“Let no man despise thy youth.” (I Timothy 4:12)
You’ve finished your formal schooling or you’re trying to continue your education while pastoring. Whether the congregation is fifty people or five hundred, your plate is full and you wonder how you could ever pastor a larger church since there are not enough hours in your day.
But you’re excited. This is what God called you to do. You can barely restrain yourself.
Here are three things lying in wait for you, young pastor. Three potholes? Three comeuppances? Three lessons you may expect to have to learn the hard way.
1) The beginning pastor can expect his sermons to be too massive as he attempts to cram into them everything he has learned on the subject.
The young pastor cannot yet bring a sermon on one word in the Bible or even one verse. Not yet. So, in order to fill the allotted sermon time, somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes, he overstuffs it.
Since he has been studying all week on this message–his notes on the text fill five pages!–he dare not leave out any of the great stuff he has unearthed. Some commentators had fascinating things to say on this scripture. So, he uses it all.
The young pastor typically uses far too many scriptures, cites too many texts, and brings in too many stories from other places in the Bible.
In time, he will learn to streamline his sermon, to pick a single theme and stay with it, and will learn how to recognize great ideas and exciting illustrations which do not fit this message and thus have to be laid aside for another time.
Eventually, if he stays with it and continues to grow, his people will comment (on their way out the door), “What I like about your preaching is it’s so simple. Why, even my eight-year-old pays attention.”
You’re doing good, young preacher.
2) The beginning pastor can expect to learn the inner structure of the church the hard way.
Let’s say you are the new preacher.
You’ve just arrived on the field, have preached a few sermons, are excited about this new opportunity, and are praying for the Lord to use you to “take this town for Jesus.” That’s a good prayer, incidentally.
So, you, the new young pastor, think of a good idea for a new program–or new building or a new employee, a change in structure or a revised schedule, whatever–so you tell the church secretary to please get the appropriate committee together to discuss it. Only later do you find out the chairman is upset that you sprang that on him, not informing him in advance what this was all about and treating him like an ordinary church member.
Welcome to the modern church, young pastor.
Or, even worse, you might bypass your committees altogether. Remembering how much you enjoyed church discussions in Remote Baptist Church Number Two, you sweet home church which was more like a family than anything else, you proceed to drop a little bomb on a hastily called meeting of the entire congregation–all fifty of them–and you learn too late the church had committees assigned that area of responsibility. They’re not real happy with you right now.
3) Too late the new young pastor learns that half the church are blood-kin, and the other half are their in-laws. There are no safe members to confide in. Anything you the pastor says will be reported to others and you will meet it coming back to him from a dozen sources.
Sorry, young pastor. Getting this kind of comeuppance is painful, but is a necessary step to maturity as a pastor.
There are no shortcuts. You have to walk this lonesome valley by yourself.
So, do not be too hard on yourself when you do any of these three.
Don’t beat yourself up on it.
Just learn from it.
You are human and so are your people. Even the best of them has not arrived, will let you down sometimes, and will show their humanity in the most unexpected times and sometimes in the worst ways. So, lower your expectations for them; give all your expectations and hopes to the Lord.
You must pace yourself. You will be learning how to pastor God’s people for the rest of your life. The older, more mature pastor up the highway–he’s in his early 30s and has been out of school longer than you–still feels green, still makes mistakes, and still sheds the occasional tear in the privacy of his prayer room.
You must learn to spend quality time with the Father every morning, praying for your members and the leaders, going over your schedule, anticipating every decision facing the church–and you must learn how to listen to the Holy Spirit. If you think of prayer as anything less than meeting with the Lord who called you into this work and sent you to this church for your instructions and His guidance, you diminish Him and guarantee that you will learn all the lessons of ministry the hard way. “He leadeth me in paths of righteousness” must surely mean He wants to show you the best route for accomplishing His purposes.
If you are married, you must find the balance between sharing with your wife every detail of your day–including the frustrations and who is on your case–and protecting her from such minutia which can over-burden her. She can be your best counselor, your most dependable advisor, and your strongest helper. As with all the other aspects of ministry, that will not happen overnight, but if you nurture the relationship and find that balance between protecting her and informing her, the day will come when you will be amazed at the wisdom coming from this woman.
Have fun pastoring, young minister. It’s the best life in the world, if you will stay close to the Lord, keep learning, stay humble, and let others help you.
Spot-on as always.
I’ll add a little something to your first point–I used to put way too much in my Power Point presentation (too much text and too many slides). Now when I go back and preach through those same texts/sermons again I delete about half of what was in those slides. I’ve seen other preachers make this mistake.
Guilty as charged on point number one, and on Kevin Sanders point. Trying to simplify my power point…getting there. Thank you Bro. McKeever, especially the point about prayer. I have recently recognized that this is an area that the Lord has shown me I need to work on. In one paragraph you showed me that my problem is in how I approach prayer…as a duty rather than as coming to the Lord for guidance.
DK
Number three is a really interesting one and definitely worth noting. I come from a small town where it is almost like that. I am the first generation of my family that was born in this county (where I am, you have to go by county because everyone in the tri-county area is related through marriage in one way or another). The, to throw a monkey wrench in the loop, my brother married a local so now I’m related ot everyone through marriage in one way or another. In fact, because of that marriage I’m related to my best friend whose family moved here from the Twin Cities (I’m from Sandstone, MN which is about an hour and a half north of the Twin Cities).
While their system has OBVIOUS problems, this is where the blessing of the Catholic system surfaces. The priests all turn to each other and, when faced with these issues, turn to the Bishop for guidance. While I do not necessarily believe in the heirarchy that they use, I think there is something to be learned from their methodology in this regard; that we network with other ministers and pastors who we are able to turn to and that we keep a mentor with years of experience. This is not to say that the word of those mentors is always “gospel” as the Holy Spirit might be directing us another direction that might be unique to your area, congretation, and people you are leading. But it is to say that they bring valuble assets to the table. Not to mention that, for the sake of accountability they are invaluble. Did you (“you” in the general sense of anyone reading this) know that even Catholic Priests do “confession” more properly called the sacrament of reconcilliation) with each other? Let us, as leaders, not forget that we still need accountability and to confess our sins to one another and thus edify each other.
The last one, about the kinship, made me think about a rotary file I found when cleaning up an office for our new pastor several years ago. A former pastor, who had served for many moons, had written notes by each name on the roladex the kin folk, including in-laws of everyone in the church. I passed that on to the new man, who found it invaluable. Keeps one’s foot out of one’s mouth when having discussions.
Our mutual friend James Richardson, who pastored Leland’s First Baptist Church, used his rotary file for his daily prayers for members, Lara. I recall seeing it one day. Probably had the same kind of notes on it, too!