Pastors may be the hardest-working, most undervalued members of our society. And that goes double for small church and bivocational pastors. So why are we so dismissive of our own worth?
I’m not talking about humility. That’s always appropriate. I’m talking about a toxic mindset that many of us allow ourselves to believe.
We tell people in our churches that God is interested in them for who they are, not for what they do. We tell them it doesn’t matter how much money they earn, how big their business is, what other people think of them, and so on. We show them from Scripture that what society values has nothing to do with what God values.
Then we go home from church depressed because, after presenting that message, all we can think about is how few people were in church to hear us say it.
Really? Are we that irony-impaired?
Where’d My Success Go?
I’m making this criticism from the inside-out. I know this is how a lot of pastors feel—especially small church pastors—because I felt the same way for a long time. I spent so many years beating myself up for an external lack of success that I ended up in a counselor’s office, burned out, depressed, and angry.
“What’s wrong with me?” I cried. “Why can’t I be a successful pastor? Why won’t my church grow? And how do I fix it?”
My counselor said several compassionate and helpful things in response to my questions that day. But I only remember one. And it didn’t feel kind, compassionate or helpful when he said it: “You need to redefine success.”
I wanted to punch him in the nose.
I thought “redefining success” was counselor-speak for dropping the bar, lowering standards, and settling for less. In other words, being okay with mediocrity.
And there’s not a strand of my DNA that will allow me to do that.
But that’s not what he meant. So his nose is safe.
A Better, Not Lower, Definition
Here’s what redefined success looks like.
On one side of our lives, people have numerical goals. The money we want to make, job promotions we hope to achieve, and, for pastors, how big we want our church to be.
On the other side, completely unrelated to our numerical goals, are the things that actually matter, the things we tell our congregations they should be concentrating on: Family. Faith. Emotional contentment. Serving others. Loving and worshiping Jesus. (Oh yeah, that stuff.)
Those are the things we refuse to take our own, or God’s advice about.
Redefining success doesn’t mean lowering our standards on the things that don’t matter. It means realizing that they truly don’t matter all that much. And it means raising our standards on the things that do matter.
It means shifting our focus.
For small church pastors, it probably looks as simple as this: Serve the people currently in our church with passion, joy and wisdom. Lead them into worship, hope, and health. Equip them to have an outward-focused faith. Help them to faithfully raise their families, live with integrity, and share Jesus’ love with their community.
Let’s do that well, no matter how many (or how few) people attend our church. That’s not only a healthy redefinition of success in ministry, it’s the original definition of success in ministry.
Karl Vaters is pastor of Cornerstone Christian Fellowship in Fountain Valley, California, and author of Christianity Today‘s Pivot blog.
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