermingling of our joy and the Spirit’s joy imparted in us. I can’t control the Spirit and how the Spirit is going to birth those things, but what I’ve found is, when I focus on cultivating joy holistically while remaining rooted in Christ as my goal, that the Spirit surprises me in every single joy, whether that’s joy in prayer, joy in worship, or joy in a hike, the Spirit’s in it all.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that. That’s a great surprise that you learned in that. I think it’s something that helps ground us to a degree as well. So we’re not just kind of up in these lofty thoughts surrounding joy, but we’re experiencing the joy in very tangible ways, in close ways. Those can be, as you said, those bread crumbs that lead us into the joy in the Lord. You mentioned something about gratitude, and I’d like to lean in there a little bit. How does gratitude relate to joy and what practices around gratitude help us on our journey in experiencing joy?

Alastair Sterne
Gratitude is so cool. I’m really influenced by the work of Robert Emmons, who is one of the pioneer gratitude researchers, he discovered that, and these were incredible tests that they did. He had won a big grant, and he didn’t want to research gratitude, but that’s what he won the grant for. So he was actually was actually grumpy about it. It’s hilarious. They found that when they went into hospital wards of people with long-term diseases that can’t be healed, basically, and had them practice gratitude for six weeks, and then had a control group of people who didn’t practice gratitude. Immediately after the six weeks, there were already qualitative differences between the two groups, ranging from better health or just better attitude. So you could kind of work them through the surveys. The wild thing was, a year later, they ran the same surveys with the same groups, and even if the people after that six weeks hadn’t continued in a habit of gratitude, which was in that case, journaling, they were still maintaining their baselines. So prior to this research, there’s this idea called the hedonic treadmill, which is as happy as you feel on an average day, and is basically where you’re going to land. So there might be moments where you run a bit faster or you’re a bit happier, you’re a bit slower and you’re depressed, but basically what you feel is your set point of happiness. What the gratitude research showed is that gratitude can change the set point. For me, my first introduction to gratitude was during my season of depression, I bought a five-year gratitude journal. So on each page, there’s like a little, tiny paragraph, and I would just bullet-point at the end of each day what I’m grateful for. Sometimes it was as mundane as modern dentistry and mint in my toothpaste. As I grew in it, it’d be people, or it’d be a moment. A friend of mine once said, Well, why don’t you try to capture where was a moment of joy, right? So I started developing that, but having done that for 10 years now, I can go back and look at a journal and there’s five entries, and I can feel the joy all over again. Willie Jennings says gratitude builds on ramps to joy. So what’s fascinating to me about gratitude and another emotion like anger, is, that while I don’t have a lot of control over how I feel love or how I feel joy, I can actually make myself angry, right? If we’re honest, that’s actually pretty easy to do. I can just stew on something and I’m angry and with gratitude, you can actually make yourself feel grateful. It’s interesting. So by practicing gratitude, it’s kind of building this pathway where joy kind of just flows. I think what’s hard about joy is we conflate it with other emotions because it intermingles with love, peace, and gratitude. So we can say, well, gratitude is joy. No gratitude is different than joy, but it’s a close cousin. It’s related. It’s the usher leading you into the procession, right? It’s a wonderful practice. So for me, again, I see Paul’s exhortation in 1 Thessalonians 5, where he says, rejoice always, pray without ceasing, and give thanks in all circumstances. Those are three practices of gratitude that are like a circle because when I rejoice, I’m actually praying, and when I’m rejoicing, I’m actually giving thanks, and when I’m giving thanks, I’m praying. It’s just this intermingling and learning how to do that as an ongoing way of praying really does rewire you. Keeping a gratitude journal helps a lot. You know, even from secular practices, there are a lot of people doing good work on gratitude, where they realize that if you can just slow down and think about something positive, a moment that makes you happy, you stay with that moment for just 30 seconds, maybe you try to associate it with a color, and then you try to imagine that color growing, in like one minute, it’ll change your life. You’ll feel grateful. So the research on gratitude is neat because what I think it shows us is that God hardwired us for thanksgiving. God hardwired us for praise. When we start doing those things, the neuroscientists get excited because you’re actually creating new neuro-pathways. So that’s a practice that I personally think, Hey, if you’re lacking joy, and joy is this elusive emotion where it’s like, sometimes you feel joy, sometimes you don’t, sometimes it surprises you, sometimes it doesn’t. Gratitude, though, you can feel at any point. So start there. One other surprise that just came to me that has just escaped my brain simultaneously. In these practices, I thought there would be a silver bullet, and what I realized was, Andrew Root, a theologian defines joy as the Spirit ministering to us, and that’s a clever definition. So what I found was like, rather than trying to find the life hack, rather than finding the 10 steps or the silver bullet, I just looked at my life and said, what can I do today to make room in my heart for the Lord? I explore those different things in my book. So whether that’s abiding in Christ, whether that’s seeking wisdom, whether that’s being with people, or learning how to tell your story and the Gospel, enjoying creation, learning to grieve well, practicing gratitude, or making the most of time as scripture envisions that. Not like a hyper-productivity westernism. What I found was that joy is in the cultivation and it’s the outcome of the cultivation. So there’s this beautiful invitation where, when we do all of our life with God, and we embrace the full spectrum of what it means to be human before God, the glories of it, the suffering of it, the frustrations of it, and the joy of it, we can discover that God is fully present in all those things and that God is, in fact, the God of joy. That joy is an attribute of God and that joy actually finds its origin in the heart of God. So anytime we’re feeling joy, we’re actually pretty close to the heart of God.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s beautiful. Absolutely love that. I love, Alastair, how you include some of these different practices and different ways that we can kind of experience and cultivate, as you said, joy in your book. One of the things that I think is interesting, you mentioned that we have this beautiful experience as we’re cultivating the joy, but then also the idea of joy itself, right? Kind of the outcome of the cultivation. So we’re getting it getting both ways. But there’s another thing you touch on, and that is how, not only are we cultivating joy for ourselves, but it helps us to express joy in the world around us. It helps us to maybe add a bit of joy to the world around us. Can you talk to us a bit about that kind of receiving and expressing of joy? The experience, but then also what that does to those around us and the world around us.

