Time & Perspective Quote by Vance Havner

Ministry, Havner suggests, has a built-in trap: the job of representing God can quietly become a way of avoiding Him. The line lands because it flips the expected hierarchy. We assume religious work is inherently devotional; Havner treats it as a kind of spiritual paperwork, capable of consuming the very attention it claims to serve. His target is not hypocrisy in the tabloid sense, but a subtler self-deception: the worker so busy with sacred activity that the sacred becomes abstract.

The irony is sharpened by the second sentence, which borrows narrative authority from Luke's account of Mary and Joseph losing Jesus in the Temple. That story is usually told as a gentle lesson about parental worry and a child's calling. Havner repurposes it as a diagnostic: even the best-intentioned people can misplace the point of the whole enterprise in the very place designed to keep Him central. "Lost Him at church" is a devastatingly plain phrase, almost comic in its bluntness, and that tonal simplicity is the mechanism. It refuses theological insulation. No ornate doctrine, just a recognizable modern scene: church as schedule, logistics, committees, programs, sermons.

Subtextually, Havner is warning that institutions can convert faith into task-management, and that religious professionals are especially vulnerable because their busyness is socially rewarded. The jab isn't aimed at churchgoers who doubt; it's aimed at churchgoers who never have to, because they're too occupied. The last clause, "they were not the last ones", broadens a biblical anecdote into an ongoing indictment: the Temple, the church, the ministry office can all become places where God is talked about constantly and encountered rarely.