Inevitably, a moment comes in ministry when the shadows begin to replace the light. A series of setbacks, an ongoing conflict, a loss of passion, an unaddressed distraction, or a growing disillusionment.

Years ago, I was leading an international church in Holland. It was one of those Dutch winter nights. The rain was pelting against the windows of my study, and it suddenly felt as if the walls were closing in. What I most remember was an unanticipated spiritual darkness. Despair was laying hold of me. I no longer wanted to press on. How did I get here? How can I get out?

It remains as a reference point, a juncture where I was forced to settle the issue of staying in ministry. Would I let the darkness of doubt and despondency dissuade me? I am convinced every pastor faces a “dark night of the soul.”

This article is written because you may be in one right now—or just coming out of the shadows and back into the light. If you have not faced this moment, hopefully these words will prepare you to anticipate and make it through.

What Describes this Moment?

Darkness is often associated with words like obscurity, blindness, powerlessness, and death. Its presence means the absence of light. The New Testament word often speaks to that which is ominous and brings fear.

We can be in the thick of ministry, growing in our knowledge of God, and experiencing divine favor. We love the church and people seem to love us. Then comes a moment when the soul is tested.

We find ourselves transported from the mountain to the valley. It can seem as if God has distanced himself, along with the more terrible torment of the inability to find God’s power and love to bear the pain or meet the situation.

Who Are Some of the Pilgrims of the Night?

When you read the lives of ministry leaders, it’s obvious we are not alone in our shadows. Moments of darkness are part of just about everyone’s journey. We see this in several biblical and post-biblical narratives.

Biblical

Job. Has anyone had a deeper walk in the dark than Job? Tragedy at every level of existence brought him into dark spaces where there was an impenetrability that isolated his soul. He screamed for answers and often experienced the greater pain of God’s seeming indifference.

Though our travails are small by comparison, we may find ourselves voicing Job’s words, “Though I call for help, there is no justice . . . let me alone; my days have no meaning.” We too might be wondering, “Is God also trying to prove to the devil that my faith is genuine?”

David. David’s story embraces the entire range of humanness, and this includes loss, grief, and complaints. He joins a chorus of others in the biblical text who have stood before God in confusion, frustration, incomprehension, and despair.

David’s psalms of lament are a mix of trust and rejection, humility and defiance, certainty and puzzlement. Some come out of a darkness of his making, one prompted by personal sin. Other laments are responses to a different darkness, one that has little to do with sin and more to do with the testing of faith.

We have our own psalms of lament. Both correction and testing take us to similar spaces of angst. David’s utterances give us permission to use language that is piercing, even offensive. God is not embarrassed or offended by the words of his saints. They enable us to become more open with ourselves, with each other, and with God.

Qohelet. The writer of Ecclesiastes often found himself in the shadows. Like David, some were of his own choosing, given his experimentations with sin, his “embracing of folly” (2:3). Other dark spaces were less about correction—more about refinement. Ecclesiastes is a journey through back roads and dead ends, the closing in of despair, disillusionment, frustration, and doubt. Yet, it eventually ends in the light.

The sage discovered, as all of us eventually do, that few things fit into neat boxes. We think we have our ministry under control. Our weekly schedule is set, ministry philosophy is in place, our missional, visionary, strategic, and tactical tasks are laid out. But we keep hitting walls. Great projects, as Peter Leithart puts it, often have all the permanence of sandcastles before the approaching tide.

Jeremiah. Among the prophets, few have had darker nights than Jeremiah. He is God’s man, summoned to shatter old worlds with God’s words. Unfortunately, his preaching tour turned out to be a mix of triumph and tragedy. He was opposed and betrayed, and seemingly abandoned at times by God.

Like Jacob in the night, Jeremiah did what many of us do—wrestle with God. Here he asked the same painful questions we ask: Where is God? Why does God let such things happen? Why is he silent?

