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
One of the worst years I ever had was in my early days at Christ Our King Church in Bel Air, Maryland. Our building was finished, and I realized I wasn’t being a pastor. I was so locked in to running the church programs 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.”
The elders 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.”
I’ll never forget what happened because of that talk. 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, walked out, and haven’t been back since. It took a year or so to deprogram myself. 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 twelve years.
There’s a line in a poem about a dog going along the road with haphazard intent. My pastoral life is now like that. There’s a sense of haphazardness to it 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. I like to keep a freedom in which I can be responsive to what’s going on with my people.
For example, I’ve never done visitation systematically. Sometimes I’ll read about someone who goes through the whole church list in a year and sticks to a rigid schedule. I’ve never done that. I do home visitation based 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 to me for a visit. I go and talk with people, 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.
Scriptural success model
Because of their different gifts, it’s all right for pastors to sharply differ in how they run churches.
I was Bill Wiseman’s associate pastor in White Plains, New York. He has personal integrity and is highly skilled in all areas of pastoral work. He did more than any other person to enable me to be a pastor, especially in the administrative and managerial aspects. He runs a tight ship; things like structure and efficiency are very important to him. However, our styles of ministry contrast markedly. He now has a church of 5,000 members in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and he would go crazy running a church the way I do.
Later on, I realized my gifts were not in administration. What I really wanted to do was spend most of my time in personal ministry to my congregation. This is how the Lord has spoken to me through the Scriptures, and in our society if pastors shape their pastoral role informed by something other than the Scriptures, they can quickly feel useless.
A hundred years ago, pastors had a clear sense of continuity with past traditions. They knew they were doing work that had integrity; their life had recognized value and wholeness. Today, that’s simply not true; we’re fragmented into doing different things.
In the pulpit you do have that sense of continuity. When I’m preaching, I know I’m doing work that has continuity going back to Isaiah. I prepare sermons somewhat the way Augustine and Wesley prepared sermons. I’m working from of the same Scriptures as they did, 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. The doctor, nurse, and pastor are a part of the healing team, but people don’t look at you that way. I’m an amateur, they’re the experts. And, in a sense, that’s true. In the modern hospital it’s a different kind of healing center than anything the church has experienced, and we don’t fit there—we’re outsiders.
Other factors contribute to this feeling of uselessness, too. When you have serious problems with running your church, what do you do? You call up someone to come out and show you how to run a duplicating machine, or you take a course in church management. And who teaches you? Someone 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.
I’ve written five books on the Old Testament—Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther. They deal with facets of pastoral work. Song of Songs gives a model for directing prayer; Ruth is a story about visiting and counseling; Lamentations deals with grief and suffering; Ecclesiastes is an inquiry into values, the naysaying sermon; and Esther is the story of community building.
These aren’t the only areas of pastoral work, but they are five important resources that provide for my pastoral ministry a great sense of continuity with traditional biblical principles. Today’s pastor has to go back to similar scriptural truths. Nothing else will suffice. Modern success models can’t match the effectiveness and self-worth provided by Scripture.
Strategic inefficiency
In the process of this study of Scripture, I found I really like being a pastor; pastoral work is my vocation. Through the whole process, 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 probably disappoint many people, mostly those in the community and in my denomination. They have expectations of me that I don’t fulfill.
To work successfully this way requires mutual trust among church leaders, myself, and everyone in our congregation. The elders 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, though, because it’s not the most efficient way to run a church; a lot of things don’t get done. We have had some leaders who weren’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 let them alone. My first priority is pastoral ministry, and so some other good things, such as making the administration of the church more efficient, must be left to others.
Community to me means a group of people who have to learn how to care for each other, and in one sense, an efficient organization mitigates against community—it won’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.
We had a woman who was working in a volunteer capacity coordinating several closely related programs. When she started, she was excited about it and did a good job. But as time went on, she took on a number of other things and began doing her administrative job indifferently. As her pastor, I was dealing with her on some family problems, and I felt it was important that I not criticize her administrative efforts at this time or ask her to resign. So I didn’t do anything.
