Trust and Trustworthiness
The relationship between a pastor and his people is an essential ingredient to a solid, stable, and steadily growing church. It is the character of the pastor that determines to a large degree the health of this vital relationship. Like all of life’s significant relationships, trust is of the highest necessity. When trust is strong, the church is strong. When trust is weak or lacking, the church is vulnerable to all manner of difficulties.
The character of a leader is directly associated with the quality of trustworthiness. Trust, by definition, is given to a leader when his trustworthiness of character is known, even if the place he is leading his people to is unknown. Trust and distrust are both earned over time in the minds and hearts of those who are being led. With a pastor who earns trust, there is great potential for the church to grow and produce Kingdom results. When the pastor earns distrust, the church has great potential for disarray, disunity, and discord.
Trust is a fragile thing in relationships. I have oftentimes through the years told couples in premarital and marital counseling that love and trust must come together to form and sustain the covenant relationship of marriage. But love and trust have different capacities and qualities. I have told some couples that love is like plexiglass. Love is tough. It can take repeated blows with a sledgehammer. But trust is like a fine piece of China. The least careless handling of it, and it will shatter into many pieces. It may not be lost, but it is very difficult to make whole again. Rebuilding trust is a painstaking task requiring much patience. Broken trust must be put back together piece-by-piece. It’s a huge challenge on the part of the pastor and the people.
Many pastors have learned this lesson the hard way and suffered many years of ministry misery as a result. All pastors make mistakes of judgment and errors in ignorance or immaturity. We all fall short in one way or another. All pastors are sinners just like everyone else. We sin in word, thought, and deed. These shortcomings don’t necessarily need to be ministry killers. They don’t always create mistrust, especially when a pastor wisely decides to own it and sincerely seeks the forgiveness of his people. In my opinion, most congregations are eager to forgive their pastor in his occasional missteps and lapses of judgment – times when his zeal overruns his wisdom. Oftentimes, a congregation’s love and respect for their pastor will grow and their trust in his leadership will increase when he fails, not in a pattern of moral negligence, but in a pattern of growth in personal character and leadership skills learned through failures.
Trustworthy leaders are essential to the life and work of God’s people. Early in the journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, Moses was exhausting himself with all the responsibilities of leadership and, especially, having to arbitrate disputes and conflicts among the people. His father-in-law, Jethro, who had come to check on things, immediately saw the extreme stress Moses was under and offered a sensible solution. Exodus 18 records Jethro’s wise counsel: “Moses’ father-in-law replied, ‘What you are doing is not good. You and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out. The work is too heavy for you; you cannot handle it alone. Listen now to me and I will give you some advice, and may God be with you. You must be the people’s representative before God and bring their disputes to him. Teach them his decrees and instructions, and show them the way they are to live and how they are to behave. But select capable men from all the people—men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain—and appoint them as officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens. Have them serve as judges for the people at all times, but have them bring every difficult case to you; the simple cases they can decide themselves. That will make your load lighter, because they will share it with you. If you do this and God so commands, you will be able to stand the strain, and all these people will go home satisfied’” (Exodus 18:17-23 NIV). Moses was wise enough (maybe weary enough as well) to successfully put Jethro’s plan to work. These god-fearing, trustworthy men were a key to that success.
The Apostle Paul gave glory to God for his grace in his salvation and his calling as a servant of Christ. In I Timothy 1, he wrote Timothy: “I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has given me strength to do his work. He considered me trustworthy and appointed me to serve him, even though I used to blaspheme the name of Christ. In my insolence, I persecuted his people. But God had mercy on me because I did it in ignorance and unbelief. Oh, how generous and gracious our Lord was! He filled me with the faith and love that come from Christ Jesus” (I Timothy 1:12-14 NLT). The Lord, who looks on the heart and not the outer appearance, saw his character as one to whom he could entrust the Gospel.
As Paul brought Timothy along in his role and responsibility as a pastor, he must have envisioned the long-term mission of the church and need for constantly raising up new leaders among the people. In his second epistle to Timothy, he wrote: “Timothy, my dear son, be strong through the grace that God gives you in Christ Jesus. You have heard me teach things that have been confirmed by many reliable witnesses. Now teach these truths to other trustworthy people who will be able to pass them on to others” (II Timothy 2:1-2 NLT).
Trustworthy men and women are still in demand today as much as ever in the work of the church, and building and maintaining a relationship of trust between the pastor and people is still paramount to Kingdom building itself.