How do I maintain a sense of pastoral vocation in a community of people who hire me to do religious jobs?
Eugene H. Peterson
One of the worst years I ever had was in the early days of this church,” recalls Eugene Peterson. “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.
“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 went to the Session one night and said, ‘I quit.’
“‘I’m out all the time; I’m never at home,’ I said. ‘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.'”
Not doing what I came here to do was not one of the potentially discouraging items listed on the Leadership survey, but it mounted an impressive write-in campaign. Pastor after pastor wrote of not being able to concentrate on the spiritual work he or she was gifted in and felt called to do —preaching and teaching, studying and praying, listening and offering guidance. They went into the ministry because they felt called to use these gifts and felt fulfilled when they did.
But somehow, after a few years in a church, they found to their dismay that they were spending large chunks of their time shuffling papers, putting out fires, administrating an organization. Illustrator Larry Thomas captured the feeling in an early Leadership cartoon in which a pastor sits at his kitchen table, head in hands. His wife says to him, “Today you’ve chaired three committee meetings, attended two potluck dinners, opened the bazaar, and refereed a boys’ basketball game. How could you feel ‘unfulfilled’?”
About thirty years ago Samuel Blizzard studied how Protestant ministers spent their time and how they felt about it. He reached a startling conclusion, writes Gaylord Noyce: “Ministers spent the most time at the job they liked least — administration; church management took almost 40 percent of their time. By contrast, the two activities that ministers liked doing the most, preaching and priestly leadership, together occupied only 20 percent of their time.”1
Throwing yourself into your work and then realizing it isn’t the work you want to be doing is a jump into chilly water. Glen Parkinson, pastor of Severna Park (Maryland) Presbyterian Church, remembers that realization hitting him during a previous pastorate. “I was just plugging away at my duties and I needed some kind of mental challenge, so I enrolled in the doctoral program at Westminster Seminary. As part of the entrance requirements, I had to write a paper on my philosophy of ministry, what I thought the ministry should be.
“So I wrote the paper, and as I read it again, I was shocked. All the dreams that had come bubbling up as I’d written —everything I thought ministry should be — had absolutely no connection to what I was doing.”
No one can keep that up for long. Says Carolyn Weese, for many years a staff member at Hollywood Presbyterian Church: “The joy of serving the church slowly gave way to ‘my career at the church,’ then to ‘my job at the church,’ to ‘I’m in a rut and how do I get out of it?'”
Great Expectations
Why is it that many ministers can’t do what they’re gifted and called to do?
Usually because they are under tremendous expectations to do everything.
Maynard Nelson, pastor of Calvary Lutheran Church in Golden Valley, Minnesota, knows the feeling: “The ministry today is so demanding: We are to be administrators, counselors, managers of sometimes large budgets, preachers and teachers — the expectations are unreal.”
Most pastors today, unlike those even fifty years ago, are expected to be jacks-of-all-trades, and too often, the sheer number of those trades forces them to be masters of none. Says a pastor from Southern California: “It’s discouraging when you know you’re not doing your best, when time won’t allow you to study the way you want to study or to minister the way you want to minister. You go home in the evening and you’ve filled up your day, but you really haven’t done anything.”
It’s not surprising that leads to discouragement. Says a Presbyterian minister: “Like most pastors, I sense a need to be omnicompetent. And then I fail in a particular area in which I’m not gifted. It’s discouraging.”
“If I could, I’d be with people hour after hour,” laments another pastor. “That’s the most important thing I could do. But you can’t do it and administrate; you can’t do it and be a good staff person.”
An East Coast pastor explains the tension. “In seminary I was prepared for the life of a specialist,” he says. “In the parish I had to become a generalist. I’m involved with administrative duties, committees, staff relationships, budgets, building programs, and on and on. I’d rather specialize in study and one-on-one care of people.”
Some of the highest encouragers on the Leadership survey were preaching, preparing to preach, and leading worship. They’re duties that refresh; they’re close to the heart of ministers.
One of the greatest discouragers was doing church administration.
In many cases, the schedule seems to pit Administration vs. Sermon. Paradoxically, studying and preparing to preach puts a pastor in the office, behind a desk, working with paper, just as administration does. But the two have radically different effects. Since the two tasks are so closely tied to ministers’ sense of encouragement, it’s worth considering each of them more closely.
Why Is Administrating Enervating?
One reason that managing a congregation is so draining comes from the very nature of the church. The church is a volunteer organization, and there’s no more difficult group to run, as Ted Engstrom, president emeritus of World Vision, points out: “A profit-making organization is the easiest to run. It’s a business with a narrow measuring stick for success — profit. The next easiest to run is a nonprofit organization like World Vision. We pay our people. We can hire. We can release. There are more problems than with a profit company, but we still have a strong measure of control. Running a volunteer organization like the church is the hardest. The church accepts everyone, warts and all. Yet you’re challenging these people to difficult ministry — without pay.”
Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman discovered what pastors have found when he had to command forces consisting of available home guards and volunteers. “I never did like to serve with volunteers,” he reflected later, “because instead of being governed, they govern.”
That’s true no matter how good an administrator someone is. Says one Reformed Church in America pastor: “Administration of the board of the church, even when successfully done, is often with personal pain.”
