I will be honest. I have wondered why pastors never retire. Do they feel that if it is a calling from God they are obligated to preach and minister until they die? One thing that I have heard from my pastor friends over the years is, what does all of my years in the ministry prepare me to do? So pastors keep on until they cannot perform anymore.
Reading about professional athletes I began to understand a little more about the trials and tribulations that professional people face when they choose to step down. It's like stepping off of a cliff they say. One day you have it all, and in a moment you are on the outside looking in.
People who have worked their whole adult life face the loneliness that comes when you retire. No more feeling needed or feeling important. Social contacts disappear.
One thing that NFL players who have successfully negotiated life after football do is that they never let football define who they are. Football was simply what they did. It was not their identity. They had education and they found something to fill the rest of their lives with. Those who lived and breathed football and are focused like a laser beam on football suffer the worst when football is over.
It is normal for new converts to be enthused and excited and zealous. It is normal for the fire to die down in time. It is pathetic to see old saints acting giddy like everything is brand new when it is not.
To pastor Mitchell's credit, he not only sent us out. When the time came to call it quits, he brought us home. He did not leave us to die in some awful place that God would not visit and never did anything.
So maybe retirement is not a good idea after all for pastors.
One final thought. We call people who leave our church rebels and backsliders. Some leave to waste their lives in sin. Some leave because they find it impossible to stay. I watched a man who's life had fallen apart in church just turn and walk away from me. It was one of the saddest things that I have ever seen. I never saw him again.
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