“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 heavy 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.

Over 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 will need 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, your sweet home church which was more like a family than a congregation, 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 to 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 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.