During my senior year in college, I met several times with one of the legends in my denomination. This larger-than-life character pastored a large church, was a noted author, and had an extensive radio ministry. I consciously made him my role model and studied his work habits. I wanted to be as productive as he was.
Once I asked him how he became effective in so many areas of ministry. He told me it came with age and experience.
“The longer you serve, the broader your ministry becomes,” he said. “You can’t afford to be a specialist when you serve in the emergency room of the soul.”
I determined then I was going to excel in everything, just as he did.
Ten years later, I found I had not excelled at everything. I had too much to do and too little time to do it.
Another older pastor who became a mentor offered some advice. If I continued at the pace I was working, he told me, I would soon burn out. He said I should choose whether I wanted to be a pastor or a preacher, and I should make that decision before I turned 40.
“Churches will allow you to be mediocre in both areas when you are young,” he said, “but once you’re in midlife, congregations need you to excel in one and bring in people to help you in the other.” According to him, to be effective in my mature years, I had to choose either pastor or preacher to be my “major” and the other to be my “minor.” He had decided to be a pastor, and his ministry gave evidence that was a good choice.
Now I had a dilemma: my two role models espoused conflicting views. One said you can do all things well while the other said you had to be a specialist.
Meet the Reverend Doctor
In America’s early days, there was great similarity between the country doctor and the country parson. One cared for the body and made house calls. The other cared for the soul and did home visits. Both doctor and parson were seen as wisdom figures; people stood in awe of their commitment and stamina.
In the last 30 years, the medical profession has shifted in emphasis from the general practitioner to the specialist.
Most pastors, however, must still function as generalists. Yet for most it takes until midlife to become competent in the three key areas of pastoral work: communication, pastoral care, and leadership. And most feel more confident and competent in one than in the other two.
But when I visit with pastors serving effectively in their fifties and sixties, I discover that over time most of them had to develop competence in all three areas.
It is ironic that, just at the point of achieving competence, some ministers are tempted either to focus their ministries on one area or to leave the ministry because the demands appear to be too great.
For me it took almost a decade of work in each area to reach a measure of competence. Now, I am a pastor with three specialties. Finally, in my fifties, they come together and I feel competent as a spiritual “general practitioner.”
Stage one: “Preacher-boy”
The church I served during seminary never asked me any questions about my theology or care-giving skills before they asked me to serve as pastor. The congregation did hear me preach four times, however, before they suggested I might become their pastor.
In my denomination, preaching is considered to be the basic pastoral skill and, as a result, I felt the most pressure to excel in that area. I worked diligently on my communication skills during my twenties.
My first church after seminary asked some questions about my leadership ability, but its search committee made it clear that energy and excitement were expected in the pulpit. At that stage, I never wanted anyone to leave the church on Sunday morning saying “he had nothing to say” or “he didn’t say it well.” I learned to preach without notes, and this discipline alone added several hours each week to my sermon preparation time.
To make time for study, I learned to make hospital visits in record time. By doing most of the talking, I could control the length of the visit and make a quick transition to the bedside benediction before the patient could report the details of his surgery. I also realized I could make better time by visiting sick and grieving members when they had other visitors.
I presented the illusion of care-giving. Because I made so many visits, people could not say I neglected them. But because I never took time with them, neither could they say I helped them. I cringe as I think of the folks I hurried past while preparing for the pulpit.
My first full-time church after seminary grew quickly, but I didn’t know how to lead the church through a building program. While both my immediate successor and I worked on preaching and motivation, we struggled with leading the organization. The church did not get the badly needed new building and new location until they called a pastor who was strong in leadership skills. He may not have been as polished in his preaching, but he accomplished what neither of his predecessors could. With the building completed, he has since enhanced his communication skills.
My point is simply that I neglected certain basic pastoral skills early in my ministry in order to focus on preaching. Often communication skills receive the most attention in the early years.
The same problem can afflict staff members. One minister of education nurtured his writing skills while neglecting organizational development. He knew the university community in which he served read his newsletter with a magnifying glass but paid little attention to whether his programs were properly developed. As result, his printed pieces were well received, but the small groups under his leadership were dying. He had to learn basic leadership skills to better serve and nurture his small group coordinators.
Most churches will tolerate some weakness in their pastor, but they tend to resent anyone who completely neglects one of the three key roles
Stage two: real life in real time
During my thirties I learned how to pastor. Serving in a community with an average age of 48 forced me to deal with church growth at a slower pace. I began to focus on life issues.
Grieving, I grudgingly learned, cannot be accelerated. For a pastor to be a healing presence requires time and listening. Answers given to a dying patient are not as crisp and concise as the well-spoken lines in a sermon. Counsel is often revised in mid-sentence without the help of a thesaurus.
Although I was hesitant to think so at the time, my preaching and communication skills did not grow during this stage of my life; perhaps they even deteriorated a little.
Stage three: leading by design
My focus shifted again in my forties. I discovered I was not a natural leader. I had confused inspiration with leadership. I could motivate people, but despite the enthusiasm I generated in the churches I served, often little was accomplished.
