Heather Moffitt
Published March 20, 2025

When a fistfight broke out in the fellowship room after a Sunday service, every punch felt like the final blow. The little Methodist congregation had just observed the Lord’s Supper—Communion, the Eucharist, the invitation to partake of Christ’s body and blood and celebrate being part of Christ’s body the church. Then they filed downstairs, where instead of sharing fellowship they exchanged fisticuffs. 
 
The next Sunday, only eight parishioners were present for the morning service. Four of them were the pastor and his family. You didn’t need to be a certified accountant or mathematics genius to understand the story the numbers were telling. The church looked defeated. 

The pastor, the Rev. Wes Neal, felt defeated a well, or at least exhausted. Just a few years earlier, he had been the pastor of a large, thriving church in California. He felt loved and supported. God seemed to be growing the church numerically and spiritually. They tell you in seminary not to expect pastoral ministry to be endless happiness and victory, but serving this church felt fulfilling and joyful. Plus, the weather in southern California was amazing. 
 
His wife, the Rev. Dr. Jerusha Matsen Neal, had discerned God’s calling to do doctoral work on the east coast. Neal believed his calling was to support her as part of their shared commitment to ministry. Once in New Jersey, the bishop suggested that he take on a small, struggling congregation where a faithful few from eight countries of origin held on at the edge of collapse. He became the pastor for about a dozen people who wanted to be part of a church but weren’t sure they wanted anyone new to be in the same church with them. Plus the weather in New Jersey was terrible.

After nearly two years, attendance had doubled to about 30. Then the altercation seemed to erase it all.

Do I Have to Stay? 

Neal had scheduled a pastoral retreat, which happened to be shortly after the fight in the fellowship hall. 

“I went on that retreat with the questions, Do I have to stay? Can I just quit?” Neal said. “And God responded in a powerful way through two things. One, the retreat chapel had a San Damiano cross, from the Francis of Assisi tradition. It's a crucifix, and Jesus’ face looks like he's very much present in that moment, but also not overcome by that moment on the cross.

“The second thing was that my spiritual director at the time suggested reading 2 Corinthians. When I got to chapter 4, I saw something I’d not grasped before, which was that Paul was not writing from a place of strength and control. Paul was writing from a place of profound weakness. Those words, from the start middle of chapter 4 through the middle of chapter 6, were like a letter written to directly to me. You're not alone in this. You're not the first person who's gone through this.

“I came home with the answer, ‘My grace is sufficient.’ I understood that God's intent was for me to stay at this church and keep working at this place.”

Since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart. 

2 Corinthians 4:1

If this story were scripted for a movie, Neal would have returned home to find a congregation ready to make a big gesture of reconciliation, to end the conflicts that had fueled that fight, to grow large enough to be counted by the hundreds instead of dozens. Ministry rarely looks like a movie script, however. The congregation was still divided and it was still tiny. But Neal discovered his vision was being shaped by the face of Christ. These verses began to transform his view of the congregation and his ministry. 

A Place of Healing and New Beginning

Neal shared a poem with his wife that he had written in his journal when thinking about the church:

“They should shine like the sun, / burn with the glory of God's holy face.
But instead, they sit scattered like faraway stars, / content to dimly glow.”

“But you know, Jerusha, even despite their dim glow, sometimes I can almost make out a constellation,” he told her. 
 
Maybe God was at work, even among faraway stars, even when it seemed some were flickering out. 
 
Why were these stars in this sky? Why were these people attending this church? There were three main groups: children who either lived or attended with their grandparents, whose main attraction was the worship packs that included candy; people struggling with addiction who attended AA meetings in the church building and wanted to come on Sundays to hear the gospel; and immigrants from around the world who had gravitated to this little church. Each group seemed to want different things from the service, from the pastor, and from the refreshments after the service.
 
Neal gathered church members for a discussion and asked, “What is getting all these people to get up and come to worship on a Sunday morning?” 
 
“For everybody, there was a profound experience of dislocation, and whether that was addiction, or whether it was moving to a new country. or whether that was their parents leaving them with grandparents, all of them had a sort of loss,” Neal said. A man from Nigeria responded: “This is a place of healing and new beginnings.”
 
That was the work God was doing in this church. They were finding the gospel and the grace of Jesus Christ through that loss.

My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.

2 Corinthians 12:9

“We started to center on that promise. There was a woman who was still struggling with addiction but had this gift for calligraphy, so we got her a big paper, and she agreed to write this beautiful message, ‘This is a place of healing and new beginnings.’ We put that banner up every service. I'd start with these words every Sunday: ‘Welcome. This is a place of healing, a new beginning.’ This became a gift of God around which the community formed.”

