Jamin Goggin doesn’t hesitate to confess his sin. Not only does he confess it, but he shares how God has moved, and continues to move, in his life to heal him from it. As a former local church pastor of two decades, Goggin understands the importance of confessing pastors—those who are honest with God, the church and themselves about sin.
This October, Goggin, who is also an author, speaker, ministry affiliate professor at Biola University, and the director of content at Pastors.com, releases his latest book, Pastoral Confessions: The Healing Path to Faithful Ministry (Baker), in which he writes about the value of confessing sin in a pastor’s life. Here, he talks to Outreach about how confessing sin can enrich a pastor’s ministry and witness.
Since we’re talking about confession, let’s start with one. Tell me about how sin, temptation and pastoral confession have played out in your own life.
When I first started in ministry, I had, like most pastors, a real sense of calling that was discerned in prayer and confirmed by wise people in my life. It felt like God was directing my path to pursue vocational ministry and opening doors of opportunity for service in the life of a church. But as a very young pastor, while there was a genuine sense of calling and a desire to proclaim the gospel and to shepherd God’s people, what I wasn’t aware of was how much pride and selfish ambition were at work in my heart. In the first couple years in ministry, I was being given opportunities and positions of leadership well beyond my spiritual maturity. Then grace came.
About three years in, all of a sudden, the church I was pastoring was struggling financially and went under. The Lord invited me into a season of exile from my vocation. I tried to get other jobs in ministry and simply couldn’t. I ended up taking a job selling copiers for a season, which was incredibly difficult and humiliating for me. It was in that time of obscurity—the inability to even do the work I felt called to do—that the Lord began to invite me to pay attention to this selfish ambition and grandiosity and how entitled I felt. In taking it away from me, the Lord in his grace was showing me how much pride was driving my life.
I can have really beautiful intentions, like proclaiming the gospel and seeing people come to know Jesus. Yet this can all be mixed with vices that also are motivating me. So that really began a deeper journey for me: discerning all the ways in which classic vices that tempt all of us uniquely tempted me in my vocation. We are the inventors of evil in the assigned laboratories of our lives, and pastors are sinners like anyone else. Those vices warp and distort the very nature of the work and the way in which we take calling.
Why do so many pastors feel, even subconsciously, that they’re not allowed to sin, that they have to be a perfect reflection of God?
I want to start with the biblical language that pastors are called, indeed, to be above reproach. We don’t want to shrink back from that qualification of the office that we get in the pastoral epistles in Timothy and Titus. But sadly, we often have interpreted what it means to be above reproach as something like “without sin.” If sinlessness was the qualification for the office, none would be qualified. Of course, we know that no pastor worth their salt is going to claim they’re sinless, so appearing to be without sin becomes the strategy.
And of course, I think pastors have strong motivations for keeping their sins a secret, because if revealing your sin might mean disqualification from your office, then the risk of vulnerability is great. If losing your vocation means losing your job, then it means losing a means by which you have provided for your family, which is the case for many pastors. One can imagine why pastors would be strongly motivated to keep sins secret. In evangelical church culture in particular, we really lost the practice of confession as a way of life, both corporately and interpersonally.
Confession, if it is practiced, has been largely relegated to the private prayer closet. In light of that, a pastor confessing their sins might land a remarkably discordant note in a harmony of silence about sin in the life of the church. I think we fear precisely what Adam and Eve feared in the garden: sin’s great lie, which is that the place of our healing is actually a place of harm, that if we expose the truth of our hearts and lives, we’re going to be condemned.
Why do we need confessing pastors?
When a pastor chooses to live an unconfessed life, they put themselves in far greater danger than when being vulnerable. That’s the picture we get in Scripture. I can’t overstate the actual personal anguish and pain, spiritually, even physically, that a pastor will experience in keeping their sins to themselves. But I also think that to live an unconfessed life is to live a life of lies and profound hypocrisy. First John would tell us that in so doing, we make God a liar. These pastors proclaim a gospel of forgiveness of sin that they themselves don’t practice personally.
Conversely, the confessing pastor walks in the truth and so speaks the truth. And here I’d want to point to Jesus’ words in Luke 7: Those who’ve been forgiven little, love little; and those who forgive much, love much. Having been forgiven much, pastors who confess are pastors who shepherd in love and who are faithful exemplars to the flock of God. This is why they’re called to be above reproach. They’re called to demonstrate the way of Jesus, and confession is central to that. They’re pastors who live by grace alone, and therefore proclaim a gospel of grace alone. They’re pastors who have known the way of God’s grace and forgiveness in their life, and so can point others in that way.
What parting message, if any, would you like to share with your co-laborers in Christ?
I love my fellow pastors. I have a burden for them. I care deeply about their well-being. There’s been such a narrative in the last decade of pastoral moral failure, especially in the evangelical church. I am convinced there are far more qualified officers who yet struggle with sin, as we all do—not [sin] that is disqualifying—but they are fearful that they can’t be honest about it, that they can’t invite others into the truth of their heart and their life. There’s such a deep need for fellow pastors to begin creating safe spaces to confess to one another, so that those little hidden sins that are not disqualifying don’t become the thing that does disqualify them 20 years later.
I really want to see pastors finish well. I know ministry can be so lonely and pastors can be so afraid of being the [subject of the] next article or Facebook post about the guy who got found out. The vast majority of pastors in North America, at least in my experience, are not actively disqualified from ministry because of their sin, but [they keep] languishing in the loneliness of their hidden sin. [This] is not a recipe for health and fidelity. I have such a burden for that. My heart’s desire is to care for pastors, to see them well, to see them known.