Occasional insights and outbursts of vision are not the same as leadership. I had to learn how to communicate vision on a regular basis, develop strategies, and recruit, train, and develop other leaders. I consciously determined to read books, attend conferences, and hold myself accountable in the area of leadership.
By pushing hard, I tried not to neglect pastoral responsibilities such as hospital visitation, but I became painfully aware that it was during this stage of ministry that I was criticized for neglecting people.
Leadership is the most difficult role for me and is crucial to my current church in its stage of development. Within a four-year period, we started an entire second Sunday school, completed one capital fund-raising campaign and started another, and added midweek and contemporary worship services.
I am confident if these leadership demands had been made on me at an earlier stage in my ministry, my discomfort with this role would have triggered a search for a new congregation.
A born (again) leader
In recent years I’ve begun to see the tasks of leadership and management as central to my calling. They cannot take the place of preaching or pastoral care, but since I believe God called me into ministry, he must have been aware of the full responsibilities of my call. If I’m to live out my call, I cannot jettison the parts of it that make me uncomfortable. Rather than resenting the administrative side of my call, thinking it is something the human side of the church had added, I now see it as a gift from God—something to be accepted and developed.
Two events prompted this shift. A younger minister with great potential resigned his church because the administrative duties overwhelmed him. When he came to see me, he was accepting some responsibility for his situation.
He said, looking back, he had rarely prayed for these responsibilities except in times of crisis. He commented that if he ever had the opportunity to pastor again, he would pray for power and wisdom in administration as well as preaching. I realized I had not prayed often for these tasks either—other than prayers for deliverance.
In another conversation, an older pastor proudly told me he did not invest much time in the management of the church. Two families from his church who had recently joined ours confirmed that. Both had commented how their pastor did not seem to care for the church. Theirs were not horror stories of an abusive pastor, but rather of benign neglect. They cited declining facilities and the late arrival of Sunday school curriculum as examples. This pastor was good at one-on-one pastoral care, but his church interpreted administration as corporate pastor care. At that, he failed.
Most churches will tolerate some weaknesses in their pastor and staff, but they tend to resent those who completely neglect one or two of the three key roles. The minister who does not have basic competency in communication, pastoral care, and leadership may be perceived as incompetent at best, and at worst uncaring.
Don’t settle for a no-growth zone
A member from another church wanted to know how he could help his pastor. The congregation, he told me, loved its pastor, a fine caregiver and an adequate leader. Yet he imagined himself as an outstanding communicator. The church disagreed.
Some board members had gently suggested that while he was working on his doctor of ministry degree, he take some classes in preaching. He resented the suggestions, and some of his key leaders were afraid he was going to resign due to hurt feelings.
I can empathize with the tendency not to want to hear bad news. But we dare not refuse to benefit from honest appraisal of our strengths and weaknesses.
An older minister urged me to set up a system for evaluation in my present ministry. So every other year, I meet with our 48 deacons in small groups and ask them three questions:
- What does the pastor need to know about his performance or the performance of the staff?
- What are the challenges the church is facing?
- What appears to be going extremely well in the life of the church?
The response is mostly affirming, but occasionally some direct comments are made. One time a frequent critic of mine spoke up. Unsure how to evaluate his remarks, I asked one of my friends, who told me there was some truth to the criticism.
“If you felt the same way as my critic,” I said, “why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t think it was a significant enough matter to burden you with it,” he replied.
Inviting evaluation has never been easy for me, but I am more capable of handling critique now than I was 25 years ago.
As a young minister, I did not always know how to evaluate properly the evaluation of others. If I liked the person who was offering the criticism, I would accept it as valid, while if I did not like the individual, I would reject it as petty or irrelevant. But I’ve discovered that my friends can be wrong and my enemies can be right. Most criticism is at least partly true, and I gain the most if I will endure the pain of sifting through it.
A woman wrote me recently regarding three grammatical mistakes and one mispronounced word in a Sunday morning sermon. Although they were not major mistakes, they were mistakes. I can remember the time I would have either ignored the letter or found a kind way to tell her I was sorry she had missed the point of the message. This time I read the letter and concluded she was correct. I called the woman and thanked her, and she worked with me on the word I had mispronounced for years.
The following Sunday I made sure I used the word in the sermon for her sake and for my mine. I received an anonymous note in the offering plate that read, “Praise God, after nearly seven years of being our pastor, you finally said, ‘escape’ correctly.”
Without accepting evaluation, I would never have corrected something that was so easy to change.
While we all tip the hat to personal development, growth is painful. But we must resist the temptation to plateau. For those who are willing to push past their limits, to grow in all the pastor’s specialties, the best is yet to come.
This article is excerpted from Your Ministry’s Next Chapter: The Best Is Yet to Come, the eighth volume in Leadership’s “Pastor’s Soul” book series. To enroll in this series, call toll-free, 800-806-7796, and mention offer E8A28. If you like the book, pay $14.95. You’ll then receive the next quarterly volume, and you may cancel at any time.
Gary Fenton is pastor of Dawson Memorial Baptist Church 1114 Oxmoor Birmingham AL 35209 dawsonmemorial@compuserve.com
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