Pastoral Confession: A Surprising Key to Healthy Ministry

By Jamin Goggin

I went into a meeting designed to foster prayer and confession of sins for those in attendance. The intention was honest, but deep down I didn’t trust that pastoral confession was a good thing. In fact, I believed it was bad. I believed confession of sin in a ministry context was a source of harm rather than healing. 

I began to pick out the vices I thought would get me into less trouble. I even found some that I thought might be heard as virtues. Like answering that infamous interview question, “What is your greatest weakness?” with a humble “I tend to overwork,” I was determined to risk nothing. Perhaps a vice like “worry for the church” would work well. Who could blame me? 

I continued to weigh my options; one sin kept bubbling to the surface—anger. This wasn’t the safe and excusable vice I was looking for. My fear wanted to pretend I didn’t notice it, but it refused to be ignored. 

Isn’t Confession to God Alone Sufficient? 

I silently confessed this anger to God in prayer. For the first time in several months, I was honest with him about my pain and disappointment, my bitterness and resentment. The Spirit of Christ comforted my heart with the forgiveness of the gospel. And yet I knew God was prompting me to go further. He was calling me to confess it out loud to the room. The lies returned.

Familiar lies, designed to mute my full confession.  

• You confessed to God. That’s good enough. 
• You have to be careful who you share your heart with.
• Boundaries are important. 
• You just need to schedule some time with a counselor or take a vacation. 
• The risk outweighs the reward. 

Lies, all lies. 

The Decision to Confess Sin as Someone in Ministry 

I confessed my anger, and the veneer of pastoral sturdiness was peeled away, revealing the hidden fragility of my heart. Not only was my sin known, but my pain and fear also were. God’s grace met me through the tender mercy of his children. Perhaps this is what it means for us to “bear one another’s burdens” (Gal. 6:2). Perhaps confession is a good thing. My sin was not mine to manage or fix on my own. What good news this was. I didn’t need to keep my sin a secret. In fact, it was best I didn’t. 

Deceiving others and deceiving ourselves is one possible vocational pathway for the pastor. One that has, for many, resulted in a “successful” ministry. To be sure, we can lie our way to the top. We can gain the whole world. The question is, at what cost? In recent years we have frequently witnessed the cost in the lives of pastors and their congregations. 

Accountability and Pastoral Confession of Sin 

There is another way. We can minister in the truth of who we are before God and others. This way is marked by risk. The risk of following Jesus. A path of fleshly mortification that demands risky behavior like honesty and repentance. But it is such risky behavior that opens up to us the secret of the gospel. 

First and foremost, God’s Word instructs us to confess our sins to God (1 John 1:9). In other words, we are called to pray our sins. We do so because God is the one we have most fundamentally sinned against and because God is the one who is “faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). 

This does not mean that confession of sin in ministry is reserved for whispers in the privacy of our prayer closet. Surely the Psalms are sufficient evidence to prove that confession is for public consumption. Scripture, in fact, exhorts us to “confess [our] sins to one another and pray for one another, that [we] may be healed” (James 5:16). We are called to confess to one another, but notice we do so with the same end in mind. 

Our confession of sin to fellow believers is not merely for the purpose of enlisting accountability partners, as valuable as that may be. It is ultimately about receiving God’s grace in and through his church. God has adopted us into a priestly household in Christ. He has freely willed to mediate his cleansing Word of forgiveness to us through the members of his body. He has freely chosen not only our prayers but the prayers of one another as a means of communicating his healing grace. The source of healing is ever and always the Triune God. 

“Confession is an essential, life-giving practice for all those who are sick and dying of sin—including pastors.“