Aside from coaches and referees, perhaps no one receives more unsolicited advice on how to do their jobs than pastors. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about who pastors are and what they should be doing. Some of these opinions are completely off base. There's no better recipe for ministry failure than trying to fulfill everyone's expectations. On the other hand, I've come to see a silver lining in some of the most common stereotypes people have of pastors. Let me explain how three of these stereotypes have actually helped me focus on the soul of my calling.
1. "Pastors don't have to work hard."
A hard-driving businessman, about my age, looks at me with half a grin. "Must be nice," he says, "to work only one day a week." Then he laughs. I know—it's just a joke. Hardy har har. But he says this a lot.
Underneath the cloak of a joke lies the naked truth: He thinks he works harder than I do. Not only does he work more hours (so he thinks), but he does real work—like landing new accounts. Nothing so namby-pamby as dispensing devotional thoughts.
This irritates me.
It pokes my male pride, and immediately I know how I want to respond: prove him wrong. I will work my butt off. I will work harder than he does, longer than he does, and I will do so in a way that—subtly, spiritually, of course—he knows it. I will drop casual comments about being "crazy busy" or "my calendar being so full."
There is one, teensy-weensy problem, though, with proving him wrong, with showing the entire church just how hard I work: it ruins me as a pastor.
The problem with showing the entire church just how hard I work: it ruins me as a pastor.
This fall, in a staff meeting, we were discussing the plan for next year's Easter services. People threw out several options, and I pushed my point so insistently, so demandingly, I made another staff member cry. A man. Yes, I did.
After the meeting, I met with him and apologized. But the next day, I wondered, Why did I go over the top? Our staff welcomes vigorous disagreement, and we often debate. But I had gotten to the point where my desire was the Most Important Thing in the World.
Later that week, I took a prayer day. This is not a badge of spirituality; it's a requirement for every pastor at our church: one day per month, spent in prayer, on the clock. I walked along the Fox River in the sunlight, praying out loud and then lowering my voice when bikers passed by. I didn't get any conscious answers to why I had thought the next ministry decision was the end of the world. But by the time I drove home, I knew it wasn't. I felt reoriented to God, to love, to people, and to patience.
It turns out that to do pastoral ministry, I need a soul. And when I work all the time, I lose that. By doing so much ministry, I lose the one thing I need most in ministry.
In Prayer Richard Foster writes: "At first we thought solitude was a way to recharge our batteries in order to enter life's many competitions with new vigor and strength. In time, however, we find that solitude gives us power not to win the rat race but to ignore the rat race altogether. Slowly, we find ourselves letting go of our inner compulsions to acquire more wealth than we need, look more youthful than we are, attain more status than is wise. In the stillness, our false, busy selves are unmasked and seen for the impostors they truly are."
That's what happened to me, walking along the Fox River: I shook free of my "false, busy self." The self that got so busy it forgot that another pastor on our staff is infinitely more important than my grand idea.
It turns out that the hard-driving businessman who puts me down for working only one day a week has a point: I should work fewer hours per week than he does. For I need time to pray, to reflect, to forgive the unfair criticism and the slight, to let go of the anxiety about our church's finances. Otherwise, my soul becomes muddied, and I fail to bring a clear pastoral presence. The nature of pastoral work requires a different way of working.
A friend once prayed for me about this, and his spontaneous prayer took on the character of a prophetic indictment. "May Kevin have a conversion," he asked the Lord, "to no longer measure productivity by hours, but by presence. May he know that prayer is the work. May he not so much use the desk as the kneeler. May he go prone so you can lift him up. May he minimize himself so you can maximize him." Then he stopped the prayer and looked at me. "The Lord wants to dig a deeper well for fresher water, for you will give 1,000 cups of cold water through preaching and pastoral presence."
Does my pastoral presence refresh people like a bottle of cold water on a hot day? It can—but only if I keep my work within limits. Leadership Journal once asked pastors to log their work each week. Pastors reported high levels of work satisfaction up to 55 hours per week. But beyond that their satisfaction turned into resentment. Surely becoming resentful is not what Jesus had in mind when he called me to this work. Eugene Peterson's words still shake me: "The adjective busy set as a modifier to pastor should sound to our ears like adulterous to characterize a wife or embezzling to describe a banker."
