Pastoring in the twentieth century requires two things: One, to be a pastor, and two, to run a church. They aren’t the same thing.
Eugene H. Peterson
The pastor is not precisely like any other leader — not ceo, not physician, not attorney, not social worker. The pastor rightly marches to a different drumbeat.
And that’s the challenge for pastors who lead. They cannot march lockstep with the methods of corporations and secular nonprofit organizations. No one outside the pastorate fully understands its own unique cadence.
In his twenty-four years as pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland, Eugene Peterson has done a lot of thinking about pastoral work: What is it? What keeps us from it? How is it done?
The answers? Eugene doesn’t know if there are hard and fast answers, but he agreed to talk about the problems.
Eugene developed his approach to pastoring from scriptural study and personal experience, and he explains it in his well-crafted Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work (John Knox), and his many articles for leadership.
He’s a man who reads mysteries, runs marathons, goes for long hikes in the woods with his wife — and who doggedly applies himself to the essentials of pastoral work.
How did you develop your view of the pastoral role?
One of the worst years I ever had was in the early days of this church. Our building was finished, and I realized I wasn’t being a pastor. I was so locked into running the church program I didn’t have time to be a pastor. So I went to the Session one night to resign. “I’m not doing what I came here to do,” I said. “I’m unhappy, and I’m never at home.”
The precipitating event was when one of my kids said, “You haven’t spent an evening at home for thirty-two days.” She had kept track! I was obsessive and compulsive about my administrative duties, and I didn’t see any way to get out of the pressures that were making me that way. So I just said, “I quit.”
How did they react?
They wanted to know what was wrong. “Well,” I said, “I’m out all the time. I’m doing all this administrative work, serving on all these committees, and running all these errands. I want to preach, I want to lead the worship. I want to spend time with people in their homes. That’s what I came here to do. I want to be your spiritual leader; I don’t want to run your church.”
They thought for a moment and then said, “Let us run the church.” After we talked it through the rest of the evening I finally said okay.
Two weeks later the stewardship committee met, and I walked into the meeting uninvited. The chairman of the group looked at me and asked, “What’s the matter? Don’t you trust us?”
I admitted, “I guess I don’t, but I’ll try.” I turned around and walked out. It took a year to learn to trust God to call and use the men and women around me in ministry.
I do moderate the Session. And I tell other committees that if they want me to come for a twenty-minute consultation on a specific problem I’ll be happy to do that. But I haven’t been to a committee meeting now, except in that capacity, for seventeen years.
Doesn’t every pastor have to be an administrator, even if that’s not his gift?
Every pastor has to make sure administration gets done. If you can’t see to it that it does get done, you’re in trouble. Pastoring in the twentieth century requires two things: One, to be a pastor, and two, to run a church. They aren’t the same thing. Every seminary ought to take their pastoral students and say, “Look, God has called you to be a pastor, and we want to teach you how to be pastors. But the fact is that when you go out to get a job, chances are they’re not going to hire just a pastor, they’re going to hire somebody to run the church. Now, we’ll show you how to run a church, and if you master what we’re telling you, you can probably do it in ten to twelve hours a week. That’s the price you’re going to pay to be in the position of pastor.”
What are some of the things you do to pay the price?
I return telephone calls promptly. I answer my mail quickly. I put out a weekly newsletter. I think that’s essential. When the parish newsletter comes out once a week, the people sense you’re on top of things; they see their names and what’s going on. It’s good public relations. If you want to keep your job, people have to believe the church is running okay.
Apparently for the last seventeen years it has been, though you haven’t been “running” it.
I suppose it’s the trust between the elders and me. They don’t always do it the way I want them to, but when I decided I wasn’t going to run the church, I also had to decide that if they were going to run it, they would have to do it their way, not mine. They listen to my preaching, are part of the same spiritual community, and know the values being created and developed, so I trust them to run the church in the best way they know how. Sometimes I do get impatient, because it’s not the most efficient way to run a church. A lot of things don’t get done.
Because they are volunteers?
Partly. Some of the leaders aren’t fully motivated. A congregation elects elders and deacons, and sometimes chooses them for the wrong reasons. Some are only marginally interested in the life of the church, so they have neither the insight nor the motivation to be productive. I can either give them the freedom to fail, or else step in and train people to be exactly what I want them to be. I’ve chosen to leave them alone.
You also have volunteer secretaries. How has that worked?
Wonderfully! The idea came to me while I was reading a Dorothy Sayers mystery. Peter Wimsey is out trying to solve a murder, and he’s having a difficult time getting information. Nobody will talk to him because he’s an outsider. So he searches for someone who would know the community, locates an elderly spinster, and hires her as a typist. Then he has her employ a typing pool, and these ten to fifteen people are his links to the community.
I thought, “That’s exactly what I need.” So I asked a woman whom I thought was competent in these areas to be the church office coordinator. We found two people for each weekday to work from nine to two o’clock, and informed the congregation of the new office hours. We divided up the office work to specific days and defined the responsibilities for each person. We have to plan ahead a little; we can’t get things done immediately. But the plus part is that we developed a lot of ministry. They do a lot of listening, they’re in touch with many people, and they tell me things that are going on. They are important to the running of the church.
