Caught up in the beauty of spring, I drove by Grover Cleveland Park on my way back to the church. That’s when I saw the juggler. There’s something about an impromptu exhibition of such dexterity, almost magically keeping those pins in the air, that causes you to pause. A small crowd of young people gathered, and even answering their questions, he never broke his concentration. He was fully absorbed in keeping those pins moving skillfully about him.
I’ve watched and talked with Don the juggler several times since. I’ve seen him pick up the strangest objects and immediately get them going in those same pure arcs-first one . . . then two . . . three . . .even four. Don, a self-taught juggler, insists modestly that it’s easy. He began with balls, went to rings, and finally took on pins, the most difficult. Don claims you can learn quickly to juggle just three objects, but it becomes increasingly difficult when you have four or five. After years of juggling, he still fears breaking his focus, losing the rhythm, and dropping one. But Don has learned one thing: No matter how good you are, you’ll drop one sooner or later.
Every minister encounters that maddening moment when ministry seems one great juggling act-so many things going on, and somehow we are responsible to keep them all in motion. We struggle to fix our focus and perfect our timing lest one of them drop. For many of us it is unthinkable to admit what Don readily acknowledges: You’ll drop one sooner or later. You just can’t keep them going forever.
The Pastoral Pins
Since meeting Don, I’ve tried to identify the pins we pastors must keep aloft. I’ve categorized the staggering number of day-to-day duties into four clusters: pastoral, prophetic, priestly, and professional.
The pastoral demands include visitation (people expect the pastor to call on the elderly, the infirm, the actives, the inactives, as well as those who have visited the church for the first time). Somewhat related is the delicate and at times daring task of maintaining relationships that help give each member a sense of affirmation, affection, and appreciation.
Our prophetic task consists primarily of speaking the Word of God. This means not only our actual preaching but also the hours of preparation that must precede proclamation.
The priestly function is concerned with our sacramental ministrations. The Latin word for priest, pontifex, aptly pictures this role: a bridge builder. As pastor-priests, we are commissioned to build bridges from man to God and from man to man. This entails baptism of new believers, confirmation of young Christians, the ministry of reconciliation through either a rite of confession or personal counseling, thoughtful planning of worship services, celebration of the Lord’s Supper, officiating at weddings, anointing of the sick, and burial of the dead.
And finally, the professional facet, the overall administration of our particular ministry. For many of us this includes working with various boards and committees, preparing a church calendar and, in some cases, the church bulletin, planning for weeks of special emphases, upgrading our ministry skills and knowledge, and attending to mounds of correspondence.
Don said juggling three is easy, four a bit tougher, and five downright demanding. We pastors are already at four, when we’re handed yet another: the dictates of personal spirituality. It is not enough for us to communicate God’s commandments to others. We must first love the Lord God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our might. Attention to personal spirituality must precede absorption in professional ministry. I cannot take lightly my need for personal prayer, Bible study, and acts of self-denial-the spiritual disciplines of solitude and fasting (too long relegated to another age) that can train me to say no to self in order to say yes more readily and freely to God.
Flowing from this (and yet an integral part of my personal spirituality as the Shema of Deuteronomy 6 teaches) must be my commitment to communicate these precepts and practices to my own family. This means accessibility, a disciplined determination to be available to my wife and children to grow together in wisdom and maturity.
These, then, are five pins we must keep aloft in those whirling arcs, and hopefully, prayerfully, prevent from crashing to the ground.
In addition, many of our people believe the pastor is capable of, and called to do, even more! Sadly, many of us add to the demanding act everything they throw at us. No wonder countless pastors give up juggling entirely.
Going for the Juggler
If we are to maintain balance in our lives, we must admit pastoral ministry is unrelenting in its expectations and often unforgiving of our limitations. Yet the fact remains that we have been called, and he who called us will also enable us. What most of us must learn to accept is the incompleteness of our tasks-projects ever in process, our work rarely, if ever, fully finished, the pins constantly in the air.
Ministry requires the ability to keep many things going simultaneously. How do we do that? There’s no secret. As Samuel Johnson said, “Men more often require to be reminded than informed.” It comes down to practicing certain truths we already preach. These, then, are not new insights, just reminders I’ve tried to apply during the past fourteen years of ministry.
Admit Your Limited Abilities
I am learning that not only can’t I do everything well, I can’t do everything. Period.
Harry Evans, former college and seminary president, purposefully misquoted to his students the folk proverb: “If a task is worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly.” He meant that some things absolutely must be done, and yet, because of other commitments, we simply will not be able to accomplish them with the diligence and excellence we might like. Once we realize this, we might also recognize others in the church who are not only capable of doing those tasks but doing them better than we can.