The right way for me to respond to the business guy who "jokes" that "You pastors work only one day a week" is to do more than swallow. It's to delight in the freeing realization that if we're competing for most hours worked per week, he can win. Go ahead. Because I'm in a different kind of work that requires a different kind of rhythm.
2. "You should be accessible when I call."
In any given week, someone wants me to come to a prayer breakfast. Another person would love it if I could attend her voice recital. A third needs me to write a pastoral reference for his mission trip. Not long ago a member called, distraught about her across-the-street neighbor, whose marriage was melting down. She didn't know this neighbor well, and the neighbor does not attend our church, but "Could you go and help out? I'll give you her number."
Their unspoken expectation falls on my shoulders—You should be accessible when I call. That's what pastors do.
Intensifying this is the raw economic fact: each person pays part of my salary. When I worked in publishing, I had one boss, whose title appeared in the upper right corner of my job description. In the church, hundreds of names appear there; the paper quickly runs out of space.
On most days, I receive this with good humor as a compliment; people want their pastor involved in their lives. But some days—usually right after I've told someone, "I'm sorry, I won't be able to come," and heard that long, distressed pause and plaintive, "Well, okay"—I sag under the weight. Why can't they understand I'm a leader? I think. I don't do all the shepherding; I make sure the shepherding gets done. This, after all, has been trumpeted for the past 30 years in books and seminars for church leaders.
Too bad this fine point is lost on people.
It turns out that the stereotype of pastor as the humble parson who still makes house calls, cannot be explained away, no matter how many church-growth books try. That's because it is in the essential nature of sheep to want a shepherd. They want someone who knows them well enough to call them by name, who will track them down when they get lost in a thicket. If you don't want that expectation, you don't want sheep.
And here the stereotype of accessible shepherd cuts across my grain. Do I merely want growth in attendance—that makes me feel good—or do I really want more people to pastor? Because that cannot wholly be delegated. If I have no time to meet with the distraught, to hear the confession of someone who starts out, "I've never told this to anyone before, but …" then I am not a shepherd.
3. "Pastors are out of touch."
I'm in the barbershop, and someone curses. Then he looks over at me, "Oh, sorry, Pastor. I know you're not used to language like that."
In one way, I appreciate his restraint, even if it came four seconds too late. But in another way, I chafe at being the professionally holy guy, the person who's thought to be so sheltered, he's never heard such language and couldn't possibly handle it.
Or someone explains to me about the latest (insert one) video game, movie, or TV show with a cult following, and I can tell he's slowing down, explaining more than he would to any other friend, because he assumes I don't know the first thing about this. Fairly often, I don't.
If the only things I pay attention to are what everyone else is paying attention to, I have nothing to say.
This stereotype, "Pastors are out of touch," hurts my pride. I want to be in-the-know and seen as culturally relevant.
But this annoying stereotype can actually help me. It reminds me that to be wholly relevant is to lose my spiritual power. If the only things I pay attention to are what everyone else is paying attention to, I have nothing to say.
That's why on the day of my ordination, the bishop charged me: "Will you be diligent in prayers, and in reading the Holy Scriptures, and in such studies as help to the knowledge of the same, laying aside the study of the world and the flesh?"
In the silence that followed, I made a public vow: "I will endeavor so to do,
the Lord being my helper."
That means I will sometimes be out of touch. But that's not all bad.
G. K. Chesterton built a whole character on this stereotype. His detective,
Father Brown, a short, unassuming priest, is constantly looked over and looked down upon. He's sheltered, irrelevant, people know, so he couldn't
possibly understand the complexities and pain of the real world.
Yet Father Brown solves the murder.
How does he do it?
Father Brown knows the human heart. His regular times in prayer have revealed to him his own sinful drives. Listening to people in the confessional, he's learned what anger, lust, and greed sound like, how they darken a soul and lead some to the point of killing another human being.
In one way, Father Brown knows nothing. In another way, he knows everything.
Kevin Miller is associate pastor of Church of the Resurrection in Wheaton, Illinois.
Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