Do these ideas make a difference in how your people view the church? Do they draw the community together?
Community to me means people who have to learn how to care for each other, and in one sense, an efficient organization mitigates against community, for it doesn’t tolerate you if you make mistakes. This is not the situation in the church. We have inefficiency on our church office staff, but efficiency is not nearly as important as being patient with people and drawing them into a mutual sense of ministry. It’s the way we operate; everything doesn’t have to be “out today.” If work is planned well enough, there’s room for things to wait.
Walk us through one of the inefficient things you allowed to happen, even though many leaders would see it as an administrative lapse.
I recall the case of a woman who was working in a voluntary capacity coordinating several closely related programs. When she started out, she was excited about it and did a good job. But as time went on, she dipped into other things and began doing her job indifferently. I was dealing with her as her pastor on family problems, and I felt it was important for me not to criticize her administration or ask her to resign. So I didn’t do anything.
Matters became worse. I had many phone calls and listened to many complaints. I said, “I’d like to improve the situation, but I can’t promise anything.” I just waited with it and kept on being a pastor to her. I felt that to keep from compromising my position as pastor to her, I had to let the programs in a sense fail that year and suffer with poor administration. Many pastors wouldn’t have permitted that, and for their ministry styles it might have been correct for them to step in and administratively handle the situation. I’m not against that kind of efficiency by any means, but I need to know what I’m good at.
I have to pay the price of being good at certain things and not be a jack-of-all-trades.
How do you make sure that personal ministry happens?
For one thing, I do home visitation. I do it on a sense of need, when I know there’s something special going on in someone’s life. Birth, death, loss of job, relocation, or trouble in the home are good indicators for me to visit. I talk with them, listen to their problems, find out where they are, and pray with them. That’s the advantage of pastoral work; it can respond to all the little nuances of community life and participate in them.
There’s a line in a poem about a dog going along the road with haphazard intent. Pastoral life is like that. There’s a sense of haphazardness to it, for me anyway, because I don’t want to get locked into systems where I have to say, “No, I’m too busy to do that; I can’t see you because I have this schedule.” But the haphazardness is not careless; there is purpose to it.
Does the pastoral role come straight from the Word, or has time changed its criteria?
A hundred or so years ago, pastors had a clear sense of continuity with past traditions. You knew you were doing work that had integrity; your life had recognized value and wholeness. Today, that’s just not true. We’re fragmented into doing different things. On the other hand, in the pulpit you do have that sense of continuity. When I’m preaching, I know I’m doing work that has continuity back to Isaiah. I prepare sermons somewhat the way Augustine and Wesley prepared sermons. I’m working out of the same Scriptures, so I don’t feel third-rate when I’m in the pulpit.
During the week, however, I do feel looked down upon. When I go to the hospital to visit, for example, I’m a barely tolerated nuisance. Other factors contribute to this feeling of uselessness. When you have serious problems running your church, what do you do? You call up a company and have them send out somebody to show you how to run a duplicating machine, or you take a course in church management. And who teaches you? Somebody from the business community. All through the week it seems we’re intimidated by experts who are teaching us how to do our work — but they don’t know what our work is. They’re trying to make us respectable members of a kind of suborganization they’re running, and as a consequence, we develop a self-image that’s healthy only on Sunday. I think pastoral work should be done well, but I think it has to be done from the inside, from its own base. That base, of course, must be the Bible; that’s why I immerse myself in biblical materials.
So you’ve found your pastoral role model in Scripture?
In the process of biblical study, I found I really like being a pastor. That’s my vocation: pastoral work. I discovered what God has called me to do and the gifts he has given me in order to do it. In my younger years, I often found myself doing things that were not my ministry. I finally learned to say, “No, I’m not going to do that anymore.” I say no often. I disappoint many people, mostly people in the community and in my denomination. They have expectations they want me to fulfill, and I don’t.
Have you also disappointed people in the congregation?
Several years ago I felt as though I were losing momentum. I quit doing many things I used to be enthusiastic about. I felt my life becoming more inward. My deepest interest is in spiritual direction, and since our community contains many psychiatrists and counselors, I quit counseling so I could spend more time alone in study and prayer. But then I found large gaps had begun to form in my congregation’s life. I had underestimated the needs, and I really wasn’t providing leadership. I felt my people deserved more from their pastor than they were getting. I thought maybe I belonged in a church with a staff that could be assigned tasks of parish programs, and I could study more and maintain a ministry of personal spiritual direction and of preaching.
I talked with a friend about this for three days. He listened thoughtfully and then said, “I don’t think you need to leave; you just need somebody to be director of parish life.” The minute he said that, I thought of Judy. She’s a woman who came to me saying she was in a transitional stage, wondering where the next challenge was for her. She has organized programs for the community, done a superb job administering them, and now was relatively idle.