Jeremiah found that to be overwhelmingly God’s person means to have “vulnerability met by ruthlessness.” God hears our “How long?” uttered in the night and responds with the same firmness he did with Jeremiah, “If you have raced with men on foot and they have worn you out, how can you compete with horses?” (12:5). Press on!

Postbiblical.

St. John of the Cross. This early Carmelite mystic is considered by some as the master of the night. He wrote the book on it—The Dark Night of the Soul. Imprisonment, forced isolation, and beatings led to lessons one only learns in the darkness. With other mystics, like Catherine of Siena, John argued that the way to contemplation is not through effort but through darkness.

Charles Spurgeon. Few have modeled faithful preaching and pastoral leadership as Spurgeon. But his luminous life was not without its dark spaces. Biographer Geoffrey Chang notes that his ministry was marked more by heartache than triumphalism. Ministry has its heartbreaks, and it is said that these killed Spurgeon.

Eugene Peterson. In his memoir, Peterson reflects on his darker years in ministry. He called them the badlands. There can come a period in ministry when the color drains out of both vocation and congregation. Rather than hate this season, Peterson learned—as we must—to value the years. They forced him to probe the interior of his pastoral vocation. There is more to the ministry than getting it right; one must also live it well.

Barbara Brown Taylor. I find this journey of an Anglican priest as compelling as any. In her Learning to Walk in the Darkness, Taylor gives an account of her development of this skill. Her earlier book, Leaving Church, is part of a trilogy of her journal in the night. Her loss of faith is not in God but in the religious system and its rituals—and its preoccupation with keeping the lights on. There are lessons to be learned in the dark that many seek to avoid.

What Explains the Darkness?

Dark nights raise significant questions. How should I interpret them? Is this sudden loss of ministry, this breakdown of health, this marriage failure, or this impasse with parishioners a divine test? Am I facing a punishment for some foolish choice? Am I suffering from some physical imbalance, some psychic disturbance?

Looking at the lives I have surveyed, as well as my own life, there are multiple reasons for why those of us in ministry occasionally encounter this moment. Here are four.

Darkness—ironically—is sometimes prompted by one’s quest for purgation of sin and divine intimacy.

Some ministers, inspired by earlier monastics, choose a rigorous life of separation. They exhort those they lead to detach from attachments, from daily habits and preoccupations that block genuine introspection.

But a deep interior look, with the aim of uncovering the sins that reside in the heart, can take one into dark places. One is exposed to an evil that one may not have been conscious of. It’s not that we should avoid an interior look. The ministry requires that we come face-to-face with who we really are. But this has its pain.

In her study of The Dark Night of the Soul, Georgia Harkness examined the testimony of older mystics and found that many experienced an even deeper darkness, one referred to as a dark night of the senses. Their quest for intimacy with God left them, surprisingly, feeling more distant. Their withdrawal from the world often led to feelings of self-condemnation, loneliness, and spiritual impotence.

Darkness is often part of the work of correction.

The most usual cause of inward darkness is sin. When we turn from God, a holy God must turn from us, and this creates its own shadows. There are at least thirty accounts in Scripture where God, in response to acts of sin, turned his face away. When God withdraws, divine features grow blurry.

In ministry, where pastoral misconduct is often subtle, one can find oneself in the same dark place. Inattentiveness to devotions or a refined form of pride can turn God’s favor away. We can begin to rely on our own capacities, use our gifts for self-aggrandizement, and employ spiritual tools to manipulate others. It’s not surprising. Few fields expose the ego so relentlessly to the ruses of egotism and vanity as ministry. But such inattentiveness can bring one out of the light and into the night of chastisement.

Darkness comes with spiritual attacks.

Sometimes the darkness that is upon us is not a divine moment of correction but a Satanic one of aggression. It is logical. He is the essence of darkness; his kingdom is a kingdom where there is the complete absence of light. To sin is to hate the light and do the deeds of darkness. The devil will do everything to keep us shrouded in the dark places of discouragement, depression, disillusionment, and resentment. It is his mission to lengthen the shadows and destroy the spirit of those who have given themselves to serving the kingdom of light.

