There is a danger of doing too much as well as of doing too little. Life is not for work, but work for life, and when it is carried to the extent of undermining life or unduly absorbing it, work is not praiseworthy but blameworthy.
Ralph Turnbull
Every preacher who trims himself to suit everybody will soon whittle himself away.
J. Harold Smith
There’s no question but that the expectations of pastors have changed dramatically in recent years. In fact, the best-known American preacher of the 1700s probably would not have been able to make it in today’s pastorate. A scholar like Jonathan Edwards would be unlikely to attract a twentieth-century audience. Apart from a supernatural movement of the Spirit, people would not be flocking from miles around to hear him the way people responded to Edwards in his day. He’d likely be teaching in a seminary instead.
It’s no longer enough for a pastor to be a scholar and Bible expositor, to preach on Sunday, and to perform such ceremonial duties as baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Today’s pastors are also expected to attract people to the church, administer a volunteer or paid staff, and counsel individuals with a wide range of personal problems. And if pastors can use computers to project church growth, giving levels, and how much debt the church can handle, so much the better.
They also have to be warm and personable, creating that feeling of intimacy we discussed in the last chapter. No matter how large or small the church, the people coming through the doors on Sunday want the pastor to make them feel loved and important. And if they can’t do all these things, they’ll have people wondering why the superchurch pastors can do it but their pastor can’t.
What’s a pastor supposed to do? It’s hard to get all the expectations clearly defined or agreed upon. “I came to this parish with only a letter of invitation that described my job and responsibilities in a very general way,” says one pastor. “I made an attempt to clarify issues through a support group that fizzled. I am free to go my own way a lot of the time, but I need more structure than has been offered. This creates haphazard ministry. I respond often with lethargy, frustration, anger, guilt, feelings of failure, and low self-worth.”
A second pastor says the “vague expectations of the congregation” force him to “struggle alone with priorities.” This in turn “causes feelings of despair and ‘not getting anything done’ at the end of many days. There’s not a clear-cut focus on any goal.”
A third pastor laments that “the expectations — unagreed upon, unwritten, and all too often unspoken — are impossible to serve. They chewed me up. My escape was to come home and hide in front of the TV.”
Another pastor discovered that “there are as many expectations of us as there are parishioners — often hidden until we fail to meet them.”
Clearly, vague expectations and hidden agendas can be a major problem. “I find it difficult to refuse to accept certain tasks,” laments one minister. “At the same time, I feel I’m spreading myself too thin. I find myself neglecting other important pastoral duties such as hospital visitation and long-range planning.”
Not all the difficult expectations come from parishioners, of course. Many times the hardest ones to live up to are self-imposed. We can be forever falling short of our own standards, or we can become afraid to act for fear of failure. Says one pastor, “I know I am spiritually and intellectually able to accomplish the task, but my expectations create a paralyzing stress.”
Some of these expectations can be taken care of by a clear work agreement, but others defy even the best job description. Let’s look specifically at some of these troublesome expectations.
The Effective Leader
One of the most prominent contemporary expectations is that the pastor will be a leader — that is, a person who gets things done. This calls for a whole cluster of skills: the ability to recruit, train, and motivate volunteer workers; the political savvy to work with boards and powerful individuals in the church, as well as with governmental bodies like zoning boards and town councils; and the ability to raise money.
In addition, effective leadership means that church committees, youth groups, choirs, and the use of church facilities all have to be coordinated, directed, and administered.
Even if the typical pastor is a “people person” whose natural gifts are not in the area of administration, nonetheless, there will likely be business leaders in the church who are managers and who think the pastor should use the same principles they do in their work, as I said in the preceding chapter.
In addition, staff people — whether lay volunteers, part-timers, or full-timers — want to be managed. And if the pastor isn’t good at that, the staff may complain to the board. Then the managers tell the pastor, “You’ve got to manage them.” The pastor, who may not know what they’re talking about, tries to give more orders but isn’t happy, and chances are the staff people won’t be, either.
What has happened to many pastors is that they’ve entered the ministry because they love to study, to interpret the Word of God, and to teach it. Most of them have some interpersonal skills as well. But then, when they encounter some of these other expectations, in the backs of their minds they begin to believe that their success as a pastor depends on their abilities in areas for which they aren’t well equipped.
This creates a lot of tension between what seems holy and what seems humanly necessary. I can’t do what the pastor of First Megachurch says he did, such pastors may think. And then they begin to think there must be a better way to make a living, that maybe they missed God’s calling after all.
