I like listening to podcasts. Though I have learned my attention span is about twenty minutes. After that, I am ready to move onto another.
A few of my favorites are: Entreleadership (Dave Ramsey), Cartalk, College Wesleyan Church (Steve DeNeff), Redeemer Presbyterian Church (Timothy Keller) and Rainer on Leadership. It is the last one that got me thinking recently. I was listening to a podcast on Eight Struggles Pastor Face. Thom Rainer shared about two kinds of pastors: Lazy pastors and workaholic pastors. Every pastor/leader at one time or another has felt the pull to either extreme and both can be destructive to a church and to the pastor.
As I reflected, I started to think there is another kind of pastor, the “misdirected” pastor. It is a deadly place to be at. Many misdirected leaders find themselves being accused of being lazy and yet feeling like they are about to burn out from workaholism. The reason is a lack of direction and vision.
Who is the misdirected leader? It is the pastor who is doing a lot, but doing a lot of the wrong things. These are the leaders who spend all of their time and energy maintaining the machine that is church. When you look at this persons week you see they are teaching the adult Sunday School class, preaching every Sunday morning and night, leading a Tuesday Bible study, Wednesday night study, cleaning the bathrooms, painting the classrooms, leading the singing, organizing the Thursday prayer meeting, planning every detail of the worship service, driving the bus pick up kids and the hearse to bury the dead, and organizing the Saturday morning men’s breakfast. And when you get done with those things pastor could you start an 8-track ministry?
Why is the pastor doing all these things? Because someone decided they need to be done and after all, “pastor, this is what we are paying you for.” John Wesley said to his ministers, “You have nothing to do but save souls.” Truth be told, almost none of it has anything to do with saving souls. We will give it fancy names so we can pretend it is about souls, but really it is about keeping the machine running keeping people happy. It is about doing what has always been done and hoping this time something will be different.
We have all heard the saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” There is also another saying just as valid, “if it ain’t broke, break it.” Sometimes we need to break the machine, stop doing what we have always done. The Bible uses an agricultural analogy. It’s called pruning. Do you want health in your life and church, start pruning. Here is the bad news: people will be mad. People will call you lazy. Some will leave the church. Others will stay so they can tell you stories about how “committed” your predecessor was. It is okay, quit anyway.
In the book Ministry Velocity by Wayne Schmidt he quotes the late Dr. Orval Butcher who said, “‘The problem with most Wesleyan churches is not who we are willing to win, but who we’re not willing to lose.’ It was his way of saying he’d seen churches completely lose their vision and momentum in an attempt to appease one powerful person or interest group in the church. Attempts to please all the people or meet every need drain energy that might otherwise be focused on moving the vision forward” (pg. 37).
In the great words of the immortal philosopher Red Green, “I’m pulling of your, we’re all in this together.”
Pastor Stephen