This war explains many of our experiences in the night. Could this be what I experienced in Holland? Richard Baxter warned, “If you will be leaders against Satan, he will not spare you. He bears the greatest malice against the one who is engaged in working the greatest damage against him.” Spurgeon, in his lectures to his students, gave this caution: “Upon the whole, no place is so assailed with temptation as the ministry … our dangers are more numerous and more insidious than those of ordinary Christians.”

Darkness can be a divine test.

Our faith is often placed on trial, and these tests can plunge us into the night. As noted, it might be prompted by a sudden loss of health, a tragic accident, or a steep impasse with antagonistic congregants or . . .

We often enter ministry thinking our natural interests and abilities can combine with God’s grace to a achieve a noble cause. We delight in the opportunity. We are living in the light of what Taylor calls “solar spirituality.” But then we discover ministry has characteristics more akin to “lunar.” The divine light available to us does wax and wane with the season. God is sending us deeper into honesty and sanity. As Dane Ortlund puts it, “Fullness can be had only through emptiness.” In the dark we see with greater clarity our vocation, who we are, and who we need to become.

This is the spiritual journey we signed up for. It is, as Parker Palmer puts it, “an endless process of engaging life as it is, stripping away our fantasies about ourselves, our world, and the relationship of the two, moving closer to reality as we do.” Dark nights help us to lose our illusions before death eventually strips them from us.

How Do We Get Through the Dark Night?

Like low tide and high, life is a rhythm of light and dark. Adjustment is a matter of life and death. When the darkness approaches, it’s critical we know how to get through.

If purgation leads to dark places, we must endure and embrace.

For many of the earlier mystics, they did not seek to escape the night; rather, they welcomed it. They learned how to navigate and wear their experience in the dark as a badge of discipleship. They found that the painful process of dragging their weaknesses into the full light of day is the first step toward conquering them. There might be initial despair so long as the moment serves as an intersection and not a dead-end. We must go there, but not stay there.

If the darkness comes because of sin, we must accept and then seek to be set free of it.

We cannot set the terms for divine correction. We must let it take its course. Part of one’s duration in the darkness is determined by our willingness to confess and repent. If we choose to avoid God’s chastening, we will remain in our self-made darkness.

When God turns aside the light of his face, the pain invites us to enter a closer self-examination of our souls. Once we take stock of, acknowledge, and ask forgiveness for our disordered affections, we must then fight towards the light.

If the darkness comes through spiritual attack, we must avoid it by resisting the adversary and fleeing.

Though he desires to bring us back to the darkness from whence we came, Christ’s victory declares we do not have to go there. Christ has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves (Col. 1:13). We can resist, knowing the devil and his darkness must flee.

If the darkness has come as a divine test, we must submit, endure, learn the lessons God intends, and give thanks.

Though painful, we must allow God to use the dark and defining moments for his purposes. They can be useful, redemptive, and transformational.

Whether we sense it or not, God is always with us. We are never alone in the dark. The Spirit indwells us, Jesus abides with us, and the Father is walking with us through the dark night of the soul (Ps. 23:4). In embracing and cooperating, we learn to both lament loss and trust in God. We learn to live with unanswered questions and unexplained suffering, all the while holding on to God.

Conclusion

In his first book, Eugene Peterson notes that pastoral work is a decision to deal, in the most personal and intimate terms, with suffering. It is a conscious, deliberate plunge into its pain. There will be dark nights. If you find yourselves in the dark night of the soul, stay the course until the night passes. Understanding may elude us, but God’s presence accompanies us, even if it is not so tangible. What is definite is that a day is coming when there will be no more night (Rev. 21:25).

John E. Johnson is an adjunct professor of Pastoral Theology and Leadership at Western Seminary in Portland, OR. He has served as a lead pastor for thirty five years, and currently is a writer working on his fourth book, as well as serving as an interim teaching pastor.