“So, take care of yourselves now.”
That is the charge Dallas Willard left with his final class. Not a strategy for ministry, not a word about production, just care for the life. You can watch or read the lecture here: Spirituality and Whole Life. For thirty-four weeks, this Substack has walked through Willard’s 2012 Spirituality and Ministry intensive at Fuller, lecture by lecture. If you are just joining, here is the arc: Willard taught that pastors are teachers of the nations, and this last lecture is the capstone, where he lands on the whole life: a pastoral spirituality that is actionable and accessible. His thesis was a single sentence: “your call is to live your life in God and to His Glory and what you get out of your life is the person you become and actually that’s what God gets out of your life, too.” God does not measure a pastor by what he produces, sermons, programs, attendance, but by the person he becomes under God’s reign: a life formed in the image of Christ, lived for his kingdom, serving for the good of the world.
Your Life Is Bigger Than Your Job, Your Ministry, and Your Work
Willard drew four concentric circles: your life, your work, your ministry, your job. “Aspects of me that I am in great danger of confusing.” Your job is “what you are paid to do; Its how you earn a living. Your job is something that men, human beings assign to you.” Your ministry is different: “something God has given to you; men do not give you a ministry. God gives you a ministry and your ministry is that part of God’s special work in my time that He has specifically allotted to me.” Your work is “the total of lasting goods, which I will produce in my lifetime.” And your life encloses them all: “Now, your life, that’s you! And that’s what you are all about. You are not about your job and you are not about your ministry and you are not about your work. Your life is bigger than all of those and I suggest to you that your life is what God is mainly interested in.”
The temptation is to reverse the circles and make the job the encompassing one. Willard warned: “if you live there, you are on a short course to ‘burn out’ and anger and disappointment and you are going to make a lot of other people unhappy.”
Midway through the lecture, Willard handed the floor to Keith Matthews, his teaching assistant for the course and an executive pastor in a large church. Keith told the class what the circles look like when they collapse. “When I crashed and burned,” Keith said, “my life circle was gone and my job circle invaded fully the ministry circle.” So he went to his congregation and his leadership and said, “I am going to reorder my life. I am not coming in until 10. I am getting the life circle in order.” He started ordering from the outside in. His congregation learned to live with a pastor who arrived at ten. The alternative was a pastor who arrived early and resented everyone by noon. Separating the job from the ministry is what freed him. The job answers to people; the ministry answers to God. Distinguish them, and the pastor is freed from people-pleasing performance and remains committed to the calling God allotted.
Your Formation Comes Before Your Ministry
If the life encloses the ministry, then formation comes first. “If you are working more than 50 hours a week, you are not doing it for God no matter how eloquent your rationalizations.” Willard read the class that line from William Martin’s The Art of Pastoring, a book he admitted he had never read, by a man he did not know. He read it because it was true. “Work a modest day; then step back and rest and this will keep you close to God.” The calendar tells the truth about the soul. “One’s daily planner tells plenty about one’s spiritual formation.”
Someone will object that the church needs the pastor at full capacity, and pulling back to take care of ourselves lets the work suffer. Fair enough for a crisis week. Willard’s answer is that the work is what suffers when the circles reverse. A pastor living inside the job circle burns out, grows angry, disappoints people, and makes everyone around him unhappy. That is not a theory. That is Keith.
John Cotton, the old Puritan, gave Willard the older vocabulary for the same point. A Christian “lives in his vocation by his faith,” Cotton wrote, and “all the life I live is lived by the faith of the Son of God.” That faith “casts all the failings and burdens of his calling upon the Lord.” Pastors are called to be faithful participants in God’s purposes and to engage in his kingdom work, not to increase their own kingdoms or platforms.
Joy Is a Duty, and Trying Harder Destroys It
Get the circles right, and joy comes back. His charge to the class came in all caps: “WE CAN STOP TRYING SO HARD AND DIRECT OUR MIND TO GOD AND TO OUR PLACE IN THE WORLD, NOW AND FOREVER.” The solutions to our problems, he said, “rarely lie in trying harder and trying too hard will destroy your joy.” When who we are gets consumed by what we do, striving turns addictive, draining the spirit and our relationships. The choice underneath is stark: cease striving and participate in the kingdom of God, or keep seeking to rule our own kingdoms.
