I already felt overbooked with weddings and studying for my ordination exams and a scheduled shoulder surgery when, unexpectedly, a key pastor left our church. Then the congregation put me in charge.

As often happens during pastoral transitions, some of our church members left. Yet I was shocked when many more people showed up, asking to take our membership classes and join our small groups. Our staff stretched and scrambled. The rapid growth made the season tough but invigorating.

I’ve often wondered how I would have reacted had the opposite happened. As an ordinary pastor, what would I have done if attendance had plummeted and finances had dwindled? I don’t know.

In Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: The Life and Reflections of Tom Carson, Don Carson, cofounder of The Gospel Coalition and renowned New Testament scholar, tells his father’s story of faithfully serving for decades in a spiritual desert as a pastor, missionary, and caregiver. In the foreword to this republished edition, Mark Dever calls the book “a modern classic” (10). He’s right. It’s exactly the sort of book that needs to be widely read when every news cycle seems to include headlines about pastors leaving the ministry due to discouragement or disgrace.

This book encourages pastors who serve in normal-sized churches with uncertain and seemingly limited results, which tend to be most pastors. These are ordinary pastors, and Tom Carson was one of them. His story celebrates God’s blessings on an ordinary pastor, a happy father who loved his family, and a faithful leader who finished well.

God Loves Ordinary Pastors

Tom Carson served in French Quebec, where, during the middle of the 20th century, Baptist pastors were jailed for preaching the gospel. In that predominantly Roman Catholic culture, ministry was like scattering gospel seed not on an open field but on a paved parking lot. Only rarely did a seed find a crack to grow.

From a human perspective, the resulting harvest hardly seems praiseworthy. Tom labored for years to grow churches to the size of large Bible studies. At times, this lack of visible gospel fruit, coupled with his struggles to be the pastor God desired him to be, caused deep discouragement that he recorded in numerous journal entries. At one point, he mentions reading the missionary David Brainerd’s journal. Like many of us who have read that journal, Tom laments months later how little his own life and ministry and journals shared Brainerd’s spiritual vitality.

Yet his son reflects that Tom’s “‘glass half-empty’ awareness of his failures and inadequacies rarely aligns with the view of him taken by his contemporaries” (15). Indeed, Tom’s own awareness rarely aligns with the New Testament’s witness to God’s smile over him in Christ.

Some ordinary ministers think too highly of themselves. However, the internal thoughts of many pastors go to the opposite extreme. Christian ministers serve under the gospel of grace. Don notes, “Dad’s diaries show he understood this truth in theory, and sometimes he exulted in it . . . but quite frankly, his sense of failure sometimes blinded him to the glory of gospel freedom” (95).

Tom’s memoirs confront the ordinary temptation of pastors to believe that God’s lavish grace—pressed down, shaken together, running over—exists for everyone except me. God sees ordinary faithfulness and delights in it, even when the ministry results seem small.

Ordinary Pastors Love Their Families

Balancing family life with the demands of ministry creates a perpetual struggle for most pastors. But the rigors of external, visible ministry never kept Tom from loving and laughing with his family. “His journals have many, many entries bathed in tears of contrition,” Don writes, “but his children and grandchildren remember his laughter” (150).

God sees ordinary faithfulness and delights in it, even when the ministry results seem small.

A significant portion of the book recounts a painful denominational controversy. Years later, when Don asked his father about the ministry dispute and why the children weren’t remotely aware, Tom responded that because they were “children of the manse” (using the old word for a parsonage) and saw “more than [their] share of difficult and ugly things,” he fought to keep them from what we often call church hurt (61–62). Tom’s daughter adds that her main memory of her parents is what she doesn’t have, namely, Mom and Dad complaining about others (62).

I must mention Tom’s care not only for the children but for his wife, who died three years before him. Her descent into what Don calls the “abyss of Alzheimer’s” upended the couple’s life together and Tom’s ministry. “External ministry just about evaporated,” writes Don. “Dad’s ministry was looking after Mum. And not once, not once, did any of his children hear a single note of self-pity” (135). Would that this glad and sacrificial love could be called ordinary among pastors.

Ordinary Pastors Finish Well

Tom’s ability to finish well was due to both God’s grace and his own diligence in spiritual formation through every season of life. Across the pages in his last years of life are pleas like “Keep me from the sins of old men,” which he details as the “tendency to gravitate toward watching television, the temptation to look backward instead of forward, sliding toward self-pity, easy resentment of young men” (146). God seems to have answered these and his many other petitions.

Tom’s ability to finish well was due to both God’s grace and his own diligence in spiritual formation through every season of life.

Tom was the kind of retired pastor who still so loved the Word that he gave his time to writing lengthy journal entries grappling with the devotional applications of an obscure passage in the book of Judges. Being riveted by the Word, however, was not only a luxury of retirement but a pattern of life. One journal entry early in his ministry describes his method for memorizing the letter of 1 John.

And he was the sort of pastor who could work so hard during a grueling season of ministry that he’d have no time for journal entries but wouldn’t neglect personal prayer. Tom’s other son mentions how his father’s regular practice of kneeling prayer stayed with him even through a season of rebellion. He said, “[It’s] one of the things that eventually brought me back” (74).

Most Christian biographies celebrate people who traveled to exotic places or achieved remarkable results. The stories excite, but they leave readers feeling that anything short of amazing indicates failure. Tom Carson’s life reminds us that the master’s “Well done, good and faithful servant” is offered to those who serve well, not those who achieve the greatest results (Matt. 25:23). Nearly two decades after its original release, Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor still encourages every believer to finish their course well, especially pastors who wonder if their ministries matter.