Joe McKeever

Wrong About Pastors

The first time I encountered this, I was just out of college and serving part-time on the staff of Central Baptist Church in Tarrant City, Alabama, next door to Birmingham. Pastor Morris Freeman was educating his young pre-seminary protégé on the realities of church ministry.

Morris said, "Our people would rather pay a staff-member to do ministry than do it themselves. If they could, they'd pay someone to do the church visitation for them." He laughed, as though he had made a joke.

Not long after, that low standard (paying ministers for every aspect of the ministry) became the norm for a great majority of churches, including Southern Baptist congregations.

Writing in "The Volunteer Revolution," Pastor Bill Hybels says, "I'm not enough of a historian to define exactly how or when the church train jumped tracks, but jump it did. Although the early church started out with this beautiful concept of the priesthood of all believers -- with every member an active minister and good works carried forth in all directions -- during the last couple of centuries, most churches have retreated to the Old Testament model."

Hybels says the way it works now is a group of Christians get together and decide to hire them a minister. That's how they put it. "Hire a minister." Then, they instruct their new employee on the duties of his office: preach, teach, marry, bury, make hospital calls, visit members, counsel, evangelize, fund-raise, administrate the office, make announcements, promote the program, pray for the sick.

Then, Hybels remarks, at the end of the year, the group fills out their report cards and lets the pastor know how well he met their expectations. "If you have, we'll sign you up for another year. If not, we'll hire someone else."

The shortest tenure of my forty-plus year ministry ended when the hirers decided that I, the employee, had not lived up to their expectations. It was a corruption of everything the Scripture teaches about the ministry of the church and its shepherds.

I'd like to report to you that that situation was an aberration. Unfortunately, it is becoming the norm. More and more, the leadership of our churches see themselves as a board of directors and the pastor as the executive-director who serves at their pleasure. If he fails to meet those expectations, he's gone.

Recently at a church where I was the Sunday morning preacher, I began the sermon with a prologue that had very little to do with the actual sermon to follow. I just felt the impulse to share this and recognized it as a word from the Lord. If I needed any confirmation, following the service the pastor's wife quietly thanked me for it.

I said, "I know you pray for your pastor. But sometimes you wonder exactly what to pray. So, I'd like to give you two suggestions.

"First, pray: 'Lord, give our pastor your vision for us.' Secondly: 'And Father, give him faithful leaders who will support his vision for the church.'"

The counsel I frequently offer to our New Orleans churches is this: select Godly, faithful leaders and then support them in the work you've asked them to do.

Nothing stymies leadership -- whether pastoral or lay -- like having a monthly church business meeting in which everything a leader has done is open to criticism and judgment and the congregation makes every decision down to the most minute detail.

Elect good leaders, then turn them loose to do their work.

Bill Hybels quotes Howard Snyder ("Liberating the Church") who said the people in the pews expect their doctors to treat them, not to train them to treat others. They expect lawyers to give them expert advice, not train them how to become attorneys themselves. In the same way, church members often want pastors to serve them, not to build them and train them to serve others.

What's wrong with this system?

We end up with a lot of over-worked, stressed-out ministers and congregations of passive, high-maintenance members who see their primary function as demanding ministries for themselves and critiquing the preachers on how well they do.

Further complicating matters, many pastors decide to go with the flow, not to rock the boat, and to follow the expectations of the congregation. That route leads to two opposites results: job security and burn-out.

Pastor read with a certain degree of longing the account of Acts 6 where the apostles declined to interfere in the distribution of food among the congregation and delegated the matter to a team of dedicated laymen. "It is not fitting," they said, "for us to leave the ministry of the Word and prayer in order to serve tables."

Pastors read that and wish they had the authority -- the courage, discipline, will power, the guts -- to decline the innumerable mundane responsibilities that pile up at their office doors and to lock themselves in for long periods of study and prayer.

"You go ahead and take care of that, Deacon Barlow. I'll support whatever you decide."

That's how it's done.

"I want you to call Deacon Booth and tell him that situation. He'll know what to do."

It takes a strong pastor.

He'll get criticized. (So what else is new?)

The pastor who can't stand a little criticism -- earned or unearned -- is in the wrong line of work. Jesus said, "You see how they treated me. Well, you're no better than I am." (My translation of Matthew 10:24-25)

A pastor friend said to me, "It's just easier to go on and do it myself than have to train someone." He was right, of course. But he was also dead wrong, unbiblical, lazy, and irresponsible.

It's not only the people in the pews who sometimes get the pastor's job wrong. Preachers also have been known to misread their biblical job description to the point of thinking God has sent them to make the congregation happy and to satisfy their wants and desires.

I told you about the pastor who informed a committee of disgruntled church members that while he was sorry they were unhappy with his ministry, it didn't matter a whole lot. "You see," he said, "the Lord did not send me to make you happy. He sent me to make you healthy and Him happy. And those are entirely different things."

We suggest that every pastor get straight on this. God has not sent you to satisfy that congregation or to meet all their needs. You are not Jesus. You should not attempt to step into His role. He alone can be God to them.

Your job, pastor, is not to make them happy. It is not to live up (or down) to their expectations.

You are there to make them healthy.

You are there to make the Lord happy.

You serve at His pleasure and no one else.

"That the leaders led in Israel and that the people volunteered, O praise the Lord." (Judges 5:2)