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. In awe of him, I consciously made him my role model for ministry and studied his work habits. I wanted to be as productive as he was.
On one occasion I asked how he had become effective in so many areas of ministry. He told me that it came with age and experience. His exact words were, “The longer you serve, the broader your ministry becomes. 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 I thought he did.
When I was in my early thirties, I led a conference in the church of an older pastor who became my unintentional mentor. By this time in ministry, I was experiencing some frustration—too much to do and too little time to do it. At the conclusion of the conference, I asked the pastor to critique my presentation. He made some generous comments and then gave me some constructive criticism about my filling the presentation with sarcastic one-liners.
Then he gave me some unsolicited advice.
He told me that if I continued at the pace I was working I would soon burn out. He advised me to choose whether I wanted to be a pastor or a preacher, and that I should make the decision before I turned forty. He was of the opinion that to be effective in my mature years the choice between pastor or preacher must be made—one would be my “major” and the other my “minor.”
“Churches will allow you to be mediocre in both areas when you are young,” he said, “but once you are in your mid-life, congregations need you to excel in one and bring in people to help you in the other.” He had decided to be a pastor, and his ministry gave evidence that his decision had been well made.
Now I had a dilemma: my two role models espoused what I perceived to be conflicting views. One said you can do all things well, while the other said you have to be a specialist. From the perspective of mid-life I can see now that to some extent both views contain truth. An effective pastor develops skills in all areas of ministry but learns how to use these skills at different stages of life. In some seasons of ministry, we may need the honed skills of a specialist, yet in most churches we have to function in more generalist roles. Much of our early years are spent trying to learn the basics, but only in mid-life do we have the skills and life experiences to know when to be a specialist and when to be a general practitioner.
For most it takes until mid-life to become competent in the three key areas of pastoral work: communication/preaching, pastoral care, and leadership/administration. It took me almost a decade per area to reach a measure of competence. Most ministers typically feel more confident and competent in just one area. But when I visited with pastors serving effectively in their fifties and sixties, I discovered most of them had to develop competence in each area over time. Ironically, just at the point of achieving competence, some ministers are tempted either to narrow their ministry to one area or to leave the ministry because the demands appear to be too great. In the previous chapter, I discussed the importance of not retiring on the job, a common temptation of middle age. This chapter defines the pastoral role for the second half of life.
Three-role specialist
When I was in my twenties, I worked diligently on my communication skills but I don’t remember consciously making it my first priority. In my denomination, preaching is considered to be the basic skill in pastoring a church and as a result I felt the most external pressure to excel in that area. The church I served during seminary never asked me any questions about my theology or my care-giving skills before they asked me to serve as pastor, but the congregation did hear me preach four times before they made their decision.
My first church after seminary asked some questions about my leadership abilities, but its search committee made it clear that energy and excitement were expected in the pulpit. I don’t remember if they were concerned about the content of my sermons, but while I worked diligently on developing communication skills, I also worked on developing content. I never wanted anyone to leave the church on a 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 to my sermon preparation each week.
To allow plenty of time for study, I learned how to make hospital visits in record time. By doing most of the talking, I could control the length of the visit and make the transition into the bedside benediction before the patient could report to me all the details regarding his surgery. I also learned that if I visited grieving members while they had other visitors I could make a quicker exit. By calculating the time of my visits, 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 much time with them, neither could they say I helped them. I cringe as I think of the folks I hurried past in the process of economizing hours for study.
My first full-time church after seminary grew quickly, but I did not know how to lead the church through a building program. While both my immediate successor and I worked on preaching and motivation, we struggled to help the organization take the needed steps to get from A to B. Therefore, the church did not get the badly needed new building and new location until they called a pastor who was strong in administration skills. He may not have been as polished in his preaching, but he accomplished what neither of his predecessors could do. After the building was completed, he was able to enhance his communication skills.
My point is simply that I neglected early in my ministry to develop certain basic pastoral skills in order to focus solely on preaching. Often the communication side of the ministry receives the most attention in our rookie years. But the same problem can afflict staff pastors. One minister of education nurtured his writing skills while neglecting organizational development. He knew the university community in which he served read his newsletter and other printed reports with a magnifying glass but could tolerate classes or programs that were not properly promoted. As a result, his printed pieces and columns in the newsletter were well received but the small groups under his leadership were dying. He had to learn basic organizational skills to better serve and nurture his small-group coordinators.
In my thirties I moved beyond preaching and learned how to be a pastor and provide pastoral care. Serving in a community with an average age of forty-eight forced me to deal with seeing church growth occur at a slower pace. I began to learn more about the grieving process. I begrudgingly discovered it 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. Care-giving thoughts are often refined and revised mid-sentence, without the help of a thesaurus. Although 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 somewhat.
In my forties, as I mentioned earlier, 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 each day, 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.
Now in my fifties, for the first time I feel a measure of confidence in all three areas: communication, pastoral care, and leadership. Though I serve in a large church with competent staff members, I find to some extent I must function in all three roles. Rather than becoming a specialist in one of the areas, I must be a specialist in each.
Destined to be a generalist
Although most of us would like to become specialists in one area and outsource the other two, few of us have that luxury. We have to know how and when to operate in these roles and when to shift into new roles. At mid-life we have the accumulated skill-development from our experience to draw on, yet we may be tempted to specialize as we age.
