It started out really aggressive and ended up oozing with grace.

It was a tweet.[1]

Figures, right? I’m not certain, but social media might have started WWII.

It was November 11, 2020, nearing the end of a long and stressful year for most pastors. The first part of that tweet from Jared Wilson, a well-known Baptist pastor, read[2]:

Pastors, let the angry people leave to form angry churches for other angry people. …

Whoa! Shots fired! I won’t comment on that part of the tweet other than to say – Hey, it was a tense time for a lot of us. But that’s not the reason for this post. Here’s the whole thing:

Pastors, let the angry people leave to form angry churches for other angry people. Those broken whom the Lord calls will eventually figure out where to find grace.

That sentence structure sounds like it was composed with two thumbs on a phone.[3] But I love it.

“Those broken” – Maybe you think church is made up of nice people. It often is, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When social graces disappear, you crave that civility and courtesy. But nice is not what defines a Christian. Maybe “broken” doesn’t fully define one, either, but it’s hard to imagine how you can be a Christian without being broken, without coming to the end of yourself, without acknowledge that you’re a sinner in the sight of God, justly deserving His displeasure and without hope except in God’s sovereign mercy. (Yes, I’ve been a pastor so long I just start quoting PCA membership vows sometimes.)

“Those broken whom the Lord calls” – We’ve all met broken people who were in denial about their brokenness. But when the Lord calls, one can probably guess that they’ve begun to see their sin and long for healing. They may think it’s their effort, their desire, and it is. But they may not realize, “We love, because He first loved us.”

“Those broken whom the Lord calls will eventually figure out where to find grace.” – If you don’t want broken people to find grace, then why are you at church? It’s a question we may all need to ask ourselves at times. I’m not the oldest pastor on the block, and I’m not the newest one, either. I’ve been around long enough to see brokenness walk through the door of the church. Sometimes, it’s obvious right away. Sometimes, it takes years to see. At some point every church leader I know reaches a point of fatigue with brokenness[4] which quickly results in hypocrisy (“Why are there so many broken people here?”) and hopefully transitions quickly to self-awareness and repentance (“Oh wait, I’m broken, too.”).

And that brings me to my point:

God, if we as a church are a place where broken people can find grace, then keep bringing them to us – bruised and broken by the fall. It may not be easy. It may take time and patience and energy and more. But isn’t this what we’re here for? Didn’t you do this for us? Didn’t you call us out of the darkness and into your glorious light? All so that we could proclaim that same glorious grace to others?

When I first read that tweet five years ago (after I got past the aggressive opening), I hoped that whatever else might be true of us, that we might be a place where the broken could find grace. I see and hear a lot of stories. I think it may be happening, at least a little bit – broken people, found in Christ, called by God, to drink from fountain of grace. And sometimes it’s heavy and makes one weary.

But I’d like to think that the same hope for broken people applies to weary burden-bearers, too:

“It’s a wonder what God can do with a broken heart, when He gets all the pieces.”[5]

-Pastor Matt, 11-20-25

[1] I still call it Twitter, and I still call them tweets.

[2] I’d link to it, but I can’t pull it up on Twitter. I have a PDF of it saved.

[3] That said, Wilson has published multiple books. I can only think of one that I’ve read, but you don’t publish multiple books without being a good writer.

[4] In the words of Galatians 6, you might call it “growing weary in well doing.”

[5] I first read this quote (from Samuel Chadwick, whom I know nothing else about) in Thabiti Anyabwile’s wonderful TGC article: The Pastor’s Happy Heavy Heart. It’s stuck with me for years, especially because I re-read that article often. And I think our church’s GriefShare ministry has adopted it as their own, too.