Note: From, The Augustinian Pastor: Deep Wisdom for Modern Ministry (Baker Academic, 2026). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
In May of 2021 I got on a plane. I was exhausted. After fourteen months of Zoom meetings, of COVID protocol discussions, of second-, third-, and seventh- guessing programming decisions, and of all the burdens of ministry, I was ready to get away. I was ready to get away from what had been the slow grind of ministry and to spend time with friends, fellow pastors who had been bearing similar burdens. But on the deeper level and in a way that I was not yet able to put into words, what I wanted was to get away from myself. As a pastor and as a disciple of Jesus, I was coming to the end of myself. I had heard the pandemic horror stories from my fellow pastors, but that had not been my experience. Yes, things had been difficult. They had been for all of us, no matter who we were. But the church I served was intact and united, pursuing a new season of ministry and on the precipice of fruitful outreach to our community. The emails in my inbox were supportive and encouraging, not critical, accusative, or divisive. No, what I was facing was deeper than what could be accounted for by the challenges of ministry. The wall I was running up against was in my own heart.
As far as I could tell, there was no mental breakdown or moral failure landmine on the immediate horizon. But something was not well with my soul. Irritable, frustrated, and listless, I felt trapped. While I could probably have muscled on through for some time longer, the path I was on was not one I could sustain indefinitely. And the walls that were confining me didn’t come from external circumstances. There wasn’t a book or webinar that was going to provide a solution. Intuitively I knew that putting my résumé out in search of another pastoral call wasn’t going to fix much. Finding a new line of work wasn’t going to help, either. I would only bring the same thin and tired self with me wherever I went.
So I got on that plane, hoping that a change of scenery, even ever so brief, could do something about the mire I found myself in. As I made my way to gather with my friends, there was within my heart the faintest of prayers: “Lord, help.”
And the Lord is good; he is “able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think” (Eph. 3:20). God’s gracious providence was at work in ways I did not understand at the time. The trip I took from Tennessee to Colorado that May was the beginning of another journey, of a long and slow work in my heart. It’s only in retrospect that I realized how this work coincided with getting on that airplane. And it is a work that is by no means done. It is in many ways a continuation of something that God had been doing in my heart for a much longer time, and it is a work that will continue for the rest of my life. That work is a grappling with the story God had been writing in my life, a coming to terms with the man I was and am, the ghosts and shadows I carried with me into every room I showed up in as a pastor and as a disciple. It was a discovery of the profundity and pain and mercy of grace, of Jesus’s persistence to refine and heal me.
In 383 Augustine took his own trip, boarding a ship bound from Carthage to Rome. He was a man who was coming to the end of himself. His prospects in his homeland of North Africa were drying up. His teaching post in Carthage, instructing young men in rhetoric in the most prestigious city in this Roman province, was an honor indicative of his prodigious talent and ability. Yet he was unhappy with his position. The students he taught were undisciplined, unruly, and even violent. He had some time earlier given himself to Manichaeism, a religion that seemed able to match his spiritual and philosophical seriousness. But doubts about this way of life had lingered, and when given the chance to meet and question Faustus, a leader and expert in the Manichaean way, he’d been disappointed. Augustine found himself at vocational and intellectual dead ends. And so he got on a ship and headed to Rome, hoping that a change of scenery might do him some good.
Looking back on that journey, Augustine would later see that in his travels God was doing something very different than he himself intended. Somewhere between fifteen to twenty years after he departed for Rome, Augustine wrote in his Confessions, “You dealt with me in such a way that I was persuaded to move to Rome, to teach there instead what I had been teaching at Carthage. I must not omit to confess to you the reasons why I was so persuaded, because in them your deep, secret providence was at work, and your ever-present Mercy” [Augustine, Confessions]. Augustine was hoping that a change of scenery would improve his prospects; God was doing a very different work – humbling, disentangling, wooing. And that book, Confessions, is Augustine’s attempt to grapple with the story that God was writing in his life.
It is difficult to capture the depth and breadth of Augustine’s Confessions. It is a work that has captured the imagination of Christians of different cultures, eras, and traditions for over fifteen hundred years – a testament to the power of this book that is part prayer, part autobiography, and part theological rumination. Indeed, one of the chief errors that scholars can make is to try to squeeze this work into a single, tidy interpretive framework. On every page of Confessions Augustine is never doing just one thing, never speaking to just one reader, never communicating just one truth. It is a work that can be read again and again, with greater and greater profit each time.
As I have read and reread Confessions, I have come to the conclusion that in writing this book one of Augustine’s hopes is to model for us men and women who lead in ministry the necessity of grappling with the story that God is working out in our lives. Eventually, we will be faced with the truth that we have come to the end of ourselves. We will no longer be able to outrun the events of our past; we will no longer be able to drift along on a shallow faith, to minister out of a thin life of prayer. Like Jacob wrestling with the nameless stranger in Genesis 32, we will have to wrestle with our God and refuse to let him go until he blesses us.
In Confessions Augustine shows us that those who lead in ministry must come to terms with their stories. Augustine began to write Confessions less than a decade after becoming a pastor and within a handful of years of becoming bishop of Hippo. As Gary Wills says about Augustine’s motives for writing Confessions, “He had reached a stage where he wanted to define his role in a new way. Bishops in the Africa of his time were rarely great preachers and never great theologians. Augustine now wanted to be a philosopher-bishop, of a type that he had encountered in Ambrose at Milan, but one that was a novelty in his home country” [Wills, Augustine’s “Confessions”: A Biography]. But even more than presenting himself as a “philosopher- bishop,” Augustine was also searching for something that would help him persevere in the often perplexing, sometimes tedious, always arduous work of following Jesus as a pastor. Confessions is marked by a tone different from that of the previous writings of a confident recent convert who pontificated at Cassiacum, a religious community on the shores of Lake Como. Noting this change in tone, Peter Brown writes, “We met him, at Cassiacum, as a man certain of his future: his books are all of them programmes; even his reminiscences are no more than a list of those obstacles to perfection, which he hoped soon to surmount. In the Confessions, he is a man who has lost this certain future: as we shall see, he is obsessed by the need to understand what had really happened to him in his distant past” [Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, 2nd ed.].
The Augustine who writes Confessions has once again come to the end of himself. And this time, with the benefit of this perspective, Augustine is determined to discover what he needs to know about God and about himself that will help him endure the long pilgrimage of life as a disciple and as a pastor. In recording these thoughts in the way he does, Augustine was implicitly redefining the role of pastor not just for himself. Of the many things that Confessions is, it is an invitation to his fellow pastors to the necessary work of God-awareness and self-knowledge that should characterize those who lead God’s people.
As I have taken Augustine as a mentor for the work of pastoral ministry, I have tried to apprentice myself to him and what he is doing in his Confessions. I have sought to understand the story that God has given me: the miracle of Jesus’s personal attention to my life, the stubborn reality of my pride, the particular patterns of sin that he is rescuing me from, and the deeper life into which he continues to invite me. In this chapter I invite you to consider apprenticing yourself in the same way. As we look at the shape of Confessions, we will see Augustine’s belief in the goodness of God’s gracious care to a single life and story, his reckoning with the complex realities of sin, and then finally the continuing necessity of the work of keeping the heart humbly open to God.
As you listen to Augustine tell his story in light of these principles, you might ask yourself: How is God inviting me to know myself and my story more truthfully?
Excerpted with permission from The Augustinian Pastor: Deep Wisdom for Modern Ministry by Joseph Sherrard. Copyright 2026, Baker Academic.
Joseph Sherrard, pastor of discipleship, Signal Mountain Presbyterian Church
