5 Frustrations of Pastoral Ministry (or Why Would Anyone Choose Pastoral Ministry?)
A guest post by Deane Proctor.
This column risks coming off as some sort of pastoral pity-party but it’s really not meant to be. I’m very pleased and honored to have been called to serve as Lead Pastor of Queensway Baptist Church in Brantford, Ontario nearly 5 years ago and have nothing but love for the people of our congregation. Rather, this article is merely an opportunity to pull back the curtain a little bit and talk openly about some of the rarely talked about realities of pastoral ministry (at least as I’ve seen and experienced them in my over 14 yrs of pastoral ministry).
What follows, in no particular order is a short (and far from all-encompassing) list of those occasions in the life of the church that have over the years brought me dangerously close to going somewhere else and selling Fuller Brushes door-to-door rather than face one more week in church leadership.
1. Watching the church making the same mistakes over and over (and over and over) again. You know in the old cartoons (think: The Flintstones) where the characters are running or driving and you notice the background images are the same ones just being repeated over again to give the illusion of movement. This is how your pastor feels when he watches your committee covering the same ground over and over again but never actually gaining any ground. Go ahead church, make lots of mistakes but PLEASE make different ones each time okay ?
2. When it’s obvious the church is ignoring the content of the weekly sermons. That time that I preached about how the church service is supposed to be worshipful and not for our individual entertainment and then overheard several tables during coffeetime immediately after the sermon talking freely about what you “liked” or “didn’t like” about the service ? Yeah that pretty much made this point for me.
3. When the church treats their pastor like “Bobo The Dancing Bear.” Alright that was an ancient Ed Sullivan reference but go with me on this. Bobo was a trained animal that performed tricks for entertainment on variety programs like Ed Sullivan. So long as Bobo kept the balls in the air or the wheels on the bike turning everyone was happy. When you treat your pastor like their job #1 is to make YOU happy, you turn ministry from being something sacred into a “reelly big shooo.”
4. Being compared to _________ (insert the name of the former pastor OR the pastor at your OLD church OR the one whose podcasts you listen to each week OR the one with the successful church in the next city over etc etc). When you do this (even with the assurance that you’re doing it “in love”) it takes all of your pastors restraint not to encourage you (“in love”) to move back to your old church OR (and this is more likely) not to completely crumble under the weight of the hurt you just inflicted upon them “in love.”
5. When the church dictates ministry priorities with its wallet. It’s one thing to sing, preach or pray aloud about how God is the supreme supplier of all of our needs, it’s quite another to actually let Him do it. Every time the church makes ministry plans or decisions based solely on what “we can afford” instead of committing to do whatever God is calling us do in faith knowing that “God will provide,” it erodes the integrity of the witness of the church. If the church doesn’t trust the Lord, why should anyone else ?
This list could be longer but maybe it’s a place for you to begin praying for, advocating for and encouraging YOUR pastor to keep running their leadership race.
Further to #3… When the congregation insists that ministry is exclusively something the pastor does or those on church committees do. Worse, that they view themselves as the ones most needful of ministry, instead of the world outside the church doors.