Itching Ears
Another expectation, which has been around for a long time but seems more pronounced now, is what I call “itching ears.” That is, people expect the pastor to tell them what they want to hear. Today we call this need-based preaching, and the rationale is that only by speaking words of comfort to the worries and struggles of your congregation will you hold their attention and really get through to them. To a certain extent, understanding needs is a very legitimate approach, a key to effective communication of any kind.
The tension here is between telling people only what they want to hear and being the prophetic voice of God, saying what you believe is his message even if it’s not what people want to hear. Preaching an unpopular message can, of course, be costly.
Jonathan Edwards was himself a victim of the consequences of prophetic preaching. I had known for a long time that later in life Edwards had been a missionary to the American Indians, even though he didn’t speak their language and was a frail man physically. I had always assumed he went because he had some great vision for reaching them with the gospel. In reading a biography of Edwards recently, however, I discovered that he went to the Indians because he had been kicked out of his church in Massachusetts!
It seems that some of the young people in his church had done things that he considered sinful, but which some of the parents excused. In any event, he decided to preach about those things from the pulpit and denounce them as sin. The problem was that the young people involved were the sons and daughters of some of the prominent and influential people in the church.
Those parents told Edwards to stop preaching that way. He refused and accused them of trying to cover up immorality. In response, they cut back his salary, and when he kept preaching, they kept cutting. Eventually they forced him to resign, and he then decided to go to the western frontier and preach to the Indians.
Occasionally a strong pastor who’s been in a church for a while is able to turn that scenario around and is able to preach strongly and specifically without risk of losing credibility or congregation. But most pastors feel the effects when they preach an unpopular message.
Program Supplier
The church has also been greatly affected by consumerism. People today often shop around for a church the way they would for a better laundry detergent. They evaluate a church — its pastor and programs — based on how well it “meets the needs” of their family:
“Do we like the preacher?”
“Do they have the kind of music we like?”
“Is there a good program for our kids?”
“Were the people friendly?”
“Do they have a softball team?”
“Is it easy to find a parking place?”
“Is the service over by noon?”
These are the standards by which many people judge churches. The pastor, of course, has the primary responsibility for “supplying the needs” of these church shoppers. As one pastor described the tension, “At times I wonder if I’m running a place of worship or a recreation center.”
Then there’s what we might call the expectation of the pastor as pinch hitter. That is, whatever job needs doing in the church, if no one else can or will do it, surely the pastor will! After all, that’s part of his calling, isn’t it? One pastor says the expectation in his congregation is that “Pastor can pick up whatever church members do not want to do — teaching classes, filling in, janitorial work, secretarial work, lead the youth, be the errand boy!”
Provider of Solutions, Preferably Simple
In my opinion, the toughest expectation facing the modern pastor is that there’s an easy solution to every problem, and that the pastor ought to be able to provide it. People today don’t want to hear that life is sometimes hard, that pain is a part of life, and that God may not even tell you why you’re having to struggle or suffer. But people seemingly expect the pastor to make life pain free.
This incredible expectation grows out of several sources. For one, commercials and the consumer society teach that for whatever problem you have, there’s a product you can buy to take care of it. Do you drive people off with body odor? Well, you just need to buy the right soap or deodorant. Having trouble attracting the opposite sex? The obvious answer is (take your pick) the right clothes, perfume, hairspray, or car.
Television shows themselves reinforce the message. The makers of these programs have yet to find a problem that can’t be solved in sixty minutes or less. No matter how much the conscious mind rejects the myth that problems are solved so neatly and easily, if you watch enough, eventually the subconscious mind begins to equate the television image with reality.
The Industrial Revolution and, especially, World War II also fueled the idea that with technology and enough resources, any problem can be solved, any enemy overcome. Those of us who went through World War II can recall that afterward, Americans felt unconquerable — as though there was nothing we couldn’t do if we set our national will and focused enough of our immense resources on accomplishing it. That sense of power persists to this day, although it’s been shaken somewhat in recent years.
Those of us who came out of that war also felt a great sense of urgency in overcoming all obstacles to reach the world for Christ. The Holocaust was interpreted as proving that humanity had become so evil that the return of Christ must be imminent. Thus, we thought there was no time to waste on the slow processes of the church, and as a result the parachurch movement was born. That was certainly my thinking as I went into Youth for Christ after college; it seemed much more results- and action-oriented than the local church. Obviously these attitudes have been adjusted over the years.