When I asked her if she would be director of parish life, a big grin came on her face. She said, “Let me tell you a story.” Her husband was an elder, and was in the Session meeting two years earlier when I shared this problem about my leadership. After that meeting Don had come home and said, “You know what Eugene needs? He needs you.” It took me two years to recognize that. And now Judy was at the place in her life where she was ready to assume this role. She needs to be in ministry and is filling some of the gap left by my withdrawal. I’m free to study more and be more sensitive to spontaneous needs within the congregation. In a sense, I had gone through a period of failure to discover grace.
Is your church growing in numbers?
Slowly. My pastoral goals are to deepen and nurture spiritual growth in people, and to build a Christian community — not collect crowds.
Could it grow faster?
Well, it could. If I did certain things we could double our membership. We could organize house-to-house visitation, advertise, bring in special speakers, create programs for the community that would tune in to some of their felt needs, or develop an entertainment-centered musical program. We could do all of those — but we’d destroy our church.
Why would that destroy it? Why don’t you get 350 new people you can preach to on sunday?
Because I’d have to quit doing what I need to do — pray, read, prepare for worship, visit, give spiritual direction to people, develop leadership in the congregation. I have to work within the limits of my abilities while I continue maturing in them.
If you speak to five thousand people and are not speaking out of your own authenticity, your own place where God has put you, you won’t be any more effective as a servant of God. I don’t think the number of people who hear you speak means a whole lot. What’s important is that you do a good job wherever you are.
Aren’t you neglecting the unchurched people of your community?
We’re not the only church in Bel Air, and I’m not the only pastor. Few places in America are unchurched. Am I going to trust the Holy Spirit to do his work through other churches in my community, or am I going to think that if we don’t do it, it’s not going to get done?
A great deal of arrogance develops out of the feeling that when we have something good going, we have to triple it so everybody gets in on it. Many different ministries take place in the community and in the world, and it’s bad faith on my part to assume the Holy Spirit isn’t just as active in them as in my ministry.
In your weekly meeting with your local ministers, what are the biggest problems you hear?
Family and marital problems. I’d say these are the most painful things in terms of pastoral crisis. Another one, which doesn’t have the same sense of acuteness, is the feeling of inadequacy. When pastors don’t have large congregations or don’t receive affirmation from their people, it’s difficult for them to provide creative spiritual leadership. In fact, considering the little affirmation many receive, I marvel that it’s done at all. One of the key ministries of lay persons is affirmation of their leaders.
What counsel would you give to pastors who are in struggling situations, or who are in small churches, and are judging themselves as failures?
That’s tough to answer. I’m convinced many pastors are actually doing a good job.
They don’t know they are preaching and counseling and leading well. They don’t expect to be perfect, but they’re doing a good job.
I guess it goes back to the other themes we’ve talked about. A person has to be content to do what he is good at and offer it constantly to the Lord. If you keep trying to do what you’re not good at, you’re bound to fail. Nobody from the outside knows what the work of a pastor is, so they keep asking us to do things we’re not good at, and then we end up feeling guilty for not doing a good job.
How do you get affirmation without becoming dependent on the compliments of others?
I think it has to do with discovering my need for spiritual nurture and making sure I get it. Prayer is very important for me; I can’t function without it.
How does your prayer life work?
In the mornings I spend a couple of hours alone with the Lord. I get up at six o’clock and put on a pot of coffee. Often I do nothing except pray the Psalms; I’ve always loved them. They’ve been the church’s prayerbook for a long time. There’s an old kind of monastic nostalgia in me; in some of the monasteries all they did was pray the Psalms. I also read the New Testament, and then after an hour and a half or so I sometimes read something else or write. If I start writing, I often write for a couple of hours.
Mondays are important. For the first few years of my ministry I never took a day off. There were too many “important” things to do. Now my wife and I leave the house and go hiking in the woods for the whole day, regardless of the weather. We pack a lunch and take our binoculars for bird watching. We’ve been doing that every Monday for fifteen years. It’s important for both of us, because it’s a completely different environment and something we both enjoy doing. In the morning it’s a quiet time when we can just be ourselves as well as get in touch with ourselves. At lunch we talk, and then often keep on for the rest of the afternoon.
What role has your wife played in your ministry?
A very prominent and strong one, for it’s been a shared ministry. She’s a marvelous entertainer, and we have people in our home often. She’s a master at making people feel at home, and she’s good about caring for them. She’s helped create a sense of community in our church.
When we arrived, one of our goals was to develop spiritual community. I thought it would be pretty easy; we’d get these people in our home, pray together, sing some hymns, and we’d have it. Well, it didn’t happen. Sometimes we felt we were making progress, but it never really happened.
Then a young woman in our congregation died of cancer. She was thirty-one years old and had six children. About a month after she died, the father was discharged from his job and then lost his house. We took those kids into our home. Suddenly things started happening. Food would appear on our doorstep; people would call up and take the kids out and entertain them. It was almost as if we came to a place of critical mass. Then it just exploded, and we suddenly had community in the congregation.
It didn’t fizzle either. The hospitality increased and people took an interest in each other. It seemed almost like a miracle, and it took just one incident to trigger it. All our earlier attempts to create community now bore fruit because of the meeting of a need that wasn’t part of our strategy.
I can now sense that I’m pastor of a community of people, not just a collection of neighbors.
Copyright ©1987 Christianity Today
