Love the Hard Ones

Christ has filled his church with many kind, generous, and gracious people.

His Spirit is clearly at work in them. But the Spirit is working in others too, even the opinionated and ungrateful. These men and women may not be a joy to pastor. They like to argue, or they’re grumpy, or they chronically complain—or all of the above.

They might be cantankerous, but they’re still God’s. And he calls us to shepherd them as well.

Prickly people are unavoidable in pastoral ministry. Craig Barnes writes in his delightful book Diary of a Pastor’s Soul, “I soon found every grumpy, pain-in-the-neck parishioner I thought I’d left in the last congregation front and center in the new one. Different names and faces, but the exact same people. There is no moving up out of any of that. Nor should there be.”* We come to a new congregation and quickly realize that our capacity for love is going to be stretched here too.

Difficult people are unavoidable. Yet that’s exactly what we’d like to do: avoid.

I can’t deny the sense of intimidation blended with dislike that fills me when I glance ten feet over in the church hall and see someone I should approach: the brother with uncomfortably strong views on church music, or the elderly sister who always gripes that I haven’t visited lately (even though I was there just last month). I hesitate for a moment. I spy an easy escape route toward the coffee urn. Yet I know that I shouldn’t. By God’s grace, I know that I need to love the difficult ones.

Two millennia ago, Paul counseled his colleague Timothy about the challenge of pastoring people who are fractious and stubborn. These were the folks in Timothy’s church who loved controversy. They enjoyed an argument, even if it was about something foolish. And it only led to congregational disorder. It’s easy to imagine Timothy wanting to walk away from these troublemakers or pretending they weren’t there. Or getting angry. Or wanting to dig in and win the argument once and for all—and certainly Timothy could have, for he had God’s truth on his side.

But to his exasperated fellow pastor Paul says, “The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil” (2 Tim. 2:24). Kindness may be what we least feel like showing, and patient endurance is going to require supernatural intervention. But thankfully, God is intervening in the pastor’s life and in the lives of his people.

For the truth is that frustrating people are human and broken, just like every one of us. Behind their abrasiveness might be a sad story. That aloofness could be merely a front. Those complaints could actually be cries for help, and their obstinacy might mask a deep fear. So it is always better to walk over and show grace. We need not be intimidated, not if we’re motivated by good things. When God helps us overcome our hesitation with courage and our dislike with love, he will certainly bless our ministry.

As pastors, we should pray that God will increase our love. We don’t always see how supernatural this is until we encounter someone who is difficult to love. I remember a time in my own ministry when I struggled hard to love a brother. He was harsh in manner and critical in speech, and on more than one occasion he treated me in a way that was deeply unfair. Humanly speaking, I had good reason to shut him out.

But during that hard season of ministry, God convicted me with 1 Corinthians 13. I found myself reading that chapter over and over, and the Lord graciously gave me clarity about what to do. I saw that I must not respond with rudeness. I must not become irritable or resentful. I must not, because “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (v. 7).

This is the kind of patient and enduring love that God in Christ has always shown me, and it was the kind of love I needed to show here.

Dealing with hard people often shows pastors where life’s real fight is. The battle isn’t against a taxing person but against our own weakness. It’s not a battle with someone’s bizarre views but with our impatience. It’s a fight against our fear of man or our worries about tomorrow. We realize how much we want to control our situation ourselves, and maybe how little we trust in God to help and guide us.

So we pray for ourselves, that God would strengthen our love and our trust. We pray for the hard ones. And then we love them. 

* M. Craig Barnes, Diary of a Pastor’s Soul: The Holy Moments in a Life of Ministry (Brazos, 2020), 139.

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Excerpt from The Ministry of Small Things: Wisdom for Those Who Serve the Church