As energy levels taper off, we may tend to neglect what we do not enjoy. That means for many pastors letting the management/leadership part of the pastoral role slide. I intentionally put the terms management and leadership together because although there is a clear distinction between the two, they often run in tandem in the church. Some pastors resent the management or administrative side of pastoral work. Managing often seems to be unrelated to our call and less spiritual than preaching or pastoral care. As a young pastor, I thought if I could delegate the managerial tasks to someone else and do only the work of a preacher or pastor, I would be happier and the church would be more effective.
Administration is the most difficult role for me, and yet is crucial to my current church in its particular stage of development. Within a four-year period we started an entire second Sunday school, completed a capital fund-raising campaign and started another, and added midweek and contemporary worship services. I am confident that if these administrative demands had been made on me at an earlier stage in my ministry, I may have convinced myself God was calling me to another congregation.
In the last few years, I have begun to see the task of management/leadership as a core value of 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 am to live out my call in the second half of life, 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 factor of the church has added, I now see it as a gift from God—to be accepted and developed.
Two events were crucial in this shift. The first was when a younger minister with great potential resigned his church because he was not handling the administrative side of things well. After he left, with no other place of service in view, he came to see me. He was starting to emerge from the grieving stage and moving toward accepting some responsibility for his present situation. He said, looking back, he had rarely prayed about his administrative 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 in preaching. I then realized that I had not prayed often about these tasks—other than prayers for deliverance or forgiveness, that is.
The second event that affected my view of the administrative side of my ministry was a conversation with an older pastor who proudly told me he did not invest much of his time in the management of the church. Ironically, I was aware of two families from his church who had recently joined ours. Both had commented how their pastor did not seem to care for or love the people in his church. Theirs were not horror stories of an abusive pastor, but they gave narratives of benign neglect in management. Evidences of this were the declining quality of the facilities and the late arrival of Sunday school curriculum. This pastor was good at one-on-one pastoral care, but his people interpreted administration or management as corporate pastoral care.
Most churches will tolerate the weaknesses of their pastor and staff, but they tend to resent ministers completely neglecting one or two of the three key roles. The model of the small-town family doctor is the model many churches unintentionally use for their pastor. Prior to managed care and hmos, the family physician knew enough about all the areas of medicine to discuss most illnesses. The minister who does not have a basic competency level in communication, pastoral care, and leadership may be perceived as at best incompetent and at worst uncaring. In the early days in America there was a great similarity between the country doctor and the country parson. One cared for the body and made house calls. One cared for the soul and did home visits. Both the country doctor and the country parson were seen as wisdom figures in the community; people stood in awe of their commitment and stamina. While in the last thirty years the medical profession has moved from the rural family doctor who did a little of everything to the specialist who concentrates on his or her narrow field, most pastors today must function as generalists. That means we must continue to grow in our giftedness, but shore up the other parts of pastoral work that we tend to slight.
Cutting through the denial
There is potential for crisis if a pastor does not know his or her strengths—something we should be pretty confident of by mid-life. Sometimes a pastor will be in denial about what he or she is good at doing. A leader from another congregation met with me regarding his pastor and wanted to know how he could help him. The congregation, he said, loved its pastor; he was an outstanding care-giver and an adequate leader. But he imagined himself as an outstanding communicator!
This church’s leadership strongly disagreed with his self-assessment. Some board members had gently suggested that while he was working on his doctor of ministry degree, he also take some classes in preaching. He resented the suggestion, and some of his key laymen were afraid he was going to resign over it. Apparently he had rarely allowed input on his performance.
I can empathize with the tendency not to want to hear bad news. It is still difficult for me to invite and accept performance evaluation, but I do not want to stop growing in the second half of my life. If the best is truly yet to come, then I must be willing to fight through the pain of self-development.
I do believe, however, that I am more capable of handling performance evaluation now than I was twenty-five years ago. In the early years I did not always know how to properly assess the evaluation of others. If I liked the person who was offering the criticism, I would accept it as valid; if I did not like the individual, I would reject it as petty or irrelevant. But through experience I have discovered that my friends can be wrong and my enemies can be right. I have also learned—albeit begrudgingly at times—that most evaluation or criticism is partially true, and I gain the most if I am willing to endure the pain of sifting through it.
Recently a woman wrote me regarding three grammatical mistakes and one mispronounced word in a Sunday morning sermon. Although they were not major mistakes, they were indeed mistakes. I can remember a time when I would have either ignored the letter or found a kind way to tell her I was sorry she had missed the central point of the message. But I read the letter and concluded she was correct. I called her and thanked her, and she worked with me on the word I had wrongly pronounced for years. The following Sunday I used the word in my 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.”
Inviting evaluation has never been easy for me. An older minister recently urged me to set up a system for evaluation. Although our deacon board is not directly responsible for pastoral oversight and supervision, its members are more reflective of the age demographics of our church than any other elected body. So every other year I meet with our forty-eight deacons in small groups and ask them three questions: (1) What does the pastor need to know about his performance or the performance of the staff? (2) What are the challenges the church is facing? and (3) What appears to be going extremely well in the life of the church?
For the most part the response is affirming, but occasionally some direct and painful comments are made. On one occasion painful comments came from a frequent critic of mine. Unsure how to evaluate his remarks, I asked one of my friends for his opinion. He helped me see there was some truth to the negative evaluation.
“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.”
Without inviting the evaluation, I would have never corrected something that was actually easy to change. While everyone tips their hat to personal development, growth is painful, especially in mid-life, when we have years of ministry experience. We must resist the temptation to plateau. To those who continue to push the outer limits of their potential, the best may be yet to come.
Copyright © 1998 Gary Fenton
