Pastors: You Should Start a Study Group

Every May I gather with a group of pastors from Monday to Friday. The agenda is simple: to work through a book of the Bible together as we think about preaching it. Every year we bring in a different scholar who has written a commentary on that book. We also have our former preaching professor (Haddon Robinson) help us think through how to preach that book.

We've had Bruce Waltke, George Guthrie, Douglas Moo, Daniel Block, and more. This week we've had D.A. Carson. It's hard to beat. I've been to a lot of conferences, but this by far is my favorite learning event of the year.

You should start one too.

I'm convinced that we as pastors have to go a bit deeper than what's offered at most conferences. We need more intimacy, more depth, and more encouragement than the average conference can afford. Many pastors graduate from seminary and never experience the same level of teaching just about the time that they can really benefit from it. I'm not talking about abstract, theoretical work. I'm talking about digging into the Word of God and thinking in depth how it applies to our lives and ministries.

Here's all it takes:

• A group of interested pastors. This may be easier than you think.
• A scholar. This, too, may be easier than you think. Most Bible scholars would love to spend a week with pastors helping them think through a text. Invite them, fly them in, and pay them well. You may have to pick them up off the floor when they find out that you're even interested.
• A structure. It's as simple as finding a place and setting a basic schedule. Then just set some ground rules and go.
• Don't try to do this in a church if you can. Get away so that you're away from the regular grind and can spend lots of your spare time together.

I stumbled across this, but I'm telling you: it's worth the effort. I would trade a dozen conferences for one of these weeks.

Most pastors desperately need the intimacy, depth, and encouragement that a week like this offers. There's power in coming together and digging into the Word together, and beginning to see what God does over a few years of sticking at this. I dare you to give it a try.

Going to Pastor an Established Church?

I’ve spent twenty years pastoring established churches, and about a year beginning to plant a new church. I’m not really sure which one is harder. I do know, though, that I’d go about pastoring an established church differently than before. Here’s what I would do differently.

Ask deeper questions. When a pastor candidates at a church, both the candidate and the church see what they want to see. It’s easy to miss some of the deeper issues that really need to be surfaced. Tom Rainer recently posted a list of questions to ask as a potential pastor, and they’re really helpful. Here’s a few questions from his list: What was the topic of your last contentious business meeting? What is something I might say from the pulpit that would cause a number of members to cringe? What is the biggest mistake made by any of your previous pastors? Questions like this will help unearth issues that may otherwise not come up.

Cultivate realistic expectations. I talked to a pastor who was discouraged about his church’s lack of growth under his leadership. The reality is that he had walked into a very bad situation after years of decline. It was like being called to pitch at the bottom of the ninth inning when the score is 17-2 against you. We want to believe that turnaround will be quick, but it’s often very difficult. Brian Croft writes, “Remember what you have inherited and if it took 30 years of decline to get your church where you find it today, it might take 30 years to change the pattern.  But God’s gospel and word is powerful enough to do just that over time.” Are you prepared to invest the time and do the work if it’s longer and harder than you expect?

Voice convictions. I think Al Mohler is right: convictions are the key to leadership. If you don’t have firm convictions, then you aren’t going to be a good leader. If you aren’t honest about your convictions, and ready to turn down opportunities that don’t line up with those convictions, then you’re not being fair to yourself or the church.

Find allies. We somehow buy into the myth that a single pastor can come in and turn things around. It’s bunk. It takes a team, and even then it’s hard. If you don’t have people (staff or key members of the church) standing with you, it’s going to be very difficult to turn a church around.

Look for footholds. I’d look for a few key areas. Is there an attitude of humility and teachableness? That attitude will make up for almost anything else. Does the church value preaching? That provides a foothold to apply God’s truth to the situation. Without a few footholds like this, it’s going to be very tough indeed.

Pray. I really love what Bill Hogg, missiologist with C2C Network, says about church turnaround: “It’s not about coming up with a plan. The first order of business is to surrender to Jesus. The idea is not to work a plan but to hear from the Lord, and then from dependance upon Him walk in obedience to what he speaks into the life of the church.” Strategic plans may be important, but we can’t strategically plan our way out of deadness. More than anything, we need the Lord.

Pastoring an established church in need of turnaround is tough work. If you’re pastoring one now, don’t be discouraged. If you’re looking at pastoring one, do your homework and be prepared for the task ahead of you.

Weakness Evangelism

Like you, I’m a fan of being strong. I love all this talk about crushing your goals and building a strong week. I always enjoy being competent and having my life fairly together. It’s how I thought I would live most of my life.

It turns out that life’s not like that. The past few years I’ve been learning lots about weakness. It hasn’t come easily for me, but I’ve had to learn how to acknowledge my limits. My weaknesses have been on display. It almost seems that God has been working to strip me of any pretense that I have it all together.

This past year, as we went through another round of confronting our weaknesses, my wife said something profound to me. What if our weaknesses aren’t a distraction from ministry? What if our weaknesses are actually part of the way God wants to use us in ministry? I know this conceptually, but I haven't always been great at remembering it when I'm weak.

