Years ago, I was a young pastor at a large church filled with elderly and middle-aged people. One demographic was distinctly missing—teens and young adults. “Please bring them back to church,” the parents had begged me—as if I was the only one who could do it. So, my wife and I invested in a few key church members—young adults with leadership potential. Together, we built a youth ministry that soon grew more quickly than we ever imagined it would. It was incredibly exciting and rewarding.
Then, as often happens, I was moved. My conference president told me I needed my own church, that it would be good for my development. Reluctantly, my wife and I accepted. Months passed and whatever guilt I felt at not staying in contact with the people I had spent so much time with was inevitably pushed to one side as new challenges presented themselves. But then, unexpectedly, a church member dropped a bomb on me. One of our key youth ministry leaders had had a moral failing and had quit. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the death knell for the ministry. Within six months, all the leaders had quit. Within a year, the ministry was dead.
If you’ve ever experienced anything like this, you’ll know how devastating it can be to see something you’ve worked so hard on fail so spectacularly. Though my mentors and colleagues reassured me to the contrary, I felt personally responsible for the ministry’s failure. Maybe there’s something I could have—should have—done differently. I felt responsible for every parent who had begged me to save their child. I felt responsible for the teens and young adults. I felt responsible for the baptisms that wouldn’t happen. Most of all I wondered: Had it all been for nothing?
Disappointment and failure are part of life—but some failures hurt more than others.
In 586 BC, the kingdom of Judah suffers its most devastating defeat at the hands of Babylon. Jerusalem was conquered, its walls were pulled down and the Temple was destroyed. An entire generation was forced to spend the rest of their lives in exile. This all changed when Babylon is conquered by Persia. Hope was restored when King Cyrus in 538 BC declared, “Any of his [God’s] people among you may go up to Jerusalem in Judah and build the temple of the Lord, the God of Israel, the God who is in Jerusalem, and may their God be with them” (Ezra 1:3).
Among these exiles were three prominent leaders: Zerubbabel, Ezra and Nehemiah.
Zerubbabel’s story, in the first six chapters of Ezra, sees him lead the first wave of exiles back to Jerusalem. First, they hope to build the altar and then the Temple so worship can resume. However, when the people living around Jerusalem hear about this, they come to Zerubbabel, saying, “Let us help you build because, like you, we seek your God” (Ezra 3:2). Zerubbabel rebuffs them rudely, telling them in no uncertain terms that they will not be allowed to join the building effort. Offended and outraged, these locals write to King Artaxerxes (Cyrus being dead by then), who ordered the work be stopped. Work is eventually resumed, but not until King Darius takes the throne.
Ezra’s story picks up in chapters 7–10. Decades after Zerubbabel, the priest Ezra leads another large contingent of exiles back to Jerusalem. Ezra is appalled to discover that some of the people in Jerusalem have “mingled the holy race with the peoples around them” (Ezra 9:2).They have married non-Jewish people and have had children. When Ezra arrives in Jerusalem, he gathers the people and gives a long series of sermons denouncing the intermarriages—as well as an emotional display of abasement and self-flagellation (Ezra 9:5, 10:1). It is decided that all the men who have married foreign wives will divorce them, under penalty of property confiscation and exile (10:7). Many do so and the final section of Ezra is a list of those who divorced their wives (10:18–44). However, not everyone complies with the divorce decree, and the story ends with this strange anticlimax.
Chances are, if you’ve ever heard stories about this period, you haven’t heard much about Zerubbabel or Ezra. The solitary figure we usually turn to in our sermonising and storytelling is Nehemiah. If you’ve heard of him, you can probably recite his story in a few basic movements: Nehemiah hears about the state of Jerusalem’s walls, convinces the King to let him lead a great building project, faces some opposition but prevails against the odds (Nehemiah 1–7). This is where most discussion on Nehemiah ends. However, if you keep reading, you’ll discover that like his predecessors, Nehemiah’s story ends strangely.
After the completion of the wall, Nehemiah and Ezra lead a huge celebration. They recount the Exodus story, there’s a mass confession of sin and all the people vow to renew the covenant with God and obey the Torah. However, soon after, the King recalls Nehemiah, who is away for some time. When he returns, he’s appalled to find the Temple misused, merchants trading on the Sabbath and Judahite men who had married foreign women parading their children around—some of whom can’t even speak Hebrew! The last we see of Nehemiah, he’s calling down curses on these men, beating them up, pulling out their hair, then offering a prayer to God, reminding God of all he’s done for Him, with a final request: “Remember me with favour, my God” (Nehemiah 13:31).
Why are these stories in the Bible? To understand what these stories contribute, we need to consider what these three men were all trying to achieve. The prophet Jeremiah had predicted that out of exile, the long-awaited for Messiah would restore the nation of Israel. But it wouldn’t just be a political restoration—it would be personal, too. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33). All the leaders in the story are trying to bring about restoration—but they go about it the wrong way.
Zerubbabel thinks rebuilding the Temple and excluding “impure” locals will bring about restoration—but all it does is create conflict that goes against God’s plans for His people. Ezra thinks weeding out marital impurity will bring about restoration—but all it does is break up families.
Nehemiah thinks building the wall will bring about restoration—but beating up people and pulling out their hair is certainly not a good way to go about it.
All these men dream of the restoration promised by the prophets, but in trying to make it a reality, they only address the external symptoms—not the root issue.
When I learned about the collapse of the youth ministry I’d spent so much time building, I was angry: angry at the church for letting it fall, angry at the leaders I’d put so much trust in—but most of all, angry with myself. The progress we’d made was unprecedented and at the time, it felt God-led. That’s why the disappointment at the end stung so much. As I reflect on it with some years of distance, I realise now how much my ego was wrapped up in the ministry. I put so much of myself into it that when it died, it was almost like part of me died, too. In ministry, that’s often what ruins us. When we see our ministry as “our ministry” and not God’s, its success or failure becomes a reflection of our value.
Reading the stories at face value, it would be easy to conclude that they were failures. However, these episodes reveal the exiles’ true need: wholistic heart transformation. Though the people are back in the land, they are still in exile in their hearts. What they need isn’t a new Temple, new wall or new wives: what they need is for God to “remove their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26). What they need is the Messiah.
Though the story of that youth ministry ended in sadness, the story of God in that community didn’t. Though some fell away, other people stepped into the gap. Bible studies were conducted, discipleship happened and baptisms did come out of it. Since then, I’ve learned that God doesn’t just work despite our weakness—He actually works in it. Though failure and success mingled in the efforts of Zerubbabel, Ezra and Nehemiah, it’s evident God still worked through them. Though we have successes and failures in our own lives, God still works through them. As God famously said to the apostle Paul, “‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me” (2 Corinthians 12:9). May Christ’s power rest on you, especially in your failures.
Jesse Herford is the associate editor of Signs of the Times.
