Paul David Tripp - Dangerous Calling: Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry

Thank you for downloading this Crossway book.

Sign-up for the Crossway Newsletter for updates on special offers, new resources, and exciting global ministry initiatives:

Crossway Newsletter

Or, if you prefer, we would love to connect with you online:

Dangerous Calling is a dangerous book to read. It is also a book every person in ministry should read. It will cut you to the heart and bring massive conviction if you read it with a humility and ask God to expose sins deeply hidden in your soul. It cuts, but it also provides biblical remedies for healing. I would love to put this book in the hand of every seminarian who walks on my campus.

Daniel L. Akin, President, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

Our wives, children, and the members we serve will have a new husband, father, and pastor by Friday if we follow Tripps example and give a humble and honest reading of this bookone with our inner Pharisee and scribe turned off. We will see the need to save ourselves from a very dark and destructive force working against pastors: undiagnosed pastoral self-righteousness. With much wisdom and conviction, Tripps Dangerous Calling preaches the gospel of grace to the men who are preaching the gospel Sunday after Sunday to everyone but themselves.

Eric C. Redmond, Executive Pastoral Assistant and Bible Professor in Residence, New Canaan Baptist Church; Council member, The Gospel Coalition

Pastoral ministry is a dangerous calling, and this is a dangerous book. It will not leave you unchanged. Pastors need pastors, and by Gods grace, every page of this book will minister to your heart, your marriage, your family, and the people you servein ways you never thought you needed. This book digs down into the inner recesses of our hearts to reveal our greatest idols and to point to our greatest needs. It will make you joyfully uncomfortable and, by Gods grace, will bring you to your knees in tears of thankfulness, only to help lift your weary head to fix your renewed gaze on Christ. This book is like a mirror that redirects our hearts reflection from ourselves to Christ. If this book were a sermon, it would be the most weighty and refreshing sermon youve ever needed to hear. My sincere hope is that it will be translated into multiple languages, become required reading in seminaries, and be distributed to Christians everywhere who know theyre called to serve God and others using the gifts with which the Holy Spirit has equipped them.

Burk Parsons, Associate Pastor, Saint Andrews Chapel, Sanford, Florida; editor, Tabletalk magazine

Few would regard a pastors role as a dangerous calling, but few people are as qualified and insightful as Paul Tripp to penetrate the snares and potential pitfalls associated with pastoral ministry. Fewer still would prescribe such gospel-based and local churchrooted remedies. This excellent volume should be read, re-read, and applied.

Terry Virgo, founder of Newfrontiers

Other Crossway Books by Paul David Tripp:

Awe: Why It Matters for Everything We Think, Say, and Do (2010)

Come, Let Us Adore Him: A Daily Advent Devotional (2010)

New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional (2010)

Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family (2010)

Sex in a Broken World: How Christ Redeems What Sin Distorts (2010)

A Shelter in the Time of Storm: Meditations on God and Trouble (2010)

What Did You Expect? Redeeming the Realities of Marriage (2010)

Whiter Than Snow: Meditations on Sin and Mercy (2010)

Dangerous Calling: Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry

Copyright 2012 by Paul David Tripp

Published by Crossway
1300 Crescent Street
Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Dual Identity inc.

First printing 2012

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible ( The Holy Bible, English Standard Version ), copyright 2001 by Crossway , a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers . Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-3582-6
PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-3583-3
Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-3584-0
ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-3585-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tripp, Paul David, 1950

BV4011.3. T75 2012

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

To all the pastors who have cared for me.
The imprint of your hands is still on me,
and I am grateful.

CONTENTS

Books are penned for many reasons. There are explanatory books written to help you understand something that has left many people confused. There are encouraging books written to speak into the discouragement of life in a fallen world and give you motivating hope and a reason to continue. There are instructive books that help you know how to do something that you need to do but simply dont know how. There are exegetical books that take apart a portion of Gods Word, helping you to understand it and to live in light of its truths. There are ways in which the book you are about to read has elements of all four of these types of books, yet that isnt meant to be its main focus.

This is a diagnostic book . It is written to help you take an honest look at yourself in the heart- and life-exposing mirror of the Word of Godto see things that are wrong and need correcting and to help you place yourself once again under the healing and transforming power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Of the books that I have written, I found this one the hardest to write, not because of the writing process itself but because its pages expose the ugliness of my own heart and display how desperate my need for grace continues to be. It is not an exaggeration to say that I wept my way through writing some of the chapters. There were moments when I would go upstairs to share what I had written with Luella, the tears of conviction would come, and I would be unable to continue. But as I did my writing, it did not leave me feeling discouraged or hopeless but, rather, with a deeper hope in the gospel and a greater joy in ministry than I think I have ever known.

This book is written to confront the issue of the often unhealthy shape of pastoral culture and to put on the table the temptations that are either unique to or intensified by pastoral ministry. This is a book of warning that calls you to humble self-reflection and change. It is written to make you uncomfortable, to motivate you toward change. At points it may make you angry, but I am convinced that the content of this book is a reflection of what God has called me to do. Perhaps we have become too comfortable. Perhaps we have quit examining ourselves and the culture that surrounds those of us who have been called to ministry in the local church. I think that, more than any other book I have written, I wrote this book because I could not live with not writing it. And I have launched myself on a ministry career direction to get help for pastors who have lost their way.