PASTORS AND LEADERSHIP

A thoughtful and helpful post from John Frye via Scot McKnight: 

Many pastors feel like the pastor in a cartoon I saw years ago. The congregation of people was running fast down the road and the pastor was running far behind shouting, “Wait! Wait for me! I’m your leader!” There is more confusion per square inch in pastoral ministry over the definition of leadership than over most any other topic. I have read the books that set your hair on fire with “choose the hill that you’ll die on and go for it!” type of leadership. I have read other books that suggest if you ask “Who’s in charge here?” you have already abandoned Christ-like leadership. I have read that there is the biblical gift of leadership (see Romans 12:8) and I’ve read that all spiritual gifts have within them a latent, yet effective leadership component. I have read good books that try to baptize the culture’s view of successful leadership into the church and I’ve heard suggested that the gospel of the kingdom of God radically transforms the world’s view of leadership. Many have tried to transform military-style leadership and USAmerican business-style leadership into pastoral leadership. I think “mutate” is a better word for it than “transform.” During the 1990s it seemed that if you just tacked the word “servant-” onto any form of leadership, it was considered biblical, like Jesus, the Servant-Leader. When big-hitter pastors host conferences in their mega-church venues and talk about leadership, you can count on many little-hitter pastors slinking back to their home churches not feeling the least bit like leaders. No matter what is said at the conferences, the medium is the message. The message is: real leaders build and lead mega-churches and host stimulating conferences. Getting caught in that fierce undertow of USAmerican success, many pastors flail just to stay afloat. So, what’s a pastor to do?

 As I have wrestled with and reflected on pastoral leadership, here are a few of my observations:

The gifting and calling of pastors by Jesus Christ includes dimensions of leadership. I do believe there is a specific gift of leadership and pastors need those gifted folks in the church. Yet, the pastor is a leader as well and those gifted leaders without solid pastoral direction can become wrecking balls in the church. The pastor as leader will keep her specific focus and use her arsenal of resources to enhance her leadership. Pastors lead by communicating ideas that are shaped by imaginative reflection on the person of Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God that he represents. A congregation is not going to fix their eyes and hearts on Jesus Christ unless the pastor stays absolutely fascinated with Jesus. The pastor’s transparent journey into his or her own Christian formation is a high pastoral priority. (See my post in the Jesus Creed archives titled “Lashed to the Mast”).

Pastoral leadership is conversational, even leisurely, and filled with attention to details. Pastors observe and reflect on in the ordinary, day to day lives of the people. Pastors are on the look-out for those spontaneous brushes of the Spirit and the tiny shoots of grace growing in backyards of the lives of people. In this sense, pastoral leadership is prophetic. “Prophetic words are never detached from the concrete, historic situation. Theirs is not a timeless, abstract message; it always refers to the actual situation” (Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man). I owe the image of shoots of grace in the backyard of people’s lives to Eugene H. Peterson in Five Smooth Stones. Hopefully, pastors are learning that homiletically casting grand doctrinal ideas (timeless truths) Sunday after Sunday is not the heart of pastoral work.  

Like most pastors I’ll continue to read books on leadership. Readers are leaders. I’ll try to glean what I believe is helpful to me as a pastor and let the rest go. Anything that I read that reminds me of Jesus the Christ and what Jesus stands for will always get my attention.

SONGS AS YOU PREPARE-THE STAND

A new feature, songs as you prepare. They may never make it into the worship gatherings of your church, but I hope strengthen your heart as the proclaimer of the Good News. - Steve

THE PREACHER AT HIS BEST

Posted on THE GOSPEL COALITION BLOG

The Preacher at His Best 

 by Kevin DeYoung

Permit me a brief word about a disconcerting trend I see in young, and sometimes very popular, preachers. I mention this concern knowing full well my own temptation to it.

Let me pose the problem as a question: Preacher, are you at your best when you are closest to the text?

Too many preachers are at their best when they are telling a personal anecdote or ripping into some sacred cow or riffing on in a humorous fashion. There is a time for all of that, but we ought to beware if those times are when we are at our best. We can be orthodox preachers of good, gospel truths and still tickle people’s ears. If we’re not careful, we’ll train the large conference audience and our local congregation that the time to really pay attention is when we start drifting not when we start digging.

“Got it. Understood. Text means this, not that. Sound good. Now get back to that funny, over the top, in your face thing you do.”

I’ve done that thing; probably will again. If the rant is honest and true, the Lord can use it. But, again, I repeat myself, it must not be the best we have. The congregation should be most aflame with gospel zeal when they are beholding new things in the chapters and verses at the end of their noses. God uses all of the preacher–personality, humor, gestures–all of us. But the indelible impression left on our people must be a sense of the presence of God arising from careful attention to the word of God. If the best stuff we have every Sunday is disconnected from our hard won exegetical work, our people will learn to trust us and not the Book. They will look forward to our new antics, not our new discoveries in the text.