In addition, there’s a brand of theology that further adds to the expectation that pastors should have an easy answer to every problem. Some prominent teachers — who, I’m convinced, are sincere and trying to be loyal to God — are saying that God wants you to be healthy and wealthy, and that if you’re not those things, you’re not on right terms with God. If you just have enough faith or pray the right way or do the right things, God will bless you in obvious, outward ways.
What those folks really want to say, I think, is that if God isn’t big enough to make us successful and to heal us when we get sick, then he’s really kind of small. So let’s get us a God that’s really big, and let’s learn how to push his button properly so he’ll keep all those promises about prosperity in the Bible.
At some level, every pastor has to deal with that expectation. It may be in our own hearts. If we pray for sick people and they’re not healed, we may begin to think we don’t have enough faith or aren’t following the right formula. Or maybe the God we preach just isn’t as big as the other guy’s.
Ours is also a very pragmatic society. “Does it work?” seems to be the ultimate test. If it does, it must be good; if it doesn’t, there must be something wrong with it. However, if pragmatism is the major criterion in evaluating ideas or people, we’d have to conclude that Adolf Hitler was the greatest youth worker of all time; no one has been more effective at motivating and enlisting the eager involvement of young people.
On the other hand, we have a small-church pastor who can’t get one young person to come to his church. Does that mean he’s a failure? No, as Christians we should understand that pragmatism is not the major criterion of success; rather, obedience and faithfulness to the call of God are the true measures. I joined YFC as a young man because it was action-oriented and produced measurable results. From a pragmatic perspective, it was a great place to be. And while I don’t doubt that was the right decision for me at that time, I also think that in terms of lasting impact on lives, perhaps the greatest ministry I’ve ever had to this point was as the head resident of a dormitory at Taylor University for two years, interacting closely with a group of forty-eight young men.
A final reason the expectation to solve life’s problems looms so large is that it satisfies a basic human desire to put God in a box. We want to feel confident that if we do A and B, God will always respond by doing C and D. Believing this gives us a sense of control, which we crave desperately. It’s very comfortable for most of us to see life, including our relationship with God, in simple, mechanistic terms.
Conversely, it’s absolutely terrifying to many people, Christians included, to conceive of God as being unpredictable, no matter how loving they may say they believe him to be.
The fallacy of the easy solution, of course, is that it’s just not the way life works. It’s not always simple, cut and dried. Much of life is not glorious triumph, but coping and making do. God is not obligated to serve us in the way we think he should. He may choose to build us through adversity. Such a perspective, however, is not popular.
Back before the era of instant gratification and five easy steps to handling any difficulty, coping and making do were considered virtues, and many people made do in tough circumstances for years or even a lifetime, with no one questioning their spirituality. Indeed, they were often considered to be among the saintliest of people.
At times I’ve had to tell myself, If God were to do everything for us, it would rob us of the adventure, the dignity of being involved with him in the stewardship of life. God gave us the responsibility to subdue and manage the earth. If he then stepped in and relieved us of that responsibility every time things started to go wrong, he would defeat his own purpose.
I have a friend who should be a good mechanic but who can’t even change a tire on his car. Why? Because his father was a master mechanic, and every time the son started to do something with a tool as a boy, as soon as he made the smallest mistake, the father would grab the tool out of his hand and do the job “right.” Now this son is totally inept with any kind of tool.
There’s a sense in which a large part of the glory of any father is in his son’s ability to emulate him — to walk and talk and work and think like him. Yet my friend can’t emulate his father’s mechanical skill at all. If God stepped in and solved every tough situation at the first sign of trouble, we likewise would be weak and ineffective, incapable of emulating our Father. The result would be no glory to God, but just the opposite instead.
Thus, those who want to believe in a God who eliminates all suffering and pain don’t make God “bigger.” They actually diminish his opportunity to be glorified through us.
I also find it helpful to think of coping in positive rather than negative terms. That is, coping isn’t a matter of struggling and reconciling yourself to failure. Rather, it’s an acknowledgment that God has us in a developmental process. He’s in the business of slowly but surely, throughout our lifetimes, conforming us to the image of Jesus Christ.
The Christian life, as it’s lived in the context of the church, is like a centerless grinder. You take some ball bearings that are pretty much round but not perfectly so, and you toss them into the grinder, which spins rapidly. Then you throw in some abrasive and some oil to hold the abrasive in suspension. As the bearings spin against the abrasive, they’re gradually smoothed into perfect roundness.
We Christians are like those bearings. The abrasives of life, the struggles, combine with the oil, the love of God and the commitment we make to him and to each other, and in that environment God smoothes us and shapes us into the perfect likeness of Jesus. To refuse any of the elements is, in essence, to refuse to be made round, to remain imperfect.