In one of my pastorates, the congregation regarded highly a former pastor whose energies enabled him to be here-there-and-everywhere. I assumed I, too, had to be Johnny-on-the-spot. I prided myself in the number of visits I made-no hour was too late, no distance too great. At one point, a church member was recovering from surgery in a hospital thirty miles away. Each Sunday for several months, I raced across the George Washington Bridge, parked illegally, dashed up six flights of stairs, shared Scripture and a short prayer, and returned to church barely in time to preach the first of three morning services. Far from being dutiful, it was dumb!
I was on the road to burnout, but worse, I was depriving members of the chance to perform a vital ministry.
My friend John Vawter at Wayzata Evangelical Free Church in Minnesota is delegation in action. He has trained his people, freely giving them ministries traditionally reserved for pastors. Lay people comprise a competent team of premarital counselors. Some administer and evaluate Taylor-Johnson Temperament Analysis Tests, others follow through with counseling sessions and share Scripture and insights relevant to Christian marriage, and there’s even a wedding hostess who regularly conducts the wedding rehearsals so that John can devote Friday night to his family. His commitment is to arrive one hour before each wedding and then conduct the ceremony. He’s shown me that the body can assume many ministries while he tends to uniquely pastoral functions.
Build a Base of Support
My greatest support system in our church is our board of elders. Because they are godly men, prayerfully considered and appointed by our people, I do not hesitate to lean on them. Our bonds are strong because of that collegial leadership and decision making. They are encouraged and eager to assume responsibility for our shared ministry.
Outside the body, I enjoy a unique relationship with four other pastors. We have made a commitment to be available to one another for insight, encouragement, and correction. We share with one another the best of our illustrations, outlines, jokes, newsworthy items-in short, anything that might assist the other in day-to-day ministry. There’s special comfort in knowing they are there not only when things get hectic, but even when the creative juices refuse to flow.
Last Christmas, my brother invited my family to spend a few days with him in Vermont. I wanted to go, but I had no idea what I was going to preach the following Sunday. But thanks to a conference call with my pastor friends, before long we had agreed on a passage, shared insights, and even discussed a few illustrations. As a result, I was able not only to visit family but come back refreshed and ready to preach.
Create a Realistic Schedule
Because I remember too well going to bed pained at the thought of work left undone, I have begun building a schedule I strictly keep unless providentially hindered.
Each Friday afternoon, before leaving my office, I prepare a weekly work sheet that highlights ministry and family commitments for the following week. My first task Monday morning, and each subsequent morning, is to detail that schedule and order the tasks in terms of relative importance.
I keep the schedule realistic. I refuse to allow the sheet to point its accusing finger at me at day’s end.
I also furnish my staff and elders with a preaching schedule for the next eight months. Planning my preaching in advance spares me the agony of trying to determine week to week what to preach. It also helps me coordinate my preaching with the church year and plan for breaks I’ll need before or after the seasons that make the greatest demands on my spiritual and emotional energies.
Discipline Yourself Spiritually
Of all I do, this is the toughest to sustain because it’s the easiest to put off. It is strictly between God and me, and too often the first area I allow to slide.
On more Sundays than I care to admit, my dryness was due primarily to neglecting my spiritual disciplines. On one such Sunday morning, I was so overwhelmed with a sense of living in the land of dry wells that I penned this psalm:
In my mind’s eye, Lord,
I see the faces of your children assembling this Lord’s Day
to worship You,
to experience your presence
as they encounter You in your Word.
Some will come excited
expecting to meet You.
Many will join us straight from battle
contra mundum
bruised and battered from that conflict.
Others will be here out of sheer routine
anticipation at a real low,
Still others driven here by an inner longing
only You can fill.
Lord God, I do not, and will not, exaggerate my role.
No good can be accomplished,
no ministry effected
apart from You.
Nonetheless, that small part You’ve entrusted to me
deserves my best.
And now, as Sunday draws near,
I hear the awful accusations of
a text not fully grasped
an outline still incomplete
a title not selected
words as yet unpenned.
The wells are dry.
Reasons surface-quickly
a swift-paced summer
that didn’t deliver the relaxed schedule
it seemed to promise at first,
a pile of paperwork
that kept me from your Word,
the beauty of these glorious days
that seduce the mind
and somehow drain its creative energies
the desire, and need, to put my mind in neutral
after the mental, emotional,
and spiritual activity of a long day.
But Lord, You are making it quite clear
these reasons are mine.
It is my voice I’ve heard,
not that of my Advocate.
I have succumbed
to a loyalty to lesser loves.
I agree with You, Father.
I have chosen the good over the Best.
These dry wells are of my own doing.
I am without excuse.
Most of us have experienced that pain of coming before God’s people and trying to speak a word from him when we haven’t first spoken to him. We simply cannot lead people where we have not been. Periodically, I have to renew my resolve to spend the first half hour of each day in prayer.