Ask yourself this Saturday: “Can I make my best point–the one I’m most excited about, the one I can’t wait to deliver–without noting anything from this week’s passage?” Everything you want to say isn’t everything you should say. We must be constrained by what we can sincerely say from these verses. If we want fresh power from the pulpit let us labor to demonstrate that our most passionate appeals come from the most precise exposition. The best preacher is the preacher who is at his best when he is closest to the text.

From Steve:  Do you have articles that you would like to share or suggest we repost that would help preachers/pastors in their ministry?  Send them to me at sdunnpastor@gmail.com

PREACHERS PREACH

by John Frye in his blog THE SHEPHERD'S NOOK

 My own vision of pastoral ministry in the North American context has been profoundly influenced by the person and writings of Eugene H. Peterson. Consider me a Petersonian in my view of the pastor and his or her place in the local church (see, e.g., Jesus Creed archives). I’ve heard Eugene speak, but I’ve never heard him preach. I am glad. We all seem to have an innate desire to imitate someone we admire. I don’t want to preach like Eugene Peterson.

 The best metaphor for talking about preaching is a slippery bar of soap. It’s just hard to grab. Good books about preaching abound; good books full of profound sermons abound; good radio preachers are ubiquitous. For all that, a preaching pastor is a particular being, serving in a specific locality with its own history and “feel,” overseeing an assembly of peculiar people that 99.9% of pastors will never know. Where the idea came from that the church can franchise preaching as a general, marketable process baffles me. The cat’s out of the bag: preaching is as unique as the pastor and the congregation she shepherds.

When I consider preaching as sacrament (last post), I am stopped, silenced, and humbled. It is a God thing shot through and through with mystery. On the other hand, when I consider preaching as a form of human communication, I lighten up, even laugh at the sheer creative freedom attendant to such a holy endeavor. Encountering God is ultimately in God’s hands; preparing for that encounter is a pastor and people endeavor. A leisurely conversation, sipping at good wine or delicious coffee, may be filled with the presence of our surprising, conversational God. A sermon, yes, a formal communication event, is also a living nexus of our particulars-loving God, a passionate, know-the-sheep pastor, and an assembly of people urged to expect God’s arrival.

I still remember when I stumbled into this reality. Parishioners, in what Prof. Howard Hendricks used to call “the glorification of the worm” ceremony, shake hands with and speak to the pastor at the end of the worship service. For a time I was accustomed to hearing things like, “Wow. I just didn’t know so much information was packed into those two little verses. You are a good Bible teacher.” As God continued transforming my particular life and preaching, I began to hear people respond with something like, “I really met God today. God spoke right into my life.” Do you hear the profound difference? I’m reticent to write this, yet believe me, I am not bragging. C. S. Lewis wrote that it would be silly for me to brag about having brown eyes. I am not the source of my brown eyes or of God showing up. A pastor is a co-worker with God, but never God.

Human co-working requires some behind the scenes work. Behind the dependency on God to meet us (we do “invoke” God’s presence) and behind the creative joy, dare I say fun, of communicating are hours of diligent study. But not just diligent Book work, that is, all the study that goes into shaping a biblical text into a meaningful sermon. Pastors also intentionally do people-watching. We offer keen, will-behind-the-ear listening. We allot time for leisurely pastoral story-hearing and story-telling. All the while, we celebrate the inestimable privilege of having a vocation that dares to engage two holy realities: the lives of human beings and the Word of God. We’re living a calling; not doing a job. I am troubled that pervasive USAmerican consumerism has turned the pastor into a professional employee for a consumerist group of religious people. A pastor is a vocational servant. Preaching is not about marketing Jesus and/or our church; it is about encountering the Trinitarian God as revealed in the Bible.

It is vexing that pastors get petrified in a theological/denominational stratum of “truth” and cease to keep on learning. I find it inexcusable that many pastors are afraid, yes, afraid of new theological ideas. Many pastors are more afraid of the “slippery slope” than they are of encountering the living, inexhaustible Lord Who is “making all things new,” including many theological ideas. I marvel at pastors, having spent so much time and hard-earned money training for their vocations, who let slip the good habits of wide theological reading; they quit looking for the most current biblical commentaries; they stop exploring excellent theological dictionaries on Old Testament and New Testament words; they lose touch of the pulse of the larger conversations and issues in the evangelical world, and they cocoon in their little worlds with no desire to travel cross-culturally on mission trips. If pastors get bored with ministry, it’s not the ministry’s fault. He or she should take a long look in the mirror. Some say, “If you knew my people and my personal and church struggles, you would understand my ministry disillusionment.” We must be careful that we do not allow our personal disillusionment to define all pastoral ministry. It doesn’t. There’s so much more to focus on. We all need to keep engaging our God and his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Supreme Pastor.