Alastair Sterne
So I mentioned Spurgeon’s Sorrows. That was a book that helped me expand my framework for my experience of depression. Another book that was really pivotal for me is a collection of sermons by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones called Spiritual Depression. In the introduction of that book, he says, the greatest need of the hour is a revived and joyful church. A bunch of unhappy Christians do nothing for the cause of Christ. I think he’s a little harsher than that, but really, I originally, aside from trying to recover my own joy, I actually first went down a path of thinking the church should be a joyful witness. So how can we cultivate joy communally? Actually, that’s what my doctorate was on. So I was looking at the missional side of joy, of what it means to be a joyful witness. The first thing that I would say, on a practical level is, if I can gently critique John Piper because I recognize he’s much smarter than I am, and he’s done good work on this. But I sometimes think he conflates his zeal with his joy and his personal temperament as a standard for all. Let me explain. I just think that joy looks different from person to person, same emotion embodied differently. When I was doing my research, I was meeting up with a friend named Mark and he was really excited, but he said, Look, a lot of people don’t realize that I’m deeply joyful, but I have a stoic disposition. I feel joy all the time, so don’t miss the quietly joyful. That was so helpful. If you look at it, it’s like, yeah, there are people who wear joy on their sleeves and they just light up a room, but there are also people who carry joy in their souls, kind of like a laughter of the heart. So the first thing, when it talked about cultivating joy as a missional approach for the church, is to recognize like, do not project your own temperament or some uniform temperament of what a joyful church looks like. You’re not going to conform everyone to be bubbly extroverts who are like big, woo, and networking, to use a bunch of business slang. If you’re going to pursue joy, you’ve got to accept that it’s going to be embodied in a variety of diverse ways. But what’s the same is that it’s the same emotion. That was a game changer for me because I realized, as a pastor, First off, I was projecting a bit of my own joylessness. So why is my church not more joyful? Well, it’s because I wasn’t joyful and maybe they were more joyful, but I just didn’t have eyes to see. Then I started seeing that joy in quieter ways. Then I realized that, again, it’s back to that volcano and firecracker. There’s people with firecracker joy and there’s people with volcano joy. So don’t get stuck on temperament. It’s always just my first qualifier to pastors, like you’re not going to get everyone feeling like John Piper feels, and that’s okay. Piper works for some people and for other people, it doesn’t. What I’m trying to cast is just a kind of gentle alternative. I think, for a church, what I discovered is you’re already probably doing everything you need to do to cultivate joy as a body. You just gotta highlight it a bit. Worship should be forming your people in the image of Christ. Praising God brings you into His presence of joy. Connecting people in community brings you into the joy of people. Helping create opportunities where your church can go serve the marginalized and excluded is opportunities to discover the joy of people in another way. You’re probably already doing it and that is really key. There’s a beautiful book called Happy Church. The author’s name is escaping me right now. But when I read that, that was basically his thesis. Your church is probably already doing the stuff it needs to do. You don’t need to add a bunch of stuff. You just need to bring a bit more intention. My research was really focused on both narrative identity, and how we construe our identity as Christians. But also, what practices do we need to both form our identity and our joy simultaneously? How do we have a more joyful identity and therefore a more joyful witness? What I found was a question that has still captivated me is well, when did Jesus feel joy? Maybe that’s where I should start. It’s three places. The first is Luke 7, where the disciples go out on the first missionary journey and come back. They’re rejoicing that the demons listen to them. Jesus says, Don’t rejoice in that, but rejoice that your name is written in heaven. Then it says, and then he prayed, full of joy, rejoicing in the Holy Spirit, I praise you, Father. So there’s this Trinitarian joy revealed in that moment. The next place is Luke 15, the joy of lost things being found. Then the next place is Hebrews 12, for the joy set before him he endured the cross. So what we see is that Jesus takes a lot of joy in our salvation, in us having our names written in the Book of Life, and in lost people finding their way home, or more accurately, God finding lost people. And enduring the cross, not just for returning at the right hand of God, but in the full theology of Hebrews, bringing many sons and daughters to glory. So the short answer is, what gives Jesus joy? You do. And when that becomes the basis of your identity, when you realize, like, oh, the face of God shines upon me. That God’s eyes light up like when a parent holds their newborn. That the joy of his beloved son is also his joy in us because we’re in Christ, and as the Father has loved Christ, so he’s loved us, and we get to abide in that love. So I think at the end of the day, as a pastor, your work is really the work of crafting a solid identity as your church, rather than, well, our our vision is to be a joyful witness that’s not going to get you there. What’s going to get you there is the slow, arduous, and patient work of helping your people root their identity in Christ, helping them develop the spiritual practices they need to be rooted in Christ and to be loving one another and serving your local community on mission and maybe some global work. If that’s in the capacity of your church, and those things most churches are already doing, we just have to see the joy in it. I think that’s a really wonderful way to go about it, rather than here’s the seven-step plan that’ll revolutionize your church, and suddenly you’ll be more on mission. I’ve been around long enough now, like no one’s figured out the trick. There will be another book that tells you they have, right? Another and another. No one’s figured it out. Books have good ideas, and you should try some of those ideas if you’re inspired, but there’s no silver bullet in this thing. So just stick to the faithful stuff that Jesus asked you to do, which is, to tend to his sheep, preach the gospel, duly administer the sacraments, or the ordinances, however you call it, and look outward. See that the harvest is plentiful and the workers are few, and so cultivate an identity where your people realize God loves them and rejoices in them, and that love is big enough to go and serve the city, neighborhood, and area you’re in with a sacrificial love that finds joy in the service and not just begrudging duty.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love it. Absolutely love it, Alastair. As we’re kind of winding down, I want to give you an opportunity to speak directly to pastors, ministry leaders, men, and women who are watching or listening. For someone who might be experiencing joylessness right now, what words of encouragement would you have for them?

