God calls us to persevere

On a recent holiday I met a retired lady.  I asked her from where she came, and she said, “From South London”.  “From which part of South London, for I lived in South Norwood, not far from Crystal Palace”, I said.  To which she replied, “I too lived in South Norwood”.  “Which primary school did you attend?”, I said. “Cypress Road Primary School”, she answered.  “Cypress Road!” , I said, “I too was a pupil at Cypress Road”

Although she was a few years younger than me, she knew most of the teachers in whose classes I had been.  There was, for instance, Mrs White, about whom we had a silly little rhyme: “Mrs White, had a fright in the middle of the night. She saw a ghost eating toast half-way up the lamp post”.  Then there was Miss Cox, who on one of my school reports, wrote “Paul likes to sit on his laurels”,  Needless to say, I did not know what she meant, so I asked my parents what Miss Cox meant. Whereupon they laughed and explained that to ‘sit on one’s laurels’ meant. However, the thing I remember most about Cypress Road Primary School was its motto: ‘Persevere’!  I then made it my own motto.  I decided that however difficult life would be, I would never give up: instead I would press on and be determined to achieve the goals which I believed God would have me set.  Those of you who have read my autobiography, This is My Story: A Story of Life, Faith, and Ministry (Wipf & Stock, Eugene Oregon, 2018) will know that at almost every stage of my life I have faced all manner of difficulties. It would have been so much easier to have given up, but I persevered and eventually many of the goals which I had set were met.

Interestingly, the importance of persevering is something which the unknown writer of the Letter to the Hebrews mentions: for toward the end of his letter, he wrote, “Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus” (Hebrews 12.1.2a). The underlying Greek word translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) is hupomone, which in my Greek New Testament Lexicon is given the meanings of ‘patience, endurance, fortitude, steadfastness, perseverance’. Indeed, the Good News Bible (GNB) translates this word found in Hebs 12.1  as “Let us run with determination the race”. Perseverance involves determination. Indeed, in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, perseverance is defined as ‘constant or steadfast persistence in a course of action or in pursuit of an aim’.

So, adopting the motto ‘Persevere’, over the last 70+ years I have persevered in spite of the difficulties I have on occasion experienced during my ministry, I never gave up.  Two examples in particular come to mind.  When I discovered that when I was appointed Principal of a theological, my faculty were convinced that the college should have appointed one of their number rather than me. This inevitably made life extraordinarily difficult. Toward the end of my principalship my colleagues sought to get rid of me.  For a while I ‘persevered’, but the pressure became so intense that I collapsed under the pressure and felt that the only option was to resign on the condition that there was a ‘committee of enquiry’.  After nine months this found in my favour and said that I had been done “an injustice”.  Thankfully, the college issued me an apology, but refused to give a public apology on the ground that the college’s reputation would suffer irreparable harm. The college chairman said, he believed that I was strong enough to be able to cope with a private apology, whereas the college could well collapse if this apology were to be made public. So against the advice of one very good friend who said that I would be a fool to return to be a pastor of a local Baptist church, I persevered for I believed that God had called me into ministry. Eventually I was called to be the Senior Minister of Central Baptist Church, Chelmsford. This proved to be far more of a challenge than I ever thought. After three years, I proposed to the Church Meeting (which in a Baptist Church makes all the key decisions) that we needed to redevelop our dark and gloomy premises with its uncomfortable wooden pews.  The church agreed to spend up to £1.3 million, but then everything went wrong and instead of spending £1.3 million, we ended up spending £2 million.  Not surprisingly some people blamed me and my fellow lay leaders for getting the church in such a mess. Sunday church attendance plummeted. Yet we ‘persevered’, so that after 21 years we ended up not just with a building fit for purpose in the 21^st century, but also with a church community of some 1,000 people.

As I know to my own cost, perseverance is not easy. Yet, as a general rule, we can only achieve the goals we believe God has led us to set if we do ‘persevere’ and not give up.  For me perhaps persevering is easier than for other ministers.  Although I am not blessed with ‘a thick skin’, nonetheless as the Myers-Briggs profile revealed, I am a ‘strong natural leader’.  Even so, I needed friends around me to encourage me at a time when I was tempted to despair. More importantly, for many years I had  various spiritual directors with whom I could be totally open and who helped me to discern how God would have me serve as a pastor of a local church or as a theological college principal.  They listened not just to my hopes and dreams, but also to my pain and even allowed me to weep in their presence. There were times when I wondered where God was when life was so incredibly tough.  However, I discovered the truth of Paul’s words when he wrote: “We know that in all things God works for good with those who love him” (Romans 8.28 GNB).  Unfortunately there are some English versions which say that “all things work for good”.  All things most certainly do not work for good – if so, where was God in the Nazi concentration camps?

On reflection, I wonder whether only ‘strong natural leaders’ find it easiest to persevere. It seems to me that other people with different personalities can surely persevere by making an effort to persevere.  What’s more, let’s not forget that God is at work in our lives through his Holy Spirit. We might even say that perseverance is a gift of the Spirit, or at least a combination of divine and human energy.

To persevere is not to give up. In a non-church context, two examples come to mind of people who refused to give up in spite of difficulties they faced. For instance, J.K. Rowling, despite facing financial hardship and rejection by publishers she approached, persevered and kept writing. Eventually she was incredibly successful with her Harry Potter series. Similarly, Thomas Edison persevered through numerous failures to invent the electric light bulb. In 1879 he developed an incandescent lightbulb system that could last a record-breaking 14.5 hours.  Or within the pages of the New Testament, we see that the Apostle Paul persevered in spite of much opposition thanks to his unwavering commitment to his faith and his willingness to endure hardships for Jesus.

Yes, even when all the odds seem to be stacked up against us, God calls us to persevere and not give up!