James spoke of this process when he said: “Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials; knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (1:2-4). Even as a minister, I have to remind myself that God does not give us a simple formula for making everything right instantaneously. He makes us perfect through the process of our trials.
Over the years, I’ve tried to help people understand this process with what I call the pearl theory. A beautiful pearl begins to be formed when an irritant — perhaps a speck of sand — embeds itself in the mother-of-pearl lining of an oyster. To protect itself from this irritant, the oyster begins to cover it with smooth layers of pearl. Eventually, a valuable, lustrous stone results.
Now suppose a girl comes to me, as a number have, to say she’s been having sex with her boyfriend, and she thinks she’s pregnant. She wonders what to do. In the course of our conversation, I’ll explain how a pearl is formed. And then I’ll tell her that if she allows the will of God to work in her life, this thing that right then seems to be the worst thing imaginable could become, by the grace of God, the pearl of her life, the most important lesson she’ll ever learn.
If she allows the pearl to be formed, she’ll have the baby, and some adoptive family will have a child they love dearly. That’s one pearl. Then I’ll go on to say, “You might also meet a young lady down the road somewhere who’s also gotten pregnant, and she’s considering an abortion, or she’s going to marry a guy she shouldn’t marry, and there’s really no other woman in your whole church who can talk to her. But if you’ve let that pearl be formed in your life, you can give it to that young girl then. You can be the person she needs desperately.”
During my time with YFC, we had a number of women on staff who had borne illegitimate children, who went on to become youth guidance workers, and who later were able to share their pearl not once, but a hundred times. I’m reminded of a chorus we used to sing that includes these words: “All I had to offer him was brokenness and strife, but he made something beautiful of my life.”
Many in the church today don’t want to produce pearls. Instead, they want to disallow the process. They want to pretend the trials, the irritants, never come. Our job as Christian ministers is to point out that when you get right down to it, that’s really a denial of how God’s grace works in the Christian life.
Dealing with Expectations
Most of us face expectation overload. How do we deal with it? Yes, you may need to have some frank discussions with your governing board concerning the church’s expectations. You may need to make the board members aware of your workload, the many demands on your time, and enlist their help in determining what your hierarchy of priorities in ministry should be. As much as possible, get the expectations out in the open and mutually agreed upon. This should be done not in a spirit of whining, but out of your expressed desire to be as effective as possible in your ministry with that church.
Yes, you’ll want to be aware of your own strengths and weaknesses and to find help in those areas where you need it. If you have some business people on your board who like to handle the financial books, for instance, there’s no shame in delegating those chores.
But given those remedies, we still have to accept that to some extent, we’re never going to solve expectation overload entirely. We have to realize that impossible expectations are just part of the role we’ve taken on, part of the harsh reality of life. The job is ambiguous; it is unfair at times; it’s occasionally impossible to go to bed at night thinking we’ve done all we should have that day.
Even so, God has called us to be his representatives, to minister under those conditions. That’s the human situation, and accepting it and moving on from there is a lot more productive than railing against it or growing bitter. It’s not nice to find a huge, immovable boulder blocking the path you’re trying to walk, but on the other hand, accepting its existence is a lot more reasonable than continually beating your head against it to try to move it out of the way.
Finally, even in a world that wants quick and easy answers, we can remind ourselves that what we “peddle” are long-term solutions — the hope that God is still on the throne, still working, and that the final chapter has yet to be written.
I try to imagine Mary, the mother of Jesus, as she saw her son rejected, beaten, humiliated, and finally crucified, and all this after his miraculous conception and the prophecy of the angel. What did she think then? There were no quick and easy answers for Mary.
Or think of the heroes of the faith mentioned in Hebrews 11. Many of them, and many other believers down through the ages, have not seen the pearls of their lives this side of heaven; they were sawn in two, they were thrown to the lions, they were burned at the stake.
Here’s a modern scenario: A faithful family in the church has a rebellious teenage son. He’s in a motorcycle gang; he’s used and sold drugs; he’s living with two girlfriends. Everything seems lost. What does the pastor have to offer to those parents? Not the quick answers that are peddled on TV. No, the pastor tries to help them maintain faith in God in spite of the harsh reality of their lives, continually assuring them that God is at work, perhaps in ways seen, perhaps unseen.
To give people hope when there’s no evident solution is one of the toughest jobs a pastor faces. But no one said ministry was easy. In the face of impossible expectations, our task is to remain true to our calling and point people not to ourselves, but to the Savior.
Copyright ©1988 Christianity Today
