September 7, 2024
INDIANAPOLIS — It’s been 13 years since Adam Dooley opened an envelope addressed to him marked “personal” — and afterward quit the ministry.
It came during the “worst” season of his life — his son was battling leukemia, and they were traveling weekly to St. Jude for treatments. Dooley said the church he was serving was also “angry about everything.”
And he said nothing could have prepared him for what the anonymous letter said.
“It said, ‘Since you are a part-time pastor, we think you should get a church in Memphis and take the so-called director of music with you. Many of us have discussed his choice of music and don’t like it at all,’” Dooley read.
The letter went on to ask if God might have made Dooley’s child sick because of the music director’s choice of songs, and it asked if it would take losing his wife or other members of his family to change it back to the type of music they preferred.
“By the time I finished, there was a mixture of anger and bewilderment that flooded over me,” said Dooley, who now serves as senior pastor of Englewood Baptist Church in Jackson, Tenn. “I cried out to God and I said, ‘I quit, I’m done. I don’t want to be in the ministry anymore, and if this is how your people act, you can find someone else to lead your people.’”
He said at that moment, he felt the Spirit of God whisper to him that finally he was getting out of the way so God could work.
“What happened next is really difficult for me to explain,” Dooley said. “It’s as if God sat down in that room and began to minister to me.”
He told pastors gathered at the SBC Pastors Conference on Monday in Indianapolis that in order to be faithful under pressure, they must “rest in the manifest presence of God.”
The importance of that is highlighted in Exodus 33, Dooley said. In that passage, God tells Moses to take the people to the promised land but tells him that He will not go with them.
“He said, ‘You can have my blessing, but you cannot have Me,’” Dooley said. “This means no more guidance from above, no more connection to the God of the universe. He’s essentially saying, ‘You can have your cold, dead religion, but I want no part of it.’”
Dooley said his concern today is that pastors can also fall into the trap of “business as usual” when the presence of God has long been absent.
“Is it possible that many of the pressures that we feel in ministry are the direct result of being religious professionals who look to God for His power but have no real interest in His Person?”
That’s tragic, Dooley said, because “the greatest gift God gives us is Himself.
“It’s so easy to forget that,” he said. “You start out in ministry hungry for God and eager to serve the Lord and see His glory, and if you’re not careful, criticism and heartache and cynicism will steal your surrender to a commitment to abide in the manifest presence of God.”
Thankfully the people of Israel came to their senses, Dooley said, explaining that Moses understood what Jesus later clarified in John 15 — “apart from God, we can do nothing.”
“Moses needed what we need, and that’s the Spirit of God leading and guiding us,” he said. “If God doesn’t lead our churches, we are doing nothing for the Kingdom of God.”
Dooley asked pastors if they were trying to lead their people without prayer and trying to serve God in their own strength.
“Friend, if so, we forfeit the only thing that makes us distinguished from everyone else in the world — the presence of God,” he said. “He is willing to meet with us if we will just seek Him. He isn’t our best hope — He’s our only hope.”
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This story first appeared in The Baptist Paper.
