Senior Pastor: Real Time Tension.
Where it lives.
Preachers don’t do rehearsal (although I think they should!). Because of that, their tension is typically happening in real-time as they’re speaking. In addition to trying to be faithful to the text, communicating well, being aware of the congregational engagement and watching the time, your pastor also has to monitor what he’s saying to see if it’s even close to what he planned on doing.
How it’s resolved.
This massive rush of working through the tension in real-time is exhausting. And the hard part about exhaustion is that it doesn’t really care if the sermon was good or not. Either way, your pastor has a date with exhaustion some time after Sunday is done. He’ll crash. Hard.
How it affects him.
He wants to unplug. This disconnection has nothing to do with the level of love your pastor has for the church. It’s a coping mechanism, plain and simple. I know you want to hang around and high five the preacher because you guys pulled it off, but your senior pastor is not up for that on Sunday afternoon. Give him space. Let him disconnect. It will keep him healthy and help him be the best he can be at his job.
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Worship leaders, help protect your pastor on Sunday afternoons. Don’t bug him, and if you’re able in any way to deflect some of the minutia from landing on him after he’s preached, do it. Take those bullets for him!
Pray for your senior pastor this week … pray that his Sunday afternoon will be restful and beneficial to his spiritual condition.
And why not forward this blog to him as a way of saying, “I realize how hard your job is! Thank you!”