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PREACHING THE WEEK OF A NATIONAL TRAGEDY

From Sam Rainer comes this timely post:

Our hearts break for the people of Boston. It’s a tragedy we all feel. Like me, I am assuming you are captivated by the unfolding events of this story. Our church set aside time last Wednesday to pray for churches in Boston. No one questioned why, even though my congregation had no personal connection to the pastors or churches. In silent agreement we all prayed corporately.

Last week I reworked my sermon to address the Gosnell trial. This week I am addressing the Boston bombings. While not every story in the 24-hour news cycle deserves attention in the pulpit, I believe these tragedies warrant the collective attention of my church. Some local tragedies become national tragedies affecting the ethos of an entire nation. It’s rare to address two tragedies in two weeks, but it is important to do so. I believe every pastor in every pulpit should discuss these tragedies. Here’s why.

National tragedies can arouse fear in the people of your community. A gloomy anxiety can cloud a community, even one far removed from the tragedy geographically. My church is in Cookeville, TN, and though our town was not shaken in the same way as Boston, we still felt the horror. Some events simply transcend geography. Don’t let geographic distance be the reason for not preaching about the tragedy in your local pulpit. The tone of leadership helps determine the tone of culture, especially in times of crisis. It’s the same in your church. Your tone in the pulpit will help shape the tone of your congregation.

The people in your congregation need to hear their local pastor’s response to a national tragedy. TV interviews with experts are not enough for your people. The president’s speech (if given) is not the same as the spiritual response of a local pastor. In a time of crisis—national or local—people are hungry for leadership. Ignoring the gravity of something like the Boston bombings only adds to the weight people feel. Most likely, the people in your church this Sunday will expect you to speak to the tragedy. If you neglect the issue in the pulpit, then you risk confusing people. These types of tragedies create a need to dialogue about them. Avoiding the tragedy in the pulpit is tantamount to not giving food to a starving person before sharing the gospel. The distinction is merely one of emotional or physical; either way people are starving for a response.

In our digital age, people need the personal interaction of a local pastor. The instantaneous nature of news means most of your people are expecting a response this week. It’s a cultural expectation. To be culturally relevant pastors must be quick in their responses. Any person can get every detail available about these tragedies. Graphic scenes are accessible to the casual Internet reader. An overabundance of information assaults us through the cable box. We ask for it, and we get every bit and byte in raw form. The mind becomes numb to the never-ending “breaking” news. The best place to unthaw frozen emotions is through the life and work of the local church. This process should obviously happen in small group settings, but it also needs to occur in larger worship settings. What the pastor speaks to in the pulpit validates and reinforces what occurs in small groups. Don’t leave the burden of discussing tragedy to your small group leaders. Guide everyone in your church through a national tragedy by addressing it in your sermon.

Again, not every news story warrants time in your sermon. The evil of Gosnell and the evil of the Boston bombings, however, must be addressed. As a leader, you are a part of the healing process. It’s a critical function of spiritual leadership. The power of the pulpit must be used to demonstrate how what fallen people mean for evil God can use for good.

HOW MUCH TIME SHOULD A PASTOR SPEND PREPARING A SERMON?

This is from an excellent blog by Charles Stone

How much time should a pastor spend preparing a sermon?

Recently I watched a video where a rather famous pastor answered that question. His response, "I study and read all the time and it takes me about one to two hours to put a sermon together."

Yikes! When I heard that I felt guilty because there's no way I can prepare a sermon that quickly. I'm sure this pastor's heart was right, but I wish he had qualified himself more. I doubt very many of us are that speedy.

In Haddon Robinson's book, Biblical Sermons, he wrote that experienced preachers he surveyed spent an average of 16 hours preparing. That sounds more like it to me. That's probably my average and I've been preaching for 25 years.

So, how much time should you spend? It depends.

It depends on...

1. how long you've been in ministry. If you been in ministry several years, you have a backlog of study material. If you haven't you will probably need to set aside more study time. I did in my early ministry years.


2. how well you've kept your previous study notes, sermons, and materials upon which to refer back


3. how well you manage your time


4. what's happening around you. Sometimes unexpected family and ministry demands arise that require our time that we other wise would have spent on sermon prep. No need to wallow in guilt when that happens


5. your personality...some pastors have the gift of gab and can 'make up stuff on the fly' :), some of us don't; some personalities require the preacher to process what he wants to say more thoroughly

Here are a few thoughts to consider as you answer this question for yourself.

1. Schedule your study and prep time during your best, most alert hours.


2. Set reasonable expectations. An hour or two is too little time for most just as 35 hours is probably too much


3. Use computer tools readily available. I own a Mac and use both Accordance and Logos. I rarely use paper books. These tools have made my study time more efficient.


4. Trust God to use your faithful preparation. Seldom do ministry demands allow us to study as much as we'd like. We must do our best and trust the Holy Spirit to fill in the gaps.