Alastair Sterne
Yeah, no one ever likes my answer, but I’m deeply convinced it’s the right one. Pay attention to your joylessness. So rather than it being a problem to solve, maybe it’s an experience to step more fully into. I relate it to learning how to brush my daughter’s hair. I just figured you’d go at it with big hacks, right? That just hurts and creates distrust. What you have to do is kind of work from the tips upward and tend to the knots as you find them. What if you learn to brush the hair of joylessness? Rather than hack it all at once and try to fix it quickly, you work from the tips upwards, and you tend to the knots as you find them. In my own experience, and in the experience that I’ve observed in others, if you tend to your joylessness, you’ll learn to actually find joy in brushing the hair of joylessness. That God will meet you in the knots, in the tangled-up longings, in the hurts, and in the beauties. So it’s the opposite if you’re like, I’m lacking happiness and joy, the inclinations will pursue that. I’m saying, maybe run in the opposite direction and find joy there. Maybe actually pay attention to the thing you’re trying to fix and maybe God is calling you into that place to find how deep His salvation really goes.

Jason Daye
I love it, brother. Good words. Thank you so much. Your book, Longing for Joy, I’ve enjoyed the book thus far as I’ve been working through it. I want to say it’s not just an assessment of joy, but even the way that you write, I love the way you write. It’s beautiful and it’s so inviting. Inviting people along on this journey. So I really encourage those who are watching and listening, if this resonates with you, this conversation, I really encourage you to pick up Alastair’s book, Looking for Joy, and we’ll have links to the book, other resources, other things that have been mentioned in the conversation, and all of that in the toolkit for this episode. You can get that PastorServe.org/network. Alastair, if people want to connect with you or the ministry of the work that you’re doing, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Alastair Sterne
My wife and I write articles and podcasts together at OrdinaryMatters.org, and then I also have a personal website, AlastairSterne.com. In the show notes, you can see how to spell my name correctly. Both first and last name will throw you a curveball. I’m on Instagram, but I’m not great on the social media, if I’m honest. But Instagram’s probably, if you want to connect with me, that’s a good place to connect with me.

Jason Daye
Awesome. We will have links to your podcast and to your site in the toolkit for this episode at PastorServe.org/network, and you guys can download that. Brother, it has been a joy to hang out with you today. Thank you so much for just your words and your posture in all this. Again, the word that keeps coming to mind is inviting. It’s a beautiful invitation. It’s the invitation that Christ makes to us and, Alastair, you’re helping us experience that invitation even more deeply. So thank you so much for making the time to be with us.

Alastair Sterne
Yeah, it’s been a gift to be with you, Jason, thanks for having me.

Jason Daye
Alright. Thank you, brother. 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.