A second enervating factor in administration is that it pulls you away from one-on-one ministry to people, where you’re most likely to find encouragement. Yes, you may be working constantly with people, but not necessarily in close, refreshing ways. “When I’m down, it’s probably because I haven’t been with people; I haven’t been hearing positive things about what’s going on in the ministry,” says an Evangelical Free Church minister. “But the larger the church grows, the more you’re involved in administration, so you tend to move away from the personal contact with people. You don’t get to hear the stories of what God has been doing.”
Further, no matter how well a pastor administrates, he or she may not feel great personal reward from it. The (rare) compliment one gets for it doesn’t mean as much as “That sermon really changed the way I’ve been looking at things.”
Managing the Managing
What happened to Eugene Peterson that night seventeen years ago when he told his Session he wanted to quit? Is there hope for others who have reached the same emotional point?
Eugene picks up the story: “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.”
There are some drawbacks to stepping back from administration, as Eugene will attest. Some things don’t get done as well or as quickly. But the lesson in his experience is that pastors — even solo pastors, like him — can actually hand off some administrative responsibilities in order to grab firmer hold of pastoral ones. It’s not easy, and not every pastor will approach it in the same way, but it can be done.
The pastor, however, still “has to make sure administration gets done,” Eugene admits, even if he or she doesn’t do it directly. That means for him, among other things, “I return telephone calls promptly. I answer my mail quickly. I put out a weekly newsletter. If you want to keep your job, people have to believe the church is running okay.”
A second principle comes through a helpful distinction made by Ben Patterson, pastor of Irvine (California) Presbyterian Church. He asks, “What is the business of the church?” and answers by saying, “Actually there are two kinds of business.” There is the Big-B Business — worship, the care of souls, helping people to mature in Christ. Then there is the little-b business — the budgets, committees, and programs that make all that possible. “The trick,” he says, “is to keep the little-b business little.” Paradoxically, that may come about by concentrating on it, by learning to do the little-b business more quickly and efficiently. For many pastors, such as Stan Allaby, minister at Black Rock Congregational Church in Fairfield, Connecticut, that has meant taking some American Management Association courses. For other pastors, it has meant reading Peter Drucker. Says Donald Seibert, retired chief executive officer of J. C. Penney, “I believe many pastors would surprise themselves by discovering what good administrators and managers they really are.”
Gary Downing says he finds help in “managing the managing” by focusing on a concept. “You provide administration as much by being able to distill things for people into a single, burning idea — a bull’s-eye for a target — as you do by creating programs. That’s been a way for me to stay alive in ministry, because concepts last; they transcend programs. In my case, the concept has been the passage in 2 Corinthians 5 about being friendmakers for God. As I communicate that to people, it helps to give focus and direction — things that good administration does.”
Many pastors have gained strength from seeing their administrative duties as ministry itself, rather than an interruption of it, as David Leucke and Samuel Southard argue for persuasively in their book Pastoral Administration. “We presume to show how administration can become a source of pastoral joy,” the authors write. “Personal satisfaction can arise from making … administrative work serve fundamental ministry purposes.”2 Communicating, organizing, putting out fires — as tiring as this service is, it helps build the body of Christ. It’s a portion of what it means “to prepare God’s people for works of service” (Eph. 4:12).
Finally, ministers with whom I talked handle the discouraging aspects of their administrative duties by tying a counterweight to them — the joys of preaching and leading worship. They focus their concentration on these, and the emotional encouragement they receive continues to lift them through the week. We turn now to them.
The Strenuous Joy
According to the pastors who responded to the Leadership survey, preaching is one of the most buoying of duties.
Not that it isn’t strenuous. Robert Hudnut, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Winnetka, Illinois, describes the tension that builds: “I often wonder why I subject myself to Saturday nights. It’s like a term paper and final exam every week.”
And yet, he says, “On Sunday afternoon, even though I’m pretty tired, I get out the Bible and start on the next week. I find myself being reinvigorated, reenergized. I get new emotional energy as the Bible begins to course through me again. Working in the Word brings me back up emotionally. It has its own inner momentum.”
In general, even when you’re discouraged, there’s no better place to be than the pulpit. That’s where the pastoral gifts God has given can be expressed most fully and used most effectively. It’s where you can see and hear some reward for your efforts. In a wonderful, inexplicable way, that’s where God’s grace connects pastor and people, your gifts and their needs. What else can you do but rejoice in that?
Says John Yates, rector of The Falls Church (Episcopal) in suburban Washington: “When you come out of the pulpit and sense there’s a hush over the congregation and God has used you in spite of yourself, in spite of your inadequacy, in spite of your own questions — that’s exhilarating; that’s humbling; that’s really encouraging.
“Not long ago a man in our church taught a class on stewardship, and he stood up and said, ‘You know, I’d never dealt with stewardship until one day when the pastor preached a sermon on tithing and hit me right between the eyes. I’d never heard that message before. I got angry. I got upset. But I went home and God dealt with me, and I knew it was right. My life has been different ever since.’
“When I heard him say that, I thought, Wow! This must be God’s blessing!”
Gaylord Noyce, “Administration As Ministry: Taking the Long View,” The Christian Ministry (March 1987), 13 – 15.
David S. Leucke and Samuel Southard, Pastoral Administration: Integrating Ministry and Management in the Church (Waco, Tex.: Word, 1986), 13.
©1988 Christianity Today
