According to Lifeway Research, 66% of pastors say they need to personally invest in trusting God. Paul Cooper, pastor of Marshall Baptist Church, joins Ben Mandrell, president and CEO of Lifeway Christian Resources, to discuss the Greatest Needs of Pastors study and the breaking point of placing your trust in God’s sovereignty when things are out of your control.
By Staff
Ben Mandrell: Two-thirds of pastors—this might be the statistic that challenged me the most—two-thirds of pastors surveyed in the research say that trusting God is a struggle. Do you think that has to do with the shrinking crowds on Sunday that it’s also causing their faith to struggle? What do you think are the factors that are causing pastors to say “I’m really struggling to believe right now that God’s in charge”?
Paul Cooper: I think that’s a good point. When we are reminded that we’re not in control, we can go one of two ways with that. We can go, “Oh man, nobody’s in control,” or we can go, “I really need to trust God.” And it’s so easy when things seem out of control to go the other way and go, “What is happening?” I remember the week that COVID became the “big thing” and everything started shutting down. My personality is like nothing bothers me. It’s all water off a duck’s back. I’m Joe Cool. It’s just my personality. It’s not something I learned to do. It’s just my natural personality. And my natural personality is to try to spin things to make them positive.
Ben Mandrell: Me too. Find the silver lining.
Paul Cooper: Yeah, I just do it. It’s part of who I am. And there came a crisis point that week where I kept trying to figure out how to spin it and how to make things continue on. How are we still going to gather? What do we need to change together? And it hit me that I can’t spin this. I can’t spin a pandemic. I can’t make us meet now when everything was shutting down. And I had for only the second time in my life, a panic attack. And I was alone. Thankfully, shortly after, my wife came home, and I was like, “Honey, speak into me. Remind me of the truth. Talk me out of this.” It revealed that for so much of my life people would say, “You have such great faith because nothing bothers you.” No, in my head I was figuring out how to make it work and what was okay with it. But when I really, really had to trust God, it became a problem for me.
Ben Mandrell: I am so thankful that you just said out loud that you’ve had a panic attack. Because I think there are a lot of pastors who have had one or maybe it was undiagnosed, but they just had heart palpitations or just a sense of constant anxiety. I don’t know that I can remember a time in my lifetime when so many things felt uncertain or out of control.