If all goes as planned, pastor, your visit to our church this upcoming weekend will result in a unanimous call from the congregation for you to become our next shepherd. You will return home, make your announcement to your church family, and put your house up for sale. A month or so later, you will preach your first sermon in our church.

You will find a lot of things once you begin your ministry among us. You’ll find our people receptive and responsive. We’ve been over a year without a pastor–we’ve had the very best interim possible in Mark Tolbert, but he would be the first to admit, “it ain’t the same”–and we’re ready.

You’ll find this church to be a lot like the one you came from, and probably the one before that. Since congregations are made up of frail beings from the complete spectrum of humanity, we’re not unlike all those other churches. This means you’ll find the vast majority to be good folks who require low maintenance, but a certain percentage at each end of the range will require more of your attention. At one end will be those who try your soul, who are never satisfied, who are takers and complainers and demanders. God puts them in the church to keep the pastor humble.

At the other end you will discover the sweetest people on the planet, those who look for ways to serve, who are grateful for anything you do, who bring you the occasional pie or flowers or a book. God puts them in the church to keep the pastor from quitting.

A pastor friend wrote back to his former church, “The most surprising discovery we’ve made since arriving here was to find the very same people we left behind. Only, they have different names.” I expect you’ll find that to be the case with us.

In spite of all our attempts to put no expectations on you and your family, I think it’s fair to warn you we do have several.

1) We expect you to be yourself.

And please assure your wife, we expect the same from her. You both should not let anyone’s expectations press you into trying to do anything other than what you do, from being who you are.

2) We expect to love you and want you to love us.

When David Crosby came as pastor of New Orleans’ First Baptist Church a dozen years ago, he told the congregation, “Calling a pastor is like adopting a 15-year-old kid. You want to love him, but you don’t know where he has been and how he has been treated.” It’s a faith proposition.

3) We expect you to put the emphasis on preaching good sermons and pastoring the church.

To be sure, there are a hundred other time-consumers pastors can delve into, but nothing is more important to our congregation than these two at this stage of our existence.

4) We expect you to stay close to the Lord.

No one will complain if you are unavailable for the first couple of hours every morning because you are spending that time with the Lord in His Word and in prayer. But whether you do that in the morning or evening or in the middle of the night, we’re all counting on you to stay close to the Heavenly Father. Some of us can be rather trying to a pastor and if you are operating in the flesh, the result might not be good.

5) We expect you to be criticized, and that you will slough off most of it as “just the way people are.”

This being a Baptist church means that someone will soon find something they do not like about you. You wore a tie that Sunday, you did not wear a tie that Sunday, you wore the wrong tie that Sunday. You told a joke and are too frivolous; you never tell a joke and are too serious; you laugh too much; you never laugh. Your points are hard to follow; you have too many points; you have no point.

The great majority of your members will not be among your critics. They will be glad you’re here, they will receive your ministry gladly, and they will be grateful for what you do. But there’s always a small percentage in any church….

You may have heard of the perfectionist pastor who was called to a church by a vote of 98 ‘for’ to 2 ‘against.’ He spent the first 6 months trying to find out who had voted against him, and the next 6 months working to win them over. At the end of his first year at that church, he was fired. The vote was 2 for him and 98 against.

6) We expect you to say ‘no’ to some of our invitations.

Have dinner with my family, attend my daughter’s recital, come to our 50th reunion, drop by the Sunday School class’ cookout, and be sure to show up at our wedding reception. If you allow it, your calendar–and your life–will be taken over by social events with some, but not much, real value.

We expect you to be your own man and exercise good judgment and decide for yourself which to attend and what to decline. We will be disappointed that you don’t make it to our event, but we will get over it. Most of us will admire you for having the strength of character to know you cannot be all things to all people, and to cull anything that interferes with your purpose and your ministry.

7)We expect you to stay a long time.

People who study these things say one trait of great churches is they keep their pastors for many years. We have learned how to accept a pastor’s resignation as the will of God for us if he leaves earlier than we had planned, but it’s hard on a congregation. Suddenly all the program plans and future projections are put on hold and the energies of the church become directed toward finding the next shepherd, a process that almost always takes a full 12 months.

I sat in the office of Dr. Landrum Leavell when he was president of our seminary and heard him talking on the phone with a mutual friend who pastored a large Texas church. The pastor was facing a critical business meeting that evening and had called the president for counsel. I heard only one end of the conversation obviously, but it went like this:

“How long have you been at that church?….Well, son, six years means that you are now the pastor of that church!….It’s time for you to take your stand and lead the church…. If you’ve done any kind of job at all during this time, they’ll follow you because you are their shepherd.”

The point he made was not lost on me: it takes six years to become the church’s shepherd. Whether we agree with that or not, since I served one church 12 years and another 14, I can say one thing with certainty: a pastor does his best work after the sixth year.

So, stay with us a long time, pastor.

After all, to be rather blunt about it, we’re getting tired of breaking in new pastors. (Smile)