I’d always thought you have to be strong to be a church planter. What if weakness is actually part of God’s plan for church planters, and for ministry in general?

With that in mind, I was encouraged to discover that the last chapter in the Sonship training manual. Sonship is “designed to help you take some of the glorious theological truths of the gospel - truths that you may know in your head - and apply them to the nitty gritty reality of daily life.”

The last chapter is called "Weakness Evangelism", and it includes this paragraph:

The most important thing about repenting and living by faith as a child of God is that dependence on God gives him glory and provides us an opportunity to experience closeness with him. But it also seems admitting our weakness before God and being willing to fail in front of people is an invitation to experience closeness with them.

This completely changes our posture when it comes to evangelism in particular, and ministry in general.

The key to evangelism and ministry, it turns out, isn’t that I am strong and a never-ending source of competence and strength. It is that I have discovered a gospel for weak people like me, and that I am living in a strength that is not my own. I don't have to pretend, because there is no need to pretend. It isn’t that I have my life together; it is that I am experiencing God’s power and strength in the middle of my own struggles and sanctification. I don’t approach others from a position of strength; I approach others with the sense that we are alike in our sinfulness and our weaknesses, and that we both can find all the grace we need in Jesus.

I’m embracing my weaknesses. I’m discovering that they bring me closer to my Savior. My weaknesses change my posture as I relate to others. They also remind me to never think I can minister to others out of my own strength. The strength and the glory all belong to someone else, and I never want to forget that.

Living Into Focus

Arthur Boers is author of Living Into Focus: Choosing What Matters in an Age of Distraction. And he knows what it’s like to struggle with busyness. He’s written a book about living well, believing that we’re not without choices as we confront the frantic pace of our lives. “I trust that sleepwalking is behind me and that more balanced and invigorating patterns of living are available to all of us,” he writes. “It remains possible to live well.”

Boers once pastored a church in which the congregation identified busyness as a key spiritual issue they were facing. The elders of the church agreed, but he jokes they were too busy to respond for a couple of years.

According to Boers, busyness is a discipleship issue. Busyness is a major challenge in most people’s lives. He points to experiments that show that busyness and haste leads us to be swept up in an agenda that isn’t God’s, or ours.

Not only is it a discipleship issue, but It’s also a missional issue. “If we are not living in substantially different ways from people in our culture,” he asks, “what do we have to offer? If we are not living in abundant ways, why would people want to join us?”

Boers encourages us to pay attention to our use of technology. “As devices and commodities move into the center, focal things become peripheral.” Boers is not against technology, but believes that we need to have discerning conversations about technology, and what our real priorities are.

He challenges pastors to face the issue of busyness in their lives and their churches. “Pastors, model what it means to live the life God has called us to, even at a cost.”

Boers spoke to Toronto pastors yesterday about living with focus. The video is a bit rough, but you can check it out here. You can also find out more about Living Into Focus at Amazon.com or Amazon.ca.

How Many Hours Should Pastors Work?

I've heard the advice many times: Pastors should work as many hours as the average person in the congregation, plus commute time, plus the number of hours that they serve or attend the church. This works out to 40-50 hours for the average workweek, plus another 5-10 hours for the commute, plus another 5 hours for time spent in church ministry, for a total of 50-65 hours a week. Therefore, pastors should work at least 50-65 hours a week.

I don't buy it.

Here's the truth in the advice: pastors should work hard. The pastorate is a place where lazy people can hide. I've met some lazy pastors, and they do need a kick in the posterior. And yes, we shouldn't expect more of others than we ourselves are ready to give. And for some, they will be able to work 50-65 hours and still live healthily. Imposing this advice across the board, however, is less than helpful.

Here's the real issue. Our challenge in ministry isn't to buy into a lifestyle that's driven by busyness and the lack of healthy rhythms. For instance, if nobody in the church is taking a weekly Sabbath, the answer isn't for the pastor to stop taking a Sabbath. Instead, the pastor should be model what it's like to pause, rest, and find refreshment one day a week. If the fathers in a community never make it home for dinner with the family, the pastor should not necessarily follow that pattern and work through dinner. Instead, the pastor should wrestle with how often to be around for the family even when work is calling.

I speak as someone who has wrestled with this for years, and failed often. I remember the years that I just wasn't there for my family. I know I didn't serve my family well those years. I don't think I served my congregation well then either.

Is it hard to figure this out? Absolutely! But what we need - not just pastors, but all of us - is to discover how to work hard, but also how to love our families, abide in Christ, and live on mission in the everyday rhythms of life. Capitulating to unhealthy and unsustainable work patterns is not the answer. Discerning what it means to live faithfully as a follower of Christ is a much tougher assignment, but an important one.

I want to work hard. But I also want to be around enough to love my family and build relationships with my neighbors, to live on mission, and to take time to pause, rest, and pray. I want the same for everyone in the church.

There's no place for laziness in the pastorate, but there's no place for capitulating to unhealthy cultural patterns either. Pastors, lead the way in learning what it means to live, as they say, with gospel intentionality in the everyday rhythms of life.