When it comes to people’s expectations of the pastor, it’s better to promise less and deliver more.
— Ed Dobson
I knew a pastor of a large church who tried to control all aspects of his church. He worked seventy and eighty hours a week: he preached, did all the visitation, oversaw the staff, and micromanaged virtually every detail of the church’s ministry.
I met with him from time to time over the course of a year and a half. He always had the same complaint, “I’m tired. I’m worn out. There is something flawed about ministry in a megachurch setting. It shouldn’t be like this.” I was saddened, but not surprised, when I learned that he had fallen into serious sin that cost him his ministry.
In spite of his fatigue, his impatience with others, his constantly being behind, his feeling of distance from God, he had been insistent on remaining in control of all aspects of the church’s ministry. Why? Part of it, no doubt, was a result of his own psychological needs.
But a large part of it was due to modern church culture, the same culture that pressures all pastors. Over the last few decades, the expectations of congregations have been raised enormously. Whereas earlier we were expected to study, preach, and visit, now we’re supposed to administer a variety of programs, raise enormous funds for larger and larger facilities, and counsel people with problems a previous generation never even heard of — all the while preaching as good as the latest televangelist.
Most pastors go into the pastorate with dreams of being able to do it all. That dream matches perfectly with the increasing demands of the congregation. The pastor, though, discovers quickly that he or she can’t do it all. The expectations to keep up the image of the omni-competent pastor are so strong, it seems impossible to lower the expectations to reasonable levels, at least without appearing lazy.
But if you don’t figure out a way to minister with realistic expectations, you will burn out, or worse. So how shall we minister in this situation?
Getting Off on the Right Foot
If you are starting ministry, or beginning a new ministry, you are in the best position to do something about it. Though expectations can be changed later, it’s easiest to set things right in the beginning. Here are some steps I found helpful as I took on the pastorate at Grand Rapids.
• Learn what the people expect. It’s not too early, even during the search process, to begin the work of negotiating expectations.
That is why, against the search committee’s advice, I insisted on a two-hour, open-and-free-wheeling, question-and-answer session during my candidating weekend. The leadership feared it would open a can of worms.
“Who cares?” was my response. “Let’s go ahead and open it and take a good look at the worms.” I wanted to know what the hot buttons were and let the congregation see how I would handle sensitive and potentially divisive issues.
The session turned out to be wonderfully informative. I was asked about such issues as women in ministry, my position on divorce, and even what I thought about eating in a restaurant on Sundays (the so-called “Dutch laws” of the region look down on this).
Soon we were discussing people’s expectations of their pastor. I was asked about my pastoral strengths and weaknesses, and my willingness to work with a strong board. Someone even wanted to know if I intended to start a Moral Majority chapter at the church.
This is not the only time or the only format available to us to discover what people expect of us. That we seek to discover what, in fact, people expect is the important thing. We don’t want to be guessing.
• Know what the board expects. I had just begun my ministry at Calvary Church when a group approached me and asked that I become heavily involved in their particular program. When I met with the board, I told them of the request and said, “I’m uneasy about getting drawn into this, but I don’t want to disappoint these people.”
The chairman of the board immediately spoke up: “Pastor, the only people you have to worry about disappointing is us.” We all laughed, yet he was making a serious point. Various factions in the congregation will attempt to place different expectations on your time and involvement, but what really matters is knowing what the board expects of you. They are the group you are answerable to month by month, even in a congregational polity.
That board member’s remark led to a lengthy discussion regarding the use of my time. At the end, the board unanimously directed me to spend at least two-and-a-half days a week in study. I later announced that decision to the congregation, and from time to time I remind them of that board directive. That is one way of letting people know I can’t be involved in everything.
• Watch those promises. The temptation begins in the interview process, but we never really shake it. We enter ministry because we want to help people. So we are regularly tempted to promise them more help than we can humanly deliver. Better to promise what we’ll not do.
For example, early on in my ministry at Grand Rapids, I mentioned that I had never been a particularly good counselor: “I hope I’m a compassionate and sympathetic person. And if you come to see me, I’ll listen and cry with you. But then I’ll tell you to go home and read fifty chapters of the Bible and let God straighten out your problem! That is the limit of my understanding of counseling.”
When it comes to people’s expectations of the pastor, it’s better to promise less and deliver more.
• Set up a regular review. Even though the board and I may have reached a mutual understanding regarding expectations, I still meet regularly with my chairman. It’s part of an ongoing effort to remain on the same page with my leaders.
I also go through an annual review process with the board chairman, vice-chairman, and chairman of the deacon board. We look at the past year and discuss issues they feel I should pay attention to. If conflicts and differences are stirring, this gives us the opportunity to bring them out in the open and resolve them.
That can be a threatening process. If not handled with love and mutual respect, it can leave a pastor deeply wounded. My father pastored a church where the entire congregation voted yearly whether to retain him or let him go. It was a difficult, humiliating process to be subjected to.
But this has worked in my situation, and it has fostered regular communication about what people expect of me and what I can realistically do.
Getting Chips for Doing Your Thing
Leith Anderson once compared the ministry to a poker game. When you first arrive at a church, you’re given a stack of chips. If you preach well, love the people, and see some successes, you’re given more chips.
If you do something poorly or irresponsibly, you lose chips in a hurry. If you lose too many, you’re thrown out of the game completely. But as you build trust with your board, they will over time give you more and more latitude in the exercise of ministry.
During my last review, after seven-and-a-half years of ministry, the board let me know it was unnecessary to check with each committee and board before I made a significant decision.
“You have the freedom to make choices on your own,” they said. “All we ask is that you keep us informed.”
