Restoring Kingdom Builders

How committed should a pastor be to the church that employs him?

I grew up in an era when pastors were expected to be available 24/7 to the people in their congregation.  In my first-ever class in seminary, Dr. Charles Feinberg – Mr. Talbot at the time – told our class, “If you can be anything other than a pastor, do it.”

Since I felt called to pastoral ministry, I didn’t know what else I could do.  (I had already tried working at McDonald’s and that experiment didn’t go so well.)

I had a friend in seminary who was a carpenter.  After he graduated, he went into that profession rather than pursue pastoral ministry.  He was able to be something other than a pastor.

But that was never true of me or many of my colleagues.  Bill Hybels used to say of pastors, “We’ve been had.”

Wives often complain that their hubands are married to their jobs, but in the case of pastors, it’s very much true.

While Roman Catholic priests have been instructed not to take a wife so they can be “married” to The Church, Protestant pastors usually commit bigamy: they marry both a woman and a local congregation.

When I grew up, pastors were more married to their churches.  Today, they’re more married to their wives … and that’s much healthier.

But pastors still struggle with how committed they should be to their church.

Let me share several thoughts about this topic:

First, pastors tend to be overly-responsible individuals.  They want their churches to grow both spiritually and numerically.  They want seeking people to find the Lord.  They want to visit sick people in the hospital and counsel people in pain.  They want to manage the church well and start new ministries and oversee worship services and make sure the church looks good and run the staff well … and on and on and on.

Scott Peck said that people who take too much responsibility tend to be neurotic.  If that’s true, then pastors must be among the most neurotic people on the planet.

When I was a pastor, I cared about every aspect of the church: music, small groups, leadership training, youth ministry, children’s ministry, and everything else.  Sometimes I was accused of not caring about certain ministries, but I tried to keep tabs on everything through the staff.  However:

Second, pastors are overly-sensitive to criticism.  In my second pastorate, I tried to help the deaconesses with their ministry and basically got kicked out of the meeting.  (I never interfered with women’s ministry again.)  But in that same church, the seniors were upset with me because I didn’t interact with them in any way – and they felt I had abandoned them.

While it sounds spiritual to say that pastors work for the Lord, He doesn’t directly pay their salary.  People in the church do.  And every pastor knows that when people in a church aren’t happy, they stop coming, giving, and serving.

So a pastor tries intensely to please as many people and groups as possible.  He knows that when people are unhappy, they spread their discontent to others … and bad things happen.

So the pastor runs around like a wedding planner trying to make sure that everything at the church is always perfect so people won’t complain about his leadership … or his caring … or his spirituality … or his preaching … and on and on.

However, pastors wish they could be divine.  While they represent a divine God, they themselves fall far short of divinity.

Pastors don’t know everything.

Pastors can’t be everywhere at once.

Pastors don’t have all power.

Only God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent.

Many years ago, a prominent church leader went into the hospital for a procedure.  He was angry with me for not coming to see him in the hospital, but I knew absolutely nothing about it.

He expected me to be omniscient, but I couldn’t be.  Even pastors have their limits.

I honestly believe that many pastors burn out because they’re trying to serve without limits (an indication of divinity) when they actually have many limits (an indication of humanity).

When pastors feel overly-responsible for their churches … when they act overly-sensitive … and when they feel like they have to be divine to succeed … they gradually drift toward being married to their church.

And in the process, the pastor puts himself in danger of being divorced by his spiritual bride.

I’ll write more about this topic next week.

What are your thoughts about pastors being married to their churches?