The day before I hiked Longs Peak, I stopped to talk with a local expert who had climbed the 14,259-foot summit several times. He knew what I was about to go through. The more he talked, the more my idealism came crashing down. When he said, “Dude, people die on this hike,” the reality began to settle in.

I needed a similar dose of reality when I first said, “I feel called to ministry.” When those words came out of my mouth, I had no idea what they meant. From the outside looking in, ministry seemed like a pretty sweet life—long hours studying the Bible, writing sermons, and having coffee with people. A dream job! Little did I know just how dangerous a call to ministry really is.

When I meet with young people who sense that call, I feel like that expert hiker describing the reality of Longs Peak. Few have had the reality check they need. If you’re thinking about ministry, you need an honest appraisal of the difficulty inherent to the calling. You need to hear about the prerequisites no one talks about.

1. Hope Amid Uncertainty

Ministry comes with risk. You might not make as much money as your similarly educated peers, though you put in more hours than they do. Your church might not grow. You’ll likely face conflicts and take on a few emotional battle scars. Yet risk is exactly what God intended when he called you. As John Piper writes, “Evidently God intends for us to live and act in ignorance and in uncertainty about many of the outcomes of our actions.”

If you’re thinking about ministry, you need an honest appraisal of the difficulty inherent to the calling.

Yes, God intends ministry to be risky. Why? Because it forces us to trust him. Hebrews 11:1 defines faith as “the assurance of things hoped for.” Faith is built on hope in the “unseen” amid your uncertain circumstances (Rom. 8:24). Without this hope amid uncertainty, that is, without faith, “it is impossible to please [God]” (Heb. 11:6). Ministry always comes with uncertainty, because it’s in the fertile ground of uncertainty that faith grows.

2. Embracing Hard Things

“This is hard.” That phrase is tossed around a lot, but why do we say it? Is it an offhand complaint? A filler phrase for whenever we’re uncomfortable? In reality, nearly every good and worthy pursuit is hard. Marriage is hard. Parenting is hard. Cultivating healthy habits is hard. Holding down a job is hard. And intentionally so.

God intends ministry to be hard because difficulty brings growth (Rom. 5:1–5; James 1:2–4). In hard things, we also participate in Jesus’s life and suffering (2 Cor. 1:5). If you’re going to make it in ministry, you must see hard things as ways to both progress in faith and experience communion with your Savior.

3. Sobriety About Suffering

If we stick with hard things long enough, we’ll eventually face loss—and sometimes that loss feels like death itself. Ministry may require a few thousand deaths.

What those deaths will look like is anyone’s guess. It could be anything from losing sleep to a pastoral emergency, enduring betrayal from a close friend, being the first to lead out in a new initiative, or staying patient as people pour out verbal vitriol because they don’t like the way you lead. Ministry death may also include publicly admitting you don’t know the answer to a congregation member’s question, changing your preferred preaching style to be better understood by your listeners, or confessing to your fellow elders when you’ve sinned as a leader.

These realities should lead us to ask a crucial question: How do we view such deaths?

In 2 Corinthians 4, Paul describes his ministry as “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus.” Ministry killed Paul—both figuratively and eventually literally—but he didn’t see that as bad. Paul believed he and his team were meant to carry Jesus’s death “so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in [their] bodies” (v. 10). People saw Jesus’s death in Paul’s suffering, and the result was that those who saw it then found life. Paul was dying, but he knew what he was dying for: “Death is at work in us, but life in you” (v. 12).

To do ministry faithfully, you must have the right view of suffering. Yes, ministry may kill you in a thousand ways, but your deaths will mean life for others.

4. Real Resilience

You’ve heard the phrase “We all have our crosses to bear.” Yet when the Bible talks about bearing crosses, it also describes the attitude we’re to have: resilient joy. The author of Hebrews tells us to look to Jesus, “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross” (Heb. 12:2). Jesus endured the cross for joy.

God intends ministry to be hard because difficulty brings growth.

Real resilience for ministry uniquely adds joy to endurance. Too often, we describe resilience as merely the ability to get through things. But in the Christian life, the goal isn’t just to make it through ministry without failing. The goal is to remain joyful as we navigate ministry’s challenges.

We want to do ministry in the same way Jesus endured the cross: for the joy set before us. We endure the challenges because of the incredible joys that come amid our suffering—the joy of having nothing but Jesus (Phil. 3:8), the joy of gospel partnership with others (1:3–5), the joy of seeing people transformed (2:2), and the joy of seeing the gospel advance (1 Thess. 2:19–20).

It’s Worth It

I hiked every bit of Longs Peak’s 4,875  feet of elevation gain. It was one of the hardest things I’ve done, but it was worth it. And after 17 challenging yet joyful years, I can say the same about ministry. It’ll be one of the hardest things you do. Yet it’s worth it.

The more you embrace difficulty with hope and joy, the more you’ll see God work in you and not just through you. You’ll see God save people and change lives. One day, you’ll see people praising their Savior face-to-face, and all the hardship you endured will be worth it.