Joy, for Willard, is “a sense of overall well-being.” “You have a duty to be joyful,” which can be chosen, cultivated, activated. The past is its great enemy. “One of the worst things about the past is it’s in the barn but you can’t change it.” The way forward, he said, “is to accept the fact that I am a failure. I am a failure,” and to trust that “God has an overarching purpose in my life.” Regret is not guilt: “when I am tempted to go back and feel regret, I am apt to slide into asking for forgiveness again but regret is different from guilt. We don’t want to spend a lot of time in the house of regret but it does prove to be very instructive and humbling about where we are now.”
For the fear of what is ahead and the pressure of what is at hand, Willard reached for the psalms. Psalm 16:8: “I have set the LORD always before me.” Psalm 55:22: “Cast your burden on the LORD, and he will sustain you.” Set the Lord before you; cast the burden on Him. “We can choose to be joyful and we have to.” That is where the disciplines come back in, by indirection.
“It’s almost in the nature of our calling that we promise too much.” So we learn the wisdom of no: “horse sense is the ability to say, ‘Nay.’” We say it “in kindness and in love.” No promises on the spot. We keep a calendar at least two years out, Willard said, and make sure it is not full. Then we “give the next hour to God and delight in what He gives.”
Willard loved the flower beds outside the lecture hall. Beauty, he said, is a discipline: “the beauty that is at hand and the enjoyment of beauty is one of the spiritual disciplines that has great power,” because “it’s very hard to be grumpy when you are looking at a beautiful flower.” Beauty is “the sensible presentation of good.” Time itself can be redeemed. Paul says to redeem the time, and redeem means buy back: “you have to buy it back; that it’s already gone wrong and if it’s gone and if you don’t do something about it, then it’s gone forever.” That is where the disciplines land: a joyful celebration of the good God intends.
To Love God Is to Love the World
An ordered life does not leave the world. It loves it. Willard read the church’s mission from the Epistle to Diognetus, an early Christian letter, “The Christian as the Soul of the World.” Christians are not set apart by country or language or customs, the writer says. They marry, they eat, they dress like their neighbors. But “what the soul is to the body, Christians are to the world.” The world hates them, the writer says, “because they say, ‘Nay.’ They say, ‘No’ to worldly passions.” The same Nay as horse sense, now said to the world.
“It would be wrong for them to flee from it,” the writer concludes, “for this is the position to which God has assigned them and it is glorious. It is glorious.” They stay because God assigned them there: participants in his mission of love within the structures of ordinary life.
Then Willard gave them the paradox of our time: “those who believe in God do not believe in the salvation of the world and those who believe in the future of the world do not believe in God.” Christians expect the final catastrophe. Atheists invent doctrines of salvation. “To love God is to love the world. To love God passionately is to love the world passionately. To hope in God is to hope for the salvation of the world.” God is looking, Willard said, for “sons and daughters who resemble Him enough to love the world enough that He could send them into the world to save it.” That is the whole calling: to join him in his love for the world.
He closed with the charge, “So, take care of yourselves now,” and then a poem, Antonio Machado’s, about a garden. The wind asks the soul for the odor of its roses, and the soul answers, “I have no roses. All the flowers of my garden are dead.” The wind takes the withered petals and leaves, and the soul weeps: “What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?” Willard gave the interpretation himself: “Now, that garden is your life. It’s you!” Teachers of the nations are not managers of religious institutions but people committed to the kingdom in every part of their lives, serving for the good of the world and inviting others into the same.
For Reflection
Willard asked his students: “Is your cup running over? Is your head anointed with oil?” When did you last sit still long enough to know the answer?
Willard asked: “What is your work?” Name the lasting goods your lifetime is producing, apart from your job and your ministry.
Willard closed with the poet’s question: “What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?” That garden is your life. What is one bed you will tend this week?