The Promise of God

Neal could see God at work in these flickering stars. He also began to see how he was one of those faint, faraway stars.  
 
“When I think back to that retreat, I think what God was giving me in those passages from 2 Corinthians was a point of identification,” he said. “Up to that point, I hadn't had a major loss. Everything was great. And then the transition to New Jersey brought a sense of loss and grief. I still wanted my spiritual effort to have an upward trajectory, but that engagement with the Corinthians passage was the moment when God broke through to me. God said it didn't have to be OK. I didn’t have to be OK. 
 
“The objective promise of God was bigger than my circumstances, or my frustrations, or a fight in the fellowship hall over coffee.” 
 

It is the God who said, “Light will shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
 

2 Corinthians 4:6

Neal continued to pastor that church for another three years, until their family moved to Fiji as missionaries. Attendance at Sunday services grew to an average of 45 people, and memorably one week there were 60 people in worship. They never saw numbers that would make headlines or attract offers to be church-growth consultants. But those numbers often aren’t the place to look for proof of God at work. God’s grace might be visible in an 8-year-old child rustling candy wrappers, sitting across from an unemployed man battling alcoholism and a woman whose first language is Portuguese—and after they sit through a worship service together, they go downstairs and enjoy juice and coffee and snacks peacefully and pleasantly. God’s grace might be seen in a pastor who didn’t resign when he felt like it and found renewed strength for ministry at his lowest point by looking at the face of Jesus.

Sustaining Grace

In 2024, Neal celebrated the 25th anniversary of his ordination. He preached a sermon series that reflected on important guideposts along the way. 
 
“So often when we think about grace,” he said, “it’s the experience of saving grace, when we might first experience God's love. Or it’s the experience of grace when responding to the call of Christ in a specific moment. But that's not the only chord that grace comes in. This word sustaining grace came to me as what has perhaps been the truest chord in my ministry. 
 
“I think that that often my most profound experiences of grace have been moments when I have felt like God has been enough. God met me at empty. God made it all worthwhile.”

We have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. 
 

2 Corinthians 4:7
Wes Neal preaches in pulpit at Asbury UMC

The Rev. Wes Neal is the pastor of Asbury UMC in Durham, N.C. He is in his first year of the missional innovation cohort in the D.Min. program at Duke Divinity School.

In a sermon series for the 25th anniversary of his ordination, Neal preached on this text in 2 Corinthians 4. The end of that sermon, focused on verse 7, is lightly adapted here. 

The God Who Is Enough

Notice Paul’s familiar image of our being like clay jars that contain a valuable treasure.
     Clay jars in Paul’s day were three things: cheap, disposable, and easily broken.
For Paul to compare himself to a clay jar would be like one of us comparing ourselves to a red plastic cup. 
     Red plastic cups are three things: cheap, disposable, and easily broken.
You don’t take your red plastic cup home to use it again.
You don’t wash your red plastic cups. (Maybe some of us do.)
And you certainly don’t use a red plastic cup to store your valuables.
           Yet that is what we are, Paul wrote, red plastic cups which God has chosen to hold the light of the glory of God revealed in Jesus Christ.
Our being clay jars or red plastic cups does not make us useless to God—it is the 
real reason we are useful.

           It is when our words come to an end, or when our strength runs out that the value of the treasure God has placed in us becomes clear.
           When our words are not enough, God’s Word speaks through our simple willingness to say what we believe.
           When our strength is not enough, then God’s resurrection power is made clear in the way that we keep going—in the way that extraordinary things (things beyond our own power) happen through us.
           What matters is not that Paul is a clay vessel. What matters is the treasure God has placed in him.
           And this too, Paul goes on to say, is a way that grace is at work in our lives.
 
We don’t have to work very long to come to the end of our wisdom and strength.
           This is true for pastors like Paul, and it is true for us.
           There are days when our words do not create the change that we so want to see in the world and we wonder if there is a point in continuing to speak.
           There are days when it seems that the strength that pushes us backward is stronger than our strength and determination to press forward.

But there are not days when God’s grace is not enough.  

When we come to the end of our words and strength we encounter the grace of God’s wisdom and power seeping up through us to sustain our strength.
           This is the reason we do not lose heart.
           This is the reason we read about treasure in clay jars with a knowing smile.

Because we know that the treasure of God’s grace will shine through us anyway.