The same trust works in regard to the congregation’s expectations of the pastor. If year by year they see I’ve been a faithful pastor with my main responsibilities, they will be forgiving of areas they wish I could cover but cannot.
So, regardless of how many years you minister in a place, it’s vital to work on the trust factor. There are many ways to establish or re-establish trust, but here are five that have worked for me.
First, I let people know I work hard. I once received this piece of advice from an old mountain preacher: “Son, whatever else you do, make sure people see you working. Park your car in front of the church so people can see it on their way to work in the morning. Then, if you like, go fishing for the day. But just make sure your car is parked in front of the church by the time people head for home!”
That humorous advice should be taken seriously. People have no idea how we spend our time, so we need to let them know that we do put in more than a few hours on the weekend. Once they recognize that, they are less apt to pile more expectations on our already busy schedules.
That’s why one of my first edicts as senior pastor was to establish regular office hours for the staff and me. I let people know we would be in the office, putting in a full week’s work. Because it’s common knowledge that, in addition to holding regular office hours, I preach on Saturday night, three times on Sunday morning, and once on Sunday evening, people understand I don’t have much time left to take on new obligations.
Second, I’ve also learned how to get things done without doing them myself. When I planted a church in the mountains of Virginia, I had to do everything. I opened the doors, cleaned the church, answered the phone, ran the mimeograph machine, worked with the Sunday school teachers, helped lead the choir, and in my spare time, did all the preaching and visitation. All those things needed doing, and those were the things a pastor of a small church did.
I soon realized, though, that I shouldn’t do all those things. So I found people to unlock the doors. I called on people to lead music and work with the Sunday school. I discovered that in a lot of cases, people don’t care who does the job as long as it gets done. And when things get done, even if not done by me, people tend to give me more trust and leeway to do the things I think I should be doing.
Third, I have to be willing to meet some expectations that lie outside my areas of specialty. Though I’m not a natural counselor, as a pastor I still have to meet with people going through a divorce and with those struggling with substance abuse. Counseling comes with the pastoral territory. The congregation is right to expect me to fulfill this function at least to some degree. If I completely shirk the essential pastoral functions, I can be sure people will start questioning how I spend my time.
Fourth, when it comes to functions I think are essential to my ministry, it’s imperative I do whatever it takes to do them with excellence. I can’t rest on my laurels.
For example, even though preaching is one of my strengths, I devoted one year recently to read and study everything I could find about preaching. If a congregation sees me constantly growing in an area I say is important, they will give me more leeway to work in that area.
Finally, I’ve learned the art of symbolic gestures. For example, Calvary Church has always had a strong missions emphasis. Though I’m committed to missions, we have other pastors on staff who are called to give more attention to it. Still, I knew I needed to show the congregation that I thought this was a vital ministry.
So I decided that once a year I would visit mission fields, meeting with the men and women our church supports, in places like Haiti and Poland. Once I began doing that, people saw in a dramatic way that, although I wasn’t on the front lines of administration and fund raising for missions, I did care about them.
Other pastors periodically visit each of the committees of the church, even though they don’t plan to attend them regularly. Such a gesture communicates the pastor thinks each committee’s ministry is important. And that alone often satisfies people’s expectations in terms of your involvement.
Just Say, “No!”
No matter how much trust building you do in ministry, sometimes you simply have to refuse to meet people’s unreasonable expectations.
Ray Ortlund once observed that every three or four years, regardless of how long you’ve been the pastor, some person or group in the church will inevitably challenge your leadership. It may come from the board, a staff member, or an element of the congregation. But someone is going to launch a direct attack concerning what is expected of you. Ortlund advises we dare not ignore it.
I faced such a challenge when we decided to begin another building program. Up until then, we had agreed that I was not expected to be the chief fund raiser in the church. In fact, when I first arrived, people were deeply concerned I would be too aggressive in raising money (they knew I had been mentored by Jerry Falwell).
My conviction has always been that if you preach the Bible and win people to Christ, God will take care of money. So that was the way I operated at Calvary. That worked fine until we entered a $5 million building program.
We agreed to ask people to make three-year pledges to the building fund. We decided that if we didn’t receive the pledge amounts we needed, we wouldn’t build.
Little by little as the campaign proceeded, and as anxiety rose about whether we would meet the goal, I began to feel the subtle pressure to become more assertive in fund raising. I knew several people were quietly thinking, How could Dobson have spent all those years with Falwell and be so lousy at asking for money?
At the end of the pledge drive, we had raised only half the target goal.
That is when I felt the pressure more than ever. Several members of the board thought I should go back to the congregation and make a pitch for the remaining money.
“I won’t do that,” I told the board. “We agreed that if we didn’t raise the money we expected, we would stop there. Perhaps God is trying to tell us something. I suggest we put the project on hold for six months.”
My position disturbed many people. I probably aggravated them further when I confessed to the congregation that we as a board didn’t know just what to do next! I suggested that as a body we should wait and pray for direction.
Six months later the project was approved again by the congregation. This time the needed funds flowed in and eventually the first cement was poured.
And I never had to become a fund raiser.
Certainly the most important trait to nurture in working with a congregation is a submissive spirit. That has not always been easy for me. But sometimes I have to be submissive to people’s reasonable expectations, even if I don’t feel gifted or interested in a particular ministry. And sometimes I have to be submissive to God and pointedly inform the congregation that I can’t do what they ask.
In either case, when I’m able to have a submissive spirit, my motive is love and a desire to serve. And few congregations expect more than that.
Copyright ©1994 by Christianity Today
