Understanding Your Pastor – the Bad News

In my last post, I reposted an article by Mark Roberts, “Pastor Stereotypes” in which Mark identified 10 stereotypical assumptions people make about pastors. The pastoral role is one of my passions; having spent the last 24 years of my 42 either preparing for, enhancing, or engaged in pastoral ministry. I believe pastors are in danger; something evidenced by the staggering drop out statistics we see in the pastoral profession. The evangelical Church is losing too many pastors out of the ministry and it's welcoming too few to replace them. This has a drastically debilitating effect on the health of the local church and the Church at large. In my book, Pastor Revisited: A Re-examination of the Primary Role of the New Testament Pastor (Trinity Press Publishing, 2012 – available here), I make the observation,

The call to the pastoral ministry is a high and holy calling. As such, the pastoral office is indispensible to the health and well-being of local church life. It is the pastor to whom people naturally come in times of crisis, bereavement, joy, change, and spiritual need. The pastor is typically the person who comforts, counsels, advises, helps, and admonishes believers along their road to Christlikeness. He is expected to be at once the preacher, teacher, leader, counselor, guide, comforter, visitor, and officiant of ecclesiastical life.

I elucidate further the demands placed upon the typical pastor; demands which the average parishioner does not normally factor into their idea of a pastor.

The demands and expectations placed upon pastors are varied and often quite fluid; shifting in predominance from congregation to congregation, and parishioner to parishioner. The work of the pastoral ministry has seldom been more demanding. The generational shifts over the past several decades have been drastic. Ever-changing technological advances, the relativist mentality of the postmodern age, and presence of a growing generational presence in churches often keeps the pastor struggling just to catch up.  Pastors are working harder in a world whose corruption is more pervasive and evident. A 1993 statistic demonstrated that nearly ninety percent of evangelical pastors worked more than forty-six hours a week. A 2009 statistic revealed that more than forty-three percent of pastors work between fifty and sixty hours, and twenty percent work sixty or more hours weekly. Seventy-five percent of pastors report that they have had a significant stress-related crisis at least once in their ministry. Fifty percent of pastors feel unable to meet the demands of pastoral ministry, while ninety percent believe themselves to be inadequately trained to cope with modern ministry demands. Pastors wonder why their people come to them with trivial matters when so many are being swallowed in death and sin. Pastors are tired to the point of fatigue with little time for adequate study, resulting in vagueness in their preaching. These statistics reveal that the demands placed upon the typical pastor are great and becoming increasingly greater with every passing generation.

And yet, the Church still needs and wants pastoral care and leadership. People have needs – spiritual and physical – and expect pastors’ help meeting those needs. They want counseling for spiritual and often psychological health, comfort in times of distress, advise in seasons of indecision, and teaching for biblical depth and growth. They want pastors there for marriages, funerals, baby dedications, baptisms, and a variety of other religious rites. Added to that is the dire need for corporate leadership and oversight. Religious non-profit organizations, according to recent research, remain the largest area of volunteering by Americans; topping all other secular non-profit organizations combined. People, whether paid or volunteer, must have organizational leaders, and they always have high expectations of their leaders; necessitating that pastors be as skilled, or more so, in organizational leadership as they should be in pulpiteering.

Pastors, who want nothing more than to glorify God by serving His Church, are often conflicted. They have certain expectations of themselves, their peers and mentors have expectations of what a pastor should be, and parishioners have wide and varied expectations that pastors face daily. Where, then, does the problem lie? 

Not Like Working for Corporate America

 Most jobs today provide a short, definitive, written job description for their employees, particularly for senior staff members. If there is ever a question about responsibilities the employee can reference that description for guidance. No such definitive description exists for the pastor; therefore, pastors are left to deduce their primary role from a variety of sources. Scripture, college and seminary instructors, personal pastoral preference, ministry experience, independent study, and parishioner expectations intertwine to influence a pastor’s perception regarding his primary role. Some have turned to single biblical passages such as Ephesians 4:11-13 to determine the primary role and job description for the pastor.

If an isolated text was capable of fully elucidating the corpus of the pastoral role, let alone of coalescing the biblical material into a universally accepted maxim that expressed the office’s primary role, then decades of modern research in the field would be mute.

Research shows that the lack of a definitive source to describe the primary pastoral role has had a negative impact on pastors.

The Fuller Institute for Church Growth conducted a survey of pastors in 1991. The survey found that 80 percent of pastors believe the pastoral ministry has negatively affected their families, 33 percent of those stated that the ministry had been hazardous to their families, and 75 percent of pastors stated that they have had a significant stress-related crisis at least once during their pastoral tenure. A 2009 study by Focus on the Family found that 42.9 percent of senior pastors average 50-59 hours of work per week, while another 21.4 percent averaged 60 or more hours. This same study cited a Barna Research Group statistic purporting that the average pastoral career lasts only 14 years, and 1,500 evangelical pastors leave their local churches every month in the United States. Such negative personal and ministry affects can stem from a lack of clear pastoral identity and direction.

The lack of a clearly identified and generally accepted conception of the primary role of the pastoral office led H. Richard Niebuhr, in 1956, to refer to the pastorate as “a perplexed profession.” At the time, Niebuhr thought such a clearly defined role was emerging. Unfortunately, history proved him wrong. The past more than half century since Niebuhr’s assessment have witnessed considerable changes in church and ministry practice; bringing new challenges to those who lead them. What has not developed is a clearly defined and generally accepted view of the primary role of the pastoral office; leading researchers like George Barna to describe the pastorate as one of the most frustrated professions in America.

Even when one reads the instructive literature on the pastoral role the teaching is inconclusive.

