For 13 years now I’ve observed pastors from the other side of the pulpit. I’ve watched them chair meetings, preach sermons, wrestle with finance committee spreadsheets, encourage volunteers, and so on. It’s not always been pretty, but it’s given me plenty to think about. You see, I was a pastor for ten years, and I keep seeing myself in them.
I cringe a lot.
I’ve served my local church in a variety of capacities since becoming a layman—everything from teaching classes, to serving on the executive committee, to shoveling snow from the walks. In such capacities, ironically, I’ve learned a lot about pastoring. It’s clearer than ever that as a pastor I ministered by a handful of assumptions that did not serve my churches well. If I again experience the call to ministry, I’m going to put the following five items on my office wall and read them daily.
Administration IS ministry
During the years when the ink was drying on my seminary diploma, I fancied myself a preacher, teacher, and curate of souls. These were the noble tasks of ministry, things no one else in the church was equipped to do. Lay people were perfectly capable of crunching the budget, putting out the newsletter, recruiting Sunday school teachers, and ordering new stationary. As for me and my ministry, I would avoid administration.
All well and good—up to a point. There’s no taking away the pastor’s unique roles. On the other hand, I’ve noticed as a layman that when the pastor doesn’t attend to the administrative details of the parish, congregational life begins to feel ragged and neglected.
The little things become noticeable: shortage of worship bulletins, torn pew cushions, dated bulletin boards, lack of pew pencils, weeds growing in sidewalk cracks, burned out light bulbs in the men’s room, ripped hymnal pages …
For better or worse, it is in such details that the church as an institution meets the lay person. When these things are not attended to, the little irritations can become a river of frustration: Who in God’s name is running this place!?
No, it isn’t the pastor’s job to replace pew pencils. But it is the pastor’s job to ennoble and monitor such “quality of life” issues as pew pencils, hallway lighting that works, carpets that are clean, signs abundant and clear, and so on. No, the pastor may not be there on Saturday afternoon changing light bulbs, but it is his attention that accounts for it getting done.
A pastor IS a diplomat
On my last Sunday in the pastorate, I goofed. Again.
I had listed the junior high and high school graduates in the worship bulletin and, you guessed it, I inadvertently left someone off the list.
As I shook hands after the service, I heard about it and “the hurt it had caused.”
My heart sank; I couldn’t believe that some family’s self-esteem hinged on whether their son’s name got printed in the bulletin of a church with 75 in attendance. I fumed about it for weeks.
But getting names right is symbolic of all those acts that make people feel important and respected, or not.
The list of a pastor’s diplomatic duties is endless—asking a key deacon his opinion about the upcoming budget, calling the head of the women’s group to ask how she’s doing, telling Mrs. Brown how much you appreciate her (failing) soprano voice.
As a pastor, I desperately wished to get beyond such niceties to the real work of calling people to discipleship and world evangelism.
But now, as a layman, I see it so differently: How am I supposed to believe the church is a “caring place” if the leaders don’t seem to care what I think, or if the pastor fails to thank me for reading the morning’s Scriptures in the service, or doesn’t ask about my son who is away at college? It’s hard to feel much enthusiasm for following a pastor into the depths of Christian discipleship when the simple acts of discipleship—gratefulness, attentiveness, love—seem to escape him.
Few parishioners will study theology—and that’s okay
In the beginning, I imagined that through the enthusiasm of my preaching and teaching I could get everyone in the church as interested in the Bible and theology as I was.
Perhaps I thought of the church as a Bible and theology club, where we would regale one another with spiritual insights gleaned from our studies. So I encouraged people to buy Bible dictionaries and Bible atlases and commentary sets, and I enthusiastically recommended (with a straight face) books on ethics, church history, and ecclesiology-pleading that it was important that we love God with our hearts, souls, and minds.
Then I became a layman.
I worked 45 to 50 hours a week in publishing. I coached my children’s soccer teams. I volunteered at a homeless shelter. I played softball for the company team. I remodeled our second-floor bathroom. I sat on the adult education committee. I worshiped weekly. I mowed the lawn. You get the idea.
As much as I continued to love theology, there was no time to squeeze in study. I discovered that I had previously been an avid student not because I was such a dedicated man of God, but because a congregation had generously freed up my time to do so.
As a layman I have become increasingly dependent on my pastor’s reading and Bible study. I look to him for leadership in this area.
To be sure, no Christian is exempt from studying God’s Word on his own. But in the real world, my study can never match that of the pastor. And if the pastor doesn’t do it, I’m the one who ends up shortchanged.
The church shouldn’t be the center of everyone’s life
As a pastor I assumed that lay people should be highly committed to the church.
I beamed when I noticed how one lay person served on the education committee and led a small group and sang in the choir and prepared the newsletter for mailing and ran the stewardship campaign and taught fifth-grade Sunday school. This was committed discipleship, an example for the rest of the congregation to follow, I hoped.
Now I see that all this church activity simply means that this person is unavailable to be a Christian witness in the community.
After I left the pastorate, I assumed I would still give myself fully to the church, just as I had expected people to give themselves to the churches I pastored. But it soon became clear that every hour I worked in the church was an hour stolen from the community—from neighbors, from the homeless shelter, from coaching kids basketball, from the myriad activities that put you in contact with people who don’t know Jesus.
I recognize that in our Protestant way of doing things, the church is the people. But I wonder if we might reconsider this proposition. Maybe it’s the pastor’s job to do much more of the institutional work of the church so that the people of God can have time to be salt and light in the world. In the real world, of course, the pastor can’t do everything.
If I were a pastor again, I would make it my goal to have as few people as possible working in the church to free up as many as possible to be active Christians in the world.
Budget time is not the time for spiritual euphemism
When I listen to sermons on stewardship, I hear the sermon behind the sermon.
Sermon: “The Lord is calling us to expand our Sunday school facilities so that we can minister more effectively to our children.”
Sermon behind the sermon: We’re having trouble finding people willing to teach in our cramped, dingy classrooms.
Sermon: “God would have us expand our ministry opportunities.”
Sermon behind the sermon: The pastor wants an administrative assistant so he can really take one day off a week, and the assistant pastor is probably going to quit if we don’t give him a raise.
I understand the need to speak about finances from a biblical perspective. Money is ultimately a spiritual issue, to be sure. But as a layman who works in a business setting, I also understand that in many ways money is money. Sometimes I would be more impressed with less euphemism.
This year our pastor got it right, I think. In the middle of a recession, he was trying to get us to raise our church’s giving by some 10 percent. In one sermon he talked about “ministry opportunities” and “the Lord’s money” and I just kept thinking, Blah, blah, blah. There’s no way we’re going to make the budget; this is a year we should be cutting back.
Then at the end, he said in so many words: “If we don’t move our assistant rector to a full-time position with a full-time salary, he’s going to be looking for work elsewhere.”
I like our assistant rector, and that matter-of-fact pitch is what finally convinced me to support the new budget goal (which we made, by the way). He would have come across as crass had he not set the spiritual context of the budget. But it would have seemed like vague idealism had he not mentioned the real-life issues at stake.
If I were a pastor again, these are the freeing and challenging insights that would influence my ministry.
Mark Galli is managing editor of Christianity Today in Carol Stream, Illinois.
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