I’m encouraged in this by another pastor friend, David Fisher, who has a highly structured hour and a half he gives to spiritual exercises. He begins with readings from the Psalter and then selections from the Diary of Private Prayer by John Baillie. Then he turns to his personal prayer notebook where he reads not only from his own reflections and meditations but also from a collection of the great prayers of the church-the Te Deum, the Veni Creator, and the Gloria In Excelsis. These serve as his introit into the presence of God. After personal communion with God comes a period of intercession. He concludes with a study in two areas-the first systematic theology and the second either biblical studies or a biography of one of the saints.
Discipline of this kind will not only invigorate us but overflow into our ministry.
Exercise the Most of Your Mind
Recently, I was in a small group of ministers who spent several hours with James Wetherbe, professor and director of The Management Information System at the research center of the University of Minnesota.
Wetherbe explained that while we might use in excess of seven million brain cells a day, we are still drawing upon only 5 percent of our brain’s capacity. While the intellectual processes of which we are aware occur mostly in our consciousness, evidence suggests mental processing can also take place in arenas outside our consciousness.
This includes the ability to wake one’s self in the morning simply by concentrating, the sudden recall of information we’d forgotten but that returns after we’ve directed our thought elsewhere, and the “aha phenomenon” (which describes the experience of inventors, writers, or others in creative tasks who struggle over a bad project, seemingly getting nowhere, and give up only to find that while doing totally unrelated activities, suddenly-aha!-the solution surfaces).
It’s almost as if we have “a second processor,” which Wetherbe tried to explain was the creative and powerful resource available in our own minds. He said it is conceivable that, because of this second processor, we could develop a concept of what we hope to achieve, give some initial thought and direction to it, establish a deadline for accomplishing it, then turn our minds to other pursuits without fretting over this project. Later we can draw on a wealth of related information we would never have imagined.
I admit, some people regard all this quite skeptically. But my experience has been, since putting this approach to work, that my weekly sermon preparation as well as my writing commitments have been helped by letting this second processor collate information.
Favor Your Family
I have resolved to no longer preach principles about family life without trying to practice them before my congregation. It took quite some time for me to realize that my home is the greatest pulpit for my life’s message-living it before my wife and children that they in turn, might live it before others.
Recently, a pastor friend was asked by a man in his church to spend some time with that member’s son who was struggling with drug abuse. In fact, the young man was to be readmitted to a drug treatment center, and the father hoped the pastor might visit him that very night.
The pastor said he would do his best. But when he got home that afternoon, his own son asked for a few hours of his time. For years the pastor had been trying to strengthen the relationship with his son. The pastor didn’t hesitate a moment. He knew his responsibility was to his own child.
One of the thoughts that motivates me to build relationships with my daughters is the simple truth that when my life comes to an end-possibly long after the churches I’ve pastored have forgotten how to spell my name-my three girls will pen my obituary. Their feelings and memories then will determine my real life’s work as much as any program or building I’ve left behind. My success in life might well be measured in God’s sight by their honest assessment of my impact in their lives.
I am learning to play to that audience-and to do so without guilt and without apology.
Glorify God as Lord of His Church
It’s not right for me to think I am the only one who can meet the needs of this church family.
Theodore Hesburgh once remarked that “Cemeteries are filled with indispensable people-men and women without whom the world could not get along.” And yet it has.
Because the church is God’s, as we assume the tasks he’s given but not the burdens others would lay on us, he will be glorified.
Every juggler-no matter how good-will occasionally drop a ball. And every pastor-no matter how committed-will never be able to do it all. There comes a time when we have to take our hands off and let Christ be Lord. But that’s difficult because of people’s needs.
During a time of great pressure in my life, the wife of a close friend wrote what seemed to be a prophetic word for me:
Merry-go-round of ministry,
Will you ever stop?
It seems there is an eternal line
Of those who need a ride.
The crowds and throngs of people
Are ever pressing near.
Will there ever be a stop
To this twirling human motion?
Yes, my child, if you will only
Come apart awhile with Me,
You will hear My voice above all others,
I will care for all these needs.
I want you to step off this
Merry-go-round of ministry.
It is not My will for you
To spin and twirl through life.
My child, walk as I did upon earth
Take time to come apart,
To listen, to be with those you love.
I have other servants to do the work.
Come away with Me, My child.
Walk in the stillness of My Presence.
For I have instructed you: In quietness
And confidence shall be your strength.
Over the years these seven reminders have been building into me an endurance, a skill in pastoral juggling I had not previously experienced. They are helping me fix my focus and refine my timing. They don’t necessarily guarantee I will keep all the balls in the air.
In fact, I just dropped one-I missed the deadline for this article by ten days!
John B. Aker is senior pastor of Montvale (New Jersey) Evangelical Free Church.
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