3. Pastoral Ministry Owns All of a Man’s Life.
Part of the reason why office time does not equal pastoral ministry is that all of the pastor’s life is ministry in some way. Even when I take my son to Taekwondo, what am I doing? I’m reading a book on my Kindle that helps me be a better pastor. I might visit with the person next to me and see if there’s some comfort I can share with them. Sometimes I am sitting with my iPad in my lap tweaking a sermon. I may be composing a letter to a church member, all of which is very non-traditional when it comes to counting office hours.
Pastors are always on call and always need to be ready to respond. We might have a disaster at 9pm on a Saturday that requires our attention. Family movie nights may have to go on without us. We may have a church member stop by our house unannounced that needs to be ministered to. We may have a hundred unplanned interactions each day that look nothing like the equivalent of flipping a certain number of burgers or mowing a certain quota of lawns in a day. You cannot quantify the work of a pastor because his whole life is, in a sense, spent on call.
There are certainly examples of lazy pastors. Sure, that happens. And perhaps someone needs to write an article on that subject. But even then, pastoral laziness still cannot be measured in terms of hours. Pastoral laziness will show up in terms of how the people are cared for, the care that goes into the sermons, whether administrative concerns are being taken care of and so on. Hours “on the clock,” I hope you can see, are not the way to gauge pastoral laziness.
Elders, I cannot emphasize this enough: Trust your pastor. Give him room to be himself and give him the freedom to work in a way that he sees best. I have developed my own routines through trial and error, and I am still learning, but I would feel utterly stilted and trapped if I was treated the way some of my fellow ministers are being (or have been) treated, and I would warn a prospective pastor to any church that I knew treated their pastor like this. Many pastors have straight up told me, “I had a church that treated me that way, and life’s too short – never again. I would say no to any church who did that in a heartbeat.”
I fear that many church sessions are not very reflective of the nature of the pastorate or what they really have when they have a pastor. This mentality that treats the pastor as an employee is a reflection of an imported business-mentality, but not of a biblical mentality.
Some sessions see their job as creating friction in the pastor’s life, pushing back at every moment and making his life difficult so that he doesn’t “rest on his laurels.” However, this philosophy misses the very real fact that every pastor is already his own worst critic. There is plenty of friction in the soul of the average minister.
Derek Thomas has spoken of the epidemic of pastoral guilt – that fear that I’m never doing enough – that fear that there is always something more… that if I could just accomplish one more thing, or preach an even better sermon, I might be worthy of this office or I would deserve to be here. Some pastors cope with that by doubling down and eventually burning out. Others cope with it by descending into deep depressions that they feel they cannot share with others (especially the members of the session). Still, others decide not to cope with it and leave the ministry. Sessions, your job is accountability and congregational care, but not to create difficulty, misery, or guilt in the minister’s life simply for the sake of friction.
In the end, the cure to this problem of sessions treating pastors like employees is remarkably straightforward: Sessions need a biblical understanding of the pastorate and of elders. We need to stop importing the things we’ve learned in the business world as if there is a 1:1 relationship between our previous success and the office of elder. I fear far too many successful businessmen have become elders due to perception of competence and worldly achievement when really they ought to be Sunday School teachers or deacons. The result is business philosophy masquerading as biblical eldering or tough love.
A church pays its pastor so that he will be free of worldly concerns, not as reciprocity for hours spent. The intention of paying a pastor is that he is free to minister the word well, shepherd the church, serve the people, and make sure that he and his family are spiritually fed so that he can keep ministering for the long term, not so that he is motivated to work harder or eventually burn out. Ministering well in a sustainable way involves finding a workflow and lifestyle that can leave him free to do those things in the way he best sees fit with a “clear conscience,” and that may not look like the easily counted 40, 60, 80, or 100-hour workweek.
If your church is stalking the pastor’s hours, watching every move he makes, and letting him know that you are holding his feet to the fire, I believe you are in the process of running your minister off, and I believe that you need to repent. This behavior reflects a business-like mentality that does not belong in the church. It reflects a belief in the power of productivity that is wrong-headed and misses the fact that soul-enrichment is totally unquantifiable. It reflects a distrust of a minister of the gospel who is responsible before God for how he lives and serves the people under his care. Any church that wants to keep their pastor needs to learn to trust the man and to trust the Spirit of God to deal with the man when he fails.
This article originally appeared here.