The precedent literature in the field of pastoral theology, specifically as it relates to discerning the primary role of the pastoral office, is not as definitive as one might expect. That one segment of the literature strongly emphasizes the primacy of pastoral care, while another segment advocates the primacy of leadership only lends to the confusion present in ascertaining the primary role of the pastoral office. Some authors define pastoral ministry in terms of pastoral care; speaking in spiritualized terms of shepherding to meet the emotional, physical, psychological, and spiritual needs of parishioners. Still, others define pastoral ministry in terms of leadership; placing a premium on the roles of leader and overseer, while not excluding pastoral care entirely from the matrix. The instructive literature surrounding pastoral theology, particularly from the early 1990s forward, provides no consensus of thought concerning the primary role of the pastoral office and contributes to the role ambiguity present in the pastoral field; serving to reiterate Niebuhr’s assessment of the pastoral office as a perplexed profession.

People's Expectations

Pastors, as was evidenced in Mark Roberts’ article, are greatly influenced, and sometimes plagued, by what their parishioners think their role ought to be. These expectations often do not align with Scripture, what pastors have been taught, or what they themselves believe their primary role ought to be.

The opinions of two predominant groups are of greatest import for pastors seeking to know what people expect of them: the parishioners who presently populate their church and the unchurched they seek to win. Research into parishioner expectations and the expectations of formerly unchurched people is insightful in understanding the role ambiguity regarding the primary role of the pastoral office…Sources detailing parishioner expectations are difficult to synthesize due to their varied scope and lack of popular publication. The most effective means, therefore, of ascertaining what parishioners expect of pastors is to investigate what pastoral search committees look for in potential candidates. Regardless of the ecclesiastical tradition, the expectations established for the pastoral office by search committees can contribute to role ambiguity experienced by the pastoral office…Research in the field of parishioner expectation via pastoral search committees has revealed several specific qualities generally desired of pastoral candidates. The qualities most frequently mentioned are: (1) the ability to do the work and an authenticity of spiritual life that unifies head and heart, (2) a good preacher and worship leader, (3) a strong spiritual leader, (4) a devotion to the local church ministry with minimal time spent in other pursuits, (5) a person who is approachable, warm, and good with people, (6) a young married man with children and some previous pastoral experience, (7) a consensus builder and lay ministry coach who is sensitive to their needs, and (8) an entrepreneurial evangelist who is innovative in his leadership toward church growth. The above list is by no means exhaustive, nor is it itemized according to importance. The presence of, or emphasis upon, any one of these qualities is generally determined by the church and its representative search committee…What can be seen from this research is that parishioners, and search committees, expect the pastor to place primacy upon pastoral care. The expectations of total availability, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, a warm and approachable demeanor with good people skills, and spiritual leadership relate directly to pastoral care. Parishioners, by and large, are looking for someone to fulfill their expectations of a shepherd, though this role remains largely undefined by parishioners and search committees. While it may be phrased in various ways, and representative lists exist, what parishioners want often varies from congregation to congregation; contributing to the sense of ambiguity many pastors and pastoral candidates feel.

The formerly unchurched, new Christians, who have recently become members of a church, have certain expectations of pastors too. When asked what factors had the greatest impact in leading new Christians to choose a particular church, nine out of ten responded that the pastor was key in their choice. The question becomes, what about the pastor made him key in their choice? Statistics demonstrate that preaching was the strongest factor for the unchurched; preaching that was teaching oriented and resonated with their life situations. The high prevalence of preaching as a factor for retaining the unchurched is not unexpected, as preaching is often the first point of contact the unchurched have with the church as an institution. Preaching is the public face of the church and easy to evaluate. If the pastor is a dynamic preacher who addresses topics relevant to everyday life, then it is no wonder it impacts the unchurched so strongly. Subsequent to preaching were several corollary influential factors about the pastor: his personal authenticity, personal conviction, being contacted by the pastor, his communication skills, his evident leadership role, and a class taught specifically by the pastor. Four of the eight items cited by the formerly unchurched relate specifically to the pastor’s ability to deliver truth through preaching and teaching. Two of the eight items relate to perceptions regarding the pastor’s character: his authenticity and conviction. One item was overwhelmingly practical, pastoral contact after their first visit. However, one item is of particular interest, namely, leadership. Nearly 40 percent of the formerly unchurched mentioned pastoral leadership as key to their remaining at that church. People know when genuine leadership exists and when it does not. When a church, and its pastor, come across as not knowing what they are doing, it turns unchurched people off. For the unchurched, pastoral leadership is a pivotal factor in their choice of a church home.

And This Is Why Pastors Are So Stressed

 Several factors that I’ve presented here contribute to the fact that serving a church as its pastor, regardless of the church’s size, is among one of the most stressful jobs in America. (1) There is no consensus in the training literature which instructs pastors what to expect of themselves as pastors. (2) Christian church members, from those who have grown up in church to the newly saved church members, have different expectations of what they think their pastor’s job really is. These expectations are as varied as the number of people in the church. (3) There is no one biblical text which anyone can point to with definitive authority and claim it alone sets forth the primary role for the local church pastor. These factors coalesce into a very stressful problem for the pastors who fail to elucidate for themselves what they believe their primary role really is and it’s s only through an in depth study of Scripture can that be accomplished.

Why go through all of this? Simple. The news gets better. Scripture is clear what the primary role of the local church pastor ought to be. If church members learn this, and pastors embrace it, then the two can get on the same page; lessening their pastor’s stress and enabling him to minister to them much more effectively than he ever has before. The result? A much healthier and more effective church emerges.