Patience is vital to faithful ministry. Ask Adoniram Judson or William Carey who both labored over six years before their faithful ministry was rewarded. Or the prophet Jeremiah who saw no visible fruit after decades of ministry.

McKitterick (2020) cautions below regarding how impatience can cause even the best-intentioned servant to become unfaithful in their pursuit of being fruitful, while in the words of Hudson Taylor, “Attempting great things for God!”

We live in a society that expects everything now! We don’t like to wait for anything. You could say we live in a society of impatience. While this sin is concerning to the Lord in every believer’s life, its danger becomes exponentially greater when shepherding the church. Impatience illustrates an attempt to usurp the workings of God by taking matters into one’s own hands. Impatience can lead to rash decisions, manipulative leadership, and discontentment. It can frustrate the church by either dragging them along, or worse, running so far ahead that they are left in the dust. Impatience is often friends with irritability, anger, self-will, and other ministry crippling sins.

The team at Empowering Action is keenly aware of this danger. It wasn’t until our 8th year of ministry that our Savings Groups program was finally launched, which could have understandably resulted in frustration from staff members with both passion and proficiency in financial ministry. And yet after three years now and a slow methodical rollout we are grateful to the Lord for his acquiescence to be serving: 500 individuals at 25 churches in Haiti, 275 participants at 8 Haitian churches within the Dominican Republic, and 120 persons at 6 Dominican churches.

Faithfulness may require that we, as William Carey said, plod, while others foolishly rush ahead.

References:

McKitterick, J. (2020, July 21). Are we there yet? The need for patience in pastoral ministry. The Expositor’s Seminary. https://expositors.org/are-we-there-yet-the-need-for-patience-in-pastoral-ministry/