Matters became worse. I received many phone calls and listened to many complaints. I responded that I would like to improve the situation, but I couldn’t promise anything. I kept on being a pastor to her, feeling that to keep from compromising my ministry to her, I had to let the programs suffer some poor administration that year.
Now, 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, but I need to do what I’m good at. I have to pay the price of being good at certain things but not at everything.
We don’t have anyone who is a full-time staff person. We have a man who has been a pastor working with us only on Sundays as a youth pastor. We also pay our choir director and organist; and we have a sexton who works about twelve to fifteen hours a week. There is no paid secretarial staff—only volunteers.
Sometimes I need people to simply answer the phone for me or telephone for me. I’ll say, “Why don’t you call so-and-so? She’s lonely and bored; see if she can come in one day and help us.” Sometimes that’s just the thing needed to draw people back into a sense of ministry and community. They arrange for my home visitation from a list I give them. It’s important, and they know it’s important.
Price of essentials
While I’m patient with some inefficiency, I don’t let the essentials slide. For several years I felt as though I was 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 includes 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 community’s needs, and I really wasn’t providing community leadership. I felt my people deserved more from their pastor than what they were getting. I thought maybe I belonged in a church with a staff that could be assigned the 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 a director of parish life.” The minute he said that, I thought of Judy. She’s a woman of about thirty-five who came to me last spring saying she was in a transitional stage, wondering where the next challenge was for her. She had organized programs for the community, had done a superb job of administrating them, and now she was relatively idle.
When I asked her if she would be director of parish life, a big grin appeared on her face. She said, “Let me tell you a story.” Her husband was an elder, and two years ago he was in the session meeting when I shared this problem about my leadership. After that meeting Don had come home and said, “You know what Gene needs? He needs you.”
It took me two years to recognize that. And now Judy is at the place in her life where she is ready to assume the role of parish director. 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.
Even if administration is not a pastor’s gift, every pastor has to make sure it gets done. If you can’t see to it that it does get done, you are 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 aside and say, “Look, God has called you to be a pastor, and we want to teach you how to be a pastor. 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.”
I make sure I pay that price. I return telephone calls promptly. I answer my mail quickly. I put out a weekly newsletter, which I think is essential. When the parish newsletter comes out once a week, the people sense you are on top of things; they see their names and what’s going on. It’s good public relations. Every week our one-page newsletter assures the congregation that everything is under control. If you want to keep your job, people have to believe the church is running okay.
Pastor of a community
Those who choose the style of pastoral ministry that I have chosen must come to terms with how to measure effectiveness. Outward signs of ministry success—big numbers—are unimportant to me. If the search committee of a large church approached me and said, “Here’s an opportunity to minister to 3,000 people, when your present congregation is only 300. Look at all the people you could be touching,” my response would be simple. If you speak to 3,000 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.
Some ministries are not meant to exist in a burgeoning place. There are ministries meant to be small, in small places, with a few people. Growth, certainly, but not always in terms of quantity.
Our church has grown slowly in numbers. My pastoral goals are to deepen and nurture spiritual growth in people, and to build a Christian community—not collect crowds. We could grow faster. 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 things—but we’d destroy our church. Although we might get 350 new people that I could preach to on Sunday, 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 own abilities while I continue maturing in them.
When we first arrived in Bel Air, one of our goals was to develop spiritual community, and I thought it would be pretty easy. We’d get these people into our home, pray together, sing some hymns, and we’d have it. Well, it just didn’t happen. It’s very difficult to develop community in our country.
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 out 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.
It was five years before that first incident happened to trigger community in our church. Only in the last six or seven years have I really felt community taking hold. I can now sense that I am pastor of a community of people, not just a collection of neighbors. That happened because I felt the freedom to respond in pastoral fashion to a need as it arose. It wasn’t great planning. It was a pastoral response.
God can produce in us what he wishes when we are true to how he has made